Raksha ran to her, but with every step he took, the roots encasing Aisa’s limbs thickened and lengthened, raising her further into the air. Soon, they had coalesced into what appeared to be a tree trunk. By the time Raksha was halfway to her, things that looked like branches had sprouted, vast and sweeping, and Aisa was already forty feet above ground.

And then sixty. A hundred.

As he hurdled the heaps of corpses around what used to be the stump, Aisa was far beyond the forest canopy. He could still hear her song drifting out into the night.

The Hunter was nowhere to be seen, but that was the least of his concerns now. Sheathing Steelbreaker, Raksha began climbing the unnatural tree. Its foul surface seemed to writhe and recoil from his touch, but he crushed it into submission beneath his grasp, gouged compliant footholds with his bootheels and steel toecaps, and hauled himself upward.

Grotesque, misshapen leaves had begun to sprout from the tree’s branches. As he climbed, massive black fruit-like pods began to swell from the hearts of these leaf-clusters, each larger than the size of a full-grown man and covered with crimson veins.

Eerie, purple light shone from the depths of these pods. Before Raksha’s disbelieving eyes, they detached themselves, one after another, from the tree and drifted off into the night, as if borne aloft the notes of Aisa’s song.

He climbed furiously, aware that many dozens of pods, certainly over a hundred, were leaving the tree and drifting off into the night with every passing moment. Raksha knew that wherever those landed, horrible things would surely unfold.

But that was a battle for another time. Within minutes, he reached the top of the tree, where Aisa hung, impaled upon a grotesque cradle of unnatural wood. Her face was twisted in agony, but still she sang. Above her, every beat of her disembodied heart sent tremors through the web of black, vein-like vines streaming from its surface.

With each note that left her lips, another pod drifted from the tree.

Raksha had to put an end to this. Father Ignatius had told him to cleanse the unholy with fire, and wreathed in the Conflagration, Raksha’s very presence was anathema to this tree of hearts. It was evident in the way its bark scorched and peeled away from his touch and how its wooden flesh writhed in seeming agony at being within the ambient backwash of his aegis.

Hauling himself higher, he drew Steelbreaker with one hand and looked up into Aisa face. Her gaze was empty, cast toward infinite suffering.

Raksha struck.

**

And suddenly, there was no more pain. The forest’ song drifted from her, like a nightmare melting away before the morning sun.

She was awash in warmth. Aisa opened her eyes and found herself looking at Raksha. She couldn’t move or turn her head or really feel anything else at all, but if they were so close together, he had to be holding her in his arms.

She smiled.

“Hello there,” she said.

Raksha smiled back, but it seemed forced, as if he were really sad. “Hello.”

“Did you like my singing?”

“Yes, yes, I did. Very much. Your voice is wonderful.”

“Why, thank you! I’m glad I was able to sing for everyone. Take their minds off of work for a bit, you know? Make their day just a bit brighter.”

“You definitely did for me, Aisa.”

She wanted to stroke his cheek, maybe even pull him in for a kiss, but she suddenly felt so tired.

“I… I’m getting sleepy, Raksha. You don’t mind if I close my eyes for a bit, do you? I’m trusting you to not take advantage of me, though!”

“How could I?” Raksha’s smile grew strained, but he seemed to hold her even more tightly, even more warmly. “Surely no Chevalier would besmirch his Damoiselle’s honor, nor let her face any affront.”

Aisa laughed.

“Sleep well, Aisa,” he said.

She closed her eyes, losing herself in the warmth wrapped about her.

**

Whatever was left of Aisa after he’d cut her free crumbled away into ash and was carried from his embrace into nothingness by the night breeze. The tree of hearts began to tremble beneath the weight of its fruit as more bloomed into existence but had no song to carry them away.

Raksha drew Steelbreaker back and aimed higher, where Aisa’s heart still hung. The organ burst beneath the blade’s edge, and the entire tree seemed to convulse. Its massive branches whipped wildly, but Raksha was too close to its trunk for them to reach him with any real effect.

Infusing Steelbreaker with the full force of his aegis, Raksha plunged the blade into the tree, edge ground-wards. It sank deeply, slicing through the unnatural wood as easily as it would through flesh. Bark crisped and burned away around the edges of the wound Raksha had inflicted on the tree, but he wasn’t done yet.

He took a double-handed grip on Steelbreaker’s hilt, swung his legs upward, so that his heels faced the sky, and aligned his entire bodyweight with the edge of his sword. Gravity began to assert its rightful place almost instantaneously, pulling him toward the ground and dragging Steelbreaker through the flesh of the tree of hearts.

Falling from his perch in the sky, Raksha roared as he carved a trench down the entire length of the tree, deepened enough by his aegis to reach its pith and scorch it with the Conflagration’s fury.

The ground whipped up toward him, and within moments, he crashed into a heap of dirt and corpses, but his descent had been slowed enough by Steelbreaker’s path through the wood for his aegis to absorb the impact of the fall.

Looking up, he saw that the tree of hearts was ablaze. The fire swiftly enveloped it and spread through its branches and onto the fruits that remained. The tree flailed uselessly as it burned, and as Raksha watched, its struggles faded, as did the fire, with nothing left to feed it.

Ash rained from above. The night breeze scattered most of it, but Raksha was still liberally dusted with the foul, stinking remains of the cremated tree.

“Goddamn it,” he spat, trying to rid its taste from his mouth. It was a futile effort. Nothing short of a bath would cleanse his clothes and his flesh.

Father Ignatius’s corpse still laid where he’d died, his eyes gazing unblinkingly into what Raksha hoped was God’s realm. Raksha had never considered himself to be particularly pious, but he felt that there was something profoundly wrong in leaving a clergyman’s body to rot in the open. Neither did he want to leave the bodies of all the corrupted serfs unattended.

Raksha wiped his blade clean as best as he could before sheathing it. Sudden fury surged within him. Whatever had lurked within the depths of this forest was responsible for Aisa’s agony and the hundreds of deaths this night. It did not deserve to exist. It could not exist.

He grinned savagely as a natural solution came to him. Father Ignatius had primed the forest for incineration, and what better funeral pyre would there be for him and the serfs than the place that had killed them?

Crouching beside the priest’s corpse, Raksha rifled through his pockets. Sure enough, he found a small pouch containing tinder and flint. He made the sign of the cross, closed Ignatius’s eyes, and got to his feet.

Raksha sighed.

It was already past midnight, and he still had an entire forest to burn.