“Holy shit.” Elach muttered, shivering under the weight that had just been lifted from him. He could move his legs this time, and no more papers fell in front of him. But something else had appeared.

Four tiny fragments of crystal shimmered in mid-air, each the size and shape of a toothpick. He waited for another note from Y’talla, but when none came, he reached out to touch the white sliver. He gently pushed it back with a musical tone, clear like a glass bell ringing out over fresh snow, and a luscious whisper filled his ears.

“Cavress must be punished for her involvement.” It spoke, then silence.

Elach blinked back tears, but it was too late. His face was already soaked for some reason, and when he raised a hand to touch his cheek, it came away coated in existential bleed. Without touching the yellow sliver, it resonated deep and low like a massive wooden drum. A different voice spoke this time, spitting vitriol with every word.

“Sedd was almost killed. Any amount of punishment would never be enough.” It spat, then once more, silence.

A cascade of hollow wooden notes from the orange sliver, the voice that followed deep and rumbling like an earthquake given form. “What would be suitable, then, for the ultimate crime? We cannot push too far, and cannot act too soon. The stability of control is not so easily rent asunder.”

“The only suitable punishment. Complete and utter nonexistence, with the scattering of her pathetic mercenaries to their own individual ends.” The red crystal sounded in a voice that was a little too close to normal for comfort, making Elach’s hair stand on end. When it finished speaking, a clattering like windchimes emerged from the sliver.

The crystals went dim after expelling their stored words, falling to the ground and exploding into glimmering mist. It whirled around Elach, collecting itself into an image that was far too large for the tiny crystals to make.

The voices joined in harmony as the image shifted, looking back at Elach with twin gazes that didn’t fit together whatsoever. One moment it was a bone-white helmet, and the next a slobbering red maw filled with mismatched teeth. “When one falls, another must rise to take its place.”

Everything went dark.

Elach ran his hands through his hair for at least the tenth time in half that many minutes. He’d woken up less than an hour ago, found Shar in the middle of an intense combat meditation session, and tried to talk to Y’talla about exactly what he’d seen last night.

Except she didn’t know anything beyond when Hoalt took the last living spawn prisoner. And the little slivers that remained of the eggs were nowhere to be found. She’d shot him a sympathetic look and went right back to trying to wrangle the wisplings, some of which glowed brighter than Elach remembered.

“Resthollow and Hoalt.” Elach muttered. “What in the hells connects those two?”

He scoured his memories for answers, but found his knowledge severely lacking. He knew plenty about everything on the side of the divide he’d started on, but still knew next to nothing about his new reality. But there was one thing he remembered plain as day; Prisoner’s markings that apparently belonged to Cavress, which used to stand where Resthollow now did.

Elach paused, frowning and drumming his fingers along his lips. Those two facts couldn’t exist at the same time. He’d learned a long time ago that Resthollow was as ancient as Pyreheld and Freshetfall, but Prisoner was nowhere near as ancient as either of them.

“Unless the eternals did something about Cavess.” Elach whispered, staring straight ahead at a vein of yellow running up one of the hideaway’s dead roots. “What happens when the Eternals destroy a city? Does it snap back just like everything else?”

The hideaway rumbed for the first time since Elach had returned, its wordless communication grating against his mind as he worked to comprehend it. But as he worked, something clicked. The grating speech took on a different tone; an almost ethereal voice that came from inside of Elach and rang like a complex set of chimes.

“A single footprint from the eternals fills over. A city is no different.” The hideaway said sadly, a small vein of bright yellow fleeing upwards with every word. “Lighthome forgets its history, shards of truth hidden away in eggs of concealment that will never see the light of day. If only you could truly understand me, and not the simple pictures and feelings I must send you. Alas.”

The hideaway sighed, and Elach tilted his head to the side. “I can understand you.”

The chair he was sitting in exploded into motion, moss flying every which way as it threw him into the air. The hideaway sputtered wordlessly, trying to fit together a coherent thought while they struggled with this revelation.

“I’m guessing nobody else can understand you?” Elach laughed, holding himself in midair with a chain while the hideaway blurred with motion. “So, dead tree, should I keep calling you hideaway?”

“No. Please, no. Izzik and Occril always called me that, and I hated it so much. I am so much more than something to hide in.” The dead tree pouted. “My name is Roxu. And I am a stone’s throw away from manifesting my own form.”

Elach let himself drop, looking up and around at the hollowed out tree. “No offense, but I don’t get how you’re about to manifest from this tree. It barely even looks alive.”

“Most of me is underground. And if you could see the massive network I span, you wouldn’t be speaking ill of this almost-dead tree.” Roxu said with the smallest amount of annoyance. “But if I manifest here, the non-manifested part of me will fall to Ghravv’s stain. Which would taint the manifested part of me as well.”

Elach nodded in understanding. “So you need to go somewhere else to manifest. But you’re a massive underground network, by your own words, so how in the hells are you going to do that?”

“I wondered the same thing for so many years. Then came along a location practitioner whose Issi has a primal tint, the sort that I haven’t felt since Hoalt uprooted me from the great network.” Roxu sighed longingly. “I need to feel it again. And from what I can tell of your headspace, you need something to give life to this repaired spring of yours.”

That was a little too on the nose for Elach, and he eyed an expanse of wall with suspicion.

“Did Y’talla talk to you last night?” He asked. Roxu was silent for a long moment.

Guiltily silent.

“Roxu?”

“...We might have had a short conversation.” Roxu admitted sheepishly. “But we devised a way to transfer all of me into the spring! It would only take a large expulsion of light directly into the ground at the moment you attempt to take me into your headspace!”

Elach was about to point out just how impossible that sounded, but Roxu wasn’t finished.

“I’d take on the burden of supplying your technique with… what did she call it… Issi! I’d take on the entire Issi supply, and you’d only have to set the destination. Which would be inside the dirt of the primal spring in your head.” Roxu said with a smile in its voice. “Simple, right? And all you need to do is get all the light from Lighthome and shove it in a really deep hole.”

Mouth hanging open, Elach searched for the right way to tell Roxu that that was quite literally impossible. He couldn’t fight one of the hornets from the first night, nevermind whatever other elite fighters or guards Lighthome had to protect the great lights.

“Morning, Elach.” Shar yawned, pushing aside the writhing black curtain with one hand. “Occril and that scorpion did wonders for my Issi.”

“How wonderful.” Roxu said cheerily, and Shar looked up at the creaking tree before looking to Elach for a translation. “Oh, right. She can’t understand me whatsoever. Another advantage of being a location practitioner.”

“Advantage of what?” Elach asked. Shar stared blankly at him waiting for a translation, and Elach coughed into his hand when Roxu didn’t elaborate. “The tree, who’s name is actually Roxu, just told me it wants to come into my headspace.”

“Oh, Y’talla’s idea.” Shar said with a nod. “I’m all for it, if you think we can pull it off. Lighthome won’t be easy to siege, but Izzik has to know a few hidden passages we can skulk through for some sneak attacks.”

Elach threw his hands up in the air. “Am I the only one that wasn’t a part of this plan? A plan that involves me taking in something that’s only about, I don’t know, a hundred times bigger than the spine?!”

Flow chimed in that they weren’t consulted, albeit only to Elach. He still felt a little vindicated, even if Shar and Y’talla were both smirking at him. And Roxu was doing whatever produced a slightly amused feeling.

Something bubbled in Elach’s throat. It was hot and sticky, but it didn’t want to come up and out. It wanted to stay down there, fester, and become something far worse. Instead, he forced it out.

“You know what, no. I’m not going to kill myself to help a tree I just met.” Elach smacked his fist into the hollow tree, the wood as strong as steel. “We’re here to get through this damn floor and meet Prisoner. As far as we know, taking all of Lighthome’s light away might belch us out of this floor and lock us out for however long it takes for the bugs to recover. We might never reach him.”

Shar shook her head. “The pillar doesn’t work like that, Elach.”

“Then how does it work?!” Elach asked, his voice raised in exasperation. “Unless that’s another secret you can’t share?”

“It probably is, but we’re in this together now.” Shar said with a shrug. “The pillar will never make it impossible to climb. If this floor’s clear condition becomes unattainable, the pillar will assign it a new one. And from what Hoalt thinks of Prisoner, it is plausible that the floor’s clear condition changed after he came through. The guidebook was nowhere near correct at any point on this floor, so I disregarded it.”

“...So destroying Lighthome would solve all our problems.” Elach sighed. “Wonderful. Fine, then; we’ll go with Y’talla’s idea. Roxu, how much brain power would it take me to pull out all of your roots?”

Roxu hummed in thought, yellow lines becoming brighter as the humming got louder. “I’m not sure, but it’d be impossible. If you took in everything, my roots would dangle out of the dirt and down into the void below. So you can cut a big circle out of the ground and take only those roots into your headspace.”

Elach nodded; that would make it slightly more realistic for him to actually do this. He’d have to get Y’talla and Flow to survey the spring and give him a guess at how big it was, and where he’d be putting Roxu’s tree part, so he’d have a good idea of where to start taking and where to stop. But he’d still have to somehow get it in his head to move something this big, and something that he couldn’t fully see.