Chapter 18: The Tree Wanted Blood
Liana went on ahead without slowing. Dorian had to set Lucky properly in motion to catch up, jolting it over roots and damp stones until the path widened enough to offend him less personally.
Then, without a word, Liana climbed up behind him.
She did not put her arms around him. She set both hands on his shoulders instead, using him for balance as the machine lurched forward again. She was clearly doing her best to avoid the rest of him, which, given the size of Lucky and the state of the path, was never going to be a complete success. Her knees brushed his thighs whenever the wheels struck rough ground. Once or twice she shifted with visible care, as though trying to reduce contact to the legal minimum.
Dorian felt it and smiled privately. The effort she was making not to touch him amused him more than it should have.
On one sharper jolt she lost the balance she had been protecting so carefully and her face brushed his hair. He smelled of soap and machine oil. She straightened at once and arranged her expression before he could glance back.
Lucky carried them farther into the forest, following the place Dorian had marked through the raven’s eyes. The trees thickened. Branches hung low enough to brush at his sleeves and catch in Liana’s hair. The ground dipped and rose unpredictably. Wet earth smelled dark and cold. Roots pushed through the path like old bones.
At last the machine gave a sharp metallic complaint.
“Yes, I heard you,” Dorian muttered.
He brought Lucky to a stop and, as usual, added a small compressed fuel capsule to the fuel slot above the engine. He always did. Just in case Lucky needed to fly in an emergency. Then he folded it away. Brass collapsed inward with neat clicks and a final hiss of disapproval. The sudden quiet after the engine was worse. Damp air settled against skin and cloth at once.
Then he and Liana continued on foot.
As they walked, the forest began to change. The green faded from the trees. The moss beneath their feet darkened, scorched, then crumbled into ash, with only rare patches of green left.
Dorian reached for the Mirror Calls. After a while, he found one answer. A small mirror was embedded in a trunk, nearly swallowed by moss, but still familiar.
He opened the hologram map above his brass arm and confirmed the point in thin blue light. Yes. He knew this crossing. Steamhollow. Stable, and exactly where it ought to be.
Liana glanced at it with interest. She had seen such maps before. But not one like this. Dorian’s was marked in different colours, with mirrors separated from ordinary routes, and beside them ran strings of precise coordinates she could not read.
Dorian shut the map.
“Well,” he said, “that is disappointingly predictable.”
He kept searching, but nothing else answered.
No hidden crossing. No second route. No useful surprise.
By evening, Liana found a narrow clearing where the ash thinned underfoot and the roots looked, for the moment, less likely to catch an ankle and break it.
Ashen Valley remained wrong. The trees stood pale and dry-barked, as though something had drained them. The air muffled sound. Even once it caught, the fire burned badly, low and uneven.
They made camp in silence. Dorian handled the practical work, checked Lucky’s capsule, and unpacked only what they needed. When they were satisfied with the place, they ate. Then Liana took out the sacred bud, packed it into a small pipe, lit it from the fire, drew once, and handed it to him.
Dorian accepted it without comment.
They shared the pipe for a few rounds. The smoke eased some of the strain from Dorian’s shoulders and left Liana a little less tightly strung, though neither of them relaxed enough to mistake it for comfort.
After a while, Liana said, “Why do mirrors answer to your blood?”
Dorian lowered the pipe slightly. “That is an unsettling question to hear in the dark.”
She did not smile. “Answer it.”
He looked back into the fire. “Because my father was a Mirrorwalker. Not every Mirrorwalker’s child is born to this burden. I was unlucky enough to be.”
Liana looked at him more closely. “Unlucky?”
He took the pipe back, turned it once between his fingers, then looked into the fire rather than at her.
“I knew early enough that I was different,” he said. “The vocabulary changes from place to place, but the sentiment remains tediously consistent. In some places they call Walkers freaks. In others, cursed folk. Bleeding creatures that open mirrors.”
Liana said nothing for a moment. She had not expected that.
After a pause, she asked, “And all the mirrors on your map answer to your blood?”
“No,” Dorian said. “That would make my life suspiciously convenient.”
He took another pull, then passed the pipe to Liana. “Not all of them know my blood. Some must be opened properly before they remember me. Others are sealed, restricted, or too unstable to risk.”
Liana exhaled smoke. “And the numbers?”
“Coordinates,” Dorian said. “They mark the area in which a mirror is likely to be found.”
Liana frowned. “Mirrors move?”
“Not all mirrors stay in exactly the same place,” Dorian said. “Some of them are too stubborn to be predictable.”
Their conversation broke off when something moved in the trees beyond the firelight.
The shape of it was wrong. Both of them looked up at once.
Liana’s hand went to her knife. Dorian watched the dark for a moment longer, then knocked the ash from the pipe into the fire.
“Promising,” he said.
Nothing came for them that night.
By morning, daylight changed nothing. The air still carried that faint dead smell. The pale trees stood in the same muffled stillness.
They spent the day on foot searching the roots of Ashen Valley, and the valley gave them nothing.
Dorian checked every stretch of ground that looked even faintly promising, every break in the ash, every place where the river bent too neatly or the air shifted oddly against his skin. He reached again and again for Mirror Calls until the effort became mechanical, driven less by hope than by refusal.
Nothing answered. No reflective energy. No trace of Drommala. Only the same blank silence coming back at him. By afternoon even irritation was gone.
Liana noticed the change without mentioning it. Less wit. Less polish. By evening there was something more exposed in his face, as if the place had stripped away a layer he usually kept buttoned tight.
With nothing else to trust, they followed the river.
It ran cold and dull through the valley. Pale roots split the banks beside ash-dark stone. The deeper they went, the less it felt like forest and the more like something half-burned and dead already.
By evening, they found the tree.
It stood near a bend where the bank widened into a shallow clearing. Larger than the others. Older by far. Pale roots coiled through the ash towards the water. Marks scarred the bark, old cuts or burns half-swallowed by growth. The place felt different at once. Not merely strange. Kept. Bound. Sacred in the severe forest way that suggested admiration from a distance and nothing else.
Liana stopped first.
“Do not touch anything,” she said.
Dorian did not answer. He was listening now.
The tree did not feel like a mirror. It felt worse. Something in it caught at him with the shape of a Mirror Pull, but the force of it was wrong, dragged through rot and old malice until it barely resembled anything clean. After a full day of silence, it hit hard.
He stepped towards it without meaning to.
Liana followed him at first because keeping the Walker alive was one of her main duties. Then the tree reached for her too. Not in the same way. Something brushed against her mind in the shape of trust, almost familiar, almost safe. That was what made it vile.
By the time either of them understood what was happening, they were already too close.
By the time Dorian touched the tree, evening had thinned into that foul half-light where Ashen Valley no longer looked like a place at all, only a grave.
The reaction came at once.
A low, wet sound moved through the wood beneath his hand, dangerous in a way the body understood before the mind did. As if the tree had drawn breath after holding it for centuries.
Liana swore.
Then the spirits came.
They did not emerge cleanly. They gathered out of trunks, ash, and river mist, taking shape only in fragments before breaking apart again. Too quick for the eye to settle on. A shoulder. A hand. The hint of a face. Then too many limbs where no body should have carried them.
They made a chilling thin sound as they came, sharp and broken, and it hit like a strike before the spirits themselves reached Dorian and Liana.
Liana reacted first. Her bow was already in her hand. She loosed one arrow, then another, firing on instinct at anything solid long enough to hit. The shots broke bodies apart, slowed them, bought seconds. No more.
Dorian moved at once. Reflective force snapped up around them in brief white planes. Thin shields flared into place and failed almost at once under the strain. The valley twisted the energy as soon as he touched it. He held the protection where he could, seconds at a time, then dropped it and struck back instead. Reflective force flashed from his hand, sharp and colourless. It drove through one spirit, glanced off another, and tore a third apart before the mist pulled it back together.
It was not enough.
The attack drove them together. Liana kept shooting wherever a body held shape long enough to wound. Dorian shifted between defence and strike, catching one rush, cutting off the next. There was no time for thought beyond the next movement, the next shape in the ash, the next thing coming through the dark.
Then one of the spirits broke through at the wrong angle. Too fast for Liana to turn. She had used all her arrows by then and was reaching for her knife instead. Dorian moved before he thought. He threw himself over her and drove her down. The strike slid across his back instead of landing cleanly.
At once the Mossgrove protection answered. Not like a wall. Not like rescue. Something narrower. More exact. It bent through them both, through Liana’s aim and Dorian’s instinct for defence, fitting itself to the shape of where they had fallen.
Dorian tried to raise reflective protection again. A thin white flare held for a second, then thinned at once. The field needed charging from nearby reflections, but the nearest clean surface was too far to help. Each attempt came back weaker than the last.
His damp hair brushed Liana’s cheek. She tried to pull away on instinct.
“Stay still,” he whispered to her, shifting more of his weight to keep her down. “If they break me, use me as a shield.”
His eyes were clear now, all distraction burned out. Liana could not stop looking at them. “Don’t you dare, Walker,” she said through her teeth. “Not now.”
Then another sound came through the valley. Not from the tree. Not from the spirits. Deeper than either. It ran under the roots and under the river, old enough to feel wrong in the bones. This one was full of voices. Hundreds of them, screaming in the old dialect all at once.
It hit like a blow. For one blank second the world went silent.
Then darkness.