What Grows
Roan was in the garden before the sun cleared the treeline.
This was his ritual — the quiet hour before anyone else was up, when the air was cool and the soil was damp and the only sounds were birdsong and the faint rustle of the sentient grain greeting him from its plot. He walked the rows the way a captain walks a deck: checking, noting, planning.
The tomatoes first. A new cluster was ripening on the largest plant, each fruit the size of a melon and deepening from green to a red so vivid it seemed lit from within. He tested one with a gentle squeeze — firm, another day or two. The carrots beside them were ready for harvest, their orange tops pushing above the soil line like stubborn children refusing to stay underground. He made a mental note: pull six today, replant the bed with the wild onion bulbs that needed more space.
The mushroom beds next. He knelt beside the cream cap plot and brushed the soil gently with his fingers. Pale threads of mycelium had broken the surface overnight — a web of gossamer white spreading across the prepared substrate. Growing fast.
The deepcap bed was slower, darker, the mycelium threading through decomposing wood in dense black veins that pulsed faintly when Roan held his hand above them. These would take longer — a week, maybe. But the concentration of flavour would be worth the wait.
The glowing mushrooms in their log bed pulsed with steady blue heartbeats. Roan checked his wrist device — Milo’s dimensional analysis was running frame by frame, the seventy-three percent similarity to wormhole models holding steady.
He tended them carefully, adjusting the substrate moisture, ensuring the log hadn’t shifted in the night. Research specimens and potential ingredients and maybe, distantly, a thread leading home.
Then the new plantings.
He opened the spice chest — he’d brought it outside, unwilling to let it out of his sight — and began.
Cumin seeds went into a prepared bed in full sun, pressed into the mana-rich soil in neat rows. He could feel the soil’s warmth through his fingers, the ambient energy denser here than anywhere else in the clearing.
Turmeric root segments, each one dense and golden, went into a deeper bed where the soil was rich with organic matter. These were rhizomes — they’d spread underground, multiplying, building a network. In normal soil, turmeric took months to establish. Here, Roan expected weeks at most.
Chilli seeds — tiny, potent, each one carrying the promise of heat — went into a raised bed the Spider had constructed from stacked stones and filled with the garden’s best soil. Chillies liked warmth and drainage.
Cardamom pods he planted in the shadier soil near the mushroom beds, where the canopy filtered the light and the air stayed humid. Cardamom was particular — it wanted shade, moisture, patience. Even mana might not rush it, and Roan respected that. Some things needed time to become what they were.
Cinnamon bark cuttings went near the treeline, where they could grow into something larger without crowding the garden. If they took — if the mana coaxed them into rooting and growing the way it had coaxed everything else — he’d have a cinnamon tree within months. His own supply, renewable, mana-enhanced.
Mustard seeds went in last. Hardy, fast-growing, tolerant of almost anything. They’d be the first to mature, and he was counting on that — mustard oil and mustard paste have been missing in his cooking since he arrived.
Rin joined him halfway through, barefoot in the dewy grass, grey eyes tracking the mana as he worked the soil.
“The seeds are already absorbing,” she said, kneeling beside the cumin bed. “The mana in the soil is flowing into them — I can see it. Like the soil is feeding them directly.”
“You can see that as well. You are impressive, Rin.”
“Mother said I have innate bloodline talents.” She tilted her head, watching something invisible. “The cumin is the fastest. It’s already cracking its shell.”
Roan looked at the cumin bed. Nothing visible yet — but if Rin said the shells were cracking beneath the surface, he believed her.
“Why do you plant them in different areas?” she asked. “The cumin in sun, the cardamom in shade, the cinnamon at the edge?”
“Different plants need different conditions. Cumin wants heat and direct light — it’s a desert plant originally. Cardamom grows in forest understories where the light is filtered. Cinnamon needs space to become a tree.” He pressed the last mustard seeds into their bed and brushed the soil smooth. “A good garden isn’t a single environment. It’s a collection of micro-environments, each one tuned to what grows there.”
Rin was quiet for a moment, absorbing this the way she absorbed everything he taught her — completely, seriously, filing it somewhere deep.
“That’s what you’re doing with the restaurant too,” she said. “Not just cooking food. Creating conditions.”
Roan looked at her. Sometimes this twelve-year-old saw things with a clarity that three centuries of experience hadn’t given him.
“I suppose it is,” he said, and went to check on the sentient grain, which had expanded its plot overnight by another three rows and was rustling with what could only be described as satisfaction.
Mid-morning, Milo flagged something strange.
“Master, I’m detecting an anomalous entity at the garden’s perimeter. Approximately sixty meters northeast, near the treeline.” The robotic cat’s ears were pricked flat, its eyes blazing with alert intensity. “The entity is cycling between dimensional states — partially present in our reality, partially elsewhere. Standard mana detection would not register it. I’m tracking it through gravitational micro-fluctuation and dimensional resonance scanning.”
Roan set down the onion he’d been dicing. The wolf was on its feet at the garden’s edge, growling at something it couldn’t see — pacing, hackles raised, snapping at empty air.
“Show me.”
“You’ll need the AR glasses.”
Roan retrieved them from the kitchen — the slim exploration-grade lenses from the ship’s equipment locker. He stepped outside, put them on, and the world shifted.
Through the glasses, mana became visible as ambient light — the garden shimmering gold-green, the restaurant blazing with concentrated energy, the soil itself glowing with the enrichment he’d been unknowingly producing for weeks. His own hands radiated golden-white light so intense he had to look away for a moment. He filed that detail for later consideration and turned his attention to the treeline.
There. Flickering between visible and invisible like a signal losing reception — a creature. About the size of a large dog, clinging to the trunk of an oak where normal vision showed nothing but bark. Multiple limbs — six jointed legs and two longer tentacle-like appendages. A dark carapace that shimmered with iridescence in the spectral overlay, threaded with faint lines of energy that didn’t match any pattern in this world’s organisms. It was phasing in and out of reality in slow, rhythmic pulses, as if breathing between dimensions.
Several merchants who had been admiring the garden noticed Roan standing motionless with strange eyewear, staring at an apparently empty tree, and began paying attention. The guild members, sharper in their instincts, moved closer with hands on weapons.
“What do you see?” Caelen asked, her voice calm but ready.
“Some extraordinary creature.” Roan studied the creature with a chef’s assessing eye rather than a warrior’s — noting the dense musculature of the limbs, the heavy carapace, the way the tentacle appendages coiled with the firm elasticity of good crustacean meat. “Milo, biological analysis.”
“Hybrid organism. Cellular structure contains trace void-energy signatures — energy patterns that don’t correspond to this world’s mana system. Tissue composition is a cross between what we’d classify as crustacean and cephalopod. Protein density is exceptional.” A pause. “It appears to be an interdimensional predator. Small, but capable.”
The merchants stared at the glasses. Sera stared at the glasses. They looked nothing like any magical implement anyone had ever seen — no runes, no crystals, no enchantment signatures. Just slim, clean, technological.
“Interesting eyewear,” Sera said carefully. “May I ask what enchantment they use?”
“It’s not enchantment. It’s spectral overlay — multiple sensor readings projected onto the visual field.” Roan said this absently, most of his attention on the creature. He didn’t notice Sera’s expression, which was the expression of someone who had just heard words that individually made sense but collectively implied something her education hadn’t prepared her for.
“Deploy the Spider,” Roan said. “Containment protocol. Track across dimensional phases — don’t lose it when it flickers.”
The Spider emerged from the restaurant’s back hatch, legs clicking against the flagstones, its posture shifting from gardening mode to something altogether more purposeful. It moved toward the treeline with mechanical precision, sensors locked on the target.
The guild members watched a six-legged mechanical construct advance on an invisible threat with predatory efficiency, and several of them unconsciously stepped back. This was not a golem or a familiar. This was something else entirely — something that moved with a fluidity and intent that suggested engineering beyond anything they’d encountered.
“What is that thing?” Torren whispered to Mira.
“His,” Mira said, which was the only answer she had.
The void-stalker sensed the Spider’s approach and tried to phase out — flickering fully into its other-dimensional state, vanishing from normal perception. But the Spider didn’t rely on normal perception. Its sensors tracked the creature’s gravitational signature, its dimensional resonance, the faint distortion it left in local space-time even when invisible. When the creature flickered back into reality a meter to the left of its previous position, the Spider was already there.
Four legs pinned the creature against the oak’s trunk. The void-stalker thrashed — its tentacle appendages whipping outward, its carapace grinding against the bark. For a moment it fought with the desperate energy of a cornered predator, limbs phasing in and out, trying to slip between dimensions. The Spider held firm across every phase, its advanced alloys indifferent to the dimensional flickering that would have confused any magical restraint.
Then the Spider’s heavy shears closed on the neural cluster behind the carapace, and it was over. Clean, precise, the way you’d dispatch a lobster. The void-stalker spasmed once, its limbs going rigid, and then went limp. Its body solidified fully into this reality, the dimensional flickering ceasing as whatever energy sustained it faded.
The clearing was very quiet.
Roan walked over, glasses still on, and knelt beside the carcass. He examined it with his hands — testing the carapace’s hardness, pressing the leg meat to assess density, feeling the texture of the tentacle appendages. Dense, firm, elastic. Good structure.
“Toxicology,” he told Milo.
“Running… Flesh is edible. High protein, unusual amino acid structures, trace void-energy compounds at concentrations well below harmful thresholds. The carapace contains mineral compounds that… Master, this is interesting. The shell compounds show strong potential as a soil enrichment agent. The void-energy traces interact with ambient mana in ways that could significantly accelerate plant growth.”
Roan looked at the creature. Then he looked at the garden. Then he looked back at the creature.
“Lets separate the meat from the shell. Meat to the kitchen prep counter. Shell to be ground and mixed into the soil around the new spice plantings.”
Behind him, twenty-seven people stood in various states of astonishment. The merchants had just watched an invisible creature get hunted and killed by a mechanical spider on the instructions of a chef wearing glasses that could see through unknown space. The knights had just watched a takedown executed with more precision than most guild operations. Sera had been scribbling notes so fast her pen had torn through the page.
Caelen stood with her arms folded, watching Roan carry the creature toward the kitchen, and thought: He detected a threat no one else could perceive, deployed a construct more advanced than anything in the Silvergate arsenal, and dispatched it in under a minute. And his first question was whether he could eat it.
She added another item to her rapidly growing assessment file and said nothing.
Lyra had appeared at the kitchen door during the Spider’s takedown. She stood very still, watching Roan examine the carcass with professional interest while butchering it for food and fertiliser.
She recognised the creature. A void-stalker — a predator from between dimensions, the kind of thing she had killed hundreds of in her millennia of service. One had followed her back from last night’s patrol, slipped through her defences, and entered the mana-enriched zone around the restaurant.
And the chef had detected it with instruments that weren’t magical, hunted it with a machine that wasn’t enchanted, and was now planning to serve it for lunch.
“That creature,” she said, keeping her voice level, “may not be safe to consume. It doesn’t appear to be native to the Greymist.”
“Milo ran toxicology. The flesh is clean.”
“Your instruments may not detect all forms of danger.”
“Milo’s sensors were upgraded just last year with the latest tech which can detect dangers across eleven galaxies worth of biological variation.” He was already laying the segmented meat on the prep counter, the Spider following with the ground shell in a container. “But I’ll cook a small sample first and test it myself before serving it to anyone else.”
Lyra stood in the kitchen doorway and watched the man who had just casually revealed technology beyond anything this world possessed. And arranged void-stalker meat on a cutting board and reached for his spice chest.
She went to set the tables, because the alternative was thinking about how thoroughly her monitoring mission had spiralled beyond any scenario she’d prepared for.
Roan worked the void-creature meat the way he worked any unfamiliar protein — methodically, respectfully, letting the ingredient tell him what it wanted to be.
He sliced a thin piece from the leg, seasoned it with salt alone, and seared it in a hot pan. The flesh was firm, dense, with a resistance that reminded him of the best crustacean meat — a slight snap when you bit through the surface, then yielding tenderness beneath. The colour shifted from translucent grey to opaque white as it cooked, with faint iridescent threads visible at the edges.
He tasted it.
The flavour was briny and clean, with an underlying sweetness and a finish that was hard to place — something cool and bright, like tasting starlight, if starlight had a flavour.
The kitchen seemed briefly more vivid — colours more saturated, sounds more distinct, the grain flour’s scent separating into its component notes.
“Interesting,” he said, and reached for the spices.
The second test piece he marinated in a paste of the ginger-pepper root, garlic, a touch of the cream from Harsk’s supplies, and — for the first time — cumin and chilli from the spice chest. He let it sit for twenty minutes while he prepared the rest of lunch, then seared it over high mana flame.
The spices transformed the creature entirely. The ginger-pepper root’s heat married with the meat’s natural brininess in a way that shouldn’t have worked but did — fire and ocean, meeting in the middle. The cumin added earthiness, the chilli added a slow burn that built at the back of the throat, and the garlic tied everything together the way garlic always did, in every world, in every kitchen.
He gave a piece to Rin.
She tasted it with her eyes open, watching the mana. “This is different from everything else you’ve made. The mushrooms harmonise. The soup nourishes. This… focuses. Like someone turned up the clarity on all my senses.” She blinked several times. “I can see the mana patterns in the room more sharply than usual. Even the grain’s network through the floor — I couldn’t normally perceive that from inside the building.”
“Good or bad?”
“Good. Temporary, I think — the effect is already fading. But while it lasts, it’s like having better eyes.”
Roan nodded and began planning the lunch service.
Meanwhile, the Spider had ground the void-stalker’s shell into a fine, iridescent powder and was working it into the soil around the new spice plantings. Roan checked on it between kitchen tasks, kneeling beside the cumin bed, and what he saw made him pause.
The cumin seeds — planted barely three hours ago — had sprouted.
Tiny green shoots, pale and determined, pushing through the enriched soil. The void-shell powder had accelerated what was already an unnaturally fast growth rate. Rin’s observation that the seeds were “cracking their shells” at dawn had been accurate — now, at mid-morning, they were already reaching for the light.
The turmeric segments showed swelling at the growth nodes. The chilli bed was still quiet, but Milo’s sensors detected cellular activity beneath the surface. The mustard seeds, true to their nature, had practically exploded — shoots two inches high already, leaves unfurling with eager speed.
Roan stood and looked at his garden — the established vegetables, the mushroom beds, the herb borders, and now the spice plantings already racing toward harvest. A month ago, this had been an empty clearing. Now it was the most productive patch of agricultural land on the continent.
He went back to the kitchen. He had a lunch service to run, and for the first time, he had spices.
Lunch was served to a dining room that was more relaxed than the night before.
The travelers had slept, eaten breakfast (grain porridge with honey and berries, which Roan considered simple but which reduced several merchants to appreciative silence), and spent a morning exploring the grounds. They were no longer strangers arriving in the dark. They were guests settling in, and the atmosphere reflected it — conversation flowed more easily, chairs were pulled between tables, someone had convinced Torren to demonstrate his new Third Circle mana circulation to an audience of fascinated merchants.
Roan served three dishes.
The first was a spiced bean stew — three varieties of beans from Harsk’s supply, simmered with tomatoes, wild onion, and garlic, then finished with a tempering of cumin and mustard seeds bloomed in hot clarified butter. The sound of the seeds hitting the fat — the pop and crackle that meant the spices were releasing their essential oils — filled the kitchen, and Roan felt something loosen in his chest that had been tight for weeks. This was how he cooked. This was the foundation. The stew was rich, earthy, deeply satisfying, the beans breaking down into a thick gravy that clung to the grain bread served alongside it.
The second dish was the spice-marinated fowl. Roan had used the full spice vocabulary for the first time — cumin, chilli, turmeric, ginger-pepper root, garlic, a touch of cinnamon, cardamom cracked and ground. The bird had been marinated in cream mixed with the spice paste, then roasted over mana flame until the skin was deeply golden and fragrant, the meat tender enough to pull apart with fingers.
The dining room had gone quiet again. Not the stunned silence of last night’s mushroom course — this was different. This was the silence of people encountering an entirely new flavour language and needing time to process it. The spices worked in combination — each one distinct but contributing to a whole that was greater than any single element. Warmth from the cumin, heat from the chilli, earthiness from the turmeric, brightness from the ginger-pepper root, sweetness from the cinnamon and cardamom. Layers that revealed themselves one at a time, each bite slightly different from the last.
Dren, who had been steadily converted from skeptic to believer over the past twelve hours, set down a fowl bone that had been stripped clean and said to no one in particular: “I didn’t know food could do this.”
Mira, sitting beside him, didn’t gloat. She didn’t need to. Dren’s clean plate said everything.
The third dish was the void-creature special — small portions of the spice-marinated, seared meat, served only to those who wanted to try something adventurous. Roan described it honestly as “a creature caught near the restaurant this morning — unusual species, the flesh has unique properties.”
Half the room declined. The other half, led by Caelen (who never declined an intelligence-gathering opportunity) and Harsk (who never declined a new experience that might have commercial potential), tried it.
The reaction was visible. The sharpening effect hit within the first bite — eyes widening, heads tilting, the particular stillness of people whose senses had suddenly been turned up. A knight on Caelen’s team looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Harsk blinked rapidly and said “I can count the grain in the wood of this table.” Sera, who had been monitoring her own mana signature with her instrument, made a sound that was half gasp and half academic excitement as her readings spiked in a pattern she’d never recorded.
Caelen tasted the void-creature meat slowly, analytically, the way she’d tasted everything Roan served. The sharpening was undeniable — her already-keen senses intensified, her mage-sight deepening to a degree that let her perceive mana flows she normally couldn’t access without deep meditation. But it was the flavour that surprised her. The spice marinade had married with the creature’s unusual flesh in a way that was genuinely delicious — not just interesting or novel, but deeply, satisfyingly good.
She looked at Roan through the service window and thought: He found an unknown creature this morning. By lunch, he’d determined it was safe, developed a preparation method, and integrated it into a menu that also featured his first-ever use of newly acquired spices. This is either genius or insanity, and I’m no longer confident I can tell the difference.
The afternoon settled into departure preparations.
The merchants packed their wagons with the unhurried efficiency of people who’d done it a thousand times, though several kept glancing back at the restaurant as if memorising its location. Horses were hitched and fed — they’d grazed on the mana-enriched grass and looked notably more energetic than when they’d arrived, which the drivers attributed to rest and the horses attributed to the best meal of their lives.
Harsk found Roan in the garden, checking on the sprouting cumin. “Two weeks,” Harsk said. “I’ll have everything on your list. And I’m doubling my wagon count — I’ll need the space for return cargo.”
“Return cargo?”
“Roan, do you understand what those vegetables would sell for in Silvergate? Those tomatoes alone — if even a fraction of their properties transfer to the buyer…” He caught himself. “That’s a conversation for next time. But think about it.”
Roan thought about it for approximately two seconds. “I’ll consider it. But the garden feeds the kitchen first. Surplus only.”
“Surplus is all I’m asking.” Harsk extended his hand. “Two weeks.”
They shook, and Harsk went to join his caravan.
Mira and Torren came to say goodbye together. Torren still hadn’t fully settled into his new Third Circle — he kept flexing his hands and rolling his shoulders, feeling the mana flow through channels that had been blocked for months. He wanted to say something to Roan and couldn’t find the words, so he bowed instead — a deep, formal bow that made Roan uncomfortable and Mira hide a smile.
“Stop that,” Roan said. “I made you mushrooms. You did the rest yourself.”
“The mushrooms—”
“Were just food. Your body was ready.” Roan looked at him steadily. “Don’t give credit to the meal. Give credit to the months of training that brought you to the edge. The food just helped you step over.”
Torren straightened. His eyes were bright. He nodded once, turned, and walked to his horse with the slightly dazed energy of a young man whose life had just changed and who hadn’t quite caught up to it yet.
Dren was already mounted. He rode past the kitchen door, paused, and said: “The fowl with the spices. Can you make that every time?”
“I can make it better.”
Dren considered this. “I’ll be back,” he said, and rode on, which from Dren was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
Caelen was the last of the guild party to leave. She clasped Roan’s forearm — a warrior’s greeting, or farewell — and said: “First patrol arrives within the week. I’ll send word through Harsk’s supply runs.” She paused. “The creature you served at lunch. Where did it come from?”
“The wolf brought it. Something from the deeper Greymist.”
“Milo being your… cat?”
“Milo being my partner. The cat is just one of his forms.”
Caelen let that statement settle into the growing file of things about Roan that didn’t fit conventional categories. Then she nodded. “Be careful with unknown species. Not everything the Greymist produces is benign.”
“Thanks for your worry. I run tests before serving food on the menu.”
“I wasn’t talking about the food.” She swung onto her horse, gave the restaurant one last assessing look, and rode after her guild.
Sera Vane did not leave with the caravan.
She was sitting on a rock near the mushroom beds, instrument in one hand, notebook in the other. She’d asked Orion about building a small research shelter that morning, and the old wizard — amused, intrigued, and eager for intellectual company — had agreed to construct one that afternoon.
“Two conditions,” Orion had told her. “First, you share your findings with me. Second, you don’t publish anything that identifies the specific individuals living here without their consent.”
“Agreed,” Sera had said immediately, because the data she was collecting was more valuable than any publication, and she knew it.
The caravan departed in the early afternoon, rolling westward along the Greymist road in a long line of wagons and riders. The merchants would reach Thornhaven in two days, carrying with them the story of a restaurant that had served them the best meals of their lives, run by a wizard-artificer of unclassifiable power, in a clearing where the very soil was magical and a mechanical spider tended the garden.
The story would spread. It always did.
Roan watched them go from the garden.
He checked on the sentient grain, which had expanded by another three rows and was currently engaged in what appeared to be a gentle tug-of-war with the mint-like creeper over a disputed patch of ground near the herb border. Roan separated them with the patient firmness of a man refereeing between children.
“You both have enough space,” he told them. Neither plant appeared convinced.
Rin was in the kitchen, cleaning the lunch service dishes. He could hear the quiet clink of ceramic and the softer sound of her humming — something tuneless and content, the sound of a girl who had found a place where she felt safe enough to make noise without thinking about it. It was the first time he’d heard her hum.
He stayed in the garden a while longer, watching the crops grow.
Night came to the Greymist Expanse, and with it came the dead.
Roan felt them first through a mana pulse — a routine evening scan he’d started doing since Rin taught him the technique. The pulse rolled outward from the restaurant, mapping the now-familiar landscape: the garden, the stream, the wolf at the treeline, Orion in his cottage, Sera in her newly constructed research shelter (a modest stone-and-timber structure that Orion had built in exactly eighteen minutes, to Sera’s open-mouthed astonishment).
And beyond the enrichment zone’s edge, in the gathering darkness of the Greymist — movement.
Not animals. Not the large, old things he’d sensed during his first pulse. These were different: cold, fragmented, their mana signatures not flowing the way living things flowed but stuttering, flickering, like broken signals. Dozens of them. Moving through the forest in loose groups, directionless, purposeless, drawn by some instinct that no longer had a living mind behind it.
“Milo, what am I sensing?”
“Undead, Master. The Greymist Expanse contains remnant populations of animated dead — a known hazard documented in Lyra’s initial briefing. They emerge primarily at night and are attracted to living mana signatures.”
Roan stood on the kitchen steps, looking out toward the dark treeline. He couldn’t see them — not with normal vision. But he could feel them through the pulse’s fading echo: cold presences shuffling through the undergrowth, some humanoid, some not, all of them carrying the brittle, broken energy of things that should have stopped moving a long time ago.
“Are they approaching?”
“Negative. They appear to be maintaining distance from the mana-enrichment zone. Current closest approach: approximately one hundred and twenty meters beyond the zone boundary.”
Roan watched. The undead presences milled at the edge of his awareness, circling the enrichment zone the way moths circle a lamp — drawn but unable to approach. The concentrated life-energy saturating the soil, the plants, the air itself was apparently uncomfortable or painful for creatures animated by death-energy. They paced the boundary and didn’t cross.
From Orion’s cottage, a faint flicker of light — the old wizard reinforcing his wards. He’d felt the undead too. His protections weren’t aimed at them, though — the enrichment zone handled that. His wards were deeper, stronger, aimed at something further away and more concerning.
The wolf was on its feet, positioned between the restaurant and the treeline, ears forward, a low growl resonating in its chest that Roan could feel through the ground. It wasn’t alarmed — just alert. This was routine for the wolf. It had been living in the Greymist long before Roan arrived.
A few of the undead shapes pressed closer to the boundary. One of them — something that had once been humanoid, its mana signature tattered and dim — reached the edge of the enrichment zone and recoiled. The concentrated life-energy hit it like a wall of sunlight, and it stumbled back, its broken movements becoming more agitated before it turned and shuffled away into the deeper darkness.
“The zone functions as a natural barrier,” Milo observed. “Ordinary undead creatures cannot tolerate the mana density within your enrichment radius. Master, your passive energy output has created a safe haven approximately two kilometres in diameter. Nothing dead can enter it.”
Roan thought about the caravan camped here last night — thirty people sleeping peacefully in their wagons while undead circled the perimeter and couldn’t get in. He thought about every future traveler who would stop at the restaurant and sleep safely for the first time in days.
“Good,” he said and went inside.
From her window, Lyra watched the undead circle and retreat, and felt the familiar weight of a night that demanded her attention elsewhere.
She needed to go — to patrol, to reinforce, to check for the incursions that came every night with increasing frequency. But tonight, for the first time, she hesitated. Her patrols were leading threats back to the restaurant.
“But they can taste good. Maybe I will bring groceries back.”
She transformed in the quiet of her room, her human shape folding into the vast dark form of the Matriarch, star-patterns rotating across her skin. She slipped through the dimensional fold and rose into the sky, leaving the warm rectangle of her window behind.