The Rootbind War
When the roots closed behind the last Inquisitor, a silence settled over Ridgefall—a silence not of peace, but of a beast holding its breath before the pounce.
Alaric stood at the edge of the Dream Maw's outer ring, its gnarled arches writhing with silver-glowing bark. Around him, his chosen—a unit of war-kin not bound by blood but by memory—waited, cloaked in moon-dipped armor, each carrying a fragment of the forest's will.
He raised his hand.
"Seal it."
A shudder passed through the living wood. Great trunks twisted. Rootbridges snapped into place. Hollow paths collapsed, one by one, behind the Council's hunters. The Maw was no longer a place of passage. It was a tomb.
Alaric turned to his warriors.
"They think they are the ghosts. But tonight, we haunt them."
The terrain around the Maw was treacherous—a blend of dream-touched nature and ancient memory. Time could stutter in these woods. An hour might become a second—or a day. But Alaric's team had trained for this. He had trained them himself.
Their mission was not only to ensure containment—but to sow fear.
He moved with surgical precision, splitting his war-kin into three flanks. One to bait the Inquisitors deeper, one to shadow and bleed their retreat lines, and the third—his—was to sever their tether.
He led that last group personally.
Each of the Inquisitors had a link—an obsidian shard worn beneath their skin, binding their will to the Obsidian Mirror back in the Council's Spire. As long as those shards pulsed, the hunters were not alone. They drew strength from the dark communion. But if the shard was destroyed, their magic would falter.
Alaric's job was to destroy them all.
They moved like specters, slipping through bark-veiled corridors and dream-gates. At one node, they ambushed a trio of Council operatives—sharp-eyed killers with blades that hissed through spells. But they were not ready for wolves that could bend shadow. Alaric struck first, tearing through with a precision honed by rage and rebirth. His blade—a fusion of ancestral silver and Ridgefall's wood—sliced through both steel and will.
The first shard shattered.
The pulse of the Inquisitors faltered.
Alaric felt it—like a fog briefly lifting in the Maw.
He pressed on.
In the next engagement, two of his kin fell—Broen, the hunter with the white-flecked jaw, and Tasra, the flameborn sorceress. They died silently, covering their kin, but the fury of their loss lit a fire behind Alaric's ribs.
They would be remembered. Their memory would carry weight.
He reached the second node—a hidden clearing where null-wards bled the ground dry of dream. There he found another Inquisitor—older, with skin marked in ward sigils, his blade curved like a reaper's crescent.
"You should have stayed buried," the man spat.
Alaric stepped forward. "So should your Council."
Their duel was not swift. It was calculated brutality. Feints twisted into counterspells. Blood watered sacred roots. When it ended, Alaric held the man's shard in his palm and crushed it under his boot.
The second link broke.
But not without cost.
Alaric's left side had been slashed open—just below the ribs. He bound it in silence, using wolf-thread linen, not daring to stop. His breath came short, but his resolve burned hotter.
One link remained.
He descended into the Dream Hollow, the deepest trench in the Maw—where even Mira dared not linger long. There, he found the final Inquisitor, already fighting something unseen.
Mira's doing, he realized.
The dream had awakened inside the assassin's mind, turning doubt into nightmare. The killer was shouting names—names that hadn't existed in centuries.
Alaric didn't speak. He drove his blade through the man's back, straight into the shard.
When it cracked, the entire Maw sighed.
The Mirror link was gone.
Now, the Inquisitors were trapped—cut from command, isolated, blind.
The tide had turned.
As Alaric emerged from the Hollow, bloodied but standing, his war-kin met him at the edge. A signal rose into the sky—blue flame wrapped in silver mist.
The trap had sprung.
Now, Ridgefall would close in.