And his power woke up.
The Genesis Saint Authority went into her first, a slow gold river of diagnostic light, and the World Tree Sovereign followed it in, reading the great body before him and the greater body around him all at once, root and flesh and flower and soul, cross referencing, and the results assembled in his mind with the cold clarity of an audit.
She was dying. That much was true.
And she was being drained.
Something was drinking her through the tree's roots, siphoning the queen's life and the world tree's strength through the same tether, drawing them both down like a lamp whose oil is being ladled out through a hole in the bottom of the bowl.
The dimming tree, the fading queen, the coincidence of their deaths, it was not a mystery, it was a mechanism.
And the tether was not natural.
