The state of Antioch in the second week of June was a vision of the apocalypse. Inside the walls, the air was a thick, stagnant soup of human misery. Men were no longer soldiers; they were ghosts in rusted mail, wandering the streets with glazed eyes, their tongues swollen from thirst. Outside, the fires of Kerbogha's camp circled the city like the glowing eyes of a predator waiting for its prey to stop twitching.
In the basement of an abandoned manor near the Iron Gate, Sir Alaric of Artois sat in a darkness that would have blinded a normal man. To him, the room was bathed in a soft, grey-violet hue. He could see the intricate patterns of the obsidian vines that now blanketed the stone walls. They looked like frozen lightning, pulsing with a slow, hypnotic rhythm.
Beside him, Godfrey was sharpening a blade. The sound was a rhythmic, metallic rasp that vibrated through Alaric's sensitive teeth.
"The army is breaking, Alaric," Godfrey said, his voice now a deep, resonant hum. "I heard three men in the square today talking about jumping from the walls to end it. They would rather the Turkish swords than the slow crawl of the famine. Even the priests have stopped singing. Their throats are too dry for hymns."
Alaric didn't look up. He was watching a single, dark sprout pushing its way through a crack in the floorboards. It was fed by a small bowl of blood he had placed there—his own "sap," sacrificed to help the Vilevine anchor itself to the city's foundations.
"Despair is a quiet killer," Alaric replied. "But it makes the spirit brittle. The Vilevine needs the city to stay standing until the roots are deep enough. If the humans surrender now, the Turks will burn everything, and the sap will boil in the wood."
"Then we must give them a reason to fight," Godfrey said. "Or we must kill them all ourselves and hold the walls as thirteen."
"Thirteen cannot hold three miles of wall against fifty thousand, Godfrey. We need the humans. We need their desperation to turn into a frenzy."
The Digging of the Saints
The catalyst for that frenzy came from the most unlikely of places: the dirt beneath the Church of Saint Peter.
Peter Bartholomew, the frantic visionary Alaric had encountered earlier, had succeeded in convincing the high lords—Raymond of Toulouse and the Bishop Adhemar—that a holy relic was buried beneath the cathedral. He claimed Saint Andrew had appeared to him, pointing to the exact spot where the lance that pierced the side of Christ lay hidden.
Alaric stood in the shadows of the cathedral's balcony as the sun reached its zenith. Below, in the humid, candle-lit interior, a group of men were digging. The sound of shovels hitting hard earth echoed in the vaulted ceiling.
The air in the church was heavy. To Alaric's heightened senses, the smell of human sweat and fear was nearly overwhelming. But there was something else. A hum. It wasn't divine, and it wasn't botanical. It was the collective, frantic psychic energy of hundreds of men praying for a miracle.
The Vilevine stirred in Alaric's marrow. He realized then that the parasite didn't just feed on blood; it fed on the intensity of life. A man in a religious trance was a much richer harvest than a man who had given up.
"He won't find anything," Baldwin whispered at Alaric's shoulder. The boy had become incredibly stealthy, his movements as fluid as a shadow. "It's just a peasant digging in the dark."
"It doesn't matter if he finds a relic or a rusted tent peg, Baldwin," Alaric said, his amber eyes fixed on the pit. "If he pulls anything out of that hole and calls it holy, these men will find the strength to tear the Turkish army apart with their bare hands. And that strength is what we will use."
The Discovery
Hours passed. The diggers were exhausted, their hands bleeding. Peter Bartholomew himself jumped into the pit, his face smeared with filth, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
Then, a metallic clink rang out.
The silence that followed was absolute. Alaric leaned over the railing, his vision zooming in on the bottom of the pit. Peter reached into the mud and pulled out a jagged, blackened piece of iron. It was a spearhead, rusted and unremarkable.
But in the eyes of the starving men watching, it was the light of the world.
"The Holy Lance!" Peter screamed, his voice cracking with hysteria. "The Lance of the Lord!"
The cathedral erupted. Men fell to their knees, weeping. Others roared with a sudden, terrifying surge of adrenaline. The "Holy Frenzy" spread through the church like a wildfire. Alaric watched as the grey, sunken faces of the soldiers were replaced by a flushed, manic intensity. Their heartbeats, which had been slow and thumping, suddenly raced.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
The sound was a drumbeat of war. The Vilevine inside Alaric purred.
"Look at them," Baldwin said, his own amber eyes wide. "They believe."
"They don't believe in God, Baldwin," Alaric said, watching the crowd. "They believe they have a permission to survive. And a man with permission is the most dangerous beast in the desert."
The Plan of the Origin
Alaric retreated from the cathedral before the priests could notice his glowing eyes. He met the rest of the Vanguard in their ruined palace. They were all standing, their bodies tense, sensing the shift in the city's atmosphere.
"The princes have ordered a sortie," Godfrey reported. "In three days, they intend to march out of the gates and face Kerbogha's entire army. They believe the Lance will shield them."
"They will be slaughtered," a knight named Marc said. "Even with the Lance, they are walking skeletons."
"Not if we lead the charge," Alaric said.
The Vanguard turned to him. Alaric stood in the center of the room, the obsidian vines on the walls behind him seeming to frame him like a dark halo.
"The humans will provide the mass, the noise, and the distraction," Alaric continued. "But we will be the tip of the spear. We will target the Turkish commanders. We will move faster than their horses and strike harder than their maces. We will turn the Great Battle into a slaughterhouse, and the blood spilled will be the final tribute the Vilevine needs to fully claim Antioch."
"But the sun," Baldwin said, looking at the windows. "The sortie will be at dawn. The secondary roots... the light makes us sluggish. It makes the Sap heavy."
"We will use the dust," Alaric said. "The Vilevine has already begun to release its spores into the air. By dawn, a mist will roll off the Orontes River. It will be thick, cool, and filled with the essence of the Tree. It will shield you. To the humans, it will look like a divine fog. To us, it will be home."
The Human Cost
As the preparations for the sortie began, Alaric walked through the infirmaries. He needed to ensure his Vanguard was at peak strength. This meant feeding.
He found a young woman, a camp follower named Elena, who was tending to a dying soldier. She was one of the few who still had a spark of kindness in her eyes. When Alaric approached, she didn't cower. She looked up at him with a tired, sad smile.
"Sir Alaric," she said. "The priests say you are the hero of the Bridge Gate. They say you are a saint of war."
Alaric looked at her. He saw the pulse in her neck. He saw the way her blood moved through her veins, a warm, golden river of life. For a split second, the old Alaric—the husband, the father—felt a pang of agonizing grief. He wanted to tell her to run. He wanted to tell her that he was a parasite wearing a dead man's skin.
But the Vilevine was stronger. It sent a pulse of cold, sharp hunger through his mind.
"I am no saint, Elena," he said, his voice a gentle, terrifying chime.
He leaned down, as if to offer a blessing. He didn't kill her. He was careful. He took just enough to sustain the "Vanguard," leaving her weak but alive. As he pulled away, he wiped a smear of amber-tinted resin from his lip.
He felt a deep, hollow shame, but it was quickly buried under the crystalline logic of the Tree. Survival required sacrifice. The Vilevine was the only thing that could save these people from the Turks, even if it meant eventually consuming them itself.
The Eve of Battle
June 28, 1098.
The Crusader army stood before the gates of Antioch. They were divided into six divisions. At the head of the first division, alongside the counts and bishops, stood Alaric and his twelve knights.
They looked magnificent and terrible. Their armor had been polished until it shone like silver, but they wore no insignias of the Church. They wore simple, dark surcoats. Their faces were hidden behind closed visors, masking the amber glow of their eyes and the marble stillness of their features.
The gates began to groan open.
A thick, unnatural mist began to roll in from the river, just as Alaric had predicted. It was a heavy, grey-violet fog that smelled of pine and iron. The human soldiers coughed, but as they breathed it in, they felt a strange, artificial burst of energy. The Vilevine's spores were acting as a stimulant, numbing their pain and heightening their aggression.
"The Lance!" the priests shouted, holding the rusted iron high. "God wills it!"
Alaric drew his sword. The blade seemed to hum in his hand. He looked at the vast, shimmering line of Kerbogha's army waiting on the plains.
"No," Alaric whispered to himself. "The Vilevine wills it."
He spurred his horse—a beast he had "turned" by feeding it the Sap, making it a tireless, demonic creature of muscle and black veins. The horse didn't neigh; it let out a low, guttural vibration.
As the first rays of the sun hit the mist, turning it into a shimmering, golden shroud, the Crusaders charged.
[Image: A massive army of starving knights charging out of a city gate into a thick, glowing mist, led by a group of dark, silent horsemen with glowing amber eyes.]
The Great Battle of Antioch had begun. History would record it as a miracle of faith. But Alaric knew the truth as he felt his resin-blood begin to boil with anticipation.
This wasn't a battle for a kingdom. It was the first time the Vilevine would truly feed on an army. And as the two forces collided, the screams of the dying were drowned out by the silent, triumphant roar of the Mother Tree beneath the city.
The harvest was finally, truly, in full bloom.