A lone gravestone stands crooked beneath a skeletal oak, half-swallowed by vines. Its surface is cracked, the name faded into a shallow whisper of letters I can’t quite read. Moss blankets its edges like a shroud, and a single white flower, wilted and impossibly out of place, rests on its base.
“This is… different,” Nala exclaims, assessing the new surroundings. She’s right. In a forest where nothing innocent seems to grow, a grave feels far more sinister than comforting.
“What does it say?” River asks, crouching down in front of it.
“I’m not sure.” Nala says, “It’s written in Enchantra.”
She dusts the moss off the plaque and traces the grooves in the stone. Ryder doesn’t say much, just keeps his hand pressed tightly on the hilt of his sword, as if he is waiting for danger to snatch us.
“Let me have a look,” I say, lowering myself to the gravestone’s level. The moss parts under my fingers, revealing a word I recognise instantly—one that appears far too often in the Paldonian law texts.
“Trial.”
Below it, a single carved stroke.
“First trial,” I breathe, the translation slipping out effortlessly… and only then does the weight of what I’ve just said hit me.
Just then, the ground shudders—and the gravestone sinks.
Not gradually.
Not naturally.
It’sdraggeddown, swallowed whole until nothing remains but moss and disturbed soil.
I jerk backwards, heart lurching, but the earth reacts faster. Vines burst through the dirt like striking serpents, coiling around my ankles, my wrists, tightening before I can even scream.
Ryder lunges forward, his blade already drawn. One clean, vicious slice and the vines snap, recoiling with a hiss. He grabs my arm, pulling me toward him—
—but the forest isn’t finished.
More vines drop from the branches above, thick and knotted, as if the trees themselves are reaching down. They ignore me entirely, instead whipping toward Ryder with terrifying precision. One wraps around his wrist, then another around his chest, slamming him back against the nearest trunk.
“Ryder!” I shout, but the vines multiply, weaving across him until he’s pinned in place, sword trapped at his side.
Nala and River don’t even get a chance to fight. Tendrils lash out, snaring them by the waist and hauling them off their feet, pinning them to separate trees like insects caught in a web.
The forest goes still.
Too still.
The kind of stillness that comes right before the trial begins.
My hands clamber at the vines restricting Ryder, but they recoil like they are alive; every touch of my fingers sends them squeezing him tighter. I look to the others, panic controlling my breathing. A noise thuds behind me, and I spin on my heels quickly to confront it. The gravestone has reappeared, but now it drips red with blood.
“Asha… Be careful.” Ryder says in a staggered breath before the vines claim his mouth, along with the others.
I approach it with hesitant footsteps—the writing. The writing has changed. My hands disturb the blood-caked plaque as my mind tries to decipher the new words.
‘To save your friends from strangling vines,
The rot will creep and intertwine.
To cure the sickness stalking life,
Seek out the root and kill it twice.’
“One root, I’m supposed to seek out a single root in a forest full of trees,” I complain aloud as if the grave could speak. Nala fidgets between the vines, each movement constricting her further.
