The air inside the Mother Tree's chamber was dense, saturated with the pungent scent of bitter sap and freshly disturbed earth. Selvryn remained on her knees, her hands firmly pressed against one of the main roots, feeling the magical pulse beneath her fingers convulse irregularly.
"Something is wrong with him," she murmured.
Tears silently streamed down her cheeks, glimmering for a moment with a faint trace of mana before disappearing into the dark soil.
"He's in pain, Lusian…" she whispered, her voice breaking. "He's scared. The mountain no longer feels safe to him."
Lusian stood beside the large window, gazing at the crops outside. The Mother Tree, Thar'Kaal, never ceased to amaze him as an extraordinary phenomenon: it absorbed the dense, heavy mana from the depths and transformed it into pure life. Where there had once been nothing but barren rock, crops now flourished with overflowing vitality.
He slowly turned toward the elf.
He was exhausted, and although he understood her feelings, he did not share the overwhelming intensity of her anguish.
"Thar'Kaal is strong, Selvryn," he said calmly. "He is not in any real danger."
Selvryn shot to her feet.
The anguish on her face vanished instantly, replaced by a restrained, burning rage. She strode toward him and began pounding her clenched fists against his chest.
Once.
Again.
And again.
She lacked the physical strength to hurt him, but helplessness overwhelmed whatever restraint she had left.
"How can you be so calm?!" she snapped, on the verge of shouting. "He's ours… your son! They attacked him, humiliated him, and you don't even flinch!"
Lusian firmly caught her wrists, without a hint of violence, stopping her blows in their tracks.
"Calm down."
"Calm down?!" she repeated, staring at him in utter disbelief. "He's suffering!"
"He has thousands of branches," Lusian replied pragmatically. "They only managed to damage one."
Selvryn stared at him for several long seconds as a heavy silence settled over the room.
Despite their stark differences and his cold demeanor, the bond between them had become unbreakable with the passage of time. Unable to maintain her composure, she finally rested her exhausted forehead against Lusian's chest.
"You're horrible…" she muttered through clenched teeth. "Cold… heartless… How can you talk like that while he's suffering?"
Lusian did not try to justify himself. He simply wrapped his arms around her waist and held her against him until the trembling that shook the elf's body began to subside.
"We'll increase security," he said quietly, breaking the silence. "We'll deploy continuous patrols."
He paused and turned his gaze toward the torn plant fibers scattered across the ground.
"And I want to find out exactly why those creatures are so desperate to eradicate him."
Selvryn looked up. The anger in her eyes had given way to a primal fear.
"We have to protect him… Lusian." She hesitated for a moment, clutching the fabric of his tunic. "You won't abandon us, will you?"
Lusian tightened his embrace for another second before shaking his head.
"The Lithar still don't understand the true extent of our strength," he murmured with icy seriousness. "But they're about to find out."
He slowly released her.
"Stay with the Mother Tree. Heal him."
He turned toward the chamber's exit, straightening his posture.
"I'll take care of the outside."
Lusian left the mountain before dawn, while mist covered the disturbed earth surrounding the Mother Tree. Dark mana silently enveloped his body, and he disappeared into the shadows.
By the time the sun began to rise over the savanna, the hunt was already over.
The first to discover the trail were not the warriors, but the scavengers. They descended in flocks toward the clearings where the battle had taken place the night before, expecting to find the usual feast of blood, flesh, and death.
The terrain still bore the marks of the massacre: torn trees, shattered rocks, and earth ripped open by the passage of claws. The same hunters who had climbed toward the mountain during the night lay motionless among the debris.
Yet something was wrong.
There were no signs of a prolonged battle, nor any tracks that could reveal what had hunted them.
There were only bodies.
The scavengers sniffed the air but found no trace of another pack, no scent of an unknown predator, and none of the fresh blood necessary to explain such carnage.
Something had executed them, and none of them had managed to see it coming.
In the carnivore camps, unrest erupted with the morning light.
The hunters who had returned from the mountain were covered in blood. Convinced of their own strength, they had celebrated late into the night.
But at dawn, they began counting the missing.
First one.
Then several.
Until they realized entire packs were gone.
When they sent trackers to search for them, the wounds on the corpses left everyone bewildered.
The beastkin knew the violence of horns, hooves, claws, and fangs, but this was different.
The cuts had passed through flesh and bone with unnatural precision—clean, deep, and exact.
Some bodies remained rigid, their eyes wide open and frozen in expressions of pure surprise. Others had simply disappeared from their dens, leaving the fires burning and the food untouched.
The oldest among them sniffed the ground and stepped backward.
There was no trace of enemies or hostile presence, only a deathly silence.
Underground, the Lithar felt the first change.
The mana had stopped flowing as it normally did, and the tunnels began to feel empty, heavy, and insufficient, as though the mountain itself were struggling to breathe.
The deep currents were being diverted.
The river of mana was still there, but it no longer descended toward their domains. Thar'Kaal's roots were altering its natural course.
The Lithar sent units to the points of disruption to correct the flow, but it was futile; the roots had occupied too much territory.
Every attempt to approach ended in tragedy.
The first Lithar to touch the wood felt their cores go dark instantly as their energy abandoned their bodies. Their mineral structures became motionless and hollow, transformed into stone shells devoid of all light.
The news spread through the tunnels like wildfire: the depths that had served as their impregnable refuge for centuries were beginning to become a hostile environment.
On the surface, the Mother Tree stopped bleeding.
The damaged roots slowly began to heal, and the sap started flowing once again, thicker and darker, stabilizing its pulse.
That was when its true expansion began.
Not toward the surface, but straight into the abyss.
New roots forced their way through the stone, pursuing the mana currents the Lithar were desperately trying to protect, as though all of Thar'Kaal's attention had become concentrated on the bowels of the world.
The Lithar thus confirmed their worst nightmare:
The Tree was not simply growing.
It was deliberately descending after them.
And for the first time in centuries, the certainty of their survival began to fade.