Evening light stretched long and golden over the city as Ilyari and Tazien climbed the winding street toward Willowgrove. Their boots struck the cobblestones with a quiet rhythm, and the familiar shape of the manor loomed ahead, framed by the silhouette of wild trees and a roofline still half-snarled in creeping vines. The air smelled of rain-warmed dust and distant bread ovens.

  At the base of the porch steps, Lord Galen Thorne stood waiting.

  He looked a little worse for wear—sleeves rolled up, a smudge of sawdust across his collar, and a fresh scuff marring one side of his boots—but his posture was proud, and his eyes glinted with something like satisfaction.

  “There you are,” he said, voice low and gravel-edged. “Thought you’d gotten lost in all that book dust.”

  Ilyari’s smile was immediate. “Did we miss supper?”

  “No,” he said, “but you missed the part where the floor almost gave out under my second apprentice. He’s fine. Scared stiff, but fine.” He stepped aside and gestured toward the open door. “Come see for yourself.”

  They stepped into Willowgrove—and froze.

  The change was subtle, but unmistakable.

  Gone were the jagged boards and precarious planks. The front parlor now had a true floor—whole, level, and sanded clean. Fresh wood gleamed faintly in the amber light of the hall sconces. The patchwork was still visible in places, but every step was sound.

  Tazien let out a low whistle. “It’s like the house exhaled.”

  “We did what we could with the time,” Thorne said, rolling his shoulders. “Walls still need reinforcement—especially near the stairwell—and the second floor’s still off-limits until we finish tomorrow’s bracing. But you’ve got solid footing now. No more playing hopscotch around the holes.”

  Ilyari’s fingers brushed the smooth grain of the entry step. “It’s beautiful.”

  “No, it’s functional,” Thorne said dryly. “It’ll be beautiful when I get three more days with it and my apprentices stop measuring crooked.”

  Tazien nudged Ilyari with his elbow, eyes sparkling. “I can’t wait for tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  He grinned, already pulling a charcoal-sketched rune from his sleeve. “The pipe under the fountain—I think I know what it’s doing. Or... what it was trying to do. If I’m right, I can run a partial code simulation through the test drive and see how the glyphs interlace. I just need the time to model the compression line.”

  Ilyari blinked. “That was a lot of words.”

  “Good words,” he said. “Possibly genius words. We’ll know if it explodes.”

  Lord Thorne rubbed his temples. “You two are going to give me gray hair.”

  “You already have gray hair,” Tazien said cheerfully.

  “And I blame you for most of it.”

  They shared a quiet laugh. The kind of laugh that didn’t erase exhaustion, but softened it.

  Ilyari set her satchel on the entry table and let out a slow breath. The floor was real beneath her feet. The house felt steadier. Safer. Almost like it was holding its breath along with them.

  Tonight, they’d eat.

  Tomorrow, they’d dig deeper.

  ???????????

  The morning air was crisp with a hint of mint from the garden’s edge. Ilyari crouched by the herb beds, checking the drying progress on the bundles they’d strung up the day before, while Tazien scrawled faint glyphs into the dirt using a crystal-etched stylus. Around them, a soft shimmer of mana flickered—a detection ward. Not strong enough to repel, but enough to alert.

  “Glyph barrier’s live,” Tazien said, brushing dust from his hands. “If anyone steps across it, we’ll know.”

  Ilyari nodded. “Good. With the kind of attention we’ve been getting, I don’t want surprises.”

  Beyond the garden wall, faint hammering echoed from Willowgrove’s frame. Lord Thorne and his crew had returned early, hauling beams and timbers through the front gates. The stairwell had been stripped and reinforced, the walls gutted, and the downstairs ceilings braced with curved timber arches that looked more like cathedral ribs than common home supports.

  “They’re rebuilding it like it’s sacred,” Tazien murmured.

  “To some people, it is,” Ilyari replied, tying off a bundle of thyme. “Willowgrove remembers things.”

  Tazien stood and dusted off his knees. “Well, today we’re going to help it forget the mold.”

  He motioned toward the fountain at the center of the courtyard—still oozing slow trails of black mana mold. The basin was thick with rot, and the corrupted glyphs etched into the piping had darkened since the last rainfall.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I think I understand the code now. But I can’t fix it until we remove the infected mass.”

  Ilyari eyed him warily. “So we dig it out?”

  “Better,” Tazien grinned. “We grow the solution.”

  He turned toward the east wall, where Laileeih had taken up most of the trellis, now resembling more of a flowering bush than a vine. Her main stalk had thickened overnight, and blossoms burst from every fork in her branches—purple, coral, and silver, like spring itself had exploded across her leaves.

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  “Laileeih,” Tazien called softly.

  The vine stirred.

  “I need one of your arms.”

  Ilyari blinked. “Excuse me?”

  He turned to her. “I’m going to guide one of her newer shoots into the fountain. She’ll wrap around the mold inside and gather as much as she can. Then I’ll sever the vine and burn the rot.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Ilyari said, standing. “That’ll hurt her.”

  “No, it won’t,” he insisted. “She’s been shedding shoots on her own. That’s what the flowers are—buds prepping for sacrifice. She’s not a vine anymore, Il. She’s adapting. She’s… evolving.”

  “She’s a living thing.”

  “So am I,” Tazien said. “But I’d trade an arm if it meant fixing this mess.”

  Laileeih rustled faintly, as if listening.

  “She puts out two new vines every morning,” he said more gently. “They grow overnight, like she’s trying to offer options. If I don’t use one, they shrivel by midday. I think… I think she knows what we’re doing.”

  Ilyari stared at the bloomed canopy above them, then at the humming fountain. The air here had grown heavier lately. Wrong.

  “You really think she can survive it?”

  “I do. And if she doesn’t, I’ll replant her from the root pod,” he said. “But she won’t die. This is just pruning with purpose.”

  Ilyari hesitated, her hands clenched at her sides. Then, with a breath, she nodded.

  Tazien approached Laileeih and gently touched a new vine already inching toward the fountain’s basin. It wrapped around his wrist like it understood.

  The glyph barrier shimmered faintly around the perimeter of the overgrown garden, humming whenever a breeze passed through—silent unless disturbed. Tazien had spent most of the morning fine-tuning the edges with chalk and glass pins. If anyone crossed the line, they’d know.

  In the center, the black-stained fountain loomed—still oozing faint traces of mana mold from its core. Lord Thorne’s crew thudded and hammered within earshot, reinforcing the interior stairwell and bracing the ceiling with thick timber. But out here, all Ilyari could hear was the shifting of vines.

  “Laileeih,” Tazien said, crouched at the edge of the fountain. “You know what to do.”

  Laileeih’s branches twitched. One long vine uncoiled from the side of the old trellis and extended across the broken stone rim, dipping cautiously toward the corrupted water.

  “She shouldn’t do this,” Ilyari said, arms crossed. “You don’t know what that mold will do to her. It could infect her root system. She’s a plant, Tazien.”

  “She’s a sacrifice vine,” Tazien insisted, tightening the code loop etched into his mana reader. “She grows throwaway extensions like we blink. I’ll cut it off when we’re done. It won’t reach her core.”

  “You don’t know that. She’s not just some coded weed anymore.”

  “She’s already turning into a bloom tree. I mean, look at her—half her pods are open and showing colors we’ve never even cataloged. If she was going to die from pruning, she’d be gone already.”

  “That doesn’t mean she can purge mana rot without damage.”

  Tazien didn’t answer. Instead, he leaned forward and tapped the glyph pad twice.

  “Laileeih,” he said softly, “go as far as you can into the pipe. Wrap every part of that mold tight. But don’t touch the pipe itself.”

  The vine hesitated.

  Then, with a slow tremble, it slithered over the edge and disappeared into the dark spout of the fountain, tendrils moving like gentle tentacles through sludge.

  Ilyari bit her lip and stood back, clutching a knife in one hand.

  Tazien dropped beside the base of the fountain and began correcting the Royal Code etched into the metal pipe. The lines were riddled with disruptions—snarled symbols twisted into curses, purification algorithms inverted into decay patterns.

  He worked with maddening precision, one glyph at a time.

  Behind him, Laileeih shuddered.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Then hard.

  A cluster of her flower pods shook violently—and three dropped off, curling and withering in the soil.

  “Tazien,” Ilyari warned, voice tight. “She’s shedding. Stop.”

  “I’m almost there—”

  Another violent tremor.

  Two more pods hit the dirt, their glow fading.

  “That’s it,” Ilyari snapped. She lunged forward, blade flashing. “I’ll cut her off myself if you won’t—”

  “Wait—just—there!”

  The last glyph snapped into place, brightening in soft silver.

  Tazien jerked upright. “Laileeih—now!”

  The vine recoiled from the pipe—and with it came a horrible slurping sound as a torrent of black sludge and twisting mold spewed from the fountain like a geyser.

  It splashed over the cracked stones and drenched the basin.

  Then, as the last of the corruption was dragged free, clear water burst forth—pure, shimmering, and cold.

  The nearby herb beds twitched, then straightened as if gasping in relief. Wilted leaves began to soften. Color returned to bruised petals.

  But Laileeih...

  The vine slumped over the fountain rim, its color darkening, black streaks racing along the tendrils toward her main trunk.

  “No—no, no, no,” Ilyari whispered. She sliced the infected vine clean near the base with a sob and grabbed the edge of her skirt.

  She dipped it in the fountain’s new stream, soaking it through, then sprinted to Laileeih’s base, where her main roots were nestled in the garden.

  Ilyari dropped to her knees and wrung the water out over the roots, again and again, praying it would be enough.

  Laileeih’s stalk trembled.

  Her color flickered.

  And then more pods began to fall.

  Tazien stood frozen in shock.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, stumbling backward.

  He ran, grabbed a bucket, filled it with fresh water and a fistful of crushed herbs—thyme, calendula, sage—and sprinted back.

  He poured it gently over Laileeih’s trunk, his voice breaking. “Don’t die. Please. You were amazing. I shouldn’t have asked you. I was too slow. I’m so sorry…”

  For a moment, nothing.

  Then—Laileeih’s remaining vines shuddered… and curled slowly around Tazien’s arm.

  Not crushing. Hugging. Then one tried to nibble his hair.

  Ilyari laughed wetly, wiping her face. “She’s alive.”

  “Barely,” Tazien said, cradling one of the dropped pods. “We almost lost her.”

  They gathered the fallen blossoms in silence and carried them into the workshop. Ilyari placed them in a shallow tray and covered them with enchanted silk.

  Ilyari whirled on Tazien the moment they stepped into the workshop, clutching one of the withered pods in her trembling hand.

  “You shouldn’t have done that!”

  Tazien wiped mold-stained water from his arms. “I had to. It was the fastest way to clear the pipe.”

  “She trusted you!” Her voice cracked. “And you used her like a—like a disposable tool!”

  Tazien’s eyes flashed. “She is a tool, Ilyari. A modified vine. You’re the one who tried to kill it the first day we got here, remember?”

  Ilyari recoiled as if slapped. Her hand clenched around the fragile pod.

  “That was before she started following us. Before she wrapped around your arm like a cat. Before she bloomed.”

  Tazien’s voice lowered, but stayed sharp. “Before you decided she was a pet.”

  “She is a pet!” Ilyari shouted, tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. “She’s ours. She chose us! And now she’s dying because of your glyph obsession!”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. His shoulders slumped.

  “I didn’t think it would go that far,” he said finally. “I thought—I thought she’d regrow. She always does.”

  Ilyari dropped the pod onto the silk-lined tray like it was made of glass.

  “Not everything bounces back, Tazien.”

  There was silence between them, the kind that settled too deep to be soothed by apologies.

  And then, from the garden, a faint rustle—Laileeih’s remaining vines brushing gently against the glass.

  Still alive. But fading.

  Tazien stayed by Laileeih’s side until nightfall.

  Neither of them ate.

  And Tazien stayed awake long after Ilyari had fallen into an exhausted sleep, sitting in the window with his arms wrapped around his knees and tears streaming past his ankles.

  One by one, he watched the last of Laileeih’s flower pods blink out.

  Each time, he whispered, “I’m sorry.” Until the garden was dark again.

  And the fountain—finally—ran clear.

  You gave more than you should have. ?????