A tree of light had stood since before the gods went away. It took one goblin’s stumble to end it. Three branches carried into the dark are all that remain.
The Enduring Lesser Lights turned the goblins’ own defenses against the demon guardian of the tree. The goblins had rigged the bridge with barrels of black powder in three parts, and gave their use freely, warning that those who had tried explosives on the beast before had never come back, and that its reach was longer than it looked. In camp Mellon’s ghost came again with Yuki, and let the cat feel a touch it could not return; Sylvie asked him why he stayed and got only a sad smile — but Savel reached him where the others could not, and Mellon, who wished only to remain with Yuki, agreed to help against the Guardian. So they set their plan: the dead man for a distraction, and the barrels brought close.
Heyou carried the barrels forward while Mellon drew the beast off, but the Guardian found him and came, and cornered him on the bridge between itself and the powder. Draz put an arrow into a barrel. The blast tore into Heyou and tore the beast loose from the tether that bound it to the tree; it came down scorched before Jamal, the branch fallen from its mouth. Jamal met it and crushed the bones of its paw; it swept back and caught him and Sarru both. Then Sylvie shoved it with a word into the path of another barrel, and the second blast put it down, and it lay pinning Heyou half beneath it.
Jamal struck it again to be sure, and Heyou took its head, and what ran out of it was not blood but a gray fluid, and cold. On its neck Jamal found a collar with a broken chain — the Guardian's collar, the thing that had held it to the tree. The Sacred Tree itself stood burned and regrown, its wood brittle, no life left in it. They took up the Blessed Branch it had carried, some five feet of it; Sylvie burned a splinter and it gave a brief sunlike warmth and then nothing. Draz climbed and cut two more. Three branches, in the end. Around the roots Heyou gathered tight oval seed-cones that Sylvie said would open only to fire. Then she sealed Heyou’s damaged form, and for a moment it looked like enough.
It was not. The goblins came back with more powder and began to set it, and Sylvie argued for the tree — for the towns a living tree might yet have saved — and the goblin leader laughed her off. Then a goblin stumbled with a barrel in its arms. The blast threw everyone down, unmade several goblins where they stood, and took the Sacred Tree entirely: no stump, the roots gone to smoke. Mellon and Yuki stood clearer against the world than before, unmoored. The party fled with the three branches, the only remnant of the tree’s light; the goblin leader was not seen again.
A stone figure stepped onto the bridge and blocked the way — not one of the wraiths, but Kelun, and Heyou felt the kinship of made things across the span. Kelun spoke into Sylvie’s mind, condemned what they had done, and asked why they had not gone to Ygva as they were meant to. He took Mellon’s shape as they neared open country, a mercy to mortal eyes, while the true ghost lingered apart. There was no refusing him. Sylvie split the company: Jamal and Draz would carry two branches down to Drosven’s Gate with Savel and Sarru, the western road past the Titan’s Jaw, while she and Heyou climbed with Kelun to the witch.
On the giant stair Sylvie admitted at last why she had not wanted to come back — the memory of these peaks had gone bad in her — and hoped Ygva might tell her what her magic was becoming, she who had once been bound to the stone and the lines of quartz. Heyou saw the stone ripple faintly under her feet, and go still when she looked. Below, on their own road, Jamal and Draz were taken: the Askavir fell out of the sky and closed both in its talons. Savel threw rings of protection round Jamal’s arms; Draz spoke to the thing in the tongue of beasts and learned it had been sent to find them and carry them — and it dropped them onto separate peaks, Draz into freezing water and his old fear of it, Jamal onto bare stone, and both of them lived.
On the climb Kelun told them what he was: a mouthpiece, mostly for Caranthalis — whose tree they had just seen burned to nothing — though he had carried the voices of Ossa and Mollthain and Tlellic besides. He named the gods whose leaving had emptied the world, and what each had been: Tlellic of the long night and the hunt; Kreth of false visions and the moon; Brathis of feral survival and the loss of the self; Mollthain the rampart, sturdy against all odds; Caranthalis of the tree of light and its blessed branches; Ossa the wanderer atop the peaks; and one the party had not yet heard named — God-King Otheidas, the arrested cycle of life and undeath, god of revenants. The door to all of them seemed shut from this side, Kelun said, and he did not know whether it could be opened again. Ahead of them was the witch, and her price still unspoken; behind them, a light that had stood since before the gods went away, gone to ash.