The days after Oswin left felt longer than they had any right to.
Chris kept working because that was what he did now, what he'd always done since arriving in this place — find something that needed doing and do it until his body gave out or his mind went blank, whichever came first. The problem was that he'd already mobilized every neglected plant he could find in the span of a single afternoon, and the village was in better shape than it had ever been, and there was nothing left to throw himself into.
So he started finding new things.
The thorn vines along the western ridge could be denser. The Ents along the southern wall needed their roots checked for rot after the last heavy dew cycle. The mobile vines had been patrolling the same routes for weeks and could probably use new patterns that covered more ground. The scream flowers in the ents had grown thick enough that some were getting crowded and needed to be thinned out — not killed, just relocated to gaps in the perimeter where their voices could carry further.
None of it was urgent. All of it was necessary, and he knew that, but knowing something was necessary and feeling like it was enough were two very different things.
Sera noticed before Korr did, which was unusual because Korr typically noticed everything about military preparedness before anyone else and Sera was more tuned to emotional shifts. But Korr had been spending most of his time at his camp outside the walls, running drills with the strangle vines and the bamboo and whatever else would listen to him, and Sera was the one who was actually inside the village watching Chris wear himself down one small task at a time.
She found him knee-deep in the northern approach at dusk, redirecting thorn vine roots that didn't need redirecting, and she just stood there with her arms crossed until he looked up.
"You've been at this since sunrise."
"The vines needed —"
"They didn't. I passed by here this morning. They were fine then and they're fine now." Her voice was flat, not angry, just stating a fact the way she always did when she was about to say something he wouldn't want to hear. "You're not preparing anymore, Chris. You're avoiding."
He opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again because she was right, and arguing with Sera when she was right was a losing battle he'd stopped fighting months ago.
"Oswin's been gone four days now and." he said instead, pulling his hands from the soil and wiping them on his thighs. "And I keep thinking about all the things that could happen between here and the border. The beasts, the terrain, other merchants who might not take kindly to competition —"
"He's a grown man who's been crossing hostile territory for years before he ever found this place." Sera's tone softened slightly. "You can't control what happens out there."
'I can't control what happens in here either,' he thought but didn't say it, and the weight of that settled somewhere behind his ribs and stayed there.
She sat down next to him on a half-buried rock near the thorn vine base, and they sat in silence for a while, watching the sun dip below the western ridges. The cloud tree's mist was thick outside the walls tonight, rolling in slow banks that made the Barrens look almost alive in the fading light, and somewhere out past the perimeter the scream flowers pulsed their quiet rhythms.
"It's quieter without him," Chris said eventually, and immediately felt stupid for saying it because of course it was quieter, they'd just lost the only person in the village who talked as much as the plants did.
"It'll get louder again," Sera said. "It always does, and if he comes through with what his hoping to do? well you will have a lot more people around who you will need to deal with."
He almost at that, rather liking that idea but something shifted in his awareness before he could, a faint pressure at the edge of the Rootmind's network, and he sat up straighter without meaning to.
The Voice.
It had been quieter lately, ever since the Rootmind's filter had grown better at catching its attempts, but quiet wasn't the same as gone and Chris had known that better than anyone. The pressure was faint, barely there, like someone tapping on a window from very far away, and for a moment he thought it might just be the network adjusting itself.
Then it pushed harder.
Not an attack. Not words, not exactly, more like urgency given form, a sense of something running out of time and trying to compress everything it wanted to say into a single compressed burst before the door closed for good. The Rootmind's filter caught most of it, the faint bell ringing in Chris's awareness as it flagged the intrusion, but some of the urgency leaked through anyway, and what leaked through felt different from before.
Desperate.
The Voice had always been many things. Mocking. Manipulative. Patient. Angry. But Chris couldn't remember it ever feeling desperate, and that was somehow worse than all the other tactics combined because it meant something had changed on the other end, something that made the Voice feel like it was running out of options.
He pressed his hand against the ground and reached through the Rootmind toward the dungeon, not close enough to touch but enough to feel the general shape of what was happening on the other side. The connection between the Voice and whatever lived in that dungeon had always been there, even though it was thinning or being consumed according to the Voice, he felt glad about it, it would mean the dungeon would have less of a hold and he would only end up needing to worry about the voice itself, so he'd mostly ignored the connection, but now it felt different. so much thinner than before and stretched. Like something was pulling at it from both ends, and the Voice was the part that was about to snap.
'What's happening to you?' Chris thought, and immediately regretted it because caring about the Voice's problems was the last thing he should be doing.
The pressure faded. Not withdrawn, just diminished, like the Voice had spent everything it had in that single push and now had nothing left to give. The filter held.
Sera was watching him. "Is the voice back?"
"It never left, its just this time,." Chris rubbed the bark ridges on his knuckles, feeling the familiar roughness as he tried to figure out how to explain it. "It's connection has been thinning for a long while now and when i questioned what was happening to it, well it just got quieter and even feels somewhat fainter. But something's changing with it Sera. The connection it has to the thing in the dungeon is being consumed by it and it seems its growing far more aggressive, it didn't even make a comment or remark when I actively spoke to it this time."
She processed that for a moment, her jaw tightening the way it did when she was filing information away for later. "If it's losing its connection, then it's losing its leverage. That should be good news."
"That's what I thought as well." Chris stared at the ground between his hands. "But desperation makes people and things act rashly, and I don't know what a desperate Voice looks like. I'm rather worried about finding out."
They sat in the dark for a while after that, the village humming its quiet life around them, and Chris tried to focus on the mist curling past the walls, on the fig tree's roots spreading through the network alongside the world tree's, on the yam tree pulling nutrients up from the deep soil and the medical grass's enriched patches spreading just a little further every day, and for a moment none of it was enough to push the unease out of his chest.
He went to sleep that night with the Rootmind's filter humming its quiet vigil and the world tree's root already wrapping around his wrist and somewhere in the back of his mind, he could feel the Voice, but in a strange, silent way that felt less like absence and more like something holding its breath.