Watabei stepped into the hut's throat, and the roots *sang*. Not the warning hum Layla had described—this was a dirge, low and shuddering, the sound of something wounded. The air thickened with the scent of damp earth and old blood. The walls pulsed.
She'd seen goblin huts before—ramshackle things of mud and twigs. This was different. The ribs of the structure weren't timber but living oak, twisted into arches like a predator's bared teeth. Vines slithered between the gaps, their leaves shuddering as if in anticipation. The floor beneath her boots was knotty, uneven—not wood, but *skin*, the grain whorling into patterns that looked too much like faces.
A whisper brushed her ear: *Hagra.*
Watabei froze. The voice wasn't Nettle's. Wasn't Goburo's. It was older, rougher, the sound of bark splitting under an axe. She turned slowly.
The far wall pulsed.
Not a trick of torchlight. The oak planks swelled and receded like a chest drawing breath, their surfaces slick with something dark and glistening. Sap? No—too thick. Too *red*. The hut exhaled, and the air filled with the scent of iron and wet earth. The roots beneath her feet twitched.
Then the vision hit.
Not a memory. Not a dream. A *splintering*—sudden and violent as a snapped bone. She was Hagra, standing in a sunlit grove, his gnarled fingers brushing the bark of a sapling. The tree shuddered under his touch, its leaves curling inward like shy children. A gift, this kinship with roots. A curse, too. The vision fractured—Hagra older now, bent over a worktable, his hut shifting around him as he muttered to the beams. *They're coming,* he told the oak. *The ones with fire.*
Watabei gasped, staggering as the vision wrenched sideways—Hagra on his knees, his hut *screaming* around him as armored boots kicked in the door. Torchlight. Laughter. A blade's edge catching the last rays of sunset before it bit deep into the old goblin's shoulder. The hut *thrashed*, its roots lashing like wounded serpents, but the men had brought axes. Had brought *salt*.
She came back to herself with a jolt, her fingers buried wrist-deep in the hut's wall. The oak pulsed around her hand, wet and warm. The vision clung like cobwebs—Hagra's last act hadn't been defiance. It had been *transfusion*. His blood into the roots. His rage into the grain. The hut wasn't just alive. It was *haunted*.
A growl shuddered through the floorboards. Watabei yanked her hand free, the motion peeling strips of bark-skin with it—dark, fibrous, bleeding. The hut inhaled sharply, its ribcage beams creaking under the strain.
She saw it then, wedged between the hut's pulsing walls: a goblet. Tarnished bronze, crusted with something darker than rust. Hagra's fingers had curled around it last—she *knew* this, the same way she knew the ache in her teeth before a storm. The vision came unbidden: Hagra hunched over this very cup, his gnarled hands trembling as he poured not wine, but *sap*—thick and amber-dark—into its belly. The liquid shimmered, resolving into shapes—towering spires of living oak, bridges spun from woven vines, a city breathing beneath the forest's skin. *The last haven,* whispered the roots. Then axes. Then fire.
A floorboard snapped underfoot. Watabei spun, dagger drawn, just as the hut's doorway *rippled*. Not a trick of the light—the oak frame *distorted*, warping inward like a throat constricting around a bone. Through the gap, torchlight flickered. Voices. The Golden Company's archer nocked an arrow, his silhouette sharp against the bleeding dusk.
"Found you," he sneered.
Watabei didn't answer. The goblet burned in her grip, its metal searing her palm as the vision surged anew—Hagra's last moments, his blood seeping into the roots, his *memory* seeping into the grain. She saw the archer then too, younger, cleaner, standing over a different goblin's corpse in a different ruin. The same smirk. The same arrow nocked.
The hut *growled*.
The archer hesitated—just for a heartbeat—as Watabei didn't flinch from his arrow. She couldn't. The goblet in her grip was *burning*, its heat searing up her arm like a brand, Hagra's memories flooding her skull in ragged bursts. The hut's roots coiled around her ankles, not to restrain, but to *anchor* her as the visions came faster now: Hagra's fingers carving sigils into the oak beams, his voice a rasp against the wood grain as he whispered to the hut like a dying man confessing to a priest.
Then the archer loosed his arrow.
Watabei didn't dodge. The hut did.
The wall *twisted*, oak planks groaning as they splintered inward, intercepting the arrow mid-flight with a wet crunch. Sap—dark as old blood—welled from the wound. The archer gaped. Watabei didn't. She was too busy seeing what the hut showed her: Hagra's last, gasping breath as he pressed his forehead to the floorboards, his life bleeding into the roots. Not just a death. A *transfusion*. His rage. His grief. His *legacy*.
The goblet in her hand burned hotter. The hut's ribs arched overhead like bared fangs as the vision surged—Hagra's gnarled fingers sketching maps in the dirt, whispering to saplings that bent to listen. Not just a home. An *archive*. The last refuge of the Rootwalkers, the goblins who spoke to trees. The Golden Company hadn't just murdered an old hermit. They'd burned a library.
The archer nocked another arrow. Watabei moved.
She lunged, not toward him, but *into* the wall—trusting the hut's hunger, its grief. The oak parted like water, swallowing her whole as the archer's second shaft whistled past empty air. Inside, the hut's veins pulsed around her, roots threading through her sleeves like skeletal fingers. They pulled her deeper, guiding her through the ribcage beams toward the heartwood—where Hagra's chair still sat, its arms worn smooth by generations of hands.
The goblet trembled. Watabei understood.
She lifted it, pressing the rim to the chair's arm—and the hut *screamed*. Not in pain. In *recognition*. Sap welled where metal met wood, thick as memory, dark as a goblin's last breath. The vision came unbidden: Hagra slumped here, his blood pooling in the cup's basin as the Golden Company's torches devoured his shelves. His lips moved—not a curse, but a *password*. The chair's arms split, revealing a hollow brimming with root-wrapped parchment. Maps. Letters. A single silver key, tarnished with old blood.
Footsteps thudded outside. The archer, circling. Watabei snatched the key just as the hut's ribs *contracted*, squeezing her toward the back wall. A root lashed out, slamming a hidden panel open—revealing a tunnel choked with glowing fungi. The escape route. The *trap*.
She hesitated. The key burned. The hut shoved.
Watabei tumbled into the tunnel as the oak *sealed* behind her with a sound like a closing tomb. The fungal glow pulsed ahead, illuminating claw marks on the walls—too large for goblin hands. The air smelled of wet stone and something older, muskier. *Predator.*
A roar split the dark.