The bioluminescent light was brighter here, the organisms more densely present in the walls, giving the whole space a blue-green luminescence that was close to daylight if daylight had been filtered through something very old and very patient.Along both walls, from the entrance to the far end, statues.Carved from the same dark wood as everything else in the village, each one standing on a base that came up to waist height, each one different. Different heights. Different postures. Different ages in the faces,some young, some that carried in the carved lines around the eyes and mouth the specific quality of a face that had looked at a great many things.Asta walked slowly.He wasn't a person who slowed down for art or for history in the general sense,he had been through enough history in the last year to find the abstract version of it less urgent than it used to be. But these were different. There was something about the specificity of them,the individual quality of each face, the

"In your language." He said.“The closest translation is…" He paused. "The Rot. It is what happens when something that has been sealed for a very long time finds a way out and has spent all of that sealed time becoming everything that was sealed away in the first place." He paused again. "It consumes living things. Not to eat, to unmake. Everything it touches loses the quality of being alive. It spreads through contact." He looked at the painting. "The forest will not survive its passage through the root shield boundary. Nothing in it will."Asta said. "What do I need to do?""I will tell you everything.” Eren said. "But I need your word first. I need to know that if I share what I know and go with you, if I leave this forest to help you find what you are looking for, the man with the dragon of Mischief inside him will have a chance to come back." He looked at Asta. "Your word. That the Moon Sovereign will be used to help him. That is my condition. Not compliance, your wor

"We need a plan that does not involve six people and three horses charging at something that size." Roderick said."I know that too." Asta said."Then what…""I'm working on it.” Asta said.Roderick looked at him.Then at the Devourer.Then back at Asta with the specific expression of someone who was choosing to trust a process they could not see and finding the choosing difficult.Eren had ridden up beside Asta.He was looking at the borderlands with the expression of someone looking at something that had been a theoretical problem until now and had become a present one."The root shield is there." He said, pointing to a line that was visible from the slope, a slight shimmer in the air at the borderline of the Rot's spread, the specific visual quality of a technique that was holding but was being asked to hold against something considerably more than it had been designed for. "As long as the Devourer does not reach the shield, the forest survives." He paused. "If it reaches th

A column of light, not visible in the ordinary sense, felt more than seen, the quality of the air directly above the anchor point changing into something that had intention in it. The seal began to reach for the shape it had been when it was whole.Asta stood up.One.He moved.The second anchor point was through the worst of the Rot, the section where the Devourer had been before it turned its attention to the engagement at its flanks. The ground here was the deepest grey, the most thoroughly unmade, and moving through it was like moving through something that was actively interested in how much of you it could take as you passed.The flame aura cost was immediate.Not dramatic, he didn't stumble, didn't slow. But he felt it the way you feel a drawing, a steady outward flow from somewhere that had a specific amount to flow from and was being drawn on at a rate he hadn't expected.He pushed through.Found the second anchor point.Went down.Palm flat.……………From the far side of the b

The white ground was cold.Not temperature cold,the white void didn't have temperature. But cold in the way that certain silences are cold, certain spaces where something has just happened and the happening has left something behind that sits in the air the way cold sits in stone after a long winter.Jabber was on the floor.He had been on the floor since the last thing he could remember clearly, which was the black-cloaked figure launching at him with the speed of something that had been waiting for exactly this opportunity and had decided the waiting was finished. He remembered the launch. The motion of it. The specific quality of something moving with intent and purpose.And then the purple.The purple that had come from the side, fast, clean, a single committed movement that put itself between the launch and him, and the kick that followed, and the black-cloaked figure going sideways through the white air and landing somewhere in the white distance.And then the floor.Which he w