They found the next glade just before dusk. It was quiet. Too quiet.

The trees had thinned into an unnatural clearing where no birds called, no insects hummed. The silence pressed against their ears like water. The glade had not been burned or poisoned like the others. It had been forgotten, unnamed, a place removed from memory itself.

A single Spirit Tree stood in the centre, tall and silver like a shard of moonlight. But its limbs were bound in chains of thorned vine, each loop pulsing with a dark rhythm, like veins around a wounded heart. Around the base of the tree, the ground was split, fractures that radiated outward like a sunburst made of absence.

Gwyn knelt first, resting her palm against the deadened earth. “There’s no aura here,” she whispered. “None. Not even decay. It’s... hollow.”

Bedwyr moved closer to the tree, circling slowly. His brow furrowed. “No song either. Not even silence. This tree doesn’t sleep, it’s been erased.”

Skif hovered nearby, her glow barely flickering. “Something’s feeding on the roots.”

Galahad drew his blade slowly. “Then we should not linger.”

But Gwyn stood. Her eyes burned. “No. We do more than look and run. We cut it free.”

She stepped forward and laid her hands on the thorn chains. They hissed at her touch, rising smoke. The runes on her arms flared in pain.

Bedwyr was at her side in an instant. “Don’t be reckless.”

She met his gaze. “If we leave it like this, it dies forgotten. We don’t get to let that happen.”

He hesitated, then nodded. Together, they began to sever the vines.

It fought them.

Each chain they cut regrew, slower but angrier. The vines lashed outward like limbs, drawing blood where they touched. Galahad held them off with his shield, Skif traced warding glyphs in the air, casting pulses of protection that gave them just enough room to breathe.

And then Bedwyr sang.

It was not a ballad or a lullaby. It was a song of unbinding, raw, jagged, deep magic from the oldest texts. The chords came off his strings like silver knives, slicing through the air and disrupting the spellwork that tethered the vines to the tree.

The chains screamed. They blackened and cracked one by one, curling inward like dead leaves. The glade shook.

Then came the scream.

Not from the vines.

From below.

The ground ruptured, and from the glade's fractured heart rose a massive figure, cloaked in bark and bone, its antlers draped in weeping moss. A Fae, once. Now twisted into something else. Its eyes were holes of shadow. Its mouth opened, but no words came — only a sound like cracking earth and drowning sorrow.

Gwyn raised her blade.

“Guardian?” Bedwyr breathed, eyes wide. “No... jailor.”

The figure lunged.

Galahad met it with a shield raised high, the impact driving him backwards into a tree with enough force to shake bark loose. The corrupted guardian swept an arm the size of a fallen log, slamming it down toward Skif.

Bedwyr moved faster than thought. One strum of his lyre sent a shimmering sound into the blow, deflecting it just enough for Skif to dart out of range. "Stay behind me!" he shouted.

Gwyn charged. Her blade, still singing with the heat of severed chains, carved into the creature's thigh. Black ichor sprayed, hissing on contact with the ground. The guardian howled again, the sound like entire forests falling at once.

"Its aura is fractured!" Skif called from above. She hovered, scribing runes midair. "The song that binds it is broken! It doesn’t know what it is!"

"Then we give it an ending," Gwyn growled.

Galahad regained his footing, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. "We need to strike together! Bedwyr, now!"

Bedwyr’s fingers flew across his strings, weaving a crescendo of dusk and sorrow, binding the group in a harmonic rhythm. Gwyn’s steps became faster, Galahad’s shield brighter, and even Skif’s glyphs shimmered with newfound clarity.

The guardian lashed out again, vines exploding from its body, twisting like barbed whips. One wrapped around Bedwyr’s arm, pulling him forward.

He didn’t panic. Instead, he drew his silver blade with his free hand and stabbed the root at its source, severing it with a flash of violet light.

Gwyn vaulted off a jutting stone and landed on the guardian’s back, plunging her sword between its antlers. It bucked and roared, flailing.

“Hold it!” she screamed.

Galahad drove his blade through its knee, anchoring it to the earth. Skif finished her final rune and unleashed it, a burst of radiant light, not fire, not lightning, but memory. It struck the creature in the chest, and for a moment, its bark-skin cracked open.

Inside, they saw what it once was, a Dryad king, his face serene, his eyes full of stars. He looked at them.

And nodded.

Gwyn drove her blade home.

The guardian collapsed like a fallen tree, its final sigh like wind through a long-dead grove.

The glade was still.