Unsleeping Patron - In Golden Amber Encased

Rising like a dark vertical cliff out of grey gravel, the tree line stood motionless. It stood like a dark, vertical cliff rising out of the grey gravel, its hundred-meter canopy catching the pale fog and filtering it into a violet twilight.Silas dragged his boots through the shale, his knees buckling every five paces. The left arm hung uselessly at his side, the bandaged slit on his forearm dried into a stiff, black scab. With every breath, his sternum felt as though it were being pried apart by a rusted crowbar. The Thread-Fish curse had reached his liver; his skin smelled so strongly of turned meat that three black-winged scavengers trailed fifty yards behind him, coasting low over the ridges.He collapsed onto his knees at the edge of the purple carpet.Around his knees, thousands of Purpur-Blossoms pulsed in silence, their bell-shaped petals casting a soft indigo glow across his boots. Silas didn’t touch them. He unslung his leather coat, dropping the Blood-Lantern onto a flat slate slab. The cold red flame inside the iron ribs flickered, low and hungry.From his pockets, he pulled the two wrapped packages. The silk scarf held one hundred and fifty grams of Asharto horn powder, grey and heavy as powdered lead. The scrap of flannel held thirty grams of Thread-Fish ash, shimmering like crushed obsidian.His hands were trembling so badly he dropped his mantis-scythe dagger twice before he managed to wedge it into a seam of soft shale. He used the flat of the steel to chip out three shallow hollows in a soft, grey limestone rock, carving three crude bowls no deeper than a man’s palm.Water was next. The river was three miles east, but he didn’t have the lungs to walk it. Instead, Silas scraped a handful of thick, damp moss from the base of a canopy root, crammed it into a broad, waxy leaf, and held it above one of the stone hollows.He lifted the Blood-Lantern, bringing its bone chimney directly beneath the leaf.The lantern’s cold red fire flared. Steam hissed off the wet moss, condensing on the underside of a second tilted leaf Silas held in his teeth, dripping pure, clear moisture down into the first stone bowl. Drop by drop, the hollow filled. It took twenty minutes of painstaking, agonizing stillness his biceps screaming under the weight of the iron frame, black sweat running into his eyebrows until two of the stone hollows contained fifty milliliters of pure water.Silas dropped the lantern, leaning back against the root to catch his rattling breath.Inside his head, the yellowed Parchment flared into gold, displaying the exact ratios.He pinched ten grams of the black Thread-Fish ash and dropped it into the left stone bowl. The grey powder didn’t sink; it dissolved instantly, turning the water into a dense, silvery fluid that began to rotate counter-clockwise on its own, swirling against the stone sides like liquid mercury.In the right bowl, he sprinkled ten grams of the iron-horn powder. The water turned a pale, milky gold, thickening until it pulsed with a faint, rhythmic throb that mirrored his own failing pulse.The two auxiliary liquids were ready.Silas turned his head toward the glowing purple carpet. His fingers hovered an inch above a large, triple-stemmed Purpur-Blossom. The Parchment’s warning echoed behind his eyes: Harvest and ingest within three heartbeats, or the ember consumes the flesh.He grabbed the stem at its root, ripped it from the dark soil, and jammed the entire flower into his mouth.The heat hit his tongue instantly a bitter, searing shock like swallowing a coal. Before his teeth could even crush the petals, Silas snatched the left stone bowl and poured the silvery Thread-Fish fluid down his throat, followed immediately by the thick, golden Asharto mixture from the right.The cold liquids hit the burning flower in his stomach.For a second, there was nothing. No sound. No breath.Then Silas fell backward into the purple blossoms.His heart gave a single, violent stroke that rattled his jaw, and then stopped completely. The searing rot behind his ribs evaporated, replaced by a flood of liquid gold that erupted from his stomach, racing through his arteries, his veins, his capillaries. It didn’t burn; it was heavy, dense, and suffocatingly warm.The golden light didn’t stay inside his meat. It oozed out through every pore of his skin from his forehead, his bleeding wrist, his chapped lips, and the knees of his torn trousers. The viscous, amber fluid coated his chest, smoothing over his clothes, hardening the instant it touched the cold air.Layer by layer, the amber shell thickened.Silas couldn’t move his eyelids. Through the narrowing, translucent window of his fading vision, he watched the golden liquid rise over his nose, his brow, and his hair, sealing him inside an unbroken, oval chrysalis five inches thick. The world outside turned into a soft, amber blur. The smell of rot vanished, replaced by the scent of fresh rain and polished stone.His sight dimmed, but in the final fraction of a second before the shell went completely dark, his translucent vision caught a movement sixty feet above the ground.High up in the fork of an ancient, three-hundred-foot canopy tree, a figure was standing.It was dressed in tattered grey rags, its skin the color of dried bone. Its face was completely hairless, its dark, unblinking eyes staring straight down through the violet leaves at the golden oval resting on the black dirt. It didn’t carry a weapon. It held a long, notched wooden staff, its dead eyes watching the shell with an expression that held neither malice nor curiosity only the hollow, infinite patience of something that had watched the forest for ten thousand years.The Old Warden stepped backward. The grey Miasma coiled around its ankles, and without a sound, the figure melted into the wood, leaving the golden chrysalis alone under the pulsing flowers.