Unsleeping Patron - Iron-Bark and Quicksilver

Clicking softly in the draft, grass at the bottom of the trough refused to bend.Silas knelt in the mud, his thumbs pressed into the base of a pale, needle-like stalk. The Quicksilver Grass grew in dense, low clumps across the valley floor, its stems filled with a liquid so heavy that the blades stood perfectly vertical under the crushing air pressure. When he nipped the stalk with his thumbnail, a drop of bright, mirror-slick fluid welled from the break, rolling down the stem like a bead of mercury before dropping into his stone bowl with a heavy, metallic clink.Beside the bowl lay seventeen distinct heaps of roots, leaves, and dried bark, laid out on a clean strip of canvas.The Parchment had drawn the map in his head three days ago a dense grid of yellow lines pointing to hidden crevices along the valley walls. He had spent seventy-two hours crawling through basalt chimneys to harvest them: bitter white roots that smelled of wet horse, black fern fronds caked in sulfur, and small, rubbery pods that pulsed with a faint, cold blue light.Silas didn’t build a fire to boil them. He had no kettle, and the Parchment’s instructions were explicit: The raw potency must strike the meat unrefined.He picked up the first herb a gnarled, ash-grey root thick as a finger and shoved it into his mouth.He chewed twice. The root tasted of liquid lye and crushed limestone, burning his gums instantly. He swallowed, then immediately reached for the Quicksilver Grass, tilting the stone bowl to drink the heavy, metallic fluid down behind the pulp.The reaction didn’t take five minutes. It hit his stomach before he could wipe his bloody chin.It felt as though he had swallowed a handful of jagged glass coated in boiling oil. Silas fell sideways off his knees, his forehead slamming into the wet moss as his abdominal muscles locked in a violent, screaming cramp. Inside his torso, his stomach lining split open under the raw spiritual heat, the wall of his stomach rupturing in three separate places.A thick, hot surge of blood and grey plant pulp rushed up his throat, bursting through his nose and mouth.Silas’s vision turned completely black.He didn’t die. The black tendrils of his Eldritch Physique erupted from his liver and intestines, writhing like dark worms as they stitched the ruptured stomach tissue back together in the dark. But while the dark physique repaired the meat, the golden seed of Mind-Light inside his chest drank the wild, unrefined spiritual energy of the seventeen herbs.The golden core flared. It didn’t just throb; it expanded, driving waves of liquid brass through his ribs, his shoulders, and his spine, boiling away the last traces of raw Miasma trapped in his marrow.He slipped into a stupor a cold, featureless coma that lasted forty minutes while his organs tore and repaired themselves three times in succession.When Silas opened his eyes, the grey sky was motionless above him.He lay on his back in the mud, his mouth caked with dry, black blood. He spat a clot of dark bile onto the moss and pushed himself up onto his elbows. His chest didn’t ache. The golden light beneath his skin had shifted; it was no longer a thin, flickering thread. It sat deep in his bones, dark and heavy as forged bronze, pulsing at a slow, controlled thirty-six beats a minute.Mind-Light, Stage 3.He could feel his spiritual reach without raising a hand. His mind extended thirty yards into the surrounding fog, sensing the weight of every slate stone, the dampness of the mud, and the heavy, metallic grain of the air.Silas dragged himself to his feet, wiped his face with the hem of his canvas tunic, and looked toward the center of the Quicksilver Valley.Rising out of the silver moss three hundred yards away was a tree.It stood three hundred meters tall, its trunk as thick as a stone fortress, covered in thick, overlapping plates of dark, iron-hard bark that looked like ancient scale armor. Its canopy didn’t bear leaves; thousands of long, rope-like willow branches drooped from the upper limbs, hanging straight down toward the valley floor like a curtain of heavy, green-black cables.An Ancient Treant.The beast wasn’t asleep, but it moved with the agonizing slowness of deep granite. A single shift of its upper limbs took five minutes, the wood groaning through the valley with the sound of grinding tectonic plates.Silas walked toward it. He didn’t draw his mantis-scythe.He stopped fifty yards from the base of the colossal trunk, looking up into the hanging curtain of green cables. He needed a binding tool something that wouldn’t snap, melt, or burn when he engaged the roaming Blood-Wing entity in the northern lakes.He raised his right arm.With his Stage 3 Mind-Light, he didn’t summon two clumsy hands into the air. A single, six-foot blade of solid, condensed golden light sprouted from his forearm, its edge honed to a razor-thin line that hummed with a quiet, saw-like whistle.Silas leaped.Using a Mind-Light blade beneath his boots as a temporary step, he launched himself twenty feet into the air, reaching the lowest hanging willow branch. The branch was thick as a ship’s hawser, supple as leather, and heavy enough to crush an ox if it fell.Silas swung his golden arm-blade.CLANG.The light struck the green cable. Sparks flew in an orange shower as the golden edge bit into the wood, cutting through three inches of dense, iron-like fibers before stopping. The Treant didn’t shriek; a low, subterranean rumble vibrated through the bedrock beneath the valley floor as the colossal tree registered the tiny nip at its hem.Silas didn’t pause. He struck three more times in rapid succession, driving his golden blade into the exact same notch until the final fiber snapped with a sharp, cannon-like pop.A hundred-meter length of the indestructible willow branch dropped into the moss.Silas landed heavily in the mud, his boots skidding three feet before catching his balance. He didn’t wait for the Treant’s slow, crushing limbs to shift toward him. He grabbed the severed end of the green cable, wrapped it twice around his waist, and began coiling the hundred-meter length into a tight, heavy hoop over his shoulder.The wood was cool, supple, and entirely immune to the damp rot of the Miasma. A lasso that could bind a mountain.Silas pulled his canvas pack tight against his ribs, hoisted the heavy coil of ancient willow over his shoulder, and turned his back on the breathing treant, heading north toward the lake shore.