# Chapter 966: The Tree's Agony
The change was no longer a subtle shift, a whisper of decay for the sensitive to feel. It was a scream. Aethelburg's great plaza, once a place of hushed reverence, was now a theater of panic. The World-Tree, the city's silent god and protector, was dying in full view of its children. The air, usually thick with the scent of pollen and damp earth, carried a new, foul odor: the smell of a forest fire burning from the inside out, a mix of acrid smoke and something sickeningly sweet, like rotting fruit. Great swaths of the canopy, once a vibrant, life-affirming green, were now a brittle, leprous brown. Leaves rained down constantly, not in a gentle autumn spiral, but in a brittle, disintegrating shower, crumbling to grey dust before they even touched the flagstones. The sound was a constant, dry hiss, a million tiny deaths adding up to a single, colossal agony. The trunk itself, a pillar of living wood wider than a city gate, was weeping. Dark, viscous sap, thick as tar and smelling of iron and corruption, oozed from fissures that were not there a day before. These cracks spread like lightning across the bark, black veins against the fading grey, a network of pain etched into the very flesh of the world. The pilgrims who had come for solace, for a taste of the tree's peaceful memories, now fled in terror. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide with a horror that went deeper than fear. They were not just seeing a tree die; they were feeling it. The gentle, psychic hum that had always emanated from the World-Tree, a song of life and continuity, had become a discordant shriek of pure anguish. It was a sound that vibrated in the bones, a psychic pressure that turned the stomach and curdled the soul. Lyra stood her ground at the base of the colossal trunk, her small frame a defiant speck against the backdrop of unfolding apocalypse. Her leather armor was dusted with the grey ash of fallen leaves, and her hands were clenched into fists so tight her knuckles were white. She had felt the change first. One moment, she was meditating, seeking the familiar comfort of the tree's shared consciousness, a tapestry of a thousand peaceful lives. The next, she was plunged into a nightmare. The memories were no longer peaceful. They were corrupted. A vision of a child's laughter twisted into a scream of terror as the ground split open beneath their feet. A memory of a harvest festival, its warm bonfires and shared bread, became a scene of frantic people burning in a street, their faces melting like wax. The shared joy of lovers meeting by a riverbank curdled into the image of one of them drowning the other, their hands locked in a struggle beneath the water's surface. The tree was not just sharing its life anymore. It was sharing its death, its pain, its terror. It was broadcasting the poison that Brother Malachi was forcing into its heart. Lyra had ripped herself free from the psychic assault, her head pounding, her throat raw from a scream she hadn't realized she was making. Around her, the other pilgrims were experiencing the same. Some had collapsed, frothing at the mouth, lost in private hells. Others ran blindly, stumbling over benches and each other, their eyes vacant and unseeing. A woman clawed at her own face, trying to tear away the images only she could see. A man simply stood and laughed, a high, unhinged sound that was worse than the weeping. The plaza was a madhouse, and the source of the madness was the silent, screaming giant at its center. Lyra's gaze fell upon a group of children who had huddled together near a large root. They were crying, not from the visions, but from the sheer, overwhelming despair that now saturated the very air. They were too young to understand the specifics, but their souls felt the world breaking. That sight broke through her own shock. Fear was a luxury. Panic was a trap. She was a Gifted. She was a fighter. She had a purpose. "To me!" she shouted, her voice cracking but carrying over the din. "To the tree! Now!" Her voice, a sliver of command in the chaos, drew the attention of a few other stragglers—guards, off-duty Ladder fighters, and a handful of pilgrims whose wills had not yet shattered. They looked at her, their expressions a mixture of fear and desperate hope. "The memories are a lie!" she yelled, pointing a trembling finger at the weeping trunk. "It's the poison! Don't listen to it! Fight it!" She didn't know if they could, but she had to give them something to hold onto. She had to give herself something to hold onto. She took a step forward, then another, forcing her legs to move toward the epicenter of the pain. The psychic pressure intensified as she approached. It was like walking against a hurricane wind, a force that pushed not just on her body, but on her mind, trying to crush her spirit. The corrupted visions assaulted her again, more vividly this time. She saw Soren, his face contorted in a mask of rage, his Gift blazing out of control, consuming everything he loved. She saw Nyra, her body dissolving into motes of light, a look of profound betrayal in her eyes. She saw her own death, a dozen times over, in a dozen gruesome ways. *It's not real,* she told herself, the mantra a shield against the storm. *It's the tree's pain. It's the heart-stone's poison.* She reached out and placed her bare hand against the trunk. The bark was unnaturally hot, and the dark sap that coated it was sticky and cold. The moment her skin made contact, the world dissolved. She was no longer Lyra, standing in a plaza. She was the World-Tree. She felt her roots, vast and deep, plunging into the earth, drinking not from clean water but from a source of pure corruption. She could feel the poison, a cold, crystalline shard of malevolence, pulsing in her heart, sending out tendrils of black fire through her entire being. She felt her leaves dying, her sap thickening, her wood cracking from the inside out. It was an agony beyond comprehension, a pain that spanned centuries, the pain of a world being unmade. And at the center of it all, tangled in her own consciousness, was another presence. A singularity of rage and grief and power. Soren. He was there, a storm of destructive energy trapped within her core, his own pain feeding the tree's agony, the tree's agony amplifying his. It was a feedback loop of damnation. He was the tree's immune system, gone berserk. He was a prisoner, and he was a weapon. Lyra felt her own consciousness beginning to fray, to dissolve into the maelstrom of suffering. She was about to be lost, just another ghost in the machine. She pulled her hand back, gasping, stumbling away from the trunk and falling to her knees. The plaza came back into focus, but it was changed. The sky overhead, once a clear blue, was now a bruised, sickly purple, mirroring the tree's decay. The dust falling from the leaves was thicker now, a grey snow that coated everything. The weeping cracks on the trunk had widened, and now a low, groaning sound emanated from the wood, the sound of a mountain shifting under an impossible weight. The last of the pilgrims had fled. The plaza was empty now, save for Lyra and a few other grim-faced fighters who had followed her lead. They stood in a loose circle around the base of the tree, a futile honor guard for a dying god. One of them, a hulking man with a Gift of stone skin, shook his head. "It's over," he rumbled, his voice heavy with defeat. "We can't fight this." "Then we die with it," Lyra shot back, pushing herself to her feet. Her body ached, her head throbbed, but a cold clarity had settled over her. Panic was useless. Despair was a luxury. There was only one thing left to do. One last card to play. She walked back to the trunk, her steps deliberate. She ignored the heat, the stench, the psychic shriek. She ignored the visions that flickered at the edge of her sight. She focused everything she had, every ounce of her will, every scrap of her love for her friends, on the single, raging point of consciousness trapped within the dying wood. She placed both hands flat against the weeping bark, leaning her forehead against it. The pain was immediate, blinding, but she held on. She closed her eyes and pushed past the tree's suffering, past the poison's malice, reaching for the storm at the center. "Soren," she whispered, her voice a raw thread of sound. The groaning of the tree deepened, and a large branch high above them cracked and fell, smashing into the empty plaza with a sound like thunder. The ground shuddered. Lyra didn't flinch. She poured all of her hope, all of her memory of the man he was before the Ladder, before the Bloom, before the grief, into a single, desperate plea. She wasn't talking to the tree. She wasn't talking to the monster of power he had become. She was talking to her friend. "Soren, if you're in there, please. Give us a sign."