Uprooted

While the Dragon² is away fighting a chimaera, beacon fires blaze from Dvernik, signaling an attack by the Wood. Agnieszka¹ knots her extravagant gowns into a rope, climbs from the tower window, and races to her village. There, she douses corrupted cattle with the Dragon²'s fire-heart potion, incinerating the herd.

She turns a farmer¹³ sunk deep in corruption to stone to halt his spread. That night, white wolves stalk her, and the Dragon² returns just in time to destroy them, but one rakes his arm. He falls, poisoned by the Wood's taint, and she transports them both back to the tower.

Desperate to save the Dragon²'s life, Agnieszka¹ ransacks his library and finds a worn journal by the legendary Baba Jaga. It holds a simple healing: a poultice of rosemary and lemon, and a song. Where the Dragon²'s precise incantations failed, her improvised chant and the folk ingredients draw out the poison.

The Dragon² wakes, furious that archaic magic succeeded. The event forces him to acknowledge her intuitive, nature-rooted approach as legitimate, though it offends his every principle. Their relationship shifts irrevocably; he owes her his life, and she has proven that her magic is not a deficient imitation of his, but something else entirely.

Walkers drag Kasia³ into the Wood. Sarkan² says it is hopeless, but Agnieszka,¹ using a lock of hair, follows. Deep in the corrupted forest, she finds her friend³ sealed within a silver-barked heart-tree, her face a frozen scream beneath the bark. Agnieszka¹ pounds the earth and screams a cracking spell, 'Fulmia,' splitting the tree open.

She hauls Kasia³'s limp body out, but the Wood's attention rouses, and monsters close in. Staggering, she carries her friend³ through the dark, escaping only because the Wood hesitates, uncertain before her wild, raging power. Kasia³ lives, but her flesh is changed, infused with wood, and something else still watches from behind her eyes.

In the ancient tomb below the tower, Agnieszka¹ and Sarkan² cast the Summoning, a spell of absolute truth. Its light forces them to see the hidden rot in each other: Agnieszka¹'s secret envy of Kasia³'s beauty and significance, and Kasia³'s deeply buried resentment of her safe, unchosen friend and her own mother's¹² cold tutelage.

Stripped bare, their love survives the shaming light. The purging fire rages, and Kasia,³ seeing herself clearly, claws free of the Wood's grip. She emerges as herself, but her body remains wood-like, and Sarkan,² for the first time in a century, offers an honest apology to the girl he once meant to take.

Prince Marek⁴ and the wizard Solya, called the Falcon,⁵ arrive to inspect Kasia.³ Marek,⁴ obsessed with reclaiming his mother Queen Hanna,⁸ sees a tool in Agnieszka¹'s success. He threatens Kasia³'s life unless they replicate the purging. They demonstrate the spell on Jerzy,¹³ the corrupted farmer, destroying another heart-tree.

Sarkan² warns that entering the Wood is a lethal trap, but Marek,⁴ wielding his grief like a weapon, assembles a company of thirty soldiers and drags Agnieszka,¹ Kasia,³ and the wizards into the forest to find the queen.⁸ The expedition is born not of wisdom but of a prince's wounded ego, and the Wood is waiting.

The Wood butchers the soldiers. Mantis creatures tear them apart, walkers swarm. Agnieszka¹ and Sarkan² blast the immense heart-tree with water-drawing and purging fire. Sarkan² is nearly consumed by the bark, screaming as she forces the spell through him. They rip the queen⁸ out, and Kasia³ carries the burned, unconscious wizard.

Marek,⁴ Solya,⁵ and only two soldiers survive the carnage. The queen⁸ stands, a hollow statue with vacant eyes. Her body is intact, but she neither speaks nor seems to see. The triumph is ash in their mouths: they paid for a shell, and the scent of a deeper trap lingers over the retreat.

In Kralia, the queen⁸ is tested with holy relics and pronounced pure. At a ballroom trial, Agnieszka¹ conjures a terrifying illusion of the Wood to stir empathy and save Kasia³ from execution. The queen⁸ suddenly speaks, accusing Prince Vasily of Rosya of kidnapping her and sacrificing her to the Wood.

The court erupts in patriotic fury, and Marek⁴ channels it toward war. Simultaneously, a long-hidden corrupted bestiary book in the royal library spawns a monster that slaughters King Kasimir and the gentle wizard Father Ballo.⁹ The kingdom reels, headless and hungry for vengeance, marching exactly toward the Wood's design.

Corrupted soldiers, remote-controlled by the Wood, attack the royal nursery. Princess Malgorzhata dies shielding the wardrobe. Alosha,⁶ the immortal weaponsmith, fights them off but is mortally wounded. She presses into Agnieszka¹'s hands her life's work: a sword forged over a century, capable of killing anything.

Agnieszka,¹ Kasia,³ and the two young children, Stashek¹⁰ and Marisha, flee the palace as Marek⁴'s forces, now believing them traitors, give chase. They race through the countryside toward the only sanctuary left: the Dragon²'s tower in the valley, with the Wood's malevolent intelligence stirring everywhere around them.

Sarkan² and Agnieszka¹ raise three stone walls around the tower. Marek,⁴ convinced they are corrupted and holding the children hostage, attacks with thousands of soldiers. The battle is catastrophic: fire-heart, cannonballs, and the Falcon⁵'s silver-tracking arrows shred the defenders. Sarkan,² in desperation, animates the dead to fight.

The queen,⁸ unstoppable and impervious, leads the final breach. With the tower crumbling and most allies dead, the survivors retreat underground to the ancient tomb, sealing themselves in as the doors splinter overhead. The ancient sanctuary becomes a final stand, its blue flame the last light.

In the tomb, they recast the Summoning. The light unveils the horrifying truth: Queen Hanna⁸ is a hollowed shell, her body merely a glove worn by the Wood-queen,⁷ an ancient being of pure malevolence who has been manipulating events for decades. Marek,⁴ refusing to believe, reaches for his mother.

She thrusts her thorned hand through his chest, killing him instantly. Kasia³ swings Alosha's sword, splitting the Wood-queen⁷'s throat. The blade drinks deeply, but the essence escapes as a foul smoke, fleeing into the cracks of the earth. The Wood-queen⁷ is wounded but not dead. Her true body lies elsewhere, in the forest's heart.

Agnieszka¹ and Sarkan² set out in a small boat down the Spindle, the river that flows into the Wood. Using illusion, they become a drifting leaf and twig, slipping past the Wood's malevolent gaze. They cascade over a waterfall into a hidden glade where uncorrupted heart-trees stand in silence, heavy with white flowers and golden fruit.

At the center, on a green mound, lies the Wood-queen⁷'s true body, asleep and dreaming. The air is still with an ancient, sorrowful peace, a remnant of what the Wood was before rage poisoned it. They have reached the wound's source.

The Wood-queen⁷ awakens and attacks. She thrusts Agnieszka¹ into the heart-tree, but instead of death, Agnieszka¹ experiences a vision: centuries ago, the wood-people welcomed human settlers. Their queen married the tower-lord, but his people feared her immortality and sealed her alive in a tomb beneath the tower.

She escaped to find that her kin, to avoid corruption, had transformed into trees. Mad with grief and rage, she became the Wood, her pain birthing the horrors that terrorized the valley. The monster is a wounded woman, a victim of human treachery who forgot how to grow.

Emerging from the vision, Agnieszka¹ understands the answer is not fire but an invitation. She picks a golden fruit from the uncorrupted grove and offers it with a drink of the Spindle's water. Using the spell 'Vanalem,' the same cantrip that once dressed her in finery, she gently channels the Wood-queen⁷'s transformation.

The charred, raging body sheds its skin, silver bark envelops her limbs, and she grows into a magnificent heart-tree, intertwining with her sister's tree on the mound. The malevolent will animating the Wood dissolves. The forest exhales. The ancient wrong is finally, quietly mended.

While Sarkan² travels to the capital to help stabilize the shattered kingdom, Agnieszka¹ refuses to leave the valley. She builds a cottage at the Wood's edge and begins the laborious work of healing: drawing water from corrupted heart-trees, burning them gently to release trapped souls, and planting new saplings from the grove.

The walkers, freed from the queen⁷'s rage, become her helpers. She drinks the grove's water and feels her roots sinking deeper into the land. The Wood slowly shifts from a nightmare into a haunted forest, no longer hostile but still bearing the scars of its long sorrow.

At the harvest festival in Dvernik, Agnieszka¹ dances among her own people, her mother braiding her hair, her basket full of uncorrupted heart-tree fruit. As evening deepens, a figure appears at the edge of the green: Sarkan,² dressed in a magnificent blue coat embroidered with a silver dragon.

He stiffly claims he came for the taxes. She laughs, the sound bright as the Spindle, and laces her fingers through his. They stand together watching the bonfire. The ancient wrong is mended, the Wood is healing, the children are safe in Gidna, and the wizard² has finally come home to stay.