There in the desert amid the playground of death, Harmon stood naked and shackled in the boiling sand—not as a man of wood, but as just a man. He looked up into a blinding sun, to a sky inflamed. He cried out for their souls. His tears slipped along his cheeks and boiled away.
He saw her. Saw the half-girl, half-rotting tree.
Saw the Tree Child.
She was dead.
The roots of her tree-legs had consumed her, their thirst draining her of her lifeblood. Her naked body arced backward, as if her spine had been snapped. The fine hair that had once caressed her tiny skull had grown brittle from the savage heat. Her bones threatened to burst from her taut black skin. Hopeless eyes lay lost in dark sockets.
Gently, Harmon took the dirtied pillow from her hand. It seemed familiar in its way.
He could hear her. Could hear the Tree Child.
Can you save me, Papa?
He knew that voice. Once, long ago. When time had meaning.
He let the pillow slip from his blistered fingers. Gazed across the wasteland. The air writhed in rippling waves that made the rides of torture come alive. And yet, all of the children—all of the charred bodies he had seen before—were gone.
He squinted into the sun. The sky glimmered red, deeper than he remembered. He listened for song; for the voices of children. Only an angry wind slapped him. Sand bit into him like fangs.
He cleared the grit from his eye. The rampart, that colossal wall of black stone that stretched not only the perimeter but the very boundaries of imagination, had crumbled in ruin, as if the evil within its confines had grown invincible and had freed itself of the chains that bound it. It had forsaken this place, had exhausted its usefulness; it had released its great will against the barrier, humbling it in one titanic eruption of brawn.
The Dark was free.
Harmon turned to the grasslands, only to find greater barrenness. The fields that had once been green and lush were brown and withered. Again he listened, and when he heard nothing, rushed forth through the dead grass in alarm. He did not get far before his lungs failed him in the stifling swelter.
He stopped before the tree. The tree he had once thought an apple tree.
The ground was littered with shattered hearts of stone, hearts he had plucked a thousand times before. Hearts he had eaten, sick with hunger.
The oak had split along its median, its halves falling away as if it had been struck by a god. The naked wood stank of rot and of death; stank of blood. He stepped closer, and indeed, saw blackened sap glistening from exposed roots.
Closer still, he saw that the halves coursed the wasteland in opposing directions, far further than sight or mind could carry. As if they stretched round the earth and were knotted on the far side in a lethal grip that would choke the very life from it.
Harmon shuddered. The chains on his wrists and his ankles rattled in his terror.
He could not feel the eyes.
Could not hear the children.
Could not feel his heart beating.
He inched to the edge of the tree and stared into the chasm below. The roots sank into oblivion. The earth had opened up, had let the light touch the darkness.
But no. He slipped to all fours, exploring the roots more closely. There were marks on them. Claw marks.
He closed his eye and prayed to God he was wrong. Prayed it only a trick from his lost and fractured mind.
But he knew. The light had not touched the darkness.
The darkness had touched the light.