She was still crouched in the grass, in the same spot where she had fallen to her knees when she had heard the thing scream for the first time.
The first sight of the monster that had lurched out of the blightwood had horrified her on an existential level. This thing was part of something that had the power to wipe all native life from this planet. She could feel that just by looking at it, even if she did not fully understand the context of what she felt.
The thing was beyond horrifying.
Demi was an ordinary young noble lady. She had never learned any sort of combat or self-defense. She had been raised to be a politician and bureaucrat-governor, an expert at contracts, law, management, and diplomacy. For her safety, she had always relied on a security detail. She had never imagined that she might find herself in a situation where she would have to face down an unspeakable cosmic horror.
But as she continued to watch Aelfric fight, rooted to the ground as if she were a tree herself, her fear faded.
And it was replaced by anger.
How dare this thing come here?
How dare it lie in wait at the edge of her place, eating away at the fringes of it, ready to devour those that she cared about?
How dare it consume and consume and consume, turning everything vile and wretched and wrong?
This was a wrong thing. It was a horrible, horrible wrong thing.
And then the monster dropped some of the wet, fleshy nodules from its belly, as if it were laying eggs, and leechlike parasites with dozens of tiny tendril legs burst from them.
And that was the last.
That was the end of everything.
She would not accept it.
Even as the disgusting, floppy parasites rushed toward her on their hundreds of tiny feet, Aelfric swore and strained, stretching out with everything he had toward where she stood. In that same moment he burst out of the space directly behind her, having leaped to her shadow, but the jump was a move too far, pushing him far past his limits. He had already spent much more than he had in himself, and as he lurched out of her shadow, he lost control of his limbs and skidded to a halt shoulder first against the hard soil of the road’s edge.
But then a brilliant light cut a circle into the ground around Demi, lifting her gently to her feet as if she were in zero gravity. The column of light surged upward, clearing a circular hole in the cloud cover above that went all the way through the troposphere. She spun around inside the column of light, her clothing disappearing in bursts of rose petals and the sound of bells to be replaced with a flowing green dress. Her feet were bare as she stepped out of the light and onto the stone of the high road.
Roses burst out of the stone behind her as she walked, and twined into a crown around her head. There was the musky scent of flowers all around, cut by the smell of ozone.
The horrible creature did not yet seem to understand its situation, nor did the leechlike parasites that were still scrambling toward her. As they surged forward, she simply unmade them.
Aelfric, ground against the soil where he had fallen in his desperate attempt to shield her, could do nothing but stare, breathing raggedly. His weapons dissolved into nothingness, entirely forgotten, and he lay there, completely transfixed.
As Demi walked toward the abomination from the blightwood, she seethed. She let herself be angry. She cloaked herself in rage against the reality that would allow a thing like this to come to pass. She was furious.
This was the reason that Tata was sick. This was the reason her farm had been infested with invasive grass that choked the life from everything. This was why everything had been so sick and frail. This was the reason that the forest before her was warped and twisted.
She would not allow it.
She would never allow it.
“Get away from my land!” she howled, and as she did, her hair was blown into the air by the energy gathering around her.
Snowy white wings burst from her back as she splayed her bare toes against the ground, and she unmade the awful thing.
It was as simple as that. She did not fight it.
She did not have to fight it. Such an idea was honestly preposterous.
She unmade it, and it dissolved into threads.
Before her, the dark, foggy expanse of the blightwood stood open like a festering wound.
Demi slowly exhaled and let her eyes go completely out of focus. She saw it all. She understood it all.
She would not allow this wrong place to exist.
And so, like pulling the thread of a sweater to unravel it, she pulled at the edge of the blightwood. It was slow at first, almost unnoticeable, but as she pulled and pulled, it began to unravel faster and faster, like a crescendo building in music, or water breaching a dam.
She pulled and pulled and pulled, and somehow, the whole forest came undone. Every tree, every flower, every plant, every fungus, every bacterium, every beast and bird, it all came undone.
Watching from the outside, Aelfric saw the blightwood first begin to heave and shimmer, but then it began to dissolve into ribbons of light. This mass of light built and built, growing brighter and brighter until he could no longer bear to look at it, and he shielded his eyes.
But then, all at once, the light faded.
He looked again at Demeter Serraffield to see that she was still standing, her long hair moving gently in the breeze. Her white wings were folded behind her, and she was looking at something in front of her.
He struggled to get to his feet, bracing his hands against his knees and breathing hard. When he looked up, it took a moment for his brain to process what he was seeing.
There were verdant green woods as far as the eye could see, with tall beautiful trees: oak, maple, pine, chestnut. There were wildflowers in bloom along the roadside, and the songs of familiar birds filtered down like dappled sunlight through the branches of the trees.
It was beautiful and serene.
But he was not looking at the dryad’s forest nor the woodland that ran alongside the high road, concealing the picturesque farm from view.
He was behind Demeter Serraffield, looking past her, into the space that had been the blightwood only minutes before.
There was no longer any trace of that accursed place.
It was simply gone.
It had been there for decades, a deadly hazard to all of the lands around it, poisoning them, draining them, turning them into itself.
And it was gone.
He had no idea what to say, no idea what to do, how to process what had happened in front of his own eyes.
And then she had turned to look at him over her shoulder and given him a painfully beautiful smile.
“That’s better, don’t you think?” she asked, as if she had simply swept aside old garbage to reveal wildflowers growing underneath.
But he had no time to answer because she swayed on her feet, as fluid as a slender blade of grass being moved by the wind.
And then she collapsed.