Elvira

She had been wrong about the entity. Not entirely — the Court-Fae identification of its method had been accurate, and Aldera's earlier observation about the feeding pattern was correct. But she had believed it was drifting in through the boundary, re-entering after each failed ritual. She had been calibrating for an incursion event.

It was not an incursion event. It had never left.

She stood among the pale trees and let herself understand this properly. Three hundred years was not three years. This was not a predator that had found an opening. This was a predator that had put down roots — not metaphorically, but through the trees, through the Etheric fault line, through a structure so old that the people who built the causeway had known to give it space.

The leaf phase-lag was constant. She had been in the grove before, on three occasions, and noticed it each time and classified it incorrectly. She had written in her notes: unusual wind behaviour, possible topographic effect. She had told herself this was satisfactory.

It was not satisfactory.

She had been wrong for three years. She could stop being wrong starting now.

"It is using the trees," she said, partly to Thorne and partly to herself, in the way she sometimes processed observations aloud. "The root structures. They go down into the layer below the physical. That is where it is sitting. Not at the boundary edge. At the root."

She looked at the largest tree — the one at the centre of the arc, older than the others by perhaps a century, its bark so pale it was almost luminescent. The grove's anchor. The entity's anchor.

"The rituals were never going to close it," she said. "I was trying to seal a door it was not using." A pause. "I have been helping it for three years. Every failed attempt, every loop of confusion — I was feeding it and trying to close it at the same time."

She said this without self-recrimination, because self-recrimination was not useful here. She said it clearly, because clarity was the only instrument that had ever been effective against this kind of entity.

Thorne did not say you weren't to know or it wasn't your fault. She appreciated this. Both statements would have been sentimental rather than accurate.

"What do we need to do?" he said instead.

She looked at the oldest tree.

"Interrupt the coupling," she said. "Not the boundary. The root."