A wet tearing sound split the air as the first thick, black brier of the monstrosity slammed into the timber wall. Splinters exploded outwards, a violent cough of wood and dirt. The impact punched a jagged gap, wide enough for a man to crawl through, venting the stench of rot across the soil. Shouts erupted along the perimeter.
“To the walls!” Ilze’s voice cut through the burgeoning terror, sharp and clear. Her bow was already in hand, an arrow nocked, its fletching vibrating with tension. “Archers, focus fire! Keep it from regenerating!”
Around her, the guards scrambled into position along the rampart. Bolgan hefted a crude iron axe, bracing his boots against the churned mud, while Mara drew twin hunting knives. They met the next wave of vines with a desperate roar.
The invasive horror struck with piston-like speed, its briers coiling and slamming into the earth until the packed dirt shuddered. Where they hit, the cedar stakes groaned and buckled under a wash of foul black sap. Even when a stem parted under an axe, the stump pulsed, splitting into fresh, fibrous whips that lunged toward the gap.
“It’s too fast!” the lumberjack shouted, hacking at a runner that slipped past the line, only for two offshoots to snap outward, one gouging a furrow through his leather bracer. “The thorns are growing back faster than we can cut them!”
Arvis stood near the inner walkway, oblivious to the screaming and the rending wood. His hands curled tightly at his waist as he watched the growth chew through the boundary stakes he had raised with the others. He saw the fear in his neighbors’ eyes, the growing hopelessness as their blades seemed to do nothing more than irritate the monster. The memory of the Fountfruit flashed across his thoughts, followed by the Arbiter's mocking text.
And then, a thought, so audacious it almost made him laugh amidst the horror, bloomed in his mind. He didn’t need to *cut* it. He didn’t need to *burn* it. He needed to make it *stop*.
His attention fixed on the ceaseless churn of barbed bark. He snatched up a wooden spool of coarse flax from a discarded mending basket. The rough plant fiber scraped against his calluses. Nearby, Ilze pinned a thrashing stalk to the dirt with a broadhead.
“Ilze! I need you to protect me!” His voice was thin against the din, but held an unexpected urgency. “I have an idea.”
She merely nodded, not dropping her guard. “Stay behind me, Arvis. Don’t step forward.” She stepped between him and the collapsing timbers, her bowstring drawn taut.
Arvis didn't stay behind her. He pushed forward, a man possessed, towards the breach. The plant's hiss rattled the air, thick with the stench of alkaline sap. The earth shook under the assault. He held the unspooled flax between thumb and forefinger, bare hands guiding raw cord against the encroaching nightmare. He exhaled slowly, discarding the clamor to latch onto an impossible scheme.
He pictured the thrashing limbs and the rapid budding of bark. Then he pictured their exact antithesis: not fire or steel, but absolute, immutable arrest. He envisioned the inertia of fossilized shale, imposing the stubborn reality of stagnation upon the thrashing wood.
His hands traced careful arcs through the open air flanking the rupture in the fence, boxing in the thickest limbs breaching the perimeter. He made small, precise motions, as if darning a colossal, invisible tear in reality itself. The flax strand attenuated, drawing out into a translucent filament that hummed as it payed out from the spool.
He funneled every reserve of stamina into the strand, weaving an absolute halt into the open air. He felt a profound drain, as if his very thoughts were being stretched thin, but he didn’t stop. He framed the most aggressive runners in tight geometric boxes, the linen dissolving into an oily shimmer across the breach.
As Arvis knotted the pattern with a flick of his wrist, a low drone resonated from the empty air. The air around the breach, where Arvis had worked, began to distort, a faint, almost imperceptible visual tremor. It wasn't a sparkle or a flash, but a subtle bending of light, as if looking through heat haze.
Inches from Bolgan’s greaves, the whipping briers locked. Barbed nodes hung rigid, trapped as though set in resin. The thrashing died instantly. Nothing moved except the dust drifting through the breach.
A sharp snap rang out as the rigid timber began to crack. The slick rind turned chalky and brittle, sloughing off in dense chunks that clattered like dry coal.
“It's turning to slate!” Mara shouted. She drove a knife forward; the blade struck the petrified bark and cracked the core clean in half. Bolgan swung his axe with two hands, cleaving straight through the rigid base as if splitting seasoned birch. A hollow whine leaked from the core as its paralyzed limbs broke under their own weight.
[Innovative Application of a Foundational Skill! Entertainment Value: High!]
[Reward: Skill Evolution - [Lesser Stitchcraft] is now [Conceptual Embroidery].]
Far away, in a stone alcove above an arid canyon, Gatis Vinter watched the struggle through a scrying orb. He had anticipated slaughter; instead, he watched the unassuming restorer bind the rampaging growth until the wood fragmented like slate.
A snarl deformed the warlord's mouth as the orb pulsed with the image of his failed gambit. With a wordless roar, Gatis slammed his fist down, not on the table, but directly onto the scrying orb. The crystal sphere spiderwebbed and burst, peppering the flagstones with sparkling glass grit.
Back at the breach, as the remaining petrified branches collapsed into inert splinters, a scattered cheer rose from the line. Arvis sank against an unbroken fencepost, his breath shallow. Ilze was beside him instantly, checking him over with quick, assessing hands.
“Arvis,” she murmured, glancing from his trembling fingers to the pile of pulverized black bark. “What else can you stitch?”