The blaze swallowed Pipo whole, a suffocating draft that peeled the skin on his arms and seared the roof of his mouth. The blinding white light gave way to an orange haze thick with ozone and smoldering bay leaf. He struck the altar's dressed flagstones shoulder-first, rolling onto the scorching granite. Above him, Milla Roon hung suspended, held fast by shimmering ribbons of tethered lightning that pulsed in rhythm with the slab beneath her. They writhed around her wrists, ankles, and throat, braided leashes pinning her taut against the heat.
He scrambled to his feet, coughing on scorched air. The spire of yellow-white flame spun around her, throwing sparks against the stone ceiling. The noise of the battle outside, the shouts of the Ash Raiders, the distant barks of Nini’s hounds, all faded into a muffled hum, replaced by the guttural roar of the pyre.
“Milla!” His voice was a rasp, raw from the heat, stripped of its usual gleeful lilt. He reached for her, his hand already blistering from the ambient heat. The luminous braids snapped at his knuckles with needle-sharp static, but he shoved past the sting, dead-eyed memory demanding he not fail.
Her gaze drifted to him, slow and unfocused. “Pipo,” she breathed, the sound barely audible above the fire. Her voice was weak, laced with a strange, melancholic peace. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s my… my duty. It’s always been.”
The words smelled of smoke and cold ash. He felt the cold, calculating logic of Dead Pipo’s trauma surface, whispering, *‘Let her burn. Conserve resources. She is a distraction.’* Pipo gritted his molars, choking the cold phantom back down into his guts. No. Not this time. Never again. He would not be that Pipo.
“No, Milla,” he insisted, forcing a smile to his lips, though it felt alien and strained. “Your duty is to live. To feel the sun on your skin, to laugh, to plant seeds that grow.” He reached again, his hands, now singed, pushing through the wall of heat. The glowing bands lashed his forearms with sharp sparks, but he closed the distance. He locked his blisters onto her blistering palms, anchoring his thumbs over her knuckles.
Her flesh radiated dry furnace heat, yet under her wrist bone, a faint pulse tapped out its count. “The sky is already dead, Milla,” he said, his voice softer now, more earnest than she had ever heard it. “This fire won’t bring the rain. It will only take you. You are worth more than a sacrifice to a dead sky.”
A flicker of something, a spark of doubt or perhaps hope, crossed her eyes. “My ancestors… the stories…” she began, her voice trailing off, conviction wavering under his unwavering gaze.
“Your ancestors never lived in a world where the River of Glass vanished overnight,” Pipo countered, tightening his grip, his own pain a dull throb against the more urgent need to reach her. “They never saw the earth-veins stirring beneath their feet, waiting for someone to listen. This isn’t their time, Milla. It’s ours.”
He pulled a small, smooth shard of glass from the pouch at his belt – a remnant from the dried River of Glass, kept as a curious memento. He pressed it into the searing stone of the altar. “The earth remembers,” he murmured, focusing, not on the inferno, but on the whisper of life beneath the rock. His fingers, despite the burns, felt the subtle vibrations, the faint hum of a dormant vein, just as the (now silent) System had once revealed.
He began to scratch, not wildly, but with precise, almost surgical motions. The vitrified edge bit hard into the consecrated granite, spraying calcite dust and orange sparks. The column of fire bowed backward, unsettled by the gouge. He chiseled with rhythmic, frantic strokes, lips tugged into a hard, cheerful crescent. He was digging again, just like he had at the start, only this time, it was to save, not just to build.
The stone gave way with a faint *crack*, revealing a faint, almost imperceptible blue-green glow beneath the altar. A vein. The dormant earth-vein pulsed with pale turquoise brilliance beneath the bed of embers. He quickly pulled a section of reinforced Deep-Root vine from his pack – the same kind that formed the outer walls of his oasis. The vine, thick and rope-like, ended in a specially designed coupling, a crude but effective piece of his ‘Apology Irrigation Pump’ network.
With a grunt, Pipo forced the coupling into the freshly exposed earth-vein. There was a low, resonant thrum, a deep shudder that set the chapel pillars rattling in their sockets. The blue-green light intensified, flowing into the vine. He knew, with a certainty that transcended logic, that the water network in his bunker, fed by the deep-root melons, was now directly connected to this ancient, dormant source.
“Hold on, Milla,” he muttered, squinting past the hissing tethers. “Just a little longer.”
He hauled hot air into his throat and bellowed toward the flues: “Nini! Open the floodgates! All channels to the hearth!” The conduit ran straight through the subterranean drainage trench to where Nini watched the pressure valves.
Almost immediately, the granite beneath his knees bucked, and the pillar of fire shrank by half. A colossal hiss ripped through the air as water, not from the River of Glass, but from the deep, cool heart of the earth-vein, surged into the hearth. The towering flames, which had licked at the rafters only moments before, recoiled with an ear-splitting shriek. Steam exploded upward, a colossal plume that swallowed them both, scalding and blinding. The light-shackles around Milla's limbs flared, then popped like ruptured glass tubes, dissolving into harmless golden sparks. She sagged, free, into Pipo’s arms.
But the force of the steam was immense, far greater than Pipo had anticipated. The stone slab beneath them groaned, then fractured with a sound like a thunderclap. The entire roof of the nave, weakened by the heat and sudden burst of pressurized steam, blew upward with an ear-splitting crash, throwing burnt terracotta tiles across the yard. Sunlight, harsh and unforgiving, poured into the now-open chamber, illuminating the devastation.
High on the cracked parapet, a massive silhouette stepped into the dust-choked daylight. The Ash Raider King, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated fury, stared down at the ruined, steaming altar, his eyes locking onto Pipo Makkal, who stood, singed and smudged, but smiling a wide, defiant grin, Milla Roon cradled safely in his arms. Around them, his enraged raiders roared, their spears now pointed directly at the exposed, vulnerable pair.