Kaz explained quickly, and his cousin didn’t hesitate. She ran off toward Lianhua, who was already speaking with Ija. Certain that Kyla would do as he’d asked, Kaz allowed his focus to widen, seeing that while Ija and Gram had been right behind Kyla, Avli and Tisdi were on their way as well. Someone else was coming, too, sneaking around the other entrance to this cavern. He would have to keep an eye on that.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Kaz turned back to Li. He wished he still had some ki-crystals to offer her, because the only ones here would most definitely not be safe to eat. “We should start cutting them out now,” he said.

  Li blinked.

  Kaz chuffed a laugh, tilting his head to indicate the thick column of golden crystal so close and yet so far from the blue one that had grown around the Rabbit. “The Tiger. He tracked down the Rabbit not long after she was taken, and tried to rescue her. Unfortunately, Qiangde and Nucai were ready for him, and used fulan to weaken him long enough to place another of the seed crystals in his core.”

  His dragon turned to stare at the other column.

  Kaz shook his head. “I don’t think fulan will work on the Twelve for very long. They - we - are too tied into the world to lose who we are.”

   Li asked dubiously.

  Kaz tugged at the longer fur beneath his ear. “We’ll have to wait for just the right moment. If we don’t, this Tree will die too soon, and may take the Rabbit and the mountain with it.”

   Heishe said, pushing the door wide as she slithered in. She had taken a form that was only a little bigger than Li’s largest size, and wrapped her body around the base of the golden column.

  Kaz thought about the limited contact he’d had with the golden ki flowing through the Tree. It had tried to attack him only once, when it thought he was part of what was hurting the Rabbit, but the rest of the time either ignored or rejected him outright. The Tiger was now one of Kaz’s ‘siblings’, however - and what a strange idea that was - and Kaz hoped that they could at least become friendly toward each other after this. He had heard that cats and dogs didn’t get along, but surely that didn’t apply to Divine Beasts?

  In any case, if Heishe was willing to take care of extracting Hu, then Kaz would let her. He could feel the imbalance around the Tree now, and he was certain she could, too. What they were about to do would begin to heal this place, and he felt something akin to a compulsion to do so. He could resist, but there would always be a constant, niggling itch to do what he could, and that was the responsibility he had accepted when he chose to become the Dog. Still, the time wasn’t quite right yet.

  Something caught at his consciousness, and Kaz turned, ears twisting as if listening to a sound that was only in his mind. Who had called for him? Ah, there it was. Kyla was almost ready.

   His cousin was repeating his name over and over in various ways, as if she had been trying to speak to him for a while. It was possible she had. He really wasn’t used to listening for one voice from among…so many that he couldn’t count high enough to number them all.

  “Kyla?” he asked, and felt Li’s attention shift from Heishe to him.

   She hesitated.

  Kaz closed his eyes, and Li helpfully showed him the Tree’s cavern, as they’d seen it while flying. He found the center, which was unfortunately underneath the Tree, and tried shifting it around, watching the way the ki flowed from the crystals in the walls and ceiling. Dongwu - Shom - really was brilliant, to have figured out how to make the crystals work together to support and obey the crystals in the Tree. He also realized that there wasn’t a single damaged or broken crystal in the entire cavern. Had Shom been quietly repairing and maintaining this space for the last eight centuries in order to keep Nucai contained?

  “Here?” he asked Kyla, showing her the image.

  He could feel her consternation, then her exasperation. He could sense her moving around, and then she said,

  Kaz nodded. He could feel the seed, and he carefully opened the channel to it even wider, giving it more Earth ki. It would require far more to fill it, and if Kaz had a few years to pour all of his golden ki into it, he was certain he could manage it. He didn’t, even if he was willing to be without Earth for so long. He knew where to find at last some of what he needed, though.

  “Now, you need to hide and go over to the other stairs. Tell the person there that she won’t be harmed if she comes with you,” he said.

  A bright spark of curiosity lit Kyla’s mind, and he felt her trying to figure out who it could possibly be. She was already moving, and he could sense the dismay from Ija and the other kobolds nearby as Kyla vanished so abruptly. His cousin would find it much harder to get away with disappearing in the future.

  Kyla’s ki met a bright golden core, and there was a brief moment when Kaz thought he might need to intervene in some way. He was sure he could, even from here, since they were his, but he didn’t really want to. Fortunately, Mila was desperate, and eventually decided it was better to trust the young Magmablade than attempt to fight or flee.

   Kyla told him indignantly, and Kaz sighed.

  “Perhaps you should wait before judging, Magmablade,” he told her, and felt her chagrin. “Tell me what she says.”

  Mila was Idla’s daughter, and the heir to the Goldblade tribe. According to her, she had had no idea what was happening until Idla told all of the Goldblades and their subsidiaries to go to the Tree. Even then, she had only been able to escape because her birth-brother, Dat, distracted their mother and told Mila to run. Dat was Mila's guard until he became Berin's mate, so Mila trusted him implicitly. She and her most faithful females fled, and had been in hiding ever since.

   Kyla asked, sounding as neutral as she could, though he could feel her distrust.

  “We need her and her females,” Kaz said bluntly. “Whatever the truth may be, I don’t think she conspired with Idla, and that’s a start. She’s genuinely horrified by what’s happened.” He could feel that clearly, though it was difficult to pick out truth from lies as Mila spoke, at least not without invading her mind further.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  There was a long silence before Kyla said,

  He knew she wasn’t happy, but there was no time to worry about it. They could talk later. “Have Mila howl for the rest of her females. They’re close. Then everyone needs to line up in a single row.”

  

  “Please, Kyla,” he begged, one eye on the Rabbit’s flickering ki. “Quickly.”

  There were only six Goldblade females left besides Mila, but they had the strongest, purest Earth cores Kaz had ever felt in a kobold - other than Idla and Mila, of course. He had Kyla send Gram and his strongest Woodblades to one side, and then Kyla walked along the unhappy line of females from the other four tribes.

  “No, no, no, Wood, no, no, Earth, Earth, no…” Kaz said as Kyla walked, and as he did, Kyla pointed to the group the female should join. All of the great tribes had intermingled over the years, and by the end, there were members of every tribe in each group, though more than three in four didn’t have enough Wood or Earth to help.

  There were so few, but Kaz himself had Wood, and though Li was only a normal Divine Beast, rather than one of the Twelve, she was closer to becoming the Dragon than she might be comfortable with if she knew. The world was already watching her more closely than any other dragon, and if nothing was done, it would offer her the choice soon. For now, however, her Earth might well make the difference between success and failure. If she chose to offer it.

  It was time. Kaz drew in a deep breath and settled onto the ground, pressing his palms against the cracked and splintered area where Nucai had been attempting to reach the Rabbit. She was close, and in pain, and he hated that he’d made her wait, but he hoped she would understand once she knew why.

  “The two groups need to hold hands and stand around the seed,” he told Kyla. “They shouldn’t touch it yet, and they mustn’t touch the old Tree at all. Wood, then Earth, then Wood, and Earth again, at least as much as possible.” There were a few more kobolds with enough Earth than there were Wood, but not many, not after Idla had given most of them to Nucai.

  Kaz could feel the females becoming increasingly impatient with obeying such a young female, even with their chiefs ordering them to do so, but they did as they were told, so Kaz said, “Now, any of them who know the howl for the Tree should begin. Rather than howling to the old Tree, however, they have to howl to the seed.”

   Kyla asked, though she dutifully repeated his instructions as she did so.

  He drew in one more deep breath and closed his eyes. “It can if I help it.”

  Even if he couldn’t feel the kobolds, he would have known when they began to howl. It was shaky at first, but Mila and the Goldblades knew it very well, as he’d hoped they would, and Gram and his Woodblades had become fairly good at it over the last few weeks as well. It wavered, then steadied, but the ki they offered rose in a sort of formless fog, dissipating into mana or absorbed by the crystals all around them. The seed was so small most of them probably couldn’t even see it, tucked into a crack in the stone as it was, while the old Tree stood right beside them, broken but still standing.

  But Kaz had claimed the kobolds, and these were his as much as any dog curled up at its master’s feet or any fox sleeping in its burrow. He refused to force them into another kind of servitude, and if they had refused to help, he would have tried by himself, and might even have succeeded. The Tree he grew alone would never be the Tree the kobolds needed, however, and he was somewhat guiltily glad his people had such a long tradition of following orders.

  The kobolds were Kaz’s, and the seed - or at least some aspect of it - lay within Kaz’s core. It was a surprisingly simple matter to pull the two together. Earth ki poured into the seed, while Wood surrounded it, gently urging it to grow. These kobolds weren’t enough, couldn’t be enough, but Kaz ever so carefully reached out and took a bit of Earth and Wood from every kobold who had them. Only a bit, since those kobolds hadn’t given their permission, weren’t offering it up in a howl as these were, but there were thousands of kobolds scattered throughout the mountain, and even a little from so many became a lot.

  Then Li lifted her muzzle and added her voice and her ki to the refrain. Holding nothing back, she gave Kaz and the seed every bit of Earth ki her core produced, and as if seeing its chance, the world responded by giving her even more Earth ki to use. Kaz could actually feel her balance shifting, and knew that when this was over, she might never be able to choose any other element as her dominant one. But she sensed this too, and only poked him with her tail when he tried to narrow the bond between them.

   she said, and that was that.

  The space within the seed filled more quickly than he would have believed possible when he first felt the emptiness inside it. It filled, and when it reached the limits of its outer shell, he pressed it down again. Over and over, he compressed it, increasing its density until it burned so brightly that he wished he could close his internal eyes as he had his physical ones. When it - or he - had reached their limit, he gave it the tiniest of pushes, causing it to spin, then raised his own muzzle, along with his voice.

  The howl was clear and fierce by now. Everyone felt the connection, and fingers tightened, Woodblade holding onto Goldblade holding onto Magmablade, and Kaz poured his Wood ki into the foundation he’d built around the seed. Wood was growth, in its most fundamental sense, and the seed finally cracked. Tiny roots dug into stone, digging down into the mountain. Down toward Kaz.

  The old Tree was in the exact center of the cavern, and there was nothing he could do about that, but the new Tree almost seemed to know where it needed to be. A tiny stem curled up from the crevice where Kyla had placed the seed, and two miniature leaves quivered in the still air. It continued to stretch up, adding a small branch, and then another. And then it began to droop.

  Kaz’s eyes opened. What? What had he done wrong? It still had plenty of Earth and Wood, but there was no doubt that it was failing.

  A hissing laugh filled the air, and Heishe stretched out her Water ki until it encompassed the lake that Kaz only now realized lay beneath their paws. The old Tree’s roots passed through this cavern on their way there, but the new one couldn’t reach, and whatever water had been in its seed to fuel its birth was gone.

  But Heishe brought Water to the Tree, the fluid itself acting as an inexorable force to wear a hole through the stone until a few drops reached the dry little roots. They took it in greedily, and Heishe stabilized the connection, making sure the new Tree wouldn’t run out of Water before it could reach the lake beneath them.

   Heishe whispered in his mind.

  Kaz stopped howling and opened his eyes. The kobolds above were growing tired, but they could all see the new Tree that was now as tall as Kyla, and they took heart from it, continuing their howl.

  Kaz looked around for a blade, then remembered something he had done once before, when fighting the salamanders in Cliffcross. Gathering his ki, he shaped it into a blade, then cut away a chunk of the crystal that lay before him. Across from him, Heishe was doing something…different, but the Tiger within her column was fighting to escape at the same time, and that made her task unlike his own.

  The Rabbit was no longer responding to him, and as he cut, desperately trying to take away the largest pieces he could, while at the same time avoiding her body, he watched her ki. The crystal was almost entirely gray now, and cracks shivered away from his ki-knife with every stroke, causing larger and larger pieces to separate and cascade down around them. Li lifted her wings to cover both of them, but those wings were trembling, and he knew he had to hurry.

  Overhead, stone cracked. Something broke through the ceiling, questing downward, while the crystal column by which he sat began to fail. Kaz reached into the hole he’d dug, and felt hard, crystalline fur beneath his fingers. It snapped off as he gave the small body a tug, and then the Rabbit was in his arms, and crystal fell like rain, and Kaz focused on the struggling core of the creature he now cradled.

  As he had a few times before, Kaz cut away part of that core. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the only one that would work, and in spite of her current condition, the Rabbit was strong. She had been drained beyond even her ability to sustain herself, but she was Wood and Kaz was Wood, and he had cut away the crystal that linked her to the mountain.

  He used his ki to remove the crystal through the hole that still remained in her abdomen even after all these years, and before even Li could sense his intention, he swallowed it himself.