Day 14, The Whisperwood
Tink’s little nose hasn’t stopped twitching all morning. I know that twitch. It’s the “trouble is brewing, and it smells like ozone and bad decisions” twitch. Sure enough, we found the source of the Whisperwood's silence.
A small glade, once sacred, was being utterly desecrated. A crude, bubbling clockwork extractor—probably left behind by some careless, greed-blind tinkerer—was spewing a sickly green blight into the soil. It was heartbreaking.
Leo and I split. I went for the extractor, intent on disabling the mechanism. A simple gear jammed here, a loose bolt there, and snap—no more blight-spewer. But the blighter had a defender.
A massive, ancient, moss-covered badger—the original guardian of this glade, I suspect—had been twisted by the green sludge. It wasn't itself. It charged me, blind with fury, foam dripping from its jaws.
I couldn't hurt it. It was a victim. I dodged, my armored glove catching a heavy claw swipe that left a nasty scorch on the leather (and a few broken crystals on my bracer). I rolled, finding my footing just as Leo—that glorious, silent engine of fur—slammed into the badger's flank. He didn’t bite to kill; he pounced to pin. He had the corrupted badger trapped against a fallen log, Leo's massive head low, his gaze steady, anchoring the beast.
I fumbled in my belt pouch, not for a weapon, but for the large, uncut Emerald I’d found in the geode tunnels. It was raw, powerful, earth-attuned. Perfect. I began the binding.
Tink, bless his fuzzy little heart, was already positioned. He was chittering, not in fear, but in a frantic, ancient, badger dialect. He was talking to the guardian inside the corrupted shell, soothing it, guiding my magic in ways I don’t fully understand. It was working. The rage was ebbing. Now I just need to hold the binding and cleanse the poison before my own magic burns out...