Magic Pot in the Cave of Priceless - Chapter 37: Chapter 37

They crossed the seventh ridge by midday. The land was stranger now—haunted not by ghosts, but by absence. The birds no longer flew overhead. The sun, though still visible, gave no warmth. Even the wind had forgotten its voice.
Before them stretched the Withering Reach — a vast expanse of twisted earth and skeletal trees, where time felt like a wounded thing. The grass here was brittle and gray. Stones bled sap when stepped on. Nothing lived. Nothing dared.
Elira knelt and ran her fingers along the cracked soil. “This place is wrong. Like it’s remembering the future instead of the past.”
Dren uncorked a vial of warding dust and scattered it. It evaporated immediately — the ground rejecting any magic not born from within. He frowned. “No spells. Not here.”
Arias held the Magic Pot in both hands. It pulsed again, slightly faster than before — a steady rhythm that matched the faint vibration beneath their feet.
It was leading them forward. Always forward.
They passed broken statues half-buried in sand, their faces weeping black moss. Strange symbols appeared in the dust — none of them stable. One moment a glyph of protection. The next, the rune for hunger. The earth itself seemed to shift its language.
At twilight, they came upon what had once been a village — now reduced to shadowy frames of houses, where doors hung without hinges and windows showed only endless black. Arias approached a crumbling fountain in the center. It bubbled with ink, not water.
The pot in his arms warmed.
He reached into the fountain.
And from the surface, a vision rippled.
He saw a young woman standing at the edge of a great tree. Solenya. Her cloak was torn, her voice sharp as broken glass.
Beside her knelt a boy — not the betrayer, not the Hollow Kings — but something in between.
“You cannot grow it,” she said.
“I must,” the boy replied. “Not everything beautiful is safe. Not everything born of shadow is evil.”
Solenya’s hand trembled. “The Echo Root does not dream of healing. It remembers betrayal and buries it deep. If it blooms… the world will forget how to forgive.”
She raised her staff — and in a single pulse of light, she buried the root in the Reach, sealing it beneath a cradle of thorns and silence.
The vision faded.
Arias pulled his hand back. His fingertips were stained with black ink.
“Elira. Dren,” he said. “She buried it here… with the hope it would never be found.”
“But something’s found it,” Elira whispered. “Or worse — it’s found us.”
As if summoned, a tremor passed through the ground. Trees snapped in the distance, falling in unnatural patterns — like letters forming a word in a forgotten tongue. Then, on the far edge of the ruins, a figure appeared.
A child.
Small. Barefoot. Eyes like cracked stone.
He smiled.
And the smile twisted something in the air around them. Dren fell to one knee, clutching his temples. Elira staggered back.
Arias stepped forward.
“Are you the Echo?” he asked.
The child tilted his head. “I am what was not wanted. What was buried because it could not be controlled.”
“You’re Valemorra.”
The child’s expression darkened. “That name is not mine. That name is the wound they gave me.”
From the earth behind him rose something monstrous — not a creature, but a structure. A great spiraled root tower, woven with bone and memory, pulsing like a living heart. From its top flowed a slow stream of ink into the sky, forming clouds shaped like faces — all crying, all screaming, all whispering the same word:
“Bloom.”
The child spoke again, but now his voice was older. Deeper.
“I remember every betrayal, every promise broken by those who carried the pot. I am what remains when love is abandoned. I am the Bloom That Devours.”
The pot pulsed frantically in Arias’s arms.
And then it spoke aloud, for the first time in weeks:
“If he blooms, all roots will turn to ash.”
Arias met the child’s gaze.
“Then we have no choice,” he whispered.
He set the pot on the ground. Light burst from it, golden and green and red — a final seed awakening.
But the Echo was faster.
From his hands grew tendrils of ink that shot toward the pot — aiming to corrupt it, twist it, consume it.
Arias, Elira, and Dren stood as one.
The battle for the second bloom had begun.