"If it lives, we can slay it. And then burn it, just to make sure it doesn't come back from the dead," she said.
"...does that happen often?" he asked.
"Slaying? Yeah, duh? It's what we're here to do in the first place, dummy."
"I meant the coming...
Raksha ran to her, but with every step he took, the roots encasing Aisa's limbs thickened and lengthened, raising her further into the air. Soon, they had coalesced into what appeared to be a tree trunk. By the time Raksha was halfway to her, things that looked like branches had sprouted, vast and sweeping, and Aisa was already forty feet above ground.
And then sixty. A hundred.
As he hurdled the heaps of corpses around what used to be the stump, Aisa was far beyond the forest canopy. He could still hear her song drifting out into the night.
The Hunter was nowhere to be seen, but that was the least of his concerns now. Sheathing Steelbreaker, Raksha began climbing the unnatural tree. Its foul surface seemed to writhe and recoil from his touch, but he crushed it into submission beneath his grasp, gouged compliant footholds with his bootheels and steel toecaps, and hauled himself upward.
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Grotesque, misshapen leaves had begun to sprout from the tree's branches. As he climbed, massive black fruit-like pods began to swell from the hearts of these leaf-clusters, each larger than the size of a full-grown man and covered with crimson veins.
Eerie, purple light shone from the depths of these pods. Before Raksha's disbelieving eyes, they detached themselves, one after another, from the tree and drifted off into the night, as if borne aloft the notes of Aisa's song.
He climbed furiously, aware that many dozens of pods, certainly over a hundred, were leaving the tree and drifting off into the night with every passing moment. Raksha knew that wherever those landed, horrible things would surely unfold.
But that was a battle for another time. Within minutes, he reached the top of the tree, where Aisa hung, impaled upon a grotesque cradle of unnatural wood. Her face was twisted in agony, but still she sang. Above her, every beat of her disembodied heart sent tremors through the web of black, vein-like vines streaming from its surface.
With each note that left her lips, another pod drifted from the tree.
Raksha had to put an end to this. Father Ignatius had told him to cleanse the unholy with fire, and wreathed in the Conflagration, Raksha's very presence was anathema to this tree of hearts. It was evident in the way its bark scorched and peeled away from his touch and how its wooden flesh writhed in seeming agony at being within the ambient backwash of his aegis.
Hauling himself higher, he drew Steelbreaker with one hand and looked up into Aisa face. Her gaze was empty, cast toward infinite suffering.
Raksha struck.
**
And suddenly, there was no more pain. The forest' song drifted from her, like a nightmare melting away before the morning sun.
She was awash in warmth. Aisa opened her eyes and found herself looking at Raksha. She couldn't move or turn her head or really feel anything else at all, but if they were so close together, he had to be holding her in his arms.
