The creaking of twisted, spiky roots droned on as the myriad flower beds collapsed under the weight of gnarled vegetation. Shaping, curling, twisting from twine-like stalks into bundled ropes of tight fibers, as ever larger thorny brambles continued to emerge. The forms had yet to fully take shape, but a wooden, raspy sound approaching equivalence to a voice returned Henry's greeting.

"…You…" the voice groaned out, like the boughs of a massive tree in a windstorm. A measured, slow response that held untold weight behind it. "You should understand exactly why I'm here, worm feed."

The last shreds of structure the planter boxes held burst, splintering under the weight of the brambles as they burst out in full force. Both he and the clone were forced to take a step back, as the thick woven ropes of thorns burst free, knotting together to shape something close to a human form.

"Precocious, aren't you?", it hissed. "To think that the abject *murder* of my betrothed would go unpunished."

Henry shivered involuntarily. Celine's figure, while loosely based on what he assumed she had looked like before... this... was so far deep into the uncanny valley that he was considering renaming it to the uncanny center of the earth. Tall and spindly, with angry whip-like roots extending in every direction. No joints in the humanoid body to speak of, so the whole mass of plant matter had this tendency to sway and bend at unnatural angles, usually in several places at once.

It reminded him of timelapse videos of plants, how you never saw a plant move on its own until you looked at the footage sped up to a ridiculous degree. Then it had a life of its own.

She looked as unsettling as she did lethal. In all honesty, he might only be coming out of this encounter via some well-timed cloning.

Though, miraculously, I haven't died yet… Maybe if I…

With sweat beading on his forehead, he stepped forward and made the effort to solve things diplomatically.

"I… understand why you'd harbor some… misgivings towards me for that," he began cautiously, "But I have reasons for my actions that I am unfortunately unable to apologize for."

He kept his speech formal, like a servant addressing a ruler. Playing to her ego had helped him in the past, somewhat. In the few times his travels had brought him close enough to converse with The Dryad, she'd made it abundantly clear what sort of attention she demanded.

"Unable?" A laugh that sounded more like splitting bark pierced his ears. "Tell me, how would you feel if your significant other was stolen away from you forever?"

"...Well, ah, funny you should mention, actually…"

He mumbled a bit, scratching the back of his head as he discreetly eyed the staircase leading back down. His duplicate kept the revolver trained on Celine, for all the good it would do if an active shootout erupted here.

"...Because that's exactly what he was threatening to do before I finished him off. You've... met the Shroudwalker by now, right?"

"What? Of course I've encountered the-"

She stopped, not because of some interruption but because two and two clicked together.

"No…"

"Oh yes. Very much yes."

"You and her…?"

"Well, it's a bit complicated… but pretty much. I'm hopeful."

"Then… what in God's name was she doing-"

"-In Stratford? It's a bit of a long story…"

"Oh, come now. I need to hear more than just that sore excuse."

"I'll just skip to the end, then. Guillaume tried to possess her body after… connecting with some sort of strange crystal. Naturally, I took offense to what he was trying to do, and, well…"

Surprisingly, he seemed to be making headway with this line of dialogue. He'd kind of guessed that The Dryad had a bit of a hopeless romantic streak – knowledge of the results of her ascension to the Dozen was common enough to reveal that much, albeit frequently exaggerated – but he'd never guessed it would lead to this.

"You have some nerve, Mister Thompson."

But, just as he was starting to get a feel for her personality, it went straight out the window once again.

"...Sorry? I don't take your meaning." A twinge of anxiety seeped into his voice.

"This… news you bring comes with two options," she elaborated. "One. You are lying through your teeth, as you have been known to do time and again. Or two…"

Henry really didn't like how the mat of plant fibers woven around her was extending deeper into the car park.

"You unequivocally believe that my fianceé would take the hand of another woman before my own."

His breath hitched as he felt the aggression roll off her in waves.

Oh. Oh, shit.

"W-wait just a minute… I think there might have been a miscommunication here, and-"

"You think to take me for a fool?! My beloved had eyes for me alone, just as I only had eyes for him!" The wooden marionette gestured animatedly, performing an almost dance-like routine somewhere between fawning and swooning. "Destined to fall in love! Fated to forever be apart in this mad city! Oh, how cruel love can truly be!"

"Y-yeah, um… it can really be that way sometimes, huh…"

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Oh, my dearest Guillaume! If only I'd found you sooner! I thought I searched everywhere for you, my dear!"

The ever-expanding briar patch was getting close enough to force Henry and his copy to take a few steps back, now. Strategically, the both of them began working their way in the direction of the ramp leading down.

Henry was more than a bit puzzled.

Does she not know that he's the one who made her forget where he lived?

Celine's dramatic wails continued on.

"And you…"

There was no face on the thorny effigy, but if there had been it would have been staring daggers at him just that moment. The two of them froze in place.

"You think a sob story will be enough to satisfy me enough to not exact justice on you? If you're going to be so brazen as to lie to me, at least make it believable. The man I knew would never have been so uncouth and superficial as to force a relation on a lady a third his age."

Well, that sentence told all right there. She was completely delusional. Or out of touch. However you wanted to call it.

Henry's clone furrowed his brow, and spoke up to her for the first time.

"Weren't you thirty-five when you both first met?"

Wood creaked dangerously as her gaze snapped to focus solely on him. The motion was so quick, the fibers in her neck cracked like a whip.

For a completely different sense of the phrase, Henry wanted to kill himself right now.

"Now you've gone and done it, you bleeding idiot…"

The air erupted into a hail of thorns as the Dryad shrieked in furious anger.

< -|- -|- >

Down below, Martin was busy putting the final touches on some last minute details, minding his own business and completely unaware of the drama above.

At least, he had been, until a small posse of fellow mages came rushing down the stairwell in quite a hurry for someplace that was supposed to be safe.

He put down what he was doing immediately.

"What's going on here?"

One of his fellow survivors, short of breath but recovering quickly, panted a quick response. "The flower garden… *haah*… started wilting… Henry said to get out as fast as we could."

"Well, did he say why?"

"N-no, but… he seemed very agitated for some reason-"

A wholly unnatural screech echoed through the building above. Not the cry of an animal or monster, but something entirely alien that he couldn't quite put a finger on. It was unlike anything Martin had ever heard in Hallow London before, lending a sudden tense atmosphere to the hazy night outside the walls of their shelter that hadn't been there before.

He happened to look up, in the direction of the noise's source. It was coming from inside the car park. There was, apparently, some monstrosity that had managed to get past their defenses that they hadn't accounted for.

When he looked, he glanced in the direction of the gaping hole in the ceiling out of pure chance. It was fortunate for them all that he did. Blackened, thorny roots were descending through the opening, writhing like snakes and extending rapidly in every direction.

But… mostly in their direction.

"Shit!"

His exclamation startled the gathered crowd, who was still trying to catch their breaths from the mad dash. The subsequent jet of flame issuing from his palm up towards the encroaching vines spurred them all back into action.

"Sound the alarm! We're under attack!"

Nobody needed further motivation past that. Noncombatants hurried off to warn others, while a few other Fire mages, seeing Martin spring into action, threw their mana into the fray alongside him.

The brambles recoiled as if they were alive, proving that his hasty counterattack was at least somewhat effective. More flames of various intensities and durations peppered the approaching threat, pushing the vines back through the opening they came from and scorching the concrete around the hole to an ashen black.

He glanced around for any more signs of trouble, hoping desperately that he wasn't about to get flanked in this wide open area. As the leader, it was important that he stay on top of the situation developing at all times, if only so that the rest of the men under his charge were at least pointing in the right direction. Though, he never would have imagined those leadership courses he'd taken years back would ever be applied like this.

As he was observing the battlefield, Henry finally decided to make an appearance. Both him and his copy were dead-on sprinting down the ramp, a literal wave of brambles nipping at their heels.

"It's the Dryad!", one of them shouted. "We need to get out of here!"

"There's people still on the lower levels!", Martin shouted back. "If we leave now, they're goners!"

Henry stifled a curse under his breath, turning to stand his ground just as a twisted mass of roots in the rough shape of a lanky, treant-like creature rounded the corner after him.

"You dare insult me in such a way, Henry Thompson?!", the towering construct bellowed. "Insinuating that the man of my life was disloyal?! That I, the most beautiful woman in London, was not good enough for him?! THAT I WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A CHEAP WHORE?!?!"

Her arm lashed out, springing forth faster than Martin would have first assumed her capable of. The woody material held an almost elastic quality, snapping through the air above the heads of the two copies with a whipcrack. It stopped mere centimeters from reaching the pair, only because it glanced off that strange reactive shield that seemed to hang around him at all times.

"Well, now you're just putting words in my mouth-" Henry paused to dodge another low swipe from a completely different set of vines. "-but regardless, I think we'd all be served better if you took the time to just calm down, already! You've got the wrong idea!"

"I don't need to hear another WORD from you! I am claiming this building in the name of my dead husband-to-be, I'm going to pick apart every loose stone piece by piece until I uncover EXACTLY what took place, and when I am done doing that I'm going to find your precious Shroudwalker and wring the story out of her myself!"

A bead of sweat poured down Martin's face as he watched the clash of Devils from the sidelines, and it wasn't because of the heat of his own magic. He might be riding high right now because that tacky-looking artifact Henry had brought back was worth its weight in gold, but when it came to dangers of this magnitude... it really put into perspective how big the pond could really get. And reminded him of how small a fish he was in the grand scheme of things.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the survivors on the lower levels were making a break for the exits. For a short moment, he considered leaving Henry to his fate on this one. Just a moment.

"Henry, maybe we should all just back away slowly and do as she asks…"

"I'd love to, but I'm not quite sure she'll let me…"

Their conversation wasn't exactly private, and the Dryad heard every word. But, rather than attack them again, she used the momentary lapse in the fight to loom over the two clones and deliver her ultimatum.

"Get out of my sight," she spat. "Consider yourself lucky that your life is worth less than my desire to see my dearest one last time."

None of them needed much convincing past that. The remaining mages, Martin, and Henry all rushed for the exits, in a mostly controlled but not quite dignified fashion.

< -|- -|- >

"So… she's covered the whole building, now?"

"Yyyup."

"And, just to be clear, she inhabits any and every patch of those plants, right?"

"Right on."

"You also made mention she'd taken over an entire city block before?"

"Astute as ever, Robb."

Miraculously, everyone had made it out of the car park with little more than frayed nerves and a creeping sense of dread. Only Henry himself really had any damage to show of it, being the center of the Dryad's ire as he was, and even then his shield had managed to take the brunt of it in their escape. Only a few light puncture wounds from where the thorns had dug in remained.

Now, all 30 or so of them had regrouped with the away teams investigating the supply drops, resting and eating whatever rations they'd managed to scrounge from the crates as they watched the scene behind them unfold.

The office building that had once been the thriving hub of the Gentleman's Club looked even worse than it had before. Every last square centimeter of the building was slowly being overtaken by decaying plant life, of numerous makes and varieties. Some, naturally, were the common brambles Celine was so fond of using, albeit on a scale where some had to be as thick as Henry himself was tall. Others were less… straightforward in the danger they most definitely harbored.

Henry watched as what seemed to be a willow tree with dark amber leaves began sprouting from the smashed glass he and Layla had driven a van through not a week ago. He had no idea what it was doing, but he didn't like it one bit.

From their vantage on the rooftops about a block away, Robb's eyes were focused on the scene closer to the very top of the building.

"Well…" he mused, chewing thoughtfully as he stared toward the sky, hood pulled back to reveal the glossy white bone near his eye. "Looks like we might have a problem getting to that radio anytime soon."

Henry and his duplicate could only nod in agreement. Far above them, a canopy of blood-red leaves was forming.

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