Juggernaut
Leaf Shakes the Wind could see the edge of the circle where Creation ended and the Underworld began, radiating out from him like heat from a coal. Though all was blighted here, the grass hung just a bit lower, the color a shade more subdued. He thought back to his time in The Labyrinth, and an involuntary shudder ran once down his frame. Looking up to his surroundings, he shuddered again.
Despite the distance between them, there was really only one view from the hilltop, one thing that dwarfed and dominated everything else in sight: Juggernaut. The living fortress clung to the southern wall of Thorns, the majority of its bulk immobile, while lesser things swarmed around and over and in and out of it. As Leaf watched, a maggot twice the size of Wave of Smoke broke through the outer flesh of the behemoth’s shoulder, it’s head wiggling confusedly in the sudden open air for a moment before it turned and burrowed back beneath the surface.
His intelligence had been right. It had taken scant time and effort for him to confirm that this was where the southern expedition had been taken. Mask of Winters hadn’t even tried to hide it. He goaded them, left his tracks fresh. “Here,” he said, “in these walls of ever-rotting, ever-regrowing flesh, in this putrid carcass, are the men and women I took from you, as you took Seven Seasons Widow from me. As you work to make her whole, I work to make them suffer.”
Leaf turned his back on Juggernaut and moved silently down the hill, the tiny circle of Creation moving with him. It bothered Leaf a little that he cared, that he wished to rescue these amalgams whose names he knew only from security reports and whose faces he could barely remember. It bothered him more that he was afraid to try.
