The Earthen Court gathered at the edge of a dying season.

The air in the forest had lost its vigor. This place no longer remembered how to breathe. Leaves hung brittle on their stems. Green now faded to a dull grey. They crinkled against each other rather then whispering with the life they once held. The scent of rot was everywhere—sweet, soft, and tired.

Rhea stood among it all, barefoot on a carpet of spent petals that disintegrated beneath her feet. She looked up at the bough of the tree that hung over her and reached her clawed hand out to it. Touching the fragile leaves, they crumbled away into dust that sprinkled down upon her face. It felt like the earth's tears. 

Assessing this tree was gazing in a mirror of herself. Her once loam colored skin was now faded and cracked. No longer could she remember all the colors that had been woven into the tresses of her hair that had vibrantly cascaded over her shoulders. All the colors of autumn leaves had now faded to the husks left for winter and hung as lifelessly. Turning her hollowed eyes away from the dying tree, she looked down at the small sapling struggling up between the great tree's roots. The small green light within her sockets flashed for a moment.

She knelt beside the sapling, its leaves curled in upon themselves like clenched fists. When she touched its stem, she felt nothing—not the pulse of life, not the hum of magic, only a dull echo, as if her fingertips pressed against memory.

“Grow,” she whispered. The word was prayer and command both, but the sapling only shuddered, then stilled.

Something inside her chest tightened, a root curling and pulling inward toward the hollow place where her heart once throbbed in tune with the soil. The silence of the sapling terrified her more than death ever could.

Standing, she moved away from the dying season and back into the heart of Enaid. Her court watched her, their fear evident in their faces. They had witnessed her failure to call the life back into the trees. Despite having seen it before, it frightened them and shamed Rhea. What had she done to have failed her people so completely?

Behind her, the shadows of the trees swayed, pulling in as if affirming her being lost to the darkness. She sighed and they fell back to lie upon the ground as they should.

Facing the Life Tree, she spoke to her people. "Tomorrow, I will wed and we will restore the flow of the Life Stream within the Glade."

The Life Tree loomed over Enaid, its large branches stretching out and covering the forest that she had always known. The black bark was split open at the base and green sap ran from the wound. There was a shadow at the entrance. It folded its wings tightly around itself and moved back into the tree. 

The heart of Enaid was still untouched by the blight that was sweeping over the forest. The ancient trees still towered above them and tangled their branches above. The Lesser Fey flitted through the undergrowth, their forms small and shimmering. The translucent wings caught the light and cast it back in rainbows that shimmered over the moss and rocks. 

Once, her court had been vast: a kingdom beneath the boughs, where dryads and moss-born knights sang to the rhythm of rivers. They had called her the Green Bride, Daughter of Root and Soil, healer of the deep. Now, she walked among the ruins of her own kind. So many dead that she could no longer recall all of their names. Each fallen and now a feast for the birds. 

The withering had begun seasons ago. First the fungi stopped glowing beneath the moon. Then the rivers slowed, turning viscous and amber, too heavy to flow. Even the worms began to surface and lie still, their bodies hardening to glass. The magic that fed them all—the Life Stream—was draining.

They said it was the cost of war. But Rhea wasn't sure that this was the whole truth of it. 

Enaid's throne sat at the center of the grove, carved from the living heartwood of an ancient tree. Once it had pulsed faintly with each word spoken by the queen; now it sat dull, veins of rot spreading beneath its varnished surface. The queen herself was gone—she had given herself to the soil years before, returning her magic to the court in one last bloom that was now fading.

With nothing else to offer her people, she left them there and returned to her tree. Rhea now ruled in the queen's place, though the crown felt foreign on her brow and she never felt the royal summon in her blood. She touched the false crown. Not a crown of metal, but a braid of ivy and thorn that no longer greened. When she removed it, small flakes of bark fell from it, collecting like dust on the floor beside her bed.

Her attendant entered quietly—a thin creature with hollow eyes and hands stained dark with sap. “My lady,” it said, bowing so low its forehead brushed the wilted moss. “The emissaries from the Court of Flame approach. They bear the ring.”

The word hung heavy in the chamber. The ring. She had dreamed of it—an object neither made nor found, but waiting. In her dreams it pulsed, the sound of its hum imitating breath, slow and patient, as though alive. 

“Bring it,” she said.

The attendant hesitated. “It breathes, my lady.”

The bride’s lips parted, but no sound emerged. Instead, she gestured. The creature obeyed.

When the box was set before her, she felt the hum before she saw it. A vibration in her bones, subtle as a pulse. She opened the lid.

Inside lay the band: not metal, not stone, but something caught between. Threads of light and shadow twined into a circle, the junctions too fine for mortal sight to follow. It shimmered faintly, though there was no light to catch it.

She stared. The hum seemed to match the rhythm of her heart—then, disturbingly, to lead it. The shadows in the room leaned in, drawing themselves towards the ring. For a moment, she imagined that there were ravens in the depths of the shadows, fluttering their wings. 

She rose, closing the box. The lid snapped shut and the shadows snapped back into their places. Just outside the reach of her hearing, she thought she heard someone sigh. Forlorn and lost. As filled with longing as she was.

Her roots no longer reached far, but she could still feel the forest’s surface beneath her soles: dry, brittle, desperate.

“The Life Stream weakens,” she murmured, more to herself than to the attendant. “The soil hungers. The fire starves. Balance fails.”

Her voice broke, finally finding the tears she had been yearning to shed. “And they think to bind it with a wedding.” Her hands clenched into fists around the box, holding the ring in its small prison. As if that could stop the wedding. 

The attendant dared not respond.

After a moment, she said softly, “Leave me.” 

When the door of woven bark shut behind the attendant, she let herself sink to her knees. Her palms pressed into the cold floor. The box with the ring clattered and then settled itself, as if considering her. Beneath her, she could sense faint motion—the sluggish crawl of what little magic remained. It moved like blood through an old vein, thick and reluctant.

She whispered to it, a language older than speech. No answer. Only the echo of her own breath.

Then—so faint she thought she imagined it—came the sound of wings. A flutter. A single raven perched on the dead branch outside her window. Its feathers gleamed like oil. It did not move, did not caw, only watched her through the slit of the hollow wall. It regarded her with its large yellow eye. 

That night, she dreamed of green fire.

It licked at the edges of her vision, not burning but breathing. In its glow stood a figure—tall, limned with light, eyes like molten glass. The groom. She knew him though they had not yet spoken.

He was once a warrior of renown, they said. Defender of both Courts during the war, when the sky itself bled smoke from the machines of humankind. He had driven the steel monsters back, wielding a sword of flame so bright it left ghosts of itself on the air.

But war had cost him. His fire, once endless, now consumed itself faster than it could renew. The Fire Court flickered. Their pyres grew cold.

Like her, he was fading.

The dream blurred. The fire around him turned green. His face wavered, stretched, distorted. She reached out, and her hand passed through him, leaving behind a trail of ash that clung to her skin.

When she woke, her room smelled faintly of smoke.

She rose before dawn, dressing herself in garments woven of the last living vines in her dominion. They brushed against her body like dying breath. She clutched them to her, shuddering at the decay that now settled on her skin.

When she stepped outside, the air tasted of rust. The forest’s silhouettes stood against the pale horizon like ribs of a giant carcass.

Everywhere she looked, she saw signs of imbalance: mushrooms blooming black instead of white; dew that shimmered with the sheen of oil; small animals lying motionless, their eyes clouded but their bodies unspoiled, as if sleep had forgotten to end.

A murmur passed through the few attendants brave enough to stand near her. The wedding would be at dusk. Between now and then, she would meet her groom for the first and last time before the ceremony.

She wondered what words could possibly exist between them that would not sound like mourning.