“Stop it,” Elijah muttered, though he knew it would do no good. The little spider was adorable, but feeling it crawl around in his hair was more than a little off-putting. His mind kept telling him that those furry, little legs were smaller pests, and he wanted nothing more than to rake his fingers through his hair to dislodge them.

Thankfully, the spider understood his discomfort – or maybe it was just restless – and it leaped to his shoulder, where it settled down. The juvenile arachnid was a bundle of energy, but like all infants, it was quick to wear itself out. And its favorite place to sleep was Elijah’s shoulder.

With a sigh, he ignored it as he went about the gruesome business of gathering blood beast corpses. There were hundreds of thousands of the things, and some had already begun to decompose, filling the entire swamp with the smell of decay. Elijah had initially found it quite disgusting, but after a day of being immersed in it, he’d grown inured to it.

Mostly.

There were only two reasons he continued. First, he fully intended to viciously scrub himself clean the second he left the swamp behind, so the situation was temporary. But more than that was the driving force behind the act – the tree and the spiders needed him to keep going.

The little arachnids were already capable of hunting, but it would likely take a few days – at the very least – for wildlife to return to the swamp. As such, there wasn’t much around for them to eat. Except the blood beasts, which the spiders found quite satisfying. So, Elijah had decided to give them a little help by piling the corpses around the tree.

However, his primary motivator was the tree’s health. The blood beasts’ presence had affected the entire ecosystem, robbing the very ground of nutrients. Elijah wasn’t entirely certain how the swarm had managed that bit, but he could feel it well enough. The tree wasn’t in any danger of dying, but if Elijah wanted it to thrive, it needed a little nudge in the right direction.

And he expected that the blood beast corpses would provide proper fertilizer that could fuel its growth for months to come.

That seemed more important than ever, given the item he had in his Arcane Loop. The apple, golden and shining with ethera, was a powerful natural treasure. Eating it would doubtless have plenty of benefits, far exceeding those associated with his grove fruits. Elijah had no idea what those benefits might be, and he had no intention of eating it to find out.

Instead, his goal was simple – he wanted to give it to Nerthus so the spryggent could plant the seeds in the grove. He didn’t expect the resulting trees to be as powerful as the one in the swamp, but if the progeny was capable of wielding even a fraction of its power, that would be a definite win.

Plus, Elijah had always liked apples. Having a ready supply would be a nice supplement to his diet and could bring untold benefits to the other members of the grove.

But for now, he was using a tried and true method to keep the tree alive. He’d never really been much of an agriculturalist, but he knew enough about biology to connect decaying matter with nutrients in the soil. And given the rapid decomposition of the blood beasts, he expected the dispersal to happen much more quickly than normal.

Or maybe that was hope.

In any case, he’d already dug a series of concentric trenches around the base of the tree. That was the easy part, though. Once he’d accomplished that feat, he embarked on the more disgusting of the two steps – gathering the corpses and putting them in their places.

To aid in that endeavor, he’d laid out a large tarp he’d bought back in Ironshore, upon which he piled the bodies. Doing so in the middle of a swamp was less than ideal, but he managed to make it work. When that was done, he dragged the burden across the swamp and to the trenches he’d dug.

At present, he’d only managed two circles, and he had nine more to go. So, he continued to work, the spider perched on his shoulder until, after two more days of hard labor, he completed his task. By that point, he was absolutely covered in mud and gore, but the job was done.

Before he left, though, he had one more task to complete. So, he settled down at the base of the tree and used Blessing of the Grove. Thankfully, it washed much of the gore away, but more than a little stubbornly clung to the crooks and crannies of his body. He ignored it, focusing on Nature’s Design.

He had no intention of altering the tree’s composition. Even if he tried, it would resist, and it was strong enough that he wasn’t certain he could affect any real changes. Instead, he tried to coax its roots to spread across the whole island. Doing so would let it access all of the nutrients.

Physically, it required no real input, but mentally, it was hard work. However, over the next day or so, he managed to accomplish the task. Mostly. The roots wanted to grow downward, and Elijah didn’t want to change that. However, he did get them to spread a little, which was all he could really hope to accomplish.

It would have to do.

Through it all, the little spider remained perched on his head or shoulder. At times, it would leap free to go eat one of the blood beasts, but for the most part, it was like it was attached to Elijah.

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He didn’t mind, though.

A little company, especially from an adorable critter, was always welcome.

But when Elijah had finished, the time to depart had come. So, he reached up to his shoulder and gently cradled the little arachnid. Holding it in two hands, he brought it up to eye level and said, “It’s time for me to leave. I’ll try to visit sometime in the future. By then, you’ll be huge.”

Something told him this particular spider was different from all the rest. Did that mean it had a better chance of being a guardian? Elijah wasn’t sure. As far as he knew, there were a host of requirements for a beast to pass that threshold, and he wasn’t entirely certain what they were. But he hoped it would reach that point.

Or at the very least, survive.

There was a part of him that wanted to take the spider with him, but he knew that just wasn’t feasible. Sure, it was docile around him, but the second it saw someone who wasn’t attuned to nature, it would probably go on the hunt. Perhaps he could come back someday and take it to the island where it would be safe.

Elijah set it on an exposed root, then said, “Be good.”

Then, without warning, he transformed into the Shape of the Sky and flew away. Idly, he noticed that the little arachnid tried to follow him for about thirty yards, leaping from the island to one of the trees. However, it wasn’t long before Elijah left it behind.

If the Shape of the Sky could have produced tears, Elijah would have been crying.

But he knew it was for the best.

Still, as Elijah left the swamp, he couldn’t help but dwell on it. Thankfully, a distraction caught his attention only a couple of days later when he entered a new chamber. In this instance, the biome was low scrubland, complete with towering cactus-like plants sprouting vicious thorns.

The wildlife was appropriate for a desert-like environment, with a preponderance of reptiles and insects, with most of the mammals being quite small. There were a couple of larger beasts, but they were obviously herbivorous, resembling giraffes, but with much stouter legs. Their long necks were useful for reaching the tops of the cacti, where water tended to pool.

As fascinating as any new ecosystem was to Elijah, he was far more interested in the sense that he was close to a leyline. Ever since he’d entered the Hollow Depths, he’d been on the lookout for just such a confluence of ethera. And that desire only grew stronger when he decided not to chance the illythiri teleportation system. Without that, traversal of the Hollow Depths was just as – if not more – time-consuming than traveling the surface.

That led him to the idea of creating another dolmen.

But as always, he couldn’t just build them anywhere. He needed a leyline, and preferably a strong one. In the beginning, Elijah hadn’t even recognized those currents of energy for what they were. Instead, he’d just followed his instincts in creating his first dolmens. He hadn’t discovered the truth until he’d met the Conclave representative, Wilhelm.

Now, he saw it for what it was.

In a way, Elijah likened the leylines to the World Tree’s roots. When it had touched Earth, it had wrapped those roots around the world, injecting ethera and submersing it in power and meaning.

Of course, Elijah was going on the idea that the World Tree was a literal tree and not just a metaphorical – or metaphysical – construct meant to allow people to better understand how the universe worked. In his core, he felt that it was a physical thing, but his mind had some difficulty wrapping around the sheer scope of such a being.

Still, he knew how the leylines worked, and from what he sensed, this one would serve his purposes quite well. Deeper understanding would need to come later. For now, he just needed to know enough to make use of it.

And that was precisely what he intended.

So, he flew across the subterranean desert, homing in on an appropriate location. In the end, he found it very near the center of the biome, which meant that it was nearly fifty miles from the chamber’s boundaries in any direction.

Elijah landed, then spent a few minutes kneeling with his hand against the ground. After that, he moved a few feet to the left, then paced a hundred or so yards forward. That’s when he felt it. He’d found the perfect spot.

He got to work.

Over the years, he’d made a few dolmens, all along the same design. Idly, he realized that he didn’t particularly need to do so. He could have just as easily used something other than vague memories of Stonehenge as a model. However, at this point, he felt like it would be something of a betrayal to go down any other design route.

There was the added benefit of knowing precisely how to facilitate the process.

Using his experiences as a guide, he marked off a perfect circle that was twenty-three feet wide. He even had a tape measure he’d liberated from Carmen’s smithy to ensure it was perfectly spaced. Each trilithon was meant to be comprised of two pillars, spaced three feet apart, and capped by a lintel. So, he dug eighteen holes, each to a depth of four feet.

That meant he needed a bunch of large stones from which he could carve the pillars and the lintel.

Once he’d laid everything out properly and dug the holes, he set off toward the edge of the chamber. Unfortunately, the stone of which the walls were composed was too brittle for his purposes, so it took another two days – and quite a lot of flying – to find appropriate building material.

In this case, it was a bluestone variant that abutted a chamber dominated by a forest of giant mushrooms. The stone itself was a blue-ish slate color, with periodic yellow slashes that pulsed with ethera. It wasn’t quite on the level of dragonstone, but it was still plainly magical.

It was also incredibly dense, and Elijah was forced to use his pickaxe – one of Carmen’s products – to set it free from the wall. Still, with Elijah’s strength and endurance, he had no trouble with the work.

At one point, he was forced to deal with a small landslide, but a few tons of rock wasn’t enough to keep him buried for long. In fact, the only real danger came from the claustrophobia that came from being trapped beneath so much stone. He swallowed that discomfort, dug his way free, then resumed work.

Over the next day or so, he carved twenty huge hunks of stone from the wall. Each one was roughly five feet wide, fifteen feet long, and five feet deep, and they weighed even more than the density implied. If Elijah had to guess, he’d have put each slab of stone at around fifty tons. Maybe slightly more.

So, the combination of that immense weight and the awkward burden meant that he was forced to shift into the Shape of Thorn in order to carry even one. Two was probably possible – just based on raw strength – but it just wasn’t feasible to balance both of them and move any appreciable distance. More frustratingly, the connecting tunnels were too narrow for that, and more than once, Elijah felt like he had when trying to get a new couch up the stairs to his old apartment.

On a few occasions, Elijah found himself swearing far more than usual.

Still, he managed it, and after only a day, got the first block back to the intended site of his dolmen. Now, he only needed to do it seventeen more times.

Sighing, he got to work.