Planar diffusion after a curse-break

The Twisted Grove was held between two trees of an age, one long dead and one thriving, each of them anchored to a plane and each holding the other in balance. Both were destroyed in the same hour, and with the two planes severed each tree began emptying out in its own direction.

The death-tree took the negative side of it and went up in dark fire, lightless and freezing and slow.

The living tree went the other way, and everything around it went with it. Moss, mushrooms and blossom broke out across the ruin’s ground; the razorleaf tripled in size; grasses and bushes ran riot over the ruin. A squirrel the size of a small dog was jumping between the branches. The tree itself lost the enormous arm it had reached over the keep’s roof, bringing down the copse the arm carried and holing the wall and the building beneath it, and its leaves turned to autumn color for the first time in all the years the two trees had held each other still.

This was the mild version. Destroying one tree and leaving the other running unchecked would have produced something far larger, faster and wider than what happened, and taking both is why the countryside got the outcome it did.

The three who came out of the ruin carrying a piece of Nancáro were shielded from the worst of it without doing anything to be. Hinta, waiting out the same hours in the keep’s map room, had nothing of the kind and took it as it came.