#3.37
TDBB: Golem Toph 3.37
The Swamp Thing knelt beside Harley and pressed a hand of woven cypress roots against her forehead. She was still muttering about sprinkles when the green light flared beneath his palm, and her body arched off the grass as the Rot's residue burned out of her blood in a wave of emerald fire.
Harley sat up fast, her eyes snapping open, and vomited a stream of black sludge onto the clover.
"Oh god," she gasped, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "I can taste every bad decision I ever made. The cotton candy at Coney Island. The time I tried to make soup out of expired pudding cups. Mr. J's birthday cake that one year with the --" she gagged again, clutching her stomach. "The marzipan. The marzipan was a mistake, Red. I told him. I told him nobody likes marzipan."
"The infection has been burned from your flesh," the Swamp Thing said.
Harley looked up at him, her face still pale, and grinned with teeth that were stained black around the edges. "You got any mouthwash in that bark?"
Ivy was already sitting up, more slowly, pressing her fingers against her temples. The vivid emerald hue returned to her skin, though she looked thoroughly exhausted. She glanced over at Toph, who was leaning casually against an overturned boulder near the swamp, picking dirt out from beneath her fingernails.
"I knew you'd find a way, but did it have to wait until we turned gray?" Ivy said.
"Is that a thank you I'm hearing?" Toph didn't look up from her fingernails. "You're welcome."
Harley scrambled to her feet, her eyes scanning the freshly churned valley until they landed on the bubbling, weed-choked mire where Solomon Grundy had been submerged. The black iron plates Toph had twisted around him were entirely gone from view, buried deep beneath the thick, shifting mud.
"Is Grundy going to be okay down there?"
She pointed at the wetland, at the thick rushes and cattails that had grown over the seal in the time it had taken the Swamp Thing to burn the Rot from their blood.
"He is bound," the Swamp Thing said. "The earth will compost what remains of the infection. In time, he will rise again, as he always does, free of the Grey's influence."
Harley's lower lip pushed out in a pout that would have looked childish on anyone else. "That's it? He's just... composting? No dramatic rescue? No tearful reunion where he realizes he was wrong and we all hug it out?"
Ivy ignored Harley's mourning, turning her attention back to her own hands. "The Green is weaker now because of him. He deserves his punishment."
The Swamp Thing turned to Ivy. He did not move his head quickly; his neck was a column of compressed peat, and it rotated with the slow patience of a tree growing toward light.
"The Green has survived the fall of empires, the blackening of the skies, and the frost of ice ages," he said. "It cannot be weakened so easily."
"But I have felt the connection fraying," Ivy said. "Ever since the influence by the Parliament of Stones."
"Only your connection wavers," Swamp Thing said. "You have adapted to the ways of the Melt."
"You have learned to stand as the stone stands," the Swamp Thing continued, and his red eyes did not blink, did not waver. "Wide feet. Heavy hips. A base that does not yield. The Green does not grow from such stillness. It reaches, it climbs, it finds the crack in the wall and pushes through. You have made your vines into pillars even if they mimic tendrils."
Ivy looked down at her legs, at the stance she had held since the tunnels, since Toph's first correction.
"You're saying I have to forget everything Toph taught me," Ivy said, and her voice carried an edge that could have been anger or could have been fear, the two sounds close enough that even she could not have named which was louder.
Toph let out a loud, harsh laugh, punching the palm of her hand with a closed fist. "What a load of absolute crap! My earthbending forms aren't the problem here, big guy. Stone is the foundation for everything you grow. If anything, she's making her weeds tougher."
To Ivy's surprise, the Swamp Thing bowed his massive head in agreement. "You are correct."
Toph blinked, her sightless eyes widening slightly. "Wait. I am?"
"The methods are not the cause," the Swamp Thing said, turning his gaze back to Ivy. "The Green and the Melt have been separated for ages. The friction you feel is the ancient divide between the root and the rock, not a flaw in your training."
Toph grinned, stepping forward. "That’s exactly right!"
"What must I do then?" Ivy asked genuinely.
"Shed the ways of the Melt or find the bridge that connects both parliaments," Swamp Thing replied.
"Speaking of parliaments," Toph said, "know where I can find those cowardly parliament stones?"
"No." Swamp Thing said.
"The Parliament of Stones," he continued, "like other parliaments, do not dwell in places that stay still. Their sanctuaries shift with the deep crust, carried on the backs of tectonic plates that move too slow for human years but too fast for human maps. Only their guardian can truly find them."
Toph's fists clenched. "I've been reading the earth constantly but I can only feel faint traces of the places they've passed through."
The Swamp Thing stretched his hand and held the palm out with a small, leaf-woven pouch on it.
"Take these seeds," the Swamp Thing said. "They are not of the Green. They are seeds of the Melt, entrusted to me by a friend a long time ago."
Toph walked toward him, her feet reading the ground. She held out her hand to receive the pouch.
"I give them to you now as you are the Guardian of the Melt, and as a token of gratitude," he continued. "Plant each in stone, and it will grow roots that seek the nearest concentration of elemental stone-energy. Use them to guide you to the Melt Sanctuaries so that you may understand the Parliament you have been called to serve."
The Swamp Thing placed the pods in her palm. The pouch was warm, heavier than stone. Toph closed her fingers around the it. She pressed her thumb against the inside and traced the pods, feeling the vibration increase, feeling the pull of something deep and slow and hungry for connection.
"So I plant this," she said, "and it grows a map. A map that will guide me to the Parliament?"
"Yes," the Swamp Thing said.
"If that's the case," Toph said pocketing the pouch in the fold of her tunic. "I better find a good rock to plant the first one!"
She turned from the Swamp Thing, her feet finding the ridge of granite that led down from the wetland, and she began to walk without looking back.
"Come on guys," she called over her shoulder. "We've got rocks to annoy."
Ivy followed, her steps slower than Toph's, her eyes on the ground as she tried to walk without the wide stance that had become habit. Harley scrambled up from the grass, grabbed her mallet, and trotted after them with the energy of someone who had already forgotten the composting.
"Hey, Tophy," Harley called, catching up to walk beside the earthbender. "What happens if we get lost?"
"We won't get lost," Toph said. "I don't get lost. The ground is the ground. It doesn't move unless I tell it to."
"Except when it does," Ivy said from behind them, and her voice carried the dry edge of someone who had watched Toph's certainty fail before.
Toph did not answer. She reached into her tunic and pulled out one of the pods, holding it in her palm as she walked.
Her bare heels dug into the soft turf until she located a dense, gray slab of embedded limestone protruding from the forest floor. She dropped to one knee, her right fist striking the top of the stone with a short, controlled impact that split the surface down the center, opening a clean, smooth vertical fissure. She took the pod from her palm and pressed it into the narrow opening, then swept her hand over the stone to close the gap completely, sealing the seed inside the rock.
The response from the bedrock arrived with an immediate, deep seismic pulse. Beneath the surface, the seed burst open, sending down a massive network of dense, crystalline root tendrils that tore through the upper rock layers and dove into the deep crust. The stone roots shot down toward the mantle, fracturing the limestone, seeking the massive subterranean currents of elemental energy that drove the continents forward. Toph remained frozen on one knee, her hands resting flat against the rock, her seismic sense riding the vibration as the network expanded thousands of feet below, mapping out a vast, shifting conduit that pulsed with a steady, rhythmic hum.
Toph stood up, brushing the fine gray stone dust from her knees, and raised her chin toward the dense treeline. "The trail is moving beneath the mountains, straight toward the northwest. We follow the tremor."
The forest closed around them, the canopy thickening as the light dimmed, the damp floor giving way to ancient granite outcroppings. Toph led the way, her stride steady and unchecked, her bare feet tracking the deep, slow pulse of the lithic root system that kept the moving sanctuary locked in her mind.
Behind her, Ivy walked with her feet positioned close together, her balance shifting with every step as she tried to feel the earth without using the stone stance. Harley stayed close behind, swinging her mallet at the low brush and complaining about the lack of diners in the valley.
None of them looked back at the wetland, where the Swamp Thing remained standing at the edge of the new mire, his massive form turning into dark wood as he returned his mind to the global balance.
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