Chapter Text
Wirt and Dipper shot through the trees, wings whirring. They darted out onto the path once it hit a bend and the human couldn’t see them.
“He’s had him, he’s had him,” Dipper muttered over and over as they zipped through the trees. “Ten years, ten years Ford’s been gone and that horrible human had him the whole time –”
“We need a plan!” Wirt panted.
Dipper snarled. Green magic sparked at his fingers and a thick thorny hedge erupted out of the path behind them, keeping pace as they flew for several feet.
“There, that’ll slow him down.”
“You think he can’t destroy that with more iron? We need to get help!”
“We need to get my uncle!” Dipper snapped. They took another bend and nearly clipped a birch dryad, sending her tumbling off her branch. “That human knew about this path! He must’ve hurt Ford and known he’d try to heal himself if he escaped!”
“We don’t know that for sure! Even if Ford really was held captive, he could be anywhere, it doesn’t mean he’ll be is that an actual corpse?!”
“Great-Uncle Ford!”
There was a fey lying face-down in the middle of the path. He was old, and much too thin, with awful burns on his wrists and ankles that disappeared up into threadbare human clothing. Even the wings, which for fey were nearly indestructible, looked like they’d been heavily scored with blunt knives. The ground under his chest was dark with blood.
Dipper was at his side instantly, hands clasping the fey’s shoulder. “Great-uncle Ford, please, it’s Dipper, can you hear me?”
Wirt landed next to him, glancing at the thicket. “Can you turn him? Maybe I can help or get him stable enough to move.”
“Right. Grunkle Ford, I’m going to move you, okay? We need to see what’s wrong.”
As gently as possible, Dipper rolled him onto his back. There were more burns on either side of Ford’s neck, and his face was a pale mess of cuts and bruises. The worst of it was a massive gash from his sternum to his stomach, so deep Wirt almost expected to see layers of torn muscle. The blood that flowed out was thick and smelled of rot.
Ford let out a quiet groan.
“Wirt,” Dipper said, voice shaking.
Wirt swallowed his nausea and knelt, pressing both hands to either side of the wound. Numbing winter cold spread from his fingers. The bleeding slowed to a trickle, then to a dull ooze. Slowly, painfully, the wound began to close.
Suddenly something dark began to suck at Wirt’s magic. Something cold, infinite, ancient, reaching for his soul with a savage, devouring hunger. He gasped and yanked his hands away.
Ford’s eyes fluttered open. “Who….”
“COME ON, SIXER, I HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY!”
Ford gasped and snapped upright, grabbing his chest with a cry. Dipper grabbed his arm
“Great-Uncle Ford, it’s Dipper!”
“What – Dipper? You can’t be here, Bill is coming –”
“That’s his name?”
“Who cares what his name is!” Wirt shouted. “Hi sir, big fan, I can’t heal that before he gets here so please use the Springs assuming they haven’t been poisoned yet!”
“He isn’t after them, he’s after –” He broke off coughing.
“Right, lean on me. Wirt, slow him down!”
“You’re lucky I like you,” Wirt muttered under his breath. He heard Dipper’s wings whirring as he turned to face the brambles. Wirt was breathing hard.
The spike, that chain, that horrible feeling when he’d tried to heal that wound... Humans didn’t do things like that. Humans couldn’t do things like that. Bill, or whatever his name was, couldn’t be an ordinary human.
What in the Five Forests was he about to face?
He didn’t have time to think about it. There was a very nasty crash and a stench of burned meat. Then Bill rounded a bend in the path, somehow smiling wider than before. He was swinging a scythe hooked to the other end of the chain, covered in sap and dried stains. Was that what had cut Ford’s wings?
“WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL!”
“Good idea,” Wirt said.
The ground suddenly froze so hard and fast it split, opening an ice-walled cravice directly under the human. Just as he started to fall, the chain snapped out and snapped around Wirt’s neck. He choked. Bill gave a nasty yank, but Wirt dissolved instantly in a flurry of snowflakes and reappeared a few feet away. His neck burned and he gagged.
The other end of the chain had been whipped around the nearest tree and Bill was hauling himself from the crevice. His head swiveled to face Wirt so fast he thought his neck would snap. He leered.
“AREN’T YOU A SIGHT FOR THE SIGHTED! I’M SURE I CAN FIND A JAR FOR YOU TOO, SNOWFLAKE.”
The chain whipped out again. Wirt reacted on instinct. He turned sharply, eyes squeezed shut, flaring his coat. A gust of wind shot out from the hem. He heard the agony of nearby trees as they caught the edges of the blast, then a nasty crack – followed by the soft, slightly wed thud of a body. He opened his eyes.
Bill was lying face down. He wasn’t breathing.
A thin whining filled Wirt’s ears. He couldn’t have killed him. He couldn’t. He had excellent self-control, there was no way he’d done more than just knocked him out.
He took one step toward him. Another.
A hand snapped out and grabbed Wirt’s ankle. “GOT YOU!”
Wirt screamed. Then he looked down, screamed even louder, dumped two feet of snow on Bill and flew down the path so fast the trees on either side were greenish smears.
“ITS FINGERS WERE MADE OF WORMS, IT TOUCHED ME, OH SWEET ASH AND ELDERWOOD WHY IS IT MADE OF WORMS –”
The Springs came into view within seconds. The path dipped into a set of stairs that reached a series of six or seven pools, each ten feet wide and half as deep, so clear that the stones at the bottom of each glittered like jewels. Wirt felt a second’s relief that Bill hadn’t poisoned or destroyed them. Ford was immersed in the closest pool up to his chest while Dipper knelt on the bank next to him, both drawing a massive runic spell in the soft earth.
“He’s not human!” Wirt shouted, landing hard. “He grabbed me and his hands were made of worms! Forget the Springs, we need to go or it’ll kill us!”
Dipper’s head snapped up. “He grabbed you? Are you – Wirt, your neck!”
“Focus, Dipper!” Ford snapped.
“Are you two drawing a greenspell, now? It’s too late for hiding!”
“It’s not a greenspell! It’s –”
“FOUND YOU!”
Bill rounded the corner. He wasn’t grinning anymore. The sclera of his eyes was blood-red, and his left hand was made of black, writhing worms that formed and reformed too many fingers. Some of them dropped to the ground and turned to ash with a hiss, killing the grass around them. He was dragging the chain behind him, but he was holding the blade end in his still-human hand, so tightly blood oozed from between his fingers. Wirt’s knees gave and he whimpered.
“YOU FIRST, LITTLE SNOWFLAKE.” Bill reached for him.
“Dipper, NOW!”
Ford and Dipper thrust out their hands. The spell they’d drawn suddenly blazed with yellows and golds. The ground shook and the earth under Bill’s feet rippled so hard it liquified, swallowing him up to his knees, thighs, waist. Bill screamed with rage and lashed out with his chain. Wirt screamed as the blade cut straight for Dipper’s face –
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Three trees erupted from the earth around Bill. The blade hit one of them with a kchunk! and stuck fast. It must have been a variation of the greenspell, but far more advanced – the bark of all three trees glittered with powerful runes Wirt had never seen before.
Their trunks thickened and twisted like flowing water, branches and leaves all twisting to form an ever-tightening cage, but Bill thrashed and clawed at them, growing less human by the second. Both of his hands were made of worms and even more fell from his mouth like bloody teeth. His body broke apart easily wherever the tree branches hit him, but the worms burned holes in the trees faster than they could grow.
“Come on, come on!” Dipper muttered under his breath.
“Focus, focus!”
“I KNOW ALL YOUR TRICKS, STANFORD PINES!” Bill screamed. “YOU THINK YOU COULD ESCAPE FROM ME? I’M NOT DONE WITH YOU YET!”
He turned and flat-out vomited on the nearest tree. Its bark sizzled and caved in a cloud of burned ash, and Bill thrust his head and shoulders through the hole, reaching for Stanford’s face.
Wirt grabbed Dipper’s hand.
Power flooded the spell. The trees grew so fast their runes were smears of light. Their massive branches forced Bill back and penned him until they sealed in his howls of rage, and then kept growing, their trunks thundering against each other as they twisted higher and higher until they broke the canopy and towered over the trees around them.
When they finally stopped, their trunks were so tightly fused to each other Wirt couldn’t have slipped a single snowflake between them. The runes faded until they were simply dark grooves in the bark. It almost looked like a very old tree, planted long before the rest of the forest. The only thing that indicated otherwise were the leaves: they were as green as the forest around them, but the undersides showed veins that glinted with hints of gold, and the tops were dusted with frost.
For a solid thirty seconds the three of them held perfectly still, breathing hard, staring at the tree. It didn’t so much as creak. A silver dragonfly landed on the bark, then flew away. Nothing.
Wirt collapsed, falling back on his butt and then going down until he was spread-eagled on the ground, breathing hard.
“I can’t believe we survived that, sweet permafrost, I can’t believe we survived that.”
“Excellent work,” Ford said brightly. “You two really did it, kids! That’ll hold him for at least a moonturn!”
“That’s it?!” Dipper and Wirt said together.
Ford waved them off. “Oh, it’s more than I expected. You were right, young man, Bill isn’t fully human anymore. He’s older than the forest and far more dangerous, and in the last ten years he’s become far more powerful.”
“Ten years…since you went missing?” Dipper asked quietly.
“As I said before,” Ford said, frowning at the tree, “Bill isn’t after the Healing Springs. He only tried to ‘stake out’ the path because he knew he’d need to follow me if I tried to heal myself…and to be honest, he’s overly fond of human puns. Never could explain that. No, what he’s really after is the entirety of the forest itself. Every twig, every fey, every speck of magic. If he gets loose and we can’t stop him, he won’t just kill every fey he can find, he’ll drain the forest until it’s nothing but a wasteland.”
“Oh,” Wirt squeaked.
Dipper breathed out, hard. “Okay. Okay. Wirt and I are ambassadors for the Winter and Summer Courts. We’ll appeal to our Queens for assistance.”
Ford brightened. “You are? Splendid! I should have guessed as much – magic is much more powerful when combined. Although I’ve never seen anything quite as powerful as the two of you. Now, I’ll need access to my study and research notes, but I’m sure we’ll –”
He started to lift himself out of the water and fell back with a splash. Wirt sat up with a cry but Dipper caught him, half-dragging him onto the bank where he wouldn’t risk drowning if he fell. The sorcerer blinked a few times, looking dazed. His face looked pale and tinged with gray.
“Ford? Great-Uncle Ford, are you alright?”
“Yes, yes, I just need to…get my research notes…”
He passed out cold.
“Is he okay?” Wirt asked, scrambling over, hands outstretched as if he could heal him with sheer proximity. “I mean, his wound looks – I wouldn’t say ‘better,’ that’s actually a wicked-looking dent, but it’s sort of healed, maybe Bill really did do something and he isn’t healing all the way?”
But Dipper shook his head. “Healing won’t cure lack of sleep or malnutrition. I just need to get him home…I can’t even imagine how Grunkle Stan is going to react.”
“Who – the changeling Grunkle Stan? Who tries to con every fey and human out of their fortune?”
Dipper half-grinned. “That’s the one.”
“You have a very interesting family.”
Dipper laughed. A bit too long. Then his face dropped into his hands.
“Hey,” Wirt said hesitantly, touching his shoulder. “Do you need me to help you two get home? Or…anything, really?”
Dipper took a deep breath and shook his head.
“Forest’s gonna end,” he mumbled into his hands. “I can fall apart later. We gotta stop him.”
“We will,” Wirt said, glancing at the tree. It didn’t so much as rustle, but that wasn’t reassuring. Wirt could still feel the faint burn of the iron around his neck. “I mean,” he said bravely, “Ford said we’re a lot more powerful together. And we already stopped him once. Next time will just be more permanent.”
“Yeah.” Dipper raised his head and met his eyes. “Hey. Thanks for having my back.”
“Oh, s-sure. Um.”
“Go on a date with me?” Dipper blurted.
“What?”
“Is that a no?”
“No! I mean yes! As in it’s a yes, not a no, but, um –”
“Great,” Dipper said firmly. “I mean. Just in case the forest ends. I don’t want to miss my chance. Catch you later.”
He hesitated, then leaned forward and kissed Wirt’s cheek, a gentle brush that felt like lightning and sunshine. Then he scooped Ford into his arms and took off with a flash of copper-colored wings. Wirt stared after him.
“Did that just happen?” he whispered.
A giggle made him look up. It was the dryads from earlier. They were peeking out from behind trees looking much paler than usual, and he guessed they’d seen the fight or at least sensed what was in the brand-new tree. As soon as they saw him looking, though, one of them grinned and blew a raspberry at him. A heart-shaped puff of pink petals poofed into his face.
“So that’s a yes, then,” he said, and they burst into giggles and took off through the branches.
He turned and headed back to the Court. Not that he wasn’t motivated before, but now they really had to stop Bill.
He had a date to attend, after all!