Great Gurus

The party enters a vast wooded hall, which Isidro reckons could swallow Flora's whole home, and meets three elderly archmages who govern the village beside Gedfring: Skirbil the perplexed, Thraein the settled, and Ginnar the ponderous, along with their steward Danan the domestic. Danan welcomes Puck and offers food and rest, but Guts asks first to see the Flower Storm Monarch, since curing Casca is their whole reason for coming. Gedfring assures him the monarch will keep and urges them to recover their strength, and Guts grudgingly yields.

Recounting their trek, the party leaves one witch calling the outer world terrifying while Molda finds it stimulating, which prompts Gedfring to raise the Falcon of Light and the astral world. He points to the branches spreading across the sky, which Serpico and Roderick admit look like clouds until seen in daylight, and describes the World Spiral Tree: a worldwide fissure binding heaven, earth, and the underworld, akin in nature to a beherit. Asking to see Guts's beherit, he wonders whether it clings to him or merely uses him to reach its true owner; Guts notes he has heard as much in another witch's wood, drawing a smile from Schierke, before Puck comically snatches the stone and claims it as his own.

Gedfring lays out the tie between the raid on Schierke's mansion and the World Spiral Tree. Flora's spirit tree, he says, was not unique, for other tree-bound lands exist in the Interstice, their roots sunk into the World Spiral Tree like parasitic mistletoe that feeds on it and holds its growth in check, keeping it from smothering the world. Each such tree sheltered a sorcerer who wielded its power and preserved the balance of the physical and astral around it, Flora among them. Most of those trees are now ash, he warns, and the great tree's power swells. He closes by asking about the Falcon of Light, sensing the two men know each other, wondering who he is and what drove him to join the God Hand and fuse the worlds.

Uneasy at having Griffith raised just as he had made peace with letting his obsession go, Guts answers plainly that he has known the man since their mercenary years and his dream of a kingdom. Gedfring, having scried, describes Falconia beneath the World Spiral Tree as a still eye within a storm, the last refuge where people live free of the dark. Kukka frets that Guts knows the Falcon, and Ivalera quips that he is a bit of a monster, her target left unclear. Isidro nearly grasps that Guts was the raiders' captain he idolizes, but lands instead on the notion that Guts merely knew the man. When the archmages ask how Griffith could do such a thing, Guts, seeing him unchanged, says Griffith treats ends and means as one and the same, and that winning his kingdom is only another step.

The Elfhelm archmages receive the party, and Guts defers his meeting with the Flower Storm Monarch. Gedfring explains the World Spiral Tree and the parasitic spirit trees that once kept the realms in balance. He names the Falcon of Light as the destroyer of the spirit woods, and Guts confirms he knows Griffith from their mercenary days.

A Fantasia Arc chapter, it appeared in Young Animal issue 15 on July 22, 2016, across twenty-one pages, and introduces the archmages Skirbil, Thraein, and Ginnar alongside Danan. Flora and Griffith appear only in flashback.