Through the green-on-green eyes of the sprite, the dead stone all around her was vague, gray and lacking in details. But when she looked at the bushes, she saw them with stark clarity. They stood out in beautiful colors, not just the leaves, but a hundred subtle movements under the surface—she could even see water moving upward through the branches by capillary action, nutrients slowly leached from the soil to be shuttled to growing buds, and all the other processes that drove the life of a plant. The wolves, behind her, were a mass of dull red animal shapes, ugly and incomprehensible.

But the tree, ahead of her, was the most startling thing of all. It was alive in a way Alice had never really grasped, less a single organism than a whole colony budded from a single seed, stretching from the thinnest root tendrils in the soil to the leaves that hung from the branches. Scrambling forward to put her green-skinned hand against it, Alice could feel the slow, gentle pulse of its life energy. She felt the strain it was under, growing in these unnatural conditions—surrounded by stone, kept watered and fed only by magic.

And she felt it twist and shudder, eager to reshape itself in response to her commands. A branch curled down toward her, as easily as if it were her own arm, and she grabbed it with both hands and let it lift her up into the canopy. The wolves were pouring into the room, surrounding the planter and blocking the doorway. The bolder members of the pack sniffed the air near the tree and stared up at Alice’s diminutive green form.

There’s only one way out of here, Alice thought. Her lip curved upward. They think they’ve got me cornered. All the better. While they’re here, they’re leaving the others alone.

Bark rippled out from where she touched the tree, flowing across her body like water, then hardening into a dense, raspy armor. Her fingers became claws like splintered branches. Where her feet rested on the branch, the armor merged with the bark of the tree itself, as though Alice were a branch herself.

The first wolf scratched at the bark with its claws. Alice bent the tree’s biggest limb back until it was taut as a bow, then let it loose. It snapped down with the force of a sledgehammer, leaves scraping and rustling against the ground, catching the wolf in its midsection and flinging the beast into the wall. Another limb whipped into the next-nearest wolf, bowling it over into several of its fellows.