As I neared the side entrance to the isla, the wind howled across the cauldron top as though furious that such strange, verdant life might exist high above the alpine tree-line. So much of our new environment raged—the snows, the wind, the fog. Yet these strange trees had emerged, bursting out of the cauldron bowl below.

  I crept to the edge of the bowl, trying my best to follow the path the ibex had trod. I tested the rock of the cauldron carefully with each step. Strange trees or no, if the shale split, I could fall to my death, and what sort of addition to the clan would I be then?

  I sized up the five trees and selected the one with the sturdiest branches. It was the one with the river-rounded leaf tips, the first that had caught my eye.

  The initial part of a descent is always the hardest, I reminded myself, selecting which part of the emergent branches to leverage myself onto before climbing down. A strange memory flickered across my thoughts, of a Hume with long hair instructing me in rappelling down a mountainside. I shook my head to clear my thoughts.

  The cauldron’s mouth was wider than I’d realized, peering over from the canyons that led here. I peered over the edge. One hundred feet down at least, I spied a sloped, Lifkin-made floor. It was nothing like our homes now, with their pressed dirt and grass mats.

  These were hulking slabs of marble joined onto natural rock. Only the barest slivers were visible through the intersecting branches of the strange trees. I pressed up from my belly and returned to the wider lip of the cauldron mouth, affixing the rope to a boulder along the edge of the flat rim of the bowl. The tie shortened the length of my rope by at least fifteen feet, but it would allow me to get my hold established in the tree. I was a strong climber, always had been.

  My stomach dropped as I thought again of Iredella. I’d been up in a tree that day, waiting for her to find me.

  The Baron’s soldiers had found her instead. They’d turned her over to the Adjudicators for the Order of Ilona. Holy knights, sworn to the goddess’s service—I shuddered. That was more than ten years ago now.

  I checked the knot at my waist and sized up the tree a final time. One slow, deep breath. On the exhale, I jumped.

  More easily than I’d expected, I latched my legs around around the gnarled branch and wriggled across it to the trunk. Overhead, fronds of different, bright shades of green waved against the gray sky. I clung to the trunk and shut my eyes, allowing the light and shadow to cast their dancing impressions across my face. What would it be like to traverse an entire forest of trees like these? I couldn’t help but imagine it would be warm—it would have to be, wouldn’t it? Trees with such wide, bright leaves would need heat of some measure to survive.

  I shook my head again to clear my thoughts. The days alone were making me overly contemplative and there was no Mirdal here to tell me not to get lost inside my own head.

  I climbed down the tree with ease, untying myself partway and affixing the rope to the branches lest it get caught in the wind. While it was still cold here in the giant cauldron-shaped hole in the isla, the narrowed bowl at the top kept out the wind. A pricking sense spread across my cheeks as my skin thawed.

  Beyond the howl of the wind overhead I could make out very little within the cavern itself. The walls were too wide. Only at the base of the trees did light filter down from above. Should I risk lighting one of the torches in my pack? I peered through the darkness, giving my eyes a moment to adjust as I neared the base of the tree.

  To my surprise, the trunks didn’t fan out as they should have, casting supporting roots in all directions. Instead, the roots tangled together like a bundle of snakes, twining off into the darkness.

  I leapt the final few feet off the tree and landed quietly on the leather soles of my boots. I crouched there, waiting for some sign that something had heard me. Distantly, I caught the shuffling sound of the ibex. As I’d suspected, they’d made a home in a cave here somewhere. I must have missed it on my way down—they wouldn’t entrap themselves in darkness.

  With the effort of getting themselves down into the cave, I doubted the ibex would wish to hurry out simply because I’d arrived. I had a little time to explore.

  Shadows stretched in all directions. Hulking shapes littered the darkness. Statues of some kind, perhaps, from the isla? I couldn’t be sure.

  However great my curiosity, I knew better than to trek too far into the dark on my own. One wrong winding path and I risked being lost underground forever—the opposite of what I wanted.

  But following the roots of the trees, I couldn’t become lost. They would lead me back here after all. The intertwined, vining roots led me toward a cavern off to the side of the main cauldron chamber. I trailed one hand along the roots until I reached the cavern entrance.

  There was a faint odor within the cavern but nothing I wouldn’t expect from a place that had been long neglected underground.

  I left a trail of bioluminescent lichen behind my fingertips as I slunk down the cavern. It was a trick Mother had taught us before—‘Call upon Spirit, and imagine what it is you wish. The world will order itself to your design.’

  I was one of the few, well, now, the only of my clan who could cast magic such as this. I tried not to as it was upsetting to many of the others. The role of spirit in the islas’ fall from the skies remained unknown. And Uncle had warned me before that many blamed spirit for my parents’ rebellion, some for its failure, others that it had transpired at all.

  It was easy for those who did not wield spirit to blame it for their misfortunes, easy for them to neglect the way it shimmered within all things. It couldn’t have been what caused the Fall, could it? The Fall that saw our people, once the rulers of these lands, removed from our positions of power, that saw the Hume rise and come into their own in our place.

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  The Hume’s religious texts offered an explanation of their own, that the goddess of light, Ilona, the one who created us, turned her back at our corruption and removed her favor from us. She bestowed it instead upon the Hume who were loyal and served her. Out of this belief the Order grew. The Order that took my sister.

  The light from the lichen shone more brightly than I meant for it too, sparking as it left my fingers, but as it did, it caught upon an echo of light in the cavern ahead of me.

  I quickened my pace without letting my fingers leave the wall. Where the roots had been swirling around one another further back in the cavern as nearly wide around and high as I was tall, here they had narrowed, even more like the body of a great snake than I’d first thought. They swirled tighter and tighter. I followed—ahead, the light I’d glimpsed shone more brightly, but its light was dappled. Something covered or obscured it.

  I came around a bend, peering closer. And there, cradled within the roots, no, what the roots emerged from and around, was a glowing, oblong green orb shaped rather like a large egg.

  My mouth fell ajar as I neared the object. The aura of spirit emanated strongly off of it—I didn’t have to focus to sense it at all.

  “You have found the Seed,” a voice by my shoulder pronounced.

  I covered my mouth to stifle my scream and startled back—who might be speaking here besides me?

  “Hmm,” the voice said, the sound almost circling me. It came to my other side, hovering above the roots. With the shine of the lichen behind me, I caught the faint outline of what could only be a spirit. His ears were long and pointed like mine, though he wore round eyeglasses at the end of his nose. They somehow reflected back the lichen’s light though they were not actually here—at least I didn’t think so. “You can see me?”

  “Y-yes. I believe so.” Or I was losing my mind, but that did not seem a helpful possibility. I had not been alone for that long, nor had I eaten any strange mushrooms or breathed in a large quantity of enchanted dust . . . I hoped.

  What was one to say to a spirit? “You said this is called a Seed?”

  “Yes,” the spirit answered, his voice soft, half-spoken, half-sigh.

  I had never spoken to a spirit before. There was only one in our Clan who—“Behind you!” the spirit warned.

  I whirled around at the spirit’s urging. Between the deep purple glow in my hands and the shimmer of the lichen upon the wall, a slithering shadow emerged.

  A mournling.

  I gasped and stumbled back, catching my heel on the roots behind me. A mournling, a spirit-monster, bent on destroying life itself and turning all it encountered into a shadow-wraith like itself. Uncle had faced one before, had taught me how to fight them. But I don’t think either one of us had actually believed I’d need to.

  The shadow-creature took a great breath, pulling the chill of the grave through the air all about it in a horrifying death-rattle. I twisted to the side, instinct finding the blade at my hip more quickly than I could think through my next steps.

  I yanked the dagger up to my chest, blade out along the line of my wrist, facing the mournling before me. I lashed out toward the creature, narrowing its available space rather than sacrificing more of my own.

  The mournling evaded my strike, hissing. It formed its shape into claws, slicing toward me in turn. I raised my forearm to protect myself and screamed as it made contact through my shirt and shawl, cutting into my arm.

  I clutched my arm to my chest, immediately drenching my off-hand in blood. What specifically had Uncle taught me about fighting them? The spectral ones were weaker than their embodied brethren. Were they sensitive to light? I couldn’t recall. But I might need something faster, less avoidable than my blade. An even darker shadow that might obscure it.

  I focused my concentration as our mother had taught us, imagining my desire coming into fruition. Such spells were always more powerful when the emerged from the environment itself, and so I imagined the shadowy spirits of the trees behind me lashing out toward the mournling and choking it.

  The mournling screeched, lashing out as pools of shadow leeched from of my hands and enveloped it, obscuring its form and choking it precisely as I’d imagined.

  Its claws darted toward my again, but this time I was able to evade them.

  I struck out with my dagger just as it emerged from the billowing cloud of shadow, rending its form in half. The mournling’s spirit whistled like the wind as it dispersed.

  I sank back, catching myself on the roots behind me.

  “You fought well,” the spirit said, its voice not betraying whether it was impressed or pleased by such a development, but seeing as he had warned me, I didn’t want to dwell on the spirit’s lack of discernible emotion.

  “Thank you for the warning.” My breaths still came rapidly and I found that my hands were shaking. I had never faced such a creature before, especially not on my own.

  “You are welcome—” The spirit asked me my name and I learned that he called himself Alapatour.

  I returned my attention to the glowing stone that I had followed the roots to find. The stone that, I believed, held the spirit of Alapatour here.

  “What is the Seed?” I whispered to the spirit. Something about the pleasantly warm green glow of the stone inspired a sense of awe, almost as though it settled the latent energy of the world around us. The stone hummed with potential rather like the spirit-energy I sensed with my magic, but it was also unique.

  “Your birthright,” the spirit breathed. He gazed at the stone in wonder.

  “What does it do?”

  Alapatour gestured to the roots stretching out from the Seed. “See for yourself.”

  I squinted from the Seed to the roots of the strange trees. “Can it cause anything to grow?”

  Alapatour nodded again.

  My mind was already spinning forward. I had left to find something of use for the entire clan, but to return with the magic of our ancestors in the form of a Seed that would sustain our fledgling gardens, that might allow us some independence from the Hume of Shakerton who were, in turn, dependent upon the Order for the blessing of their crops—I could barely comprehend what it would mean for us.

  I reached out for the Seed but hesitated. The Hume had taken one home from us already. If the Seed truly was our birthright, wouldn’t they feel themselves entitled to take it as well? I turned back to Alapatour who hovered beside me, even less visible than the mournling had been. “I’m scared that if I bring this back to my people, the Hume will take it from us. Perhaps hurt us for having it in the first place.”

  Alapatour frowned. “Things have certainly changed since I was alive as you are.”

  It was my turn to assent without truly having the words to express how right he was. How to describe to the Old Ones the dominion the Hume now held over us, particularly when it was the reverse of what they had known?

  “You will need to trust,” Alapatour told me.

  He was right. I knelt and crawled forward, lifting the Seed from the stone floor of the cavern and wrapping it in one of my spare shawls before tucking it into my bag. Though even my own people feared Spirit and the wielding of spirit-magic, it had led me here, had brought me to the Seed. There had to be a reason.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to Alapatour. Before I could say more, the spirit faded away.

  ***

  Historian’s Note:

  The original rulers of Illios who tumbled from their position of power 473 years ago in a world-altering cataclysm known as the Fall brought about the end of the Bright Age. The name is both metaphorical and literal. Since the Fall, heavy smoke hangs in the atmosphere, choking out light.

  For the Lifkin of Breoland, a failed rebellion on the Night of a Thousand Fires led to the Great Displacement. They were divided from one another and sent to varying outposts such as the Twisted River Clan, named for their proximity to the river of the same name.