Chapter 005 First Flight
The things were the size of Honda Civics, only fuzzier and with significantly more mandibles.
I stood outside the tent, blinking in the gray dawn light, trying to process the nightmare fuel parked on the moss. They were bees. Bumblebees, specifically-fat, yellow-and-black striped, fuzzy monstrosities that hummed with a sound that vibrated in my molars. Their wings were folded back like translucent solar panels, and their compound eyes looked like multifaceted obsidian mirrors reflecting my own terrified expression back at me a thousand times.
"They don't sting," Xyl said, patting the nearest one on its fuzzy flank. The creature made a trilling sound, like a purring chainsaw. "Well, they do, but only if you insult their mother. Or their honey."
"We're riding insects," I said flatly. "That's the improved plan. Yesterday I was walking through a forest that wanted to eat me, and today I'm strapped to a bug."
"This is Barnaby," Xyl said, ignoring my existential crisis. He gestured to the bee he was petting. Then he pointed to the one next to it, which was slightly darker. "That's Barnaby. And the one over there by Vahr? Barnaby."
I stared at him. "They're all named Barnaby?"
"Easier to remember," Xyl said, adjusting a leather strap that circled the bee's thorax. "Plus, they don't respond to names anyway. They respond to pheromones and vibes. And right now, your vibes are screaming 'prey animal,' which makes them nervous. Try to be more... flower-like."
"I don't know how to be a flower, Xyl. I'm barely managing to be a person."
Vahr, the mist-entity in the containment suit, was already mounted on one of the Barnabys, looking like a steampunk astronaut riding a pi?ata. Zephyran and Vorn were securing packs to another.
"You're with me."
The voice came from behind me, low and gravelly. I jumped, turning to find Thalren standing there. He looked terrible. The circles under his eyes were dark enough to be bruises, and he was holding his left arm stiffly against his side. The corruption on his neck-those creeping silver-black veins-seemed to have climbed another inch during the night.
He walked past me toward a massive, charcoal-colored bee that was grooming its antennae with a leg the size of a baseball bat.
"I can ride my own Barnaby," I lied. I had never ridden anything other than a bicycle, and I wasn't particularly good at that.
Thalren turned, his expression deadpan. "You'd fall before we cleared the treeline. These aren't horses, Aria. They don't trot. They move in three dimensions, freely and violently. Unless you'd prefer to fall a thousand feet to your death?"
"When you put it that way, it sounds like a threat."
"It's physics." He swung himself up onto the bee's back, setting his boots into stirrups woven into the creature's fur. He extended a hand. "Get on."
I looked at the hand. Rough, calloused, scarring on the knuckles. Then I looked at the bee's eyes.
I took the hand.
He pulled me up with annoying ease. I settled behind him, the fur of the bee surprisingly soft under my new leather trousers. It smelled like old dust and sweet pollen. There was no saddle, just a depressed area in the fuzz and a leather strap for Thalren to hold.
"Hold on to me," he ordered.
"Where?"
"My waist. Tight."
I hesitated. Touching him felt... complicated. Not just because he was a scary, brooding warrior with a magical infection, but because of what Glimm had said. *Magnets.*
"We're losing daylight," he snapped.
I wrapped my arms around his waist. Through the layers of leather and linen, he felt solid. Warm. A human radiator in a world of cold magic. I could feel the tension in his muscles, the rigid line of his spine.
"Tighter," he muttered. "And keep your legs tucked."
Before I could ask why, the bee surged.
Whatever sound I made was lost in the roar of wings. It wasn't a flap; it was a revving engine. The world dropped away. My stomach remained on the ground while the rest of me shot vertical, two hundred feet in three seconds.
I buried my face in Thalren's back and screamed, but the wind tore the sound from my throat. We banked hard left, gravity pulling sideways, and I squeezed him so hard I probably bruised his ribs.
"Open your eyes," Thalren shouted over the wind. "Look."
I didn't want to look. I wanted to go back to Arkansas and pay my taxes. I wanted to be bored. But the air up here was thin and sharp, smelling of ozone and pine, and the sheer velocity was intoxicating.
I peeled my face away from his jacket and looked down.
Oh.
From the ground, Fenwood had been a claustrophobic maze of shadows and roots. from the air, it was an ocean. The canopy stretched endlessly in every direction, a rolling sea of green and gold and russet. Massive trees, some indistinguishable from mountains, pierced the cloud layer. Between them, I saw bridges made of woven living vines, platforms of bioluminescent mushrooms the size of city blocks, and waterfalls that tumbled from floating islands into the mist below.
It was impossible. It was the cover of every fantasy novel I'd never read, painted on a scale that broke my brain.
"It's beautiful," I whispered, though I knew he couldn't hear me.
"Look closer," he said. The wind carried his voice back to me, stripped of its usual harshness. Just weary.
I squinted against the slipstream.
The beauty was a lie. Or at least, it was fading. I saw it now-great patches of gray and black amidst the green. Entire groves of those massive trees were stripped bare, their wood bleached white like bone. A dark, oily sheen seemed to coat the leaves in the valleys. It looked like mold on a forgotton loaf of bread, spreading slowly, inexorably.
"The Rot," Thalren said. "The balance has been wrong for a long time. The Bloom grows unchecked, choking the life out of the soil, and the Root rots in response. It's dying, Aria."
I looked at the black veins spreading through the forest, then at the silver-black veins on Thalren's neck. They looked uncomfortably similar.
"Is that what's happening to you?" I yelled close to his ear.
He stiffened. "No. My corruption is... different. A souvenir from a different failure."
He banked the bee again, diving through a cloud bank. The mist was wet and cold, soaking my hair instantly. For a second, the world was nothing but gray whiteness and the thrum of wings.
I pressed my chest against his back to stay warm. He smelled like pine and steel, and something sharper-ozone, maybe. The 'static buzz' Glimm had mentioned was there, a low-grade vibration at the base of my skull. It intensified when we touched. It wasn't painful, exactly. It felt like standing too close to a massive speaker, waiting for the bass to drop.
"We're almost there," he said. "Vyn Hollow."
The clouds broke.
Below us lay a crater in the forest floor, easily five miles wide. In the center of the crater stood a single tree.
It was immense. It made the skyscrapers of New York look like toothpicks. Its bark was white as milk, its leaves a shocking, vibrant violet. Whatever rot was eating the rest of the forest hadn't touched this place.
Around the trunk, built into the bark and hanging from the branches, was a sprawling shantytown of lanterns, colorful fabrics, and suspended wooden walkways. It looked like a chaotic, magical treehouse built by anarchists.
"Sanctuary," Thalren said, guiding the bee into a spiraling descent. "For everyone who exists incorrectly."
"Incorrectly?"
"Mutations. Failures. Things the Crown wants dead and the Resistance doesn't know what to do with."
We landed on a wide wooden platform jutting out from the main trunk. The bee touched down with surprisingly delicate grace, its legs absorbing the impact. The moment the buzzing wings stopped, the silence rushed in, filled only by the distant sound of wind chimes and low conversation.
I practically fell off the bee, my legs turning to jelly the second they hit solid wood. Thalren dismounted with annoying grace, wincing only slightly as his boots hit the deck.
People emerged from the structures carved into the tree.
I stared. I couldn't help it.
A woman walked by carrying a basket of glowing blue fruit; her skin was entirely bark, rough and fissured, with moss growing in the cracks of her elbows. A man-or a shape-leaned against a railing, his body composed of swirling gray mist, but he wore a very real, very sharp-looking vest and had a monocle floating where an eye should be.
"Don't stare," Thalren murmured, stepping in front of me. "And keep your hands to yourself. They can smell the human on you. Some of them haven't had fresh meat in years."
"You know how to make a girl feel welcome," I whispered.
"I'm not a tour guide. I'm a bodyguard."
"Is that what you are?"
A new voice floated out from the hollow of the tree entrance. It sounded like dry leaves skittering over payment.
"I thought you were a cautionary tale, Thalren."
An entity glided onto the platform. Tall, draped in robes made of living moss and woven grass. Where a face should have been, there was a mask of smooth, polished wood, with two glowing green lights for eyes. Long, twig-like fingers curled around a staff made of twisted root.
Thalren didn't bow, but he notably stopped resting his hand on his sword. "Chronicler Willowmere."
"And this," the Chronicler said, the green lights fixing on me. "This is the disturbance."
"I'm Aria," I said. "Hi."
"Aria," Willowmere repeated, tasting the syllables. "A song. Or air. Meaningless." The figure moved closer, moving without feet, just gliding over the wood. "Show me."
I didn't have to ask what. My right arm was throbbing. I rolled up the sleeve of my tunic.
The marks had changed again. The geometric gold lines that had started on my wrist were now spiraling up past my elbow, looking less like tattoos and more like circuitry made of light. The skin around them was flushed, fever-hot.
Willowmere reached out a wooden finger.
"Don't," Thalren warned.
"Quiet, boy."
The finger touched my skin.
The world vanished.
There was no transition. One second I was standing on a wooden platform; the next, I was soil. I was the dark, rich earth, crushed under the weight of history. I was the roots drinking deep from the aquifer. I was the sap rising, thick and sweet, through a million capillaries.
I gasped, but I didn't have lungs. I had leaves. I was expanding, exploding outward, breathing in sunlight and carbon.
*I see you,* a thousand voices whispered. *Welcome home.*
Sensory overload slammed into me. I could taste the color green-it tasted like iron and rain. I could hear the sunlight hitting the canopy-a high, chiming sound like bells.
It was euphoric. It was better than being human. Why had I ever wanted to be human? Being a person was small and lonely and painful. Being this-being the forest-was infinite.
I looked down at my feet. They weren't boots anymore. They were roots, bursting through the leather, digging into the wood of the platform, fusing me to the tree.
*Stay,* the voices sang. *Grow.*
I wanted to stay. I wanted to stop moving. I wanted to let the moss cover my eyes and sleep for a thousand years.
*No.*
A shard of ice drove into my mind.
Pain. Sharp, cold, horrible pain.
It ripped through the euphoria like a serrated knife. The green taste turned to ash. The sunlight screamed.
Gravity slammed back into place.
I collapsed, hitting the wood hard. My lungs remembered how to work and sucked in a ragged, desperate breath.
Thalren was kneeling over me, his hand clamped around my wrist, right over the marks. His skin was burning cold. Black smoke poured from his grip, his corruption warring with the gold light of my marks.
He snarled, a guttural, animal sound, and ripped his hand away.
The connection snapped.
I retched, dry-heaving against the planks. My arm felt like it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen, then set on fire.
"You idiot," Thalren hissed, glaring up at the Chronicler. "You almost broke her."
"I merely opened the door," Willowmere said calmly. The entity hadn't moved. "She chose to walk through it."
"She didn't choose anything!"
"She did," Willowmere said. The glowing green eyes narrowed. "She preferred the silence of the wood to the noise of her own mind. Dangerous."
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, shaking. My boots were intact. No roots. It had been a hallucination? No. The wood of the platform beneath me was cracked, splintered in the shape of footprints.
"What was that?" I croaked.
"That," Willowmere said, drifting closer, "is what you are becoming."
Thalren helped me sit up. He didn't let go of my shoulder. His grip was tight, grounding. The 'static buzz' was back, furious and loud.
"Becoming what?" I asked.
"The Realm does not tolerate vacuums, Aria," Willowmere said. "The Throne is empty. The land is dying. It is trying to grow a replacement. You are not just a vessel for magic. You are a seed."
"I'm a person," I insisted, though my voice sounded small even to me.
"For now," Willowmere agreed. "But the marks are spreading. The root is taking hold. Soon, the distinction between you and the forest will dissolve entirely. You will simply... germinate."
"Germinate," I repeated. "Like a potato."
"Like a god," Willowmere corrected. "Or a monster. Depending on who holds the pruning shears."
"How long?" Thalren asked. His voice was shards of glass.
Willowmere tilted their wooden head. "The rate of integration is exponential. She does not have weeks, Thalren. She has days."
Silence stretched on the platform. The wind chimes tinkled, oblivious.
"Fix it," Thalren said.
"I cannot fix a sunrise," Willowmere said. "I can only document it. Or end it."
Thalren's hand went to his sword hilt instantly.
"Peace, Wolf," Willowmere sighed. "I will not cull her. But you must teach her to control the growth. To prune herself. If she cannot master the urge to merge with the Realm, she will cease to be Aria. She will become a fixture of the landscape. A very powerful, very mindless tree."
"Great," I managed to say, pulling myself to my feet. My knees were shaking. "My career aspirations. Lawn furniture."
"Reassurance is for those with hope," Willowmere said softly. "You have something better, child. You have inevitability."
The Chronicler turned and glided back into the hollow of the tree. "Come inside. We have work to do."
I watched the entity go.
"Thalren," I said.
He didn't look at me. He was staring at his own hand, the one that had touched my marks. The veins on his wrist were pulsing violently.
"You felt it," I said. It wasn't a question.
When the connection had opened, when I was dissolving into the green, I had felt him. Not just his hand. I had felt his mind. A dark, cold singularity anchoring me when I tried to float away. He hadn't just pulled me out; he had been in there with me.
"I felt nothing," he said.
"Liar."
"I felt corruption," he corrected, turning to face me. His eyes were completely flat, shut down. "I felt the parasite in your blood calling to the parasite in mine. Don't romanticize biology, Aria. It gets you killed."
He walked away, following the Chronicler.
I stood there for a second, watching him go.
"He's good, isn't he?"
I looked down. Sylith, the wind-spirit who looked vaguely like a flurry of cherry blossoms in a dress, was floating beside me.
"Good at what?" I asked.
"Professional-level brooding," Sylith said. "He's practicing for the championships. He felt it, Aria. He felt every second of it. That's why he's angry."
"He said it was just the parasite."
"Thalren treats his own heart like a parasite," Sylith said, drifting toward the entrance. "He thinks if he starves it, it'll stop hurting."
I looked at my arm. The marks were humming, a low, golden light pulsing in time with my heartbeat. And fifty feet away, I could feel Thalren's presence like a phantom limb.
I knew he was lying.
But as I looked at the cracked wood where my feet had almost turned to roots, I decided to let him lie. Because if he admitted that we were connected-that he could feel me dying, and I could feel him rotting-then we'd have to talk about it.
And right now, I had enough problems being a potato.
"Come on," I whispered to myself. "Let's go learn how not to become a tree."
I followed them into the dark.