Chapter Thirteen Within #2
The revelation ricocheted through my chest like a rogue arrow glancing between shadowed trees.
Irian had shared that same belief when he’d revealed his suspicions about my parentage.
I’d rebuffed the notion, saying, People do not return from the dead.
Tragedies do not have silver linings. But part of me had hoped.
Of course I had. What child growing up without a mother does not secretly yearn for one, even when they have outgrown tall tales?
“How?” I demanded, longing and bitterness tangling inside me. “And if this woman trapped in the tree is not Deirdre, then who is she?”
Do you not know, child? Their voice held both warmth and sorrow. Do you not remember?
My memories of the night of the Ember Moon, when I’d tithed myself beneath the Heartwood, slid over me.
I had chosen myself, accepted my birthright, and promised my heart to the Bright One before me.
Then I had flung myself into their embrace, in ecstasy and ascendancy.
I had fallen through an endless sky, unmade and remade in the same breath.
My roots and branches had both scraped the stars.
“Then…” I had not wanted to accept it. “Then I truly died, beneath the Heartwood.”
You did.
“How am I standing here?” The question was plaintive, and I grappled with a sharp thorn of regret for all that had passed. All who had truly lost their lives. All who had not had the privilege of resurrection. “How did I come back to life?”
Circles. Cycles. Balance in all things, my child.
The Bright One reached out and, with its thick, sharp claw, again drew a circle above my left breast, where my heart solemnly throbbed.
Dark green blood once more welled; again I felt no pain.
The Heart of the Forest glowed. We are all connected.
We are all the same. We are all different.
When we die, we return to the place we were born.
Every ending is its own beginning. Time comes and time goes.
Hearts break and hearts heal. Balance is not voluntary. It is essential. And endless.
As they spoke, the forest faded—the smaller, featureless trees melting away as if in a dense mist, leaving behind only the majestic trees marked by the figures of the long-dead heirs.
The trees made a circle a hundred trunks strong, each with a silent face staring inward.
The look of arrested wonder I had seen on Eibhlín’s face echoed across every expression.
I turned to see for myself what they gazed at, in their final rest.
At the center of the grove was a vast tree.
I had thought the Heartwood colossal. It was but a sapling compared to this eldertree—little more than a shadow cast upon the ground from a far greater essence.
I fought to comprehend the immensity of its breadth, the profundity of its existence.
I could hear it, a soundless singing like stars screaming through vast empty spaces.
Its trunk—a monolith of ancient knotted wood—swirled with intricate patterns tessellating in a million fractal forms. Its branches soared endlessly high before curving back down around us, jeweled with multicolored leaves.
Its roots drove impossibly deep, thrusting not through dirt and loam and clay and stone, but through the very fabric of reality—twining through the memories of long-dead kings and the dreams of sleeping children and the hopes of pregnant mothers.
When the roots entwined with the stretching branches, they wove the warp and weft of…
everything. A hundred million stories, spoken in husky voices over crackling campfires and carved in ocher clay upon dark cavern walls and etched in ink upon parchment and thrilling to life inside hopeless, hopeful hearts.
One story. One vast, expansive, enduring story.
I swayed toward that unknowable tree, hardly noticing the cool tears on my cheeks or the trembling of my limbs or the song of wonder spilling unbidden from my throat.
ínne caught me with a hand upon my shoulder. Drew me gently away. Embraced me when I struggled.
Not yet, my child, they murmured softly in my ear. Your part in the story is not yet finished. There is more you must do before your saga can be etched upon these boughs. Battles you must win before your ending is whispered between these leaves.
It broke my heart to turn away from the godhead at the center of everything. Yet the moment I faced away, the tree of life slid gently from my mind’s eye, until it was little more than a distant, perfect promise. I knew I would return here, in time.
We all would.
I turned my tearstained face to the tree that bore my likeness, some small part of me trapped even now in this necropolis of trees.
“Would we go free?” I asked ínne, haltingly. “Would all the heirs be freed to their true rest if the Treasures were unmade?”
Yes.
A thread of light stitched over her breastbone, sliced the center of her stomach, and split her down the middle. The tree—my tree—yawned open. Beyond, in dense, dusky shadows, a doe stood in the undergrowth, so motionless she might have been a statue. Her dark, depthless eyes seemed to swallow me.
All my strange dreams from the past few months rippled hazily through my mind, mingling with everything I knew or suspected about my mother. Dread and hope beat twin pulses between my temples.
The deer flicked her tail, white in the dim. Then turned on her delicate limbs and bounded away into the evening shadows.
Go, said the Bright One when I hesitated. There is one place still for you to visit. Your future will wait for your past. Unless you do not wish to know it fully.
For as long as I could remember, I had wanted nothing more. Yet now, confronted with the deep forest of my mind, I was afraid. I had already seen so much. Felt so much. Could I bear to do this?
Could I bear not to?