Chapter 5 Unbidden Gifts
Unbidden Gifts
Oren led her to a clearing in the Garden where the amethyst trees grew close together and their canopies interlaced overhead, creating a dome of dark, translucent wood that filtered the ambient silver light into something softer and more intimate.
The air in the clearing was warmer than in the corridors of the Court, carrying the rich scent of growing things and the faint, sweet undertone of flowers that Sera could not identify but that made her chest ache with a longing she did not understand.
Moss carpeted the ground in thick, velvety layers that yielded beneath her boots like the padding of an old, well-loved chair, and the memory-vines that Oren had described during his examination grew here in abundance, climbing the trunks of the amethyst trees in spiraling patterns that were almost too regular to be natural, as though the vines had been planted in deliberate arrangements by a gardener with a very long memory.
"Sit," Oren said, gesturing to a flat stone at the clearing's center that was worn smooth by what must have been thousands of years of use.
The stone was warm to the touch when Sera lowered herself onto it, radiating a gentle heat that seeped through the fabric of her coat and into the muscles of her thighs and lower back, releasing a tension she had been carrying since the Council chamber.
She let out a breath she had not realized she was holding, and Oren, watching her from a few feet away with his faded gold eyes, smiled the knowing smile of a man who had seen more new students than he could count and who understood that the first lesson began before the first word was spoken.
"Close your eyes," he said. Sera hesitated.
The instinct to keep her eyes open, to watch, to observe, to catalogue, was so deeply ingrained that overriding it felt like swimming against a current.
In the Sunlit Realm, closing her eyes meant surrendering her primary tool, the botanical vision that had defined her professional life and, to a large extent, her sense of who she was.
But Oren was patient, his expression neither urging nor indifferent, simply present, and after a moment she let her lids fall.
The darkness behind her eyes was not the darkness of the Sunlit world.
It was alive. She had noticed this in the hours since her arrival, a quality to the Umbral darkness that was fundamentally different from the absence-of-light darkness she knew, and now, with her eyes closed and her attention turned inward, the difference was overwhelming.