Chapter 5 Unbidden Gifts #2
The darkness pulsed. It breathed. It carried textures and temperatures and tastes that her mind struggled to process because it had no categories for them, no boxes in which to file the information.
She felt as though she were standing inside a living heart, surrounded by blood that was not blood, and the sensation was at once terrifying and profoundly comforting, as though the world itself were holding her in a way that no human hand ever had.
"Breathe," Oren said, and his voice came from everywhere and nowhere, absorbed by the living darkness and redistributed through it so that it seemed to emanate from the moss beneath her, the air around her, the pulse of the amethyst trees.
"Do not try to understand what you feel.
Feel it. Let it move through you without resistance.
Your mind will want to analyze, to categorize, to name.
Do not let it. This is not a science. It is a conversation.
" Sera breathed. The air filled her lungs with the taste of silver and something floral and something older than flowers, something mineral and deep, and she felt it spread through her chest and into her limbs, not like oxygen but like light, a warmth that moved through her body's pathways with a deliberateness that suggested it knew exactly where it was going.
Her instinct was to track it, to map its progress through her system the way she would map the vascular system of a new plant, but Oren's instruction held her back, and instead of tracking she simply allowed, and the warmth spread, and with it came something else.
It came from the left, a soft, complex wave of sensation that was not hers.
She felt it before she understood it, a texture in the darkness that was distinct from the Garden's ambient pulse, more personal, more concentrated, carrying a quality that she recognized, after a moment of bewildered processing, as emotion.
Not her emotion. Someone else's. It was warm and steady and patient, shot through with threads of curiosity and the faintest edge of anxiety, and it radiated from the spot where Oren sat with the quiet certainty of a man who had learned, over eight thousand years, to let his feelings exist without trying to control them.
Sera's eyes flew open. "You," she breathed.
"I can feel you." Oren's smile widened, crinkling the deep lines around his eyes, and he nodded with the satisfaction of a craftsman whose apprentice has just produced a first work that exceeds expectations.
"Of course you can. You have always been able to feel the emotions of those around you.
You simply did not have the vocabulary for it in the Sunlit Realm.
" He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his aged hands clasped before him.
"Tell me what you felt." Sera tried to articulate it, but the experience had been so immediate and so total that words felt like a poor translation.
"Warmth," she said. "Patience. Curiosity, but the kind that is not demanding.
And underneath all of it, a thread of anxiety.
Not fear, exactly. More like the anxiety of someone who has waited a very long time for something and is afraid it might not be what they hoped.
" Oren's expression did not change, but something shifted in his eyes, a brightening of the gold that Sera was learning to read as a deepening of emotion, and she understood that she had just described him with a precision that no amount of polite observation could have achieved.
He had asked her to feel, and she had felt, and what she had felt was the truth of him, unfiltered by the social masks that every being, Sunlit or Umbral, learned to wear.
"Extraordinary," he said quietly, and the word was not flattery but assessment, the professional judgment of a master evaluating a student's raw ability.
"Most new practitioners of Reading require weeks of meditation before they can distinguish the emotional resonance of another being from the ambient emotional noise of the Garden.
You did it in minutes, with your eyes closed, on your first attempt.
" He paused, and the curiosity she had sensed in him rose to the surface of his expression, bright and eager and boyish despite his ancient face.
"Your sensitivity is not merely natural.
It is exceptional. I have not seen its equal in all my years.
" *** The days that followed took on a rhythm that Sera found unexpectedly grounding.
She woke each morning in the small chamber that had been assigned to her in the Court's outer ring, a room that was spare but comfortable, its walls grown from the same translucent living material as the corridors, its single window overlooking a courtyard where veil-stalkers spun their delicate webs between branches of shadow-fern.
She ate meals that were brought to her by attendants whose faces she was beginning to recognize, food that looked like nothing she had ever seen but tasted of familiar things: dark, sweet fruits that reminded her of plums, bread that was the texture of silk and the color of amethyst, a warm, amber liquid that tasted of honey and pine and left a pleasant warmth spreading through her chest. And she trained.
Every morning, Oren led her to the clearing, and every morning she sat on the warm stone and closed her eyes and reached into the living darkness around her, and every morning the darkness reached back.
Her ability to distinguish individual emotional resonances sharpened with startling speed.
By the second day, she could identify Oren's signature at a distance of thirty feet without effort, could separate it from the Garden's ambient hum as easily as a botanist separates one species of fern from another in a dense forest floor.
By the third day, she could detect the emotions of the attendants in the corridors as they passed her door, could feel their moods as textures in the darkness, their weariness and their quiet contentment and, in one case, a sharp spike of fear that she traced to a young attendant who had just been assigned to carry a message to Lord Darius and who clearly did not relish the errand.
She began to practice in the Garden itself, wandering the luminous paths under Oren's watchful eye, extending her perception outward like a net cast into dark water and pulling back impressions of the beings and creatures that inhabited the world around her.
The sorrow-whales in the Garden's deeper reaches registered as vast, slow-moving fields of grief so deep and so old that touching them made her eyes sting with tears that were not her own.
The desire-moths that drifted through the warm air near the bell-flowers were tiny, flickering sparks of longing, each one a specific and particular want that Sera could almost read as a thought, the desire for warmth, for contact, for the specific golden light that the bell-flowers emitted when the air moved through them.
She reached for one of the moths instinctively, her fingers extending toward its iridescent wings, and it veered away from her with a frantic fluttering that made her laugh for the first time since crossing the Veil, a startled, genuine sound that echoed off the amethyst trees and came back to her multiplied and sweetened by the Garden's acoustics.
On the fourth day, she found the memory-vine.
It was different from the other vines she had encountered during her wanderings.
Thicker, for one thing, its trunk as wide as her wrist where the others were no thicker than a finger, and darker, its surface a deep, matte black that absorbed the ambient light rather than reflecting it.
It grew at the base of one of the largest amethyst trees in the clearing, spiraling upward in a tight helix that was almost aggressive in its growth pattern, and where it touched the tree's bark, the bark had changed color, darkening from its usual deep purple to something closer to the vine's own absolute black.
Sera felt drawn to it in a way she could not explain, a pull that was not emotional resonance but something older, something that operated below the level of feeling and spoke directly to the part of her that had recognized the nightbloom in the Twilight Woods.
She reached out and touched it. The world vanished.
She was standing in a place that was not the Garden, though it shared the Garden's fundamental quality of living darkness.
The sky above was a deep, pulsing violet, shot through with veins of silver that spread across it like the capillaries in a leaf, and the ground beneath her feet was not moss but something harder, denser, a dark stone that radiated heat through the thin soles of her boots.
The air was thick with emotional resonance, so thick that she could taste it on her tongue, a complex blend of awe and terror and a fierce, defiant joy that she associated, inexplicably, with the act of building something that had never existed before.
Figures moved in the distance, tall, luminous shapes that were not quite solid and not quite transparent, their edges bleeding silver light into the violet air.
They moved with purpose, their gestures deliberate and synchronized, and Sera realized that they were not simply walking but constructing, raising structures from the living shadow itself, shaping the darkness into forms that held their shape with the permanence of architecture.
A city. They were building a city. The first city.
The thought arrived in her mind not as a deduction but as a memory, as though the knowledge had been planted there by the vine and was simply surfacing now, and she understood with a jolt that went through her entire body that she was seeing the Age of Emergence, the ti