Prologue
I dreamed about the tree again last night.
I’ve had the dream for as long as I can remember.
Not every night, not every dream. In fact weeks can go by, sometimes months, without it rising from my subconscious to torment me.
But it’s frequent enough and vivid enough that the after-image haunts me for days. Weeks. Months.
When I was little I would excitedly tell my mother every detail and she would sit and listen in that indulgent, solemn way parents listen to the ramblings of a three-year-old.
She’d hold my hands together, wrapped in hers, and smile.
When I’d finished she would breathe out slowly, as if I had reached the end of translating some ancient epic, or performed a feat worthy of a hero, and she’d smile.
‘Well,’ she would say. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’
And I’d be happy with that.
But that was before she vanished. Everything changed after that.
I never told my father. He wouldn’t want to know. I understood.
The tree is taller than a redwood. Taller than a mountain. As tall as the sky. I’m certain that there are clouds threaded through its branches while the uppermost golden leaves are tangled with stars. It stretches beyond understanding, and so very far beyond my dreams. It feels eternal.
But for something so tall, it is strangely fragile.
The trunk is slender, knotted with a million old black scars.
Its branches twist like a contortionist, like the end of a corkscrew, or the whorls and spirals carved on a standing stone.
And the bark is pale silver, opalescent, peeling away from the tree like paper.
It’s so fine, so delicate, that it crumbles if touched with even the gentlest caress.
The shadow beast flits around the base of the tree, in and out of the mighty roots which plunge into the ground, rise again and then dig even deeper.
It leaps from the great flat rock at the foot of the trunk to the earth.
I can never quite see it, but I know it.
I’m not afraid of it. I never have been.
It’s a guardian, that’s all. It was created to protect the tree. I’m no threat to it.
It is always the leaves that entrance me.
They’re golden, not merely yellow. They shine.
They dance in breezes I can’t feel, moving and whispering, singing a strange sibilant song that winnows its way inside my mind and becomes my ear worm for the rest of the day.
It’s a tune I know like my own heartbeat, like the rushing of my blood, but I can never quite capture it.
All the same I find myself humming snatches of it for days afterwards.
The leaves that fall, twisting like a girl on a flying trapeze, glimmer with light, with fire. The sunlight eats into them and I can see markings on them. Words perhaps, although the little crow-scratch symbols are not in any language I, or anyone else on the earth today, might know.
Or perhaps I do.
They’re familiar, like something half forgotten.
They glow with their own life, capturing the eye, lines of fire which eat away at the leaves’ surfaces even as they appear, devouring the very thing that supports them.
But no matter how much I run and leap and try to catch them, the moment I do the glow dies away and the leaf, that shining glowing perfect thing, turns to ash in my hands.
My mortal, earthbound hands.
I wake up sobbing, my face silver and wet.
With ashes on my hands.