Author's Preface
Aspen turns and runs.
The outer curtain strikes one shoulder and rolls over the wing that has not folded quickly enough. Before Aspen can catch it, the wing turns edgewise and slips through. In the main room, her lower right lifts over the table; both upper wings draw close before the shelf can touch them. The left lower one trails, catches a cup’s rising steam, then snaps into the same narrow arrangement a beat after the others. Aspen reaches the second curtain without striking the table, shelf, or either side of the opening.
She pushes into the room where she woke and goes straight to the wall above the cocoon. The gray moth waits where she left it, swallowed through the middle by black heartwood. Its felt antenna bends toward her. The new room, the woman, the old man outside—none of those have crossed with Aspen. This has. The stitched dots still follow the wings in the same uneven spacing. The flattened place along its body still carries the shape of her backpack pocket. Aspen’s fingertips stop beneath the lowest gray seam.
“Please, do something. Move if someone can hear me.”
The moth does not move. It cannot; it is cloth. Aspen stretches higher anyway, rising onto the fronts of feet that do not have enough height in them.
“Turn if I can go back. Or point. You pointed before.” Her nail brushes the loose thread and loses it. “Go blue again. Just—move. Do anything. Answer me.”
Something trembles under her shoulder blades. The vibration spreads into the wings and lifts dust from the dry paint. Aspen ignores it. She strains through her ankles until her calves ache and reaches for the bent antenna.
Her fingers close around it. For a moment she thinks the moth has come lower. The felt gives between her thumb and first finger with exactly the same stuffed resistance she remembers: flatten, hold, slowly round itself again. Her wrist has stopped straining upward. Her shoulders are no longer reaching as hard. She can see the crooked stitched smile without tipping her head back.
It moved.
Then cool air moves beneath both heels. Aspen looks down. The floor is a hand-width away.
Both ankles have lengthened instinctively toward the heartwood, toes pointed hard enough that the tendons stand along the tops of her feet, but there is no pressure beneath them.
All four wings beat in a shallow blur. She cannot see the upper pair properly from this angle, only orange interruptions flickering at the limits of her peripheral vision, but she feels their strokes with nauseating clarity. The upper right begins high beside the spine. The root contracts, drawing the raised branches downward and slightly inward; pressure gathers across the membrane until air releases beneath it in one broad shove. The left answers almost alongside it. Their movements overlap enough that Aspen cannot separate where one ends and the other begins until she deliberately tries.
She clutches the moth’s antenna. The felt bends between her fingers, but the black wood around its middle does not split. She changes her grip to one gray wing and pulls until the stitched edge lengthens. Heartwood holds the body without a gap she can get her nails into.
“Come on.” Her voice rises with her while the wings lift another inch. “I did what you wanted. I went there. I went to the treehouse. I brought you. So do something.”
The moth’s smile consists of one curved row of thread. It does not need a face behind it to continue smiling.
Aspen lets her arms fall. The wings keep raising her. Her toes leave even the possibility of the floor. She hangs beside the black wall with both hands empty, the body maintaining the reach after there is nothing left she wants to touch.
“Mom?”
The word comes out small enough to belong to the height of Jamie’s head.
Aspen stares at the gray cloth. “Mom, please.”
The second curtain moves behind her. The woman enters, sees Aspen above the floor, and stops. The stool beside the cocoon still holds the folded cloth.
The woman looks up. “A—”
Her mouth closes around the rest.
She crosses to the stool and lifts the cloth from it first, bringing both folded edges against her chest without shaking out the dust. Then she catches the stool with her clean hand. “The stool. Put your feet on it.”
Aspen looks down. The stool is beside the cocoon, farther left than her hanging feet. “I can’t.”
“I’ll move it.”
“No, I mean I can’t get down.”
The woman drags the stool over black grain in short, controlled scrapes. She stops it beneath Aspen and pulls her fingers away at once.
“Find it with your feet.”
Aspen points her toes. The stool’s flat top touches one sole, then slides away when the wings correct for the contact as though it were a collision. She tries again. The right foot lands along an edge, but no weight follows it; she can feel the wood without standing on it.
“Stop fucking holding me up,” she tells the wings. They beat harder when her body tilts.
The woman nudges the stool after Aspen’s drifting feet rather than reaching for her. “Bend your knees.”
Aspen bends them. Her heels lower by less than an inch before the upper wings open wider and replace the lost height. She catches the wall with one palm, presses the other foot down, and forces both knees to keep bending. The stool shifts under her soles. The wings buzz so hard that the pale cloth in the woman’s arms stirs against her chest, but Aspen pushes until her weight finally passes through her legs and into wood.
The vibration does not stop. It remains trapped high in her back, making the painted lines tremble through the aqua light.
From the stool, the moth is level with her face. Aspen grabs it again. She braces one hand against the wall and hooks the nails of the other into gray cloth where the body disappears. The felt gives slightly. The heartwood does not.
Am I alone here?
It smiles.
She rakes downward. Her nails drag across one wing and catch beside the body. A short tear opens with a soft ripping sound. The new edge curls outward, exposing a line of gray stuffing beneath gray cloth.
Aspen’s hand stops there. The bent antenna is old. The loose thread is old. This cut was not there in her backpack, at the park, or when she woke. She lowers her hand and a few gray fibers cling beneath one nail.
“Hermit'to.”
Hierophant stands outside the room, one hand resting near the edge of the second curtain without lifting it further. He has not crossed the boundary. From there, his pupil-less gaze passes the torn moth and comes to rest on the four wings still vibrating behind her.
At the title, Aspen’s elbows draw toward her ribs. The woman stands close enough to move the stool, but something in the word leaves her a distance away that Aspen could not cross by reaching. The moth is against Aspen’s knuckles and still untouched somewhere at its center. Even these ribs seem built around a place nothing else quite reaches.
Hierophant points toward her back. “You seem ready.”
I’m not.
His eyes lift up to the ceiling. “Children learn to settle before they learn to fly.”
“What?”
The faults around his mouth move toward a smile. They do not crease the way the woman’s face does; the expression fits itself between ridges that appear to have hardened in place long before Aspen was born.
“As long as you don’t fall,” he says, “it is fine.”
Aspen looks down at the stool she has only just managed to stand on. The tattered moth cannot tell her where Jamie is. It cannot tell her whether it was really Mother who touched her hand, and it cannot fight back if she wants to hurt it.
Hierophant, at least, has seen something. The child he describes should not exist. The lines descending through this wood should not exist. This place should not exist. Nothing in this room answers Aspen, but those impossible things began when she arrived.
She steps down carefully. The woman guides the stool with one foot when it threatens to skate from beneath her, still without touching Aspen.
…Just take it one step at a time.
“Um, sorry. Where would you teach me?” Aspen asks.
Hierophant lowers his gaze from the ceiling. “There is a practice silk three levels ulward. At first light it should be nearly empty.”
“No,” the woman says. She holds the folded cloth tighter, pressing the orange dust and Aspen’s heel-shaped hollow against herself. “Everyone there would see her.”
“The first person who reaches for her Ainm will find nothing.” He sighs.
Aspen whispers, “is that what 'nim means?”
The woman glances at her and Aspen avoids her gaze. "You kept saying Lyra'nim."
The woman’s fingers tighten around the folded cloth. "It meant I was speaking directly to her, and wanted a response from only her."
"Oh." Aspen's wings shiver in the silence.
The woman’s eyes flick back to Hierophant. “Why are you trying to bring her outside?”
Hierophant considers this with no visible offense. “If they will find a contradiction eventually, then why not make the most of it?”
The woman shudders. “ This is supposed to be useful?”
“The day after her Qimmo, our Hermit has woken-sh·sut suddenly, unable to fly and without her smell. As if to mark this moment, a child cries·sel before my eyes. What do you think those above will make of this?”
Woken-sh·sut. Cries·sel. Different endings. One for the story he has assembled, another for the child only he can see. Aspen cannot yet tell which is which.
Is this some kind of formal speech? Why doesn't she use these weird words as much as him? She glances back at the moth. And those above?
“Excuse me,” she interrupts, “are those above invisible?”
The pair look back at her. Hierophant smiles. “For anyone who isn’t me.”
Then are those the fai—wait. But I don’t know if they’re fairies. Why did I think of fairies? No, that's not it.
If they are the same thing, then why were they in my world?
The woman’s four green wings close until the lower pair disappear partly beneath the upper. “Are you saying they would enjoy something like this?”
For the first time since appearing beyond the curtain, Hierophant looks directly at the cloth in her arms. The sloping depression is still visible between two folds.
He inclines his head. “None of us are privy to their thoughts. But, for your sake, we will close the terrace.”
Aspen tilts her head. “You can stop them from watching? The things above?”
Hierophant turns left to the first curtain. “This is for those ulward.”
Aspen stands still for a few moments. The woman sets the folded cloth back on the stool. She does not smooth the orange dust from it. Before leaving the room, she loosens the cloth around her bloody hand far enough to inspect the black stain. Nothing extends from it. She folds a clean layer over the center, winds the remaining cloth twice around her palm, and tightens the end at her wrist with her teeth.
When they enter the main room, she kneels beside a low shelf grown from the black wall and pulls out another pale length wound around two wooden slats. This one is narrower, its weave thicker along both edges and marked at intervals by small knots.
Aspen realizes that the cloth is silk. She looks at the curtains, then at the deliberate gaps in the woman’s clothes for wings. The question forms clearly enough— Do you make it? —and remains behind her teeth.
Do you make silk like how spiders make webs?
She glances at the woman’s bottom. If so, where does it come from? Aspen stops herself from thinking further, and then apologizes for being creepy.
They return to the terrace more slowly than she fled it. When she steps fully outside, the black inner wall falls away in both directions, crowded with terraces, weighted curtains, grown bridges, and people moving through gaps no path joins. Aspen keeps three full paces between herself and the edge. She expects it this time, and that makes it no better. But she tells herself that if she expects it, then she is stronger.
Hierophant stands near the edge. “When are some times when you have wanted to close your eyes?”
Aspen tilts her head. Huh?
The woman carries the practice silk to an anchor grown beside the outer wall. She positions herself between Aspen and the open drop while she works. “When I’m scared.”
Hierophant taps his foot against the floor. “Vague.”
Aspen looks between the woman and Hierophant. Eye-guy asks when we want to close our eyes. Is this supposed to help with something? “When I’m far away.”
He glances at her. “From what?”
“Things I like.”
He puts a hand to his chin. “Hm. That won’t work here.”
Aspen frowns. “What are you trying to do?”
“Close my eyes.”
Aspen waves her hand in front of her face. “You… can’t just close them?”
He stares at her.
She stops waving. “I guess not.”
Hierophant sighs and steps toward the black heartwood wall. He presses one hand against it. “What do you see here'ke?”
The woman answers before Aspen can ask why a man with eyes needs help. “Black heartwood. Three mushroom clusters. A green curtain. Silk.”
The nearest mushrooms brighten at the sound of themselves being named. Aspen sets that to the back of her mind. Aqua runs along the rims of their cups and lays a thin color over Hierophant’s wrist. He waits.
Aspen looks from his hand to his eyes. “Your hand. The wall. Us.” Her gaze follows his up to the black beyond. “Nothing above us.”
His head remains lifted, but the gray-magenta irises stop climbing through the ceiling. Until now, his attention has kept passing through every surface that attempts to end it. As the local objects accumulate, that reach draws back. His eyes settle on the heartwood beneath his palm. The terrace seems to become enough for him.
Aspen gets a surge of inspiration. “Oh right, I like to close my eyes when I’m scared.”
He traces a broad curve against the wall with two fingers. “There is no child here·sel. It is not crying here·sel. The gold is not a summons·sar.”
From his other hand, a short clear knife emerges. Aspen’s index finger curls toward the palm where yesterday’s cut should be. Jamie stands across from her in her memory, watching the green knife touch her old skin. From here, with a stranger’s unmarked hand closing at her waist, she can finally see what he saw: her opening her own finger as though the blood were merely another pen.
Sorry, Jamie. Was I a good sister?
Hierophant holds the knife along the heel of his palm. “When the circle closes, I will need you to bless it, Hermit.”
Aspen looks at the blade. “What? How am I supposed to do that?”
“However you understand it.”
He draws the knife across his skin. Both Aspen and the woman flinch. The cut opens red. A finer blue-green wetness shines along one edge, separate enough that Aspen can follow both colors while they remain inside the broken line of his palm. Hierophant turns his hand against the wall.
The first drop leaves him. Red darkens before it reaches the heartwood. The blue-green thread beside it narrows, loses its aqua, and joins the same wet black. Instead of falling, the joined drop darts beneath the shelter of Hierophant’s hand. More follows much faster than the cut can supply. Black liquid runs from under his palm in two directions, one stream racing up the wall while the other slips down to the floor. The mushrooms turn toward it.
Their stems extend from the cracks that hold them. Cups tip nearer, aqua strengthening through their gills as the black stream passes. The blood travels around the boundary Hierophant traced without requiring a surface everywhere: along the wall, across the terrace grain, then outward at the lip in a taut wet curve suspended over open air. The two ends meet above them. For an instant the joined blood swells at the contact point, a massive black bead suspended against black distance. Then it draws smooth.
A complete circle coats the wood along the terrace opening.
Aspen takes one step backward. The shape should be difficult to see. Most of the blood hangs against the hollow where black heartwood already occupies everything behind it. Yet she can follow the entire circumference.
Mushroom light gives parts of it away. Aqua catches along the wet surface in thin curved highlights, disappears where the circle passes through darkness, then reappears several feet later. Where no light touches it, Aspen still knows where the boundary continues because the space inside it has begun to feel different from the space outside.
Contained.
Something behind her forehead settles into a budding indentation. Hermit. The title does not hurt this time. It fits. The sensation she had when the man first spoke it—the impossible inward direction—returns around the blood circle with enough physical agreement that Aspen’s hands prickle.
It came from Hierophant, but it no longer resembles an open wound. It has closed around a region. No beginning. No exposed end. Nothing pointing outward. Aspen’s eyes travel along the curve and by the time she returns to the top, she knows—not what she is supposed to do, exactly, but that there is room for something she can do.
Like seeing the empty notch beside a puzzle piece and knowing the next piece has three corners before seeing its picture. She realizes why Hierophant wanted her to bless it. Her fingers rise but she does not decide on the gesture immediately.
Her thumbs come up, tips meeting. The contact gives her a base. Both index fingers angle upward and for a moment, they hover apart. Wrong. Aspen moves them closer. Something in the pressure behind her eyes drops into place.
A triangle.
The shape encloses a thumb-sized portion of the black hollow. It is the shape her pen makes whenever she needs what she writes to remain after she lifts the tip. A triangle points even when no arrow is drawn from it. Aspen holds it inside the blood circle and thinks, Here.
Her mouth says, “Please work.” Her hands say it more precisely. The nearest mushrooms turn. Aspen notices because aqua suddenly strengthens across her knuckles.
In her vision, there is the silhouette of her fingers before the blood circle, aqua lights radiating beyond. The tiny triangle is closed, but not sealed in the same way as the circle. Three straight sides create corners, one end narrower than the others. Her eye enters through the broad bottom and exits through the top without being instructed.
What was he seeing above this?
A child’s cries embedded in the dark. A face large enough that its lower jaw crosses the hollow. Aspen has never seen it. That should make the picture weak. Instead the black circle they began with supplies a mouth. Aspen’s hands hang inside that imagined mouth, tiny enough to be caught between teeth she cannot see.
Beyond the circle, an enormous face must cover the above; beyond the face, something else must contain the child. The triangle between Aspen’s fingers becomes small because the circle surrounds it. The hollow contains that distance. The tree contains the hollow. A thing is large only until something larger surrounds it.
The blood twitches. A thin black strand pushes outward from one side—her eyes snap to it. At first she thinks the triangle is leaking, but the strand does not fall. It curves against gravity. Sideways and forward, away from the boundary, tracing a tightening arc through open air. Its wet surface catches one narrow aqua line as it curls. Another thread emerges farther up. It follows the first curve but begins at a different point, turning around the same absent center. A third.
The circle is growing tendrils. No. Not tendrils. Each black filament extends while bending around an invisible axis, widening a fraction farther from the triangle with each partial revolution.
A spiral.
Aspen knows the shape before she consciously counts the turn. Her fingers come apart and the hand-triangle disappears. The blood does not stop. The spiral continues and goes and expands—the geometry opens something inside her.
Not Hermit. Aspen knows that before anything else. This has none of Hermit’s inward hold. The sensation is almost opposite. It does not preserve a center, it decides what counts as the center by placing something else around it. The triangle is inside the spiral. The blood working is inside the hollow. The hollow is inside the face she cannot see. The face is inside—
Her mind reaches for another frame.
The next frame arrives.
Then another.
For one nauseating instant there is no largest thing. Every boundary becomes an object the moment something larger contains it. Aspen grips her own wrist. The contact is ordinary. Skin. Bone. Pulse. It does not stop the expansion. A word forms but nobody speaks it. That frightens her enough that she tries not to hear it. There is nothing to refuse. The word is already there.
Emperor. The scale.
A direction only matters when it has something to point to. The intuition touches Hermit and pain begins behind both eyes. She presses both palms against her forehead. The titles are not synonyms. They do not even feel like the same kind of thing until they sit next to each other.
The new word presses against Hermit. One sensation holds inward. The other decides what gets to contain it. When they touch, a third position seems briefly necessary. Aspen reaches for it and finds nothing.
Her balance tilts forward although the floor stays level. Both upper wings open in reflex. She is too high inside her own skull. As if her eyes have moved backward from the world and can see more relations at once. The sensation hurts. The sensation excites her.
What is the triangle pointing to?
Then, as quick as it came, the feeling dies. She blinks twice as the pain recedes. The space around her returns at normal size, but the spiral does not.
The blood circle tightens. Four sections pull toward four different folds. For less than a breath, Aspen can see the beginning of corners: one above, one below, two drawing parallel from the sides. Then the fourth movement fails. The circle pinches at three points instead. Its upper curve rises into a peak; the lower sides draw together around until the wet boundary repeats the hollow triangle she made.
Aqua glides across the spirals in narrow moving highlights as they curl into open air. Other spirals begin in the wood itself. Thin layers of grain lift from the wall like shavings from beneath an invisible blade, but they do not fall. Each strip coils around a blood spiral and lengthens away from the terrace.
“Uh.” Aspen takes another step backward.
The working thrusts out from the wall. The base of the shape grows beneath the terrace floor, black and shallowly curved, wide enough to receive a body. Two sloping sides rise from it and meet above, enclosing the terrace inside a long triangular passage. The home’s wall seals the space behind them. Through the dark sides, distant mushroom lights disappear. Voices outside dull to pressure without words. Aspen realizes she’s been breathing too loud.
The mushrooms beside her wrench away. The cluster nearest Hierophant bends so sharply that several stems press flat against the heartwood. Their cups contract toward their own gills. Aqua drains from the rims and gathers in the deepest folds, leaving only small, frightened points of light. The second cluster turns every cap toward the wall. The third nearly extinguishes, its stems held in a single strained direction away from the triangle.
Aspen stops. “Sorry.” The apology leaves her mouth before she can decide whether mushrooms can be offended.
Then she turns to look at Hierophant. His face has taken on an ashy cast beneath the aqua. The blood still runs from the cut in his palm, but not enough. Not remotely enough. The wound should have given him a smear. The structure contains more black than could fit inside his entire hand.
Did the tree help out?
The woman freezes with one end of the silk looped around the terrace anchor. Then she pulls the knot tight. She hooks both hands beneath it, leans her full weight away, and watches the heartwood instead of trusting the first test. She runs her fingers along the pale edge for places where it might scrape the floor. She presses one foot against that floor, gradually transfers weight, then stamps once near a wet seam. Only after it holds does she look at Hierophant.
“Why didn’t you make a square?”
He is staring down the length of the triangle. In the contracted mushroom light, his face appears cut from the same dark matter as the wall. When he looks at Aspen, his lower lids tighten. At the same time, one hardened ridge beside his mouth draws upward before he holds it still.
“It will hold long enough.”
The woman pulls the knot a second time. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
Hierophant does not answer. He takes the free end of the practice silk and steps from the terrace. His three hazel wings open inside the enclosure and carry him toward its far point with no hesitation visible in his limbs. The silk unrolls behind him, pale against the black lower face. When he turns away from the woman, the fault lines around his mouth settle into the smile he did not give her.
Aspen looks down. Past the terrace’s edge, the triangle’s floor is made from two kinds of black. Peeled heartwood lies matte beneath the remaining aqua. Hierophant’s blood crosses it in wet seams that return the light. Both came out of him or the tree, both have been forced into a shape neither possessed before, but the blood keeps pulling toward the closest fold as though it would rather hide inside the structure than be seen across its surface.
The woman’s blood reached for Aspen after the woman chose to stop. Hierophant named the terrace, traced the boundary, and asked for what they saw before he cut himself.
The blood doesn’t listen to them?
Or, well, is it trying to finish what they started? He didn’t want to see, so now the blood is stopping them from watching us. Maybe.
Aspen looks at the red and green Qimmo lines painted over the orange wing nearest her. Then at the blood, black now, holding an intention Hierophant prepared while it still had color.
I was wrong about blue. What if I’m also wrong about green?
But if blue is like something coming back, and green is close enough to wants, then… wants that keep coming back?
The thought fits badly. Then what’s the red for? Green has moved toward too many different things to be only want. Red remains worse. Her blood had stayed red on the leaf. The red figure had carried out movements Aspen could not remember choosing.
Still, the question beneath all of those survives: Why did his blood make the shape I wanted?
Hierophant reaches the far end of the enclosure, a few meters away, and draws the silk taut. It becomes a narrow pale path, sagging only slightly above the black floor.
Aspen looks back at her wings. Blood answered a shape she gave it. Maybe this body can answer something smaller than fly . She approaches the silk without leaving the terrace. First she places one foot against it. The weave depresses beneath the ball of her foot and rolls slightly toward the edge. Aspen retracts the leg.
She touches it again. This time she leaves her toes long enough to feel the tension running toward Hierophant at one end and the anchor at the other. The silk is smoother along its center and rough where the doubled edges meet. She crouches, sets both palms onto it, and pushes. It sags. Her upper wings snap open at the change in height.
Aspen removes one hand and shakes the silk.
“Please don’t do that,” the woman says. She is already checking the anchor again. The dimness of the mushrooms has narrowed her pupils; she bends close enough to follow each strand through the knot, then looks along the lower face where Aspen would land if the silk turned under her.
Aspen leans sideways. There is blackness beneath the pale strip, but not the deep hollow. The new floor waits less than her own height below. “It feels like it’s going to flip.”
“It will move,” Hierophant says from the far end.
“What?”
His three wings keep him level while his arms maintain tension. “Just a little bit.”
Aspen stands. She places her right foot across the silk rather than along it and gives the weave a fraction of her weight. The view reminds her of the trampoline park. The damp mineral smell of the hollow gives way to hot rubber, old foam, sweat, and the sweet chemical fog spilling from a machine near the birthday rooms. Music pounds through the dark so loudly that Mother has to cup a hand around her mouth.
“Bend your knees!”
Aspen is fourteen again, or close enough that Jamie would still be light when she picked him up. A foam pit yawns beneath the narrow battle beam, black between cubes whose bright colors the low lights keep changing. Jamie stands at the opposite end in blue grip socks and holds an oversized padded stick across both hands. It is almost as long as he is tall.
The employee raises one hand. “Three—”
Jamie swings.
The padded end catches Aspen’s shoulder before the count reaches two. She windmills both arms, locks her knees, and forces herself to balance along the beam.
“Cheater!” she shouts from between two cubes.
“Loser,” Jamie says.
Mother is supposed to correct him. Instead she folds over the two pairs of shoes hanging from one hand and laughs.
“Don’t encourage him,” Aspen tells her.
Mother straightens enough to point the shoes at Jamie. “Wait until one.”
“He didn’t even wait until two.”
“Then wait until two.” Mother looks at the employee. “What are the rules?”
The employee has given up pretending not to laugh. “We usually finish counting.”
On the next round, Aspen loses without Jamie touching her. The beam shifts beneath the first step. She stiffens from ankles to shoulders, tries to cancel the movement all at once, and supplies the shove that tips her into the pit.
“You suck!” Mother calls.
“The beam moved!”
“Then move with it!”
Mother holds both pairs of shoes by their laces. Jamie’s left sneaker keeps knocking against her knee while she gives advice that changes every time Aspen wobbles. Bend. Stand straight. Don’t stand that straight. Stop bouncing. Actually, bounce if it helps. Her laugh enters every instruction and ruins its authority.
Aspen climbs back onto the beam. This time, when it rolls beneath her right foot, she does not demand that the left side become still before she moves. Her knee loosens. The tilt travels through ankle, hip, shoulder, and out the raised end of the padded stick. Another movement returns from the other direction. She lets that one pass too. The beam never stops changing; Aspen stops treating every change as the beginning of a fall.
Jamie swings early again. Aspen, with her newfound balance, swats his attack with one hand. Jamie flies into the pit because he is a child. Aspen gloats regardless.
The memory clears when the silk moves beneath Aspen’s foot. Black heartwood returns under it. Aqua replaces black light. The smell of mushrooms settles around the remembered rubber, but Aspen’s knee remains loose.
She moves her second foot onto the pale strip. The silk rolls. She lets one ankle lower with it rather than wrenching both legs straight. Her wings flare, but she stays standing.
“Good,” Hierophant says. “Let the lower pair take more of your weight.”
Aspen’s knees lock again. “How?”
“Let the upper roots relax. The lower wings will bear you.”
Aspen tries to find the upper roots without moving anything else. Sensation spreads across all four at once: air on membranes, tension along raised branches, the ache left by her fall, tiny differences in paint stiffness. She can feel more of the wings than she has ever felt of either arm. None of that tells her how to release one pair.
She drops her shoulders. Both upper wings sweep down. The lower right folds to avoid them. The lower left fails to fold until an edge catches the upper membrane and jerks the whole side of her body around. The silk rotates beneath her feet.
Aspen crouches. All four wings burst open to stop the fall.
“Not from your shoulders,” Hierophant says.
“They’re attached near my shoulders.”
“Some of them. Are your arms attached to your hips?”
He changes the angle of his own hazel wings. The motion is clean and immediate, an answer in a language Aspen can feel but not reproduce.
“Open the upper pair to catch the air,” he says. “Do not beat. Hold.”
Aspen can feel the warm streams all around, the sensations concentrating behind her. She turns both upper wings toward it deliberately. The left catches first and pulls. The right follows too far, taking enough air to lift that side of her ribs. She tries to hold both still.
The silk slips half an inch under her heel and every wing beats at once.
The lower-left enters late and strikes harder to recover the difference. Aspen’s feet leave the silk just long enough to land in a worse arrangement, one across the weave and the other nearly parallel. She grabs at air. The woman rises beside her.
Before Aspen sees her move, the right upper wing turns toward her. It opens into the woman’s position as if the space beside those green wings has an edge it knows how to find. The lower pair reorganizes around that reference. Aspen’s balance settles.
The woman sees the orange branch aimed toward her. She stops close enough that the tips of their wings almost overlap.
Aspen straightens. “Thank you, but… move a little farther away.”
“I won’t touch you.”
“I know.” The admission costs more breath than the balance did. “Just—a little farther. I want to do this alone.”
The woman retreats one wing-width. The orange wing follows. Her eyes remain on Aspen’s feet. Aspen pulls it back. The silk rolls again, and the wing opens toward the woman a second time without asking.
“Uh, go farther.”
The woman’s mouth draws flat. For one second she looks at the painted support the way she looked at the blue bead in her hand. Then she moves. She does not abandon the silk; she changes her position until she is beneath and to the side of it, close enough to catch the pale weave if Aspen falls but no longer where the body expects her to be.
The next sway reaches Aspen without an old answer waiting inside it. She bends too late. The upper wings thrash. Her right foot slides.
“Leave your feet on the silk,” Hierophant says.
Aspen glares down the pale length at him. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“No.” His eyes follow the sag beneath her soles rather than the movements above her. “Stop deciding which wing should lift you.”
He waits until both feet have found the center again.
“You want to make the silk carry less of you.”
Aspen looks down. That, at least, has a direction she understands. She presses both feet into the silk and notices the depth of its curve. Full weight: the weave sinks beneath her heels. She asks for less—not flight, not a particular wing, only less pressure—and the muscles across her back tighten in several places at once.
Nothing visible happens. Aspen lets her weight return. The silk dips. She asks again.
This time it rises a fraction beneath her left heel.
Her upper wings angle into the warm current without beating. The lower pair give two short, ugly strokes, the delayed one arriving after the silk has already begun to lift. Aspen lowers again before the movement can become a fall.
Full weight. Less. Full weight. Less.
The silk gives her an answer faster than the wings do. It sinks when she fails and rises when some portion of her body leaves it. Aspen begins to bounce. Not high, only enough to make the differences arrive closer together.
At the trampoline park, the padded beam never comes still. Her knees learn the rhythm before her thoughts stop interfering. Here, the silk pushes up through her soles; Aspen lets that force continue through bent knees and hips instead of trapping it there. The wings catch the upward part. When she returns, they release enough for her feet to receive the silk again.
The woman moves another small distance away. Aspen bounces higher. The first few beats remain separate from her legs. Feet push; wings answer late. Then the lower right begins at the same moment her heels rise. The upper pair hold the height the push gives her instead of trying to create a different one. Even the lower-left delay enters the rhythm as something Aspen can expect. She does not make it stop being late. She leaves a place for its correction.
The silk sinks beneath her, stretches, and returns. Aspen rises with it and her feet do not come back down. For one breath she waits for the silk and feels nothing beneath either sole. Her knees remain bent. Air moves around her calves. The four wing roots pull in a shared pattern that is still too quick to name but no longer arrives as four unrelated emergencies.
Aspen is hovering. Intentionally.
A laugh jumps into her throat. The black triangular passage becomes the dark trampoline park again—not replacing Hinter, but lying warmly across it. Jamie falls backward into foam, padded stick still clutched in both hands. Mother raises their shoes and cheers. Aspen remains above the beam.
She did not order the right wing to turn or the left lower one to correct. She gave the body a change in weight, and it answered. Her mouth opens into a grin.
Then she looks down. Both feet hang over blackness.
The distance is less than her height. Her stomach does not care. This is how she woke: beside black heartwood, soles finding no floor, four things behind her already moving through a task she had not begun. Four things she thought were fans. The rhythm holding her now resembles the one that held her then. It does not feel newly invented. It feels like something Aspen has entered halfway through.
The grin remains on her mouth while the muscles beneath it pull tight. The lower-left misses its place. Aspen tries to correct it directly. Both upper wings fold in response, the right lower drives too hard, and the silk leaps sideways beneath her as she falls.
Pale weave receives her hip and folds around her waist. Her shoulder strikes a second layer. The silk stretches toward Hierophant and the terrace, then returns her weight in a deep swinging hollow. The woman lunges, hands open, but stops before touching Aspen when the weave holds.
“Are you hurt?”
Aspen checks the wing trapped beneath one thigh, then her ribs. “No. I—”
A laugh escapes anyway. For half a second she is buried in foam cubes with Jamie shouting that his early swing did not count. Then Aspen hears what the laugh sounds like in this throat: light, smooth, not the sound Mother cheered for. Not the immature voice she secretly liked, even when others said she sounded like a child. It ends too quickly.
Aspen pulls herself upright in the silk. “I’m okay.” She looks at the empty space where her feet had been. Excitement and nausea move through the same breath. “I did it.”
Hierophant’s grip remains steady at the far end.
“You did,” he says.
Something wet strikes the silk beside Aspen’s knee. The drop flattens into a shiny circle, recoils from its exposed edge, and begins pulling toward the nearest fold. Another lands on the silk.
Hierophant looks up. The sloping sides have begun to sweat blood. The three dark walls flex inward, then outward, as though pressed by changes Aspen cannot feel. Beyond them, a growing murmur finds no words but gains bodies. The outer blood lines stretch toward that pressure and thin.
“Back to the terrace,” he says.
The woman is already at the anchor. She loosens one turn of silk, catches the released length around her forearm, and begins drawing Aspen toward the wood. Hierophant comes forward with his end.
Aspen gets one foot beneath herself, standing on the silk. Walking would require leaning into the changing slope while the weave continues to move, and the first step sends her knees sideways. Her wings flare. She does not wait for Hierophant.
Aspen feels how deeply the silk receives her heel and asks it to carry less. The upper wings hold. Both lower wings beat, one late but expected. The pressure beneath her sole lightens. She steps into the space the wings preserve, let the silk take her again, then removes part of her weight before the next step.
Full. Less. Full. Less.
She does not leave the silk completely. She does not need to. The woman keeps pulling; Hierophant advances from the far end, maintaining enough tension that the pale strip does not twist. Aspen crosses the final body-length with her feet and wings sharing each movement.
At the terrace, she steps onto the black heartwood. The wings continue to hold part of her weight. She bends both knees and presses down until her soles become heavy, then heavier, until the terrace rather than the air carries her. The upper pair settle. The lower right folds. The left arrives after it.
Aspen has ended the movement. Mostly by herself.
To her side, the triangle opens. Across the sloping walls, Hierophant’s blood liquefies. Each rivulet pulls sideways toward the nearest fold. Black threads travel beneath curls of tree flesh, hanging on to the solid strips keeping them from the open hollow. Where gravity drags one stream downward, its upper end stretches backward until it becomes a taut line refusing to leave the shelter of the seam.
One thread tears free and the exposed drop curls around itself in the air. Its wet surface rolls inward until no shine remains except one aqua point, and then the closed black bead falls into the lower hollow.
But the heartwood that extended out with the blood splits. A thin trunk stays thrust sideways from the wall. Two more break from the lower corners, growing across rather than up, each one repeating the direction the failed triangle gave it. Branches uncoil in tight spirals. Small leaves form already folded around hard fruit no larger than fingertips, the skins set before the branches are thick enough to bear them.
The dark sides break into strips, revealing the hollow in narrow vertical cuts. People occupy the spaces beyond them. Some hover a few meters below the terrace with their wings held in cautious patterns. Others stand near distant ledges. Faces turn upward from levels Aspen had thought too far away to notice anything here.
By the time the last broad section drains away, Aspen is standing safely on the terrace. No one sees the silk throw her or the body forget its rhythm. They see yesterday’s green and red paint still laid across the Hermit’s orange wings. They see Hierophant flying back along a collapsing line of silk and various sideways trees growing from Lyra’s terrace.
Hierophant lands looking first at the new trees, then at the crowd, then back at the place where the triangle opened. The faults at the sides of his mouth have not settled from their smile.
The woman looks from one watching face to the next. Her wings spread enough to place green surfaces along Aspen’s side without touching her. Every danger she named in the sleeping room now has eyes.
One person is much closer than the rest. He hovers above them. The boy looks about fourteen, though the strip of cloth tied over both eyes makes the judgement uncertain. One foot rests against the sideways trunk without placing its full weight there. The branch bends under only a little of him.
The mushroom clusters farthest from the failed working have begun to reopen. Several cups turn toward the boy, aqua returning along their rims in quiet bands. The cluster nearest Aspen remains contracted against the wall, every stem still bowed away.
Hierophant sees the boy.
“Fool'to.”
Aspen braces. She waits for the word to open some new direction in her—an edge, a center, a pain behind the eyes. Nothing happens. The word remains a word, and the boy remains a boy wearing a blindfold beside a branch.
Was he just insulting him?
Hierophant sighs. “How long have you been there?”
“You couldn’t see me?”
His voice is young enough to make the blindfold seem less ceremonial and more like something an adult should tell him to remove before he flies into a wall.
“You know how the blood is. Unruly things.” Hierophant shrugs.
The boy turns the blindfold toward the people suspended beyond the terrace. His wings spread out, many dark dots lining their membranes. “Anyone could feel it. Why did you make a triangle?”
The woman’s wings fall low. “Then why did you come so close? You can never predict the blood.”
He faces her. “I wanted to know why I was afraid to.”
He leaves the answer there, with the plain accuracy Jamie uses when reporting that his butt itches. The last blood drains from the upper point of the triangle. The boy reaches one hand toward the small folded leaves but stops before touching them.
“If your blood made-t a triangle, then you must’ve wanted those above to see.”
“No,” the woman says.
He turns toward Hierophant. “Are you bored?”
Hierophant looks at Aspen. His mouth opens around what may be a longer answer—the circle, his blood, the points, the shape neither of them made alone.
“Sorry, he told me to bless his thingy,” Aspen points at the branches. “I… made a triangle on accident.” Aspen lies.
The blindfold tilts. “Accident?”
“I thought triangles were like flashlights.”
Silence moves through the three people nearest her. The boy tilts his head. “Like what?”
Oh right. Idiot.
Aspen rubs her thumb across the clean side of her index finger. “A light you point at something so you can see it.” She gestures toward the trees, the staring hollow, the last strips of black enclosure. “I thought triangles said, like, look here.”
Hierophant stares at her. “How do you know·sar that?”
Aspen reaches for the harmless answer. “I used to draw them.”
She remembers notebook paper meeting her palm. Her red pen draws one line, then another. The third closes around an empty center. Then the paper roughens beneath her fingers. The paper is bark.
Familiarity reaches her before the memory does. A blue triangle waits on the next tree. Another waits beyond it, three lines cut across brown ridges. Something yellow lies low between the trunks. Jamie is somewhere behind her. She knows, and doesn’t know how she knows it. The treehouse stands farther ahead, positioned like the center of an arrangement through a stretch of forest she cannot remember walking.
Her palm expects the next ridge in the bark. One foot knows where a root will rise before she sees it. She recalls when she left to see the treehouse, telling Jamie to stay home. She recalls looking up at the sky, about to ask it if he was following her.
She recalls arriving at the treehouse.
Pain tightens behind her eyes. Every tree had been saying the same thing she’d never written.
Look here.
The blue above had returned the message. The sun was a pupil in the eye of the sky.