Are You Real

The walk between that sky and the next tree is missing.

Aspen has the place before it. Jamie in the doorway, face scrunched around an argument he has already lost and intends to continue anyway, in his own way. ‘Ten is old enough.’ ‘Ten is basically grown.’ ‘Ten can absolutely go into a forest if eighteen can.’ His hands have already disappeared halfway into his sleeves because he does that when he is trying not to look small, and Aspen is turning away from him before his expression can become useful against her.

She has the place after it too—the treehouse. Those two places have always touched. Not nearly touched. There had been no darkness between them, no blank white page, no sensation of skipping. Her memory simply moved from one completed scene into another the way two puzzle pieces can meet despite having nothing painted across the seam.

This is comfortable.

Aspen’s memory is terrible, and her excuses worse, so when she arrives home late, and her fingers are covered in blueberry blood, she doesn’t have to try to explain. Jamie will look at her hands, and then her dirt-caked shoes, and he will ask “Are you being dementia again?”

She will avoid his eyes. She will ask if he is hungry. He will say he ate fruit snacks. She will ask if he is bored. He will tell her he wants to go on an adventure, but he will say that with a raised brow because he believes one raised eyebrow makes him a detective. She will say yes, and he will smile. Of course he will.

Aspen will take out the blue moth. Six turns. No cheating. A toss. The plush will point them somewhere fun.

Maybe the kitchen. Maybe the park. Maybe, because the moth is mean and literal, directly back toward Aspen’s bedroom where the laptop waits with the three-player game Jamie insists still works perfectly well with two people.

They will play.

Jamie will choose the same character he always chooses and accuse Aspen of screen-looking despite the fact that they are sharing one screen. They will fight over snacks. They will laugh hard enough that Jamie starts coughing and then gets angry when Aspen asks if he is dying. At eleven fifty-nine, Aspen will pretend not to watch the clock.

At eleven fifty-nine, she will jolt and stare at the screen. She will ask him what happened. He will raise a second brow.

At twelve o’clock at night, she will say, “Happy birthday, Jamie.”

At twelve o-one, she will ask herself if she is a terrible sister.

At twelve o-two, she will tell him to go to bed.

This is comfortable, sometimes. The seam between scenes can remain a seam if she does not put a finger into it. Aspen has lived beside missing pieces before. A forgotten assignment. A conversation remembered only because somebody mentions it. Walking into a room and having no idea why. Her mind has always been good at placing furniture over holes.

But sometimes something calls from the other side of memory. She never knows who it sounds like. Her stomach always tightens when she hears it.

Uh-oh.

Aspen tries to return to Jamie’s doorway. The memory remains where it is. Then—cold. For a fraction of a second she cannot place where on the body it belongs because the body itself is missing. Cold simply occupies the gap. Not winter air against cheeks. Not rain through clothing. Something broad and exposed, temperature touching too much surface at once.

That voice comes with the rhythm of a heart monitor. That voice says the space ahead is cold and the space ahead is bright and the space for her is loud. It eases her out with a tug, and a squeeze. It says it will hurt. Tug—and squeeze. It says not to worry. Tug and squeeze. She kicks at its hands. It takes her feet and tugs. Tugs. Squeezes. It says it loves her but the light is so cold so bright so yellowlikeakitchenbulb itsayshereyeshaveonlyjustbeguntoadjust

Her palm rests against something warm. It is not Mommy.

The bark scratches at her hand, the sweet blueberry pigment dry beneath her fingers. Another marked trunk stands farther ahead. Something yellow lies low between two roots where the ground dips, but branches interrupt its shape before she can decide what it is. Yellow raincoat? Plastic? Flower? The memory refuses to sharpen.

The steps joining home to here are blurry. No remembered pressure of dirt beneath her shoes, no leaves passing her shoulders, no breath drawn between the final thing she said to Jamie and this hand already touching blue. Yet Aspen knows he is hiding somewhere behind her.

Or was hiding somewhere.

This… is this yesterday?

The knowledge comes without a snapped twig or a glimpse of a yellow raincoat. She cannot hear him trying not to breathe loudly. She cannot see a sleeve behind a trunk. He occupies the missing woods in the same finished way the word fairies once occupied every blank in her mind—as an answer she does not remember earning, or an intuition.

Aspen’s fingers press harder into the triangle. Its dry surface drags against the unfamiliar fingertips she woke with while remembered bark presses into the palm she had before. For one moment, both hands agree upon the roughness.

Am I here or there?

Before Emperor, the final sight of Jamie and the first sight of the treehouse had touched without a seam. Aspen could know time was gone by counting what should have fit between, but the lost part had no direction, temperature, or distance. Now the certainty left beneath that title takes hold of the join and finds that it has an inside.

It does not give her the walk. Cold reaches her without any wind she can remember. Brightness presses through eyes already open somewhere else. The voice crosses a distance but brings no words now. The missing span has not returned. Aspen can feel the space in which it failed to.

She tests that space without knowing how. The remembered hand is smaller than the trunk. Aspen is smaller than the tree. The tree is one upright thing inside a forest, and the forest lies beneath the wom—sky.

At first, the measure behaves. Her fingertips occupy one patch of bark. The trunk continues above and below them. Other trunks stand farther away. Branches divide the sunlight into smaller places, and the sky contains every division at once: tree, route, treehouse, Aspen, and whatever waits behind her.

Then size and weight stop agreeing. The trunk could hide Aspen’s whole body, but when her attention presses into it, nothing presses back. Bark supplies roughness beneath her palm and weakens a finger-width away. The next trunk separates from the forest because a blue triangle chooses it. Beyond that marker, trees repeat without becoming particular until the route needs another surface on which to point.

The sky contains the forest, but its blue does not seem to originate above it. The color holds where Aspen once placed a question and thins wherever she no longer expects a reply.

Her hand looks small against the tree, but the tree feels dependent upon the hand for being noticed at all.

On the terrace every nearby face turns toward Aspen in the same instant. The movement arrives at the edge of her awareness as one broad change in pressure. Wingbeats interrupt themselves. Fool’s blindfold snaps away from Hierophant and fixes on her. The woman says something from close by. Aspen receives the shape of concern in her voice and none of the words.

The remembered forest, meanwhile, has arranged itself around something physically smaller than every tree in it. Blue and green remain distinct, even when they are not brighter. Bark dust dulls the triangle beneath Aspen’s palm, and holes interrupt several leaves overhead, but blue continues from this mark to the next. Green pushes each leaf out from its stem, turning surface after surface toward the light. Her eyes search for a visible stretch of red. Nothing red belongs here. Its absence feels complete. Brown bark, dark soil, the weak beige beneath a root, a pale orange fungus near her shoe—those colors felt… derivative. Forgotten.

Beside Aspen’s wrist, a leaf still joined to the tree stirs without any remembered wind. Her thumb could cover most of it. The stem narrows to almost nothing before entering the branch; fine veins divide its green into patches smaller than Jamie’s fingernails.

Did they ever really carry what I wanted?

A weak laugh leaves Aspen. Why would a leaf care what she wanted?

The green does not drain from the tip or run back into the stem. It fails everywhere at once. Gray tissue remains, thin enough for light to pass through and too weakly divided for the veins to keep their own edges. What Aspen had taken for a narrow shadow spreads until surface, vein, and the air showing through the holes differ only because she remembers that they should.

Green loosens across the branch. Separate leaves touch and no longer finish where they overlap. One edge continues into the next; a stem thickens into wood without a joint; branch and trunk share enough gray that Aspen can distinguish them only by assigning each part its old word. Brown fails beneath Aspen’s palm. The ridges remain rough, but color no longer decides which belong to bark and which to shadow. The pale fungus becomes a swelling in the gray with no reliable border. When those lesser colors go, the shapes they had helped separate begin going with them.

Even blue divides into what acts and what merely appeared blue. The remembered sky weakens first. It had seemed to answer with Aspen beneath it, but without that answer the color has no structure; it spreads too evenly, belonging to no edge and joining no two things. Blue thins from the height, but the marks cut into bark remain. The trees around the triangles can barely maintain the shape of trees, but the marks continue selecting a route. They are not scenery she happened to interpret.

Trunks stand because vertical bands suggest them. Leaves gather overhead because a mottled ceiling implies a canopy. The yellow thing near the roots loses its last boundary and goes colorless with it. Each shape remains just long enough for Aspen to recognize what it is meant to represent, then runs into the next.

Only then does Aspen remember the person behind her.

Jamie.

She tries to turn. The memory does not turn with her. The marked trunk remains centered at the same angle. The next blue triangle stays beyond its left side. Aspen pulls harder, trying to move her remembered chin over her shoulder, and the vision blurs. Her—the real neck strains instead.

Pain draws from beneath one ear into the collarbone. The upper wing on that side rotates backward through the air above the terrace. Its natural eye-mark angles toward the space Aspen cannot see, orange supports drawing taut around it. A lower wing spreads beside her hip and drives down once, trying to rotate a body that is standing on black heartwood rather than gray dirt.

The memory refuses to give her even the edge of Jamie’s sleeve. He remains where she somehow knew he was hiding, just beyond a field of sight chosen before Aspen realized there had been anything to choose.

The thought of him does not dissolve as easily as the leaves. His position keeps a person-shaped pressure behind her. It could belong to Jamie. It could belong to the need that makes Aspen place him there.

Didn’t I tell him to stay home? Why did he come then?

For one breath, the disobedience helps. Jamie wanted something Aspen did not. He argued, followed, and hid after she arranged the entire morning to keep him home. Maybe that resistance is the part of him her world could not build around her.

Or maybe he disobeys because somebody has to follow. Maybe conflict is another service performed for Aspen, no more independent than a leaf that seemed to carry whatever she asked of it.

“Jamie,” she says. The real hollow gives his name an echo. The remembered woods give her nothing.

She cannot test him. A memory is not a room she can move through, and Aspen has reached the edge of this one from inside it. The harder she tries to turn, the more exactly she feels its limit: Jamie held beyond her sight, his reality indistinguishable from the fact that she needs him to be there.

Only the blue triangles keep their separation, and above them, the sun remains yellow. Aspen can feel its warmth across the back of her remembered hand. Heat lies along her cheek, enters the dark hair near her temple, and gathers beneath the yellow raincoat tied around her waist. The sun needs no remembered outline beyond the circle her eyes have always given it. Its warmth reaches everything, so its color still has somewhere to go.

Yellow was love—not the kind that answered when asked, but the kind that made answering unnecessary. Mother’s hand warm around hers; Jamie’s head beneath her palm; ordinary afternoons laid over the park, the kitchen floor, the walk home.

Yellow is the color Aspen thought was love. She had never noticed how much of the world arrived already illuminated. At night, nothing replaced it. Aspen remembers the sky above her old bedroom, above the park after the lamps went out, above the trees when the sun finally blinked away.

Night is gray.

There are no   .

But this time, the sun watches through the place where the sky used to be blue. Pressure closes behind Aspen’s eyes. It builds from both temples toward the bridge of her nose, too large for the bones around it. Her sight contracts. The yellow circle lengthens, then doubles, while the gray forest pushes inward from every edge.

She tries to close her eyes but the memory stays open. The pressure drops into her neck. Every muscle between her skull and shoulders seizes. Then the pain passes lower, spreading out from her spine. The wings go rigid behind her. Four distant places on her body grow hot at once.

She realizes the memory is gone. The gap shuts her out. Her lower wings cannot brace while their supports are drawn taut, and the terrace tilts beneath her—or she tilts above it.

The woman catches her around the ribs.

There is no warning and no open hand held where Aspen can see it. Two arms close under her chest before her knees strike the black wood. Hierophant steps behind her and puts one broad palm into the narrow place between the four roots. His pressure holds Aspen’s back straight while the wings pull upward.

Fool hangs near enough that Aspen can see his mouth open beneath the blindfold. His head turns from her wings to the mushrooms, then to Hierophant, then toward the ceiling as though one of those places must explain the others.

I… I’m back?

Her eyes focus on the black above, and for the first time, she is thankful for it. Black heartwood curves beneath her feet with every line of grain intact. Aqua gathers in the grooves and leaves the raised surfaces dark. The terrace has an edge. The edge remains separate from the hollow beyond it. Even the sideways trees have bark, branches, folded leaves, and hard little fruit that do not mix merely because they share a color.

Something black rises past her shoulder and disappears into the hollow. At first she mistakes it for a line in the heartwood. Aqua reflects along one wet edge. Aspen raises her pale hand ahead of it, and the tendril appears across the skin, thin as pulled syrup and black enough to cut through the visible veins in her wrist. Three more lift beyond it.

She twists far enough to see the nearest eye-mark on her wing. Red and blue-green gather where the fluid touches living membrane, going dark as the heartwood.

Hierophant’s eyes widen. His gaze climbs each thread of blood, then jumps higher.

Aspen looks toward the place the sun should be.

“Are you real?”

The woman’s arms tighten once. Fool turns his blindfold toward the dark above. Somewhere below, one person asks who she means.

Warmth touches Aspen’s bare feet and does not descend. It rises through the black heartwood and brushes her wings. Another current travels along the terrace from somewhere inside the tree. Warm air climbs the hollow and passes around her calves, while a cooler layer catches along her forehead. The mushrooms radiate little stores of heat. Even the woman’s forearms are warm where they cross Aspen’s ribs.

No single yellow thing is supplying it. The mushrooms nearest Aspen cannot decide where to face. Three stems pull toward her until their caps begin to open; the fourth contracts and twists away. Farther along the wall, a whole cluster leans toward the remains of the triangle. One small cup points halfway between, shudders, and turns its pale gills toward the bark as though hiding its light from both.

Aspen thinks of the blue bead lying clear in the woman’s hand. It did nothing. The gray moth stayed inside the wall and did nothing. But she joined three points, and Hierophant’s blood abandoned his square intention. Black heartwood peeled itself into the shape she gave it. Sideways branches still continue that shape.

“I saw it,” Aspen says.

The woman shifts one arm as though checking whether Aspen can stand.

“Why did it all… no. I get it. I can see it.” Her knees are still loose, but she presses both feet into the terrace until they accept more of her weight. The wing-eyes continue leaking. Their black threads keep grasping toward the air. “ They saw it.”

The thought puts a smile onto her mouth before anything around her becomes safer. Triangles. Whatever took over my body wanted them to see. Her lips pull too wide; she can feel them shaking at the corners. It’s a clue. Why could I see it? Is it Emperor? The procedure is weak, untested, probably another trap, and still it is a procedure. Something she can change and repeat.

Hierophant removes his hand from between her wings. The woman loosens her arms enough to let Aspen stand but does not move away.

Aspen looks into her new black sky. She smiles hard enough to cry.

“What really are the things above?”

A man hovering below the terrace draws a deliberate breath through his nose.

Aspen hears the inhale, but what reaches her is not air alone. A searching pressure moves over the painted wings, along the unfamiliar hair, across her face. She feels a faint line drawing between her and him. That line enters every place the body ought to supply a recognition and finds nothing to hold. The pressure passes through Aspen and returns to the man empty.

She straightens enough to look past the terrace edge and see his wings misalign. He drops half a body-length before catching himself.

“Where is Hermit’s scent?”

The question breaks whatever restraint kept the crowd below at a distance. Several people inhale. Others simply turn their faces toward Aspen and reach in ways she cannot see. Their attention crosses her in overlapping passes—probing, withdrawing, returning more urgently. One woman covers her mouth. A person near the opposite terrace shakes their head and tries again.

Aspen breathes toward them. Mushroom damp enters first, then the mineral wetness of blood, hot wood, silk, skin, and the faint green bitterness of something spilled with breakfast. No name opens inside any of it. She receives no childhood room, no favorite food, no habitual joke, no place where one person ends and someone loved begins.

But the crowd is no longer equal. The man who first searched for Hermit separates cleanly from those behind him. His place in the gathering carries enough pressure that two nearby bodies angle around it without seeming to know they have made room. An older woman farther down occupies less visible space and more of the arrangement; glances keep returning to her before anyone speaks. Two people hovering shoulder to shoulder barely divide at all. Aspen can distinguish their faces, clothes, and wings, yet whatever scale has awakened in her keeps measuring them as one small weight attached to somebody else’s decision.

She turns and sniffs. The woman at her side carries so many gathered directions that Aspen cannot follow one without finding another crossing it. Hierophant does not merely occupy his body. The crowd is already arranging itself below him. She looks at a young girl and receives only the amount by which surrounding people bend around her, as though the stranger can be reduced to the pressure she puts on a scene. Aspen searches her face for one private thing that would remain if the crowd dispersed. Nothing comes.

“There’s nothing there,” somebody says.

Voices rise from below and across the hollow. Hermit’s title moves through them. So does the word gone. The woman beside Aspen draws both upper wings forward until their green edges enter Aspen’s vision.

Hierophant places one hand firmly on Aspen’s shoulder. The joint locks beneath his palm, and one upper wing lifts its leading edge. Aspen has enough weight on her feet to knock him away. Before she does, his voice takes the whole hollow. The broad old face rearranges itself above the crowd; the calcified ridges beside his mouth pull apart, and his smile becomes so wide that it exposes the line where dark lips meet teeth. But his three hazel wings go completely still.

“Within,” he says.

The word enters the hollow differently from every shouted question before it. Not louder but cleaner. People stop speaking in pieces—Aspen hears one sentence break in the middle. Another person finishes a final syllable and does not begin the next. Silence travels downward not as a wave but as a chain of people noticing that other people have become quiet.

“You all know·sat the story of Hermit.”

The title tightens. Aspen has heard it enough now that the inward relation arrives before the sound has fully ended. Is sat for when they talk about me formally?

“The Radiant was never one to be understood, and the circle must contain itself. Why are you searching from outside it?”

People below stop inhaling toward Aspen. Not all at once, but Hierophant has given their failure a shape. Aspen feels the moment it becomes easier for them to believe him than to continue not knowing. That frightens her.

“Yesterday marked·sat Hermit’s Qimmo. Before first light, a crying child took shape·sel above this terrace. Its birth-lines descend through Hermit’s rooms.” Hierophant lifts his other hand toward the black roof and the face nobody else can see. “The Rooci addressed·sut her before any of us knew what had returned.”

Formal 'sat'. Perceived 'sel'.

But sut? And what the fuck is a Rooci? Aspen holds the word in her mind. Is he talking about those above?

He gestures toward the three horizontal trees growing out of the wood. “You felt her triangle. You have watched the tree continue it. What you cannot smell·sin is not vacancy. I believe Hermit has drawn-sh·sut her Ainm within the only boundary in Hinter no other person may cross.”

The woman’s fingers spread against Aspen’s side. Her mouth opens. No correction comes through it.

Hierophant looks over the people below. “At the advent of a new regard upon Hinter, Hermit has been reborn-l·sat.”

The word reborn closes more tightly around Aspen than the woman’s arms did. She shivers. The yellow light. Hands around feet.

For one second she cannot tell whether Hierophant has accidentally touched something true. Then she understands what he has done. He has taken the blank around Aspen and put borders on it.

Rooci above.

Hermit here.

Witnesses below.

Yesterday stands on one side and rebirth on the other. Behind her eyes, the joined leaf stays gray. Jamie remains beyond the view she cannot turn, yellow sun above them all.

The first objection comes from the man who greeted her when she stood at the terrace edge. Aspen recognizes the voice before she finds him below the new branches.

“She didn’t know me,” he says. “I called Bright Qimmo, and she looked at me like we had never met.”

Hierophant’s smile does not change. “You greeted yesterday’s Hermit. What else would rebirth look like from outside?”

The man’s mouth remains open, but several people near him murmur before he can answer. “Can she even fly?” One voice calls.

The woman’s arms stiffen around Aspen.

Hierophant turns his pupil-less eyes toward the speaker. “Could you fly the moment you were born?”

The woman lets go. She does not step away. Her hands lower from Aspen’s ribs as though putting down something heavier than the body they supported, and all four green wings draw close enough to overlap.

“Why—why is this..?” She murmurs to nobody.

A bad explanation should break when facts hit it. This one eats them.

“Why did the mushrooms hide?” asks someone hovering by the right.

“Because attention is not kindness. Do you trust the mushrooms more than you trust me?”

This answer travels farther than the others. Several faces turn toward the contracted cluster beside Aspen. Its stems remain pressed away from her, caps almost closed.

“Is this some play for the Rooci?”

The challenge comes from a person hovering level with the terrace, two bodies back from the front of the crowd. Hierophant’s smile vanishes. His hand remains on Aspen, but his fingers stop adjusting with her balance and become fixed upon her shoulder. He looks directly into the speaker’s eyes.

“What do you take those above for?”

The person holds their position. Their wings begin a stronger beat, perhaps because the surrounding bodies have shifted away and removed a shared current. Hierophant studies something beyond their face. His gaze moves once over the people to either side and returns.

“They have not even blessed you with a shape distinct from those beside you,” he says. His voice stays smooth. “Do not flatter yourself that they would arrange a play for you.”

Aspen feels the insult before the challenger does. In her new, budding scale of the crowd, that person does blur into the two bodies beside them. One carries the group’s anger. Another supplies its courage. The speaker occupies the mouth between those weights without separating cleanly from either.

Is that really all they amount to?

A part of her answers yes. That part frightens her more than Hierophant does. That part also comforts her.

The challenger’s next wingbeat comes late. They lower their face and drift backward into the bodies Hierophant named around them.

He turns from them as though nothing impolite has occurred.

“Who carries witness glass'ke?”

Clear knives appear throughout the crowd. Some come from belts, some from narrow sheaths fitted between wing roots and hips, one from inside a sleeve. A woman pats both sides of her wrap, searches again with increasing anger, then says, “I left mine.” She starts toward a terrace below.

“You may abstain,” Hierophant tells her.

She stops, more offended by that than by the missing knife, and continues home faster.

“Can I use yours after?” a younger man asks the person beside him.

The person pulls their clear blade closer. “Then it would be my witness twice.”

“I saw it too.”

“With my glass? Go lick some sap, wet-wing.”

He gives up. Several others keep their hands empty. They do not leave; they move to the outer edge of the gathering and watch those who remain.

The woman beside Aspen looks at Hierophant. The dampness along her lashes has thickened enough to catch the aqua light. “Don’t.”

He either does not hear or gives the word no public shape.

“Do not address the body,” Hierophant says. “Address Hermit'to.”

The woman’s wrapped fist presses into the center of her chest. All four wings draw close enough that their green edges overlap.

At first, the distinction passes over Aspen. The crowd cannot smell her, cannot know her, and it seems none of them can say Lyra. Hermit is the only part of this body they can reach without crossing whatever boundary Hierophant has invented.

Then she understands what he has removed. Whatever they are about to establish does not require the person inside the body to agree.

Hierophant lifts his free hand and touches index fingers to thumbs, shaping a circle around empty air. Across the hollow, those holding witness glass do the same with their uncut hands.

“▵o Hermit,” he says, “one held within one: receive en, the return without opening.”

The spoken shape closes around Aspen. Pressure meets at her sternum and passes around her ribs without touching skin. Her wings draw inward together, not folding but locating the circumference beyond which the title does not extend.

The witnesses repeat the address. Their accents alter the sounds. Some circles are narrow enough to frame one eye; others open between both hands. Each still places Hermit at its center.

Hierophant turns his raised circle upward. “▵Á▵ Rooci, regard the boundary remade beneath you.”

Aspen’s attention shoots toward the black height. Her chin lifts. The four threads from her wing-eyes pull taut in the same direction, and for a moment she feels the scale. Rooci brings no face with it. The word remains above Aspen anyway, the place from which regard descends.

“Place what you witnessed beneath Hermit’s keeping,” Hierophant tells the crowd.

Whispers begin.

“I saw·sel the black triangle close.”

“I felt·sel the point from six ways below.”

“I saw·sel the wood bear before its branches opened.”

“I searched·sin for Hermit and found no scent.”

'Sin' for trying to find my smell. That perception must be different from the others. For once, Aspen feels smart here.

One person speaks too softly for Aspen to hear. Another starts twice, dissatisfied with the wording. A child near the lower terrace asks an adult whether watching the trees counts; the adult tells them they have no glass and should not be this close.

Each completed witness adds weight below Aspen. En gathers the triangle, the missing Ainm, the child, the strange flight, and the premature fruit into one affected event.

“Ír lay our witness below Hermit,” Hierophant says. “Let what returned remain in shape.”

Many voices join ír . The people do not disappear into one another, but their speech reaches Aspen as a single lower pressure. Rooci above. The alleged return held against her title. Witnesses beneath.

The language makes a scale and leaves Aspen no position outside it.

The clear knives touch skin. Dozens of small cuts open red. Blue-green moisture gathers at their thinnest edges. For a moment the crowd holds both colors—warm red wells in palms and fingers, aqua lines beside it—then the first drops leave living skin.

Black repeats across the hollow. With each person's preparations before cutting, the blood does not hesitate. It runs to the ends of stained fingers as they fold the edges of their circles. Triangles form. Dark lines continue each gesture beyond the hand and fine spirals curl from the completed shapes while the witnesses speak the final words.

No two are identical. One spiral winds so tightly around its triangle that almost no empty space remains. Another opens broad and level, placing its speaker well below Aspen. A third breaks halfway around, resumes from a different finger, and leaves a visible gap. Two people beside each other produce spirals that lean together until their outer curves touch. One witness’s blood keeps drawing backward toward an older woman behind him even while his triangle points at Hermit.

All of them refer to Aspen.

Warmth gathers around her without a sun. Air curls over the upper wings, circles beneath the lower pair, and returns from directions no clean draft could take. Farther mushroom clusters lean toward the terrace. The closest caps contract until aqua survives only in their deepest gills.

Aspen feels each black triangle find the circle around Hermit. Some strike it and settle. Others slide along its edge before locating a place. The public searches for an Ainm again, and this time the reaching pressure does not pass through her as vacancy.

People exhale.

Aspen doesn’t know what they find, but it was not her. She wonders if their search returned any of her at all.

Hierophant’s hand grows heavier on her shoulder as the last spirals close. His story no longer belongs only to his mouth. The warmth, the altered air, the black shapes, and the crowd’s relieved faces have begun carrying it for him.

Aspen looks at them and tries once more to find people. The differences in their weight arrive first, empty of anything intimate. One person smiles with the tight pride Jamie wears after doing something dangerous correctly. Another watches Aspen with an upward tilt of the chin and parted lips that her mind supplies as reverence. A woman near the terrace gives her the careful smile Aspen used whenever Jamie looked frightened and she needed him to believe she was not. Someone farther down arranges pity across their face in the same softened lines Mother used before saying everything would be fine. A young man is plainly afraid—the tendons in his wrists stand out around his witness glass—but he lifts his bloody triangle higher when the people beside him begin celebrating.

Aspen recognizes every expression by borrowing from home, but none of these faces are recognizable.

They remain colored. Their skin keeps undertones Aspen could not name; their wings hold patterns and repairs and uneven edges; black heartwood stays distinct behind them. Hinter refuses to dissolve into the gray that took her forest.

She can measure how strongly each stranger affects the gathering, and she cannot reach a life beyond the arrangement in front of her. Familiar expressions settle over people she cannot smell. Her tongue presses hard against the backs of her teeth. The next breath shakes at the top of her chest, but by the time she draws another, even that has flattened. The crowd can be wounded by Hierophant, persuaded by blood, frightened into ceremony, and she watches their reactions arrive with no more access to the people producing them than she had to the gray leaves touching one another.

The woman takes Aspen’s hand. Her fingers are cold. One palm remains wrapped; the clean hand closes around Aspen’s without asking and trembles there. Tears have crossed the woman’s lower lashes now, making narrow tracks beside her nose. She looks at Aspen while the crowd addresses Hermit. Or she looks at Lyra.

Aspen’s mouth supplies the careful smile regardless. It is the same one she just found on the stranger below: corners raised gently, lips held closed so worry cannot escape between them. Aspen has used it on Jamie. Mother used it on her. On Lyra’s face, given back to a woman Aspen still does not know, it feels tight on her lips.

Three of Aspen’s wings remain controlled behind her. The upper wing that has repeatedly turned toward the woman flinches away. Its supporting branch rotates inward before the woman moves. The orange membrane snaps tight; painted green and red leave the warmth beside her and fold toward Aspen’s back. The movement begins after fear, not before it.

The woman feels Aspen’s hand tense and sees the wing retreat. Her grip loosens.

I did that.

Fool has not raised witness glass. He has spent Hierophant’s proclamation and the entire ritual hovering beside the sideways tree with his blindfold aimed at the back of Hierophant’s head. When the last collective words fade, he turns toward Aspen.

“If you were born-l again before first light…” He pauses, apparently arranging the consequence. “Then aren’t you a Sleeper Baby, Hermit?”

Aspen’s brows furrow. “What?”

“Or, well… if you were born today, then maybe we could say it’s your birth of the day.”

Aspen stares at Fool.

He waits. The lower edge of his blindfold descends by a fraction as his chin tips toward his chest. No apology follows. “Was that wrong?”

Aspen’s careful smile disappears. She pulls her hand from the woman’s. Hierophant’s palm remains on her shoulder until Aspen shrugs hard enough to move it.

The woman starts to reach again. All four of Aspen’s wings recoil. The one that once leaned toward her retreats first and fastest, opening just far enough to put its raised edge between them.

“I wasn’t born here.”

Fool tilts his head. “But—”

“I think I want to be alone.”

“Hermit,” Hierophant begins.

Aspen looks directly into his pupil-less eyes. His mouth remains open around the objection. His gaze lifts, drops to the crowd, then returns to Aspen. The old ridges along his cheeks shift with a quiet breath. He steps aside.

Fool pushes away from the sideways branch and clears the opening. His blindfold follows Aspen. Confusion keeps his mouth slightly open; something near apology draws it closed, but he does not pretend to understand enough to speak.

The woman moves when Aspen does.

Aspen’s arms shiver. She does not turn or raise a hand. The upper wings between them become rigid, and the woman stops before her first full step reaches the curtain.

“I just need to think for a second.”

Aspen walks into Lyra’s home. She does not run this time. The black threads from her wing-eyes still trail above and behind her, thinning as they enter the dark. She passes through the first curtain slowly enough that its weighted edge drags across one ankle.

Behind her, Hierophant gives the movement its public meaning.

“Let Hermit close.”

The curtain falls between Aspen and the terrace. She crosses the main room with warm heartwood under her feet and the gray moth waiting beyond the second curtain.

Before she reaches it, a voice outside repeats, “Let Hermit close.”

At first she can distinguish them.

Old. Young. Near. Far.

Then they chant again. Same words. Same cadence. Same position beneath the title. Her title.

One voice becomes another.

Another becomes another.

By the time Aspen reaches the second curtain, the hollow behind her is full of people saying the same thing, and the difference between one voice and the next is missing.