“We must, at all times, cleave to the teachings of the Holy Tree. Doubt is impurity, doubt is weakness, doubt is the crack in our heart which lets corruption in.”

“Yes Teacher!”

“In the teachings of the Holy Tree is recorded the wisdom which saved us and raised us up from the fallen world to our life under the protection of Divine Mazana’s blessed illumination.”

“Yes Teacher!”

“Should you feel doubt creeping in, should questions and uncertainties assail you, you know what you must do, do you not children?”

“Pray to the Holy Tree.”

“Confess our sins.”

“Do penance.”

“And through the suffering of penance will you find the light of the Holy Tree shining upon you once more.”

– Notes from the First Tender’s classes to the first generation of children born within the Garden.

I expected my intruder to be offended. She was from beyond the Thicket Wall and I knew everything beyond the wall was broken and monstrous. Or I thought I’d known that. Being called broken and monstrous seemed like the sort of thing someone would take offense at. That would have made things really simple. If she’d fought me, I would have…I would have…

I don’t know.

I should have fought her.

I should have raised an alarm and battled against her like all the life in the Garden depended on my victory, but I was so far past that doing that I felt like I’d stepped into someone else’s life.

No backsliding now. Please.

I almost chuckled at that. I couldn’t backslide far enough to return to my life if I was greased head to toe in Glowflower oil.

My intruder didn’t fight me though.

She was the one who chuckled.

And then laughed in my face.

“You’re not kidding are you?” she said said before her laughter got out of control. “You think…you think the wall is the end of the world?”

“Well, no,” I said, lying to avoid admitting how stupid I obviously was.

“What about all the food you eat? Where do you think that comes from?”

“From the Holy Tree?” I mean, the food we ate had to come from the Holy Tree. Where else could it grow?

“Even the meat? Does the tree grow meat bulbs?”

“No. Of course not. The meat comes from the Root Farms.”

“Root Farms? And come on, you don’t have any farm land in here. There’s nowhere your tree could grow anything inside the wall if it wanted to, much less have animals grazing for food.”

“No. The storehouses. The tree creates the food in the…”

I stopped as a question I’d swallowed at four years old belched itself back into the forefront of my mind.

It’s surprising more people don’t ask how the food gets in the storehouses, but then I suppose you’ve been trained to accept miracles as your just due.

“Are you really just figuring this out? I mean…really?” She looked like accepting that I was stupid as I clearly was was inconceivable.

“I…no. What did you come here for? What’s out there? Who are you?”

Was I falling apart? Nah. I’d already fallen apart. Was I losing coherency and spiraling into madness? Nope. I couldn’t be going somewhere I already was. 

I mean, nothing about the day had made sense so far, so losing my mind was clearly just going with the flow. 

Maybe this was Divine Mazana’s will?

Sure, that was it! It was a test. All I had to do to get back in the Holy Tree’s good graces was…was…

The thought of the penance I would be required to perform hit me and I felt sick. Not from fear though, not like I was supposed to. No, doing penance would be a violation. I knew a much better approach than penance.

Burn it to the ground.

Burn everything.

Did nothing made sense? Well ashes would make a whole lot of sense.

What about what’s yours? You’d give all that up too?

There was a gravity to that question that pulled me back together. My demon wasn’t idly chatting. What she had asked was somehow, in that moment, the most important question in the world and I could feel my whole life turning on its fulcrum.

Ashes on one hand.

And on the other?

The unknown.

No.

The future. My future.

I could feel the fire rising in me. I could fracture and let it loose. I could make everything make sense again by burning it all down into a very sensible layer of silt that a new world might spring from.

But I wouldn’t be there to see it.

I would be at peace.

I would be gone, past the madness, past the anxiety I’d carried for so long, past everything.

And what would I have?

Nothing.

No, we weren’t going to throw away everything.

The future was mine.

Mine.

No matter how long I’d been lied to.

No matter what they’d tried to make me into.

No matter what they did, I wasn’t going to let them take what was mine.

Strangely, the anger I felt worked to keep the fire in check.

Because they were both mine. My fire and my anger.

They were both me!

My intruder had been answering me with something like words, but the rush of flame within me had drowned it out.

I wanted to hear her words, but too much else was roaring through me so I held up my hand for her to stop for moment as years upon years of the insanity I’d been living with came crashing down around me.

Had I known this would happen if I confronted her? Had I wanted it to happen?

Those weren’t the questions I needed answers to.

Why she’d come into the Garden? What she planned to do? I didn’t need those answers either, at least not as much as I needed the answer to the one question I’d been avoiding for far, far too long.

Are you mine? I asked without words.

Am I? came my demon’s answer.

My demon.

Mine.

Yes. The word didn’t explode out from me. It exploded inwards, etching each letter onto my soul so indelibly that I would never be able to deny them again.

Never be able to deny her.

I wasn’t a good Sylvan.

And I wasn’t possessed.

I was the possessor.

And what did I possess?

Flame and exaltation leapt from me. My hands twisted into claws and scales slid down my arms as wings flared from my back and strength I’d been crushing with denial since the night when I’d found her ripped through my whole body. My strength. Her strength. 

My goddess’s strength.

YES!

Her relief was so palpable, it drove me to me knees.

I was afraid that was going to take much longer, but still, that was a long time.

You’re really mine? I asked, tears of flame tumbling down my cheeks.

As you are mine.

I fell to my hands and knees and vast wings wrapped around me, sheltering me as they’d always been ready to.

I was losing so much as the ramifications of what I’d chosen shot through me, but what I found in the wreckage of the life I’d known was so much more.

I could feel that even if I didn’t understand it, could sense the critical importance of not just finding the god I carried within me, but the small precious thing that was me. The real me. The me I chose to be.

When I rose again, no claws adorned my hands and no scales shielded my arms. The wings on my back were gone as well, or perhaps it would be better to say they were hidden.

And my intruder?

She was positively gleeful.

“I knew it! I knew it, I knew it!” She danced from one foot to the other, a smile as wide as the sky gleaming on her face.

And then she frowned and turned a bit to say, “Shut up. Okay, yeah, your idea was a good one. I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t think it was though. So there.”

“Umm, who are you….” I started to ask, hoping I hadn’t driven my intruder crazy with the tiny little life shattering revelation I’d been overwhelmed by.

That would be me, a new voice whispered in my ear.

Umbrielle? My god sounded surprised, which was an odd thing for a god to be but then my lessons on the nature and abilities of the gods were demonstrably flawed so who was I to say?

Draconia? I thought, I hoped, is it really you though?

Of course! Who else would I be you silly shadow!

That sounds like you, but the Draconia I know would never have allowed herself to become the trapped by an overgrown shrub.

Why don’t we try fighting like we used to and you’ll see just how much like my old self I still am.

Okay, now that does sound like you.

Brat.

Demon.

Flirt.

Can you blame me? I’ve been missing you for centuries you scaly beast.

“Should we let you two have the chapel to yourselves?” my intruder asked.

“You can hear them too?” I asked.

“Trust me, hearing them isn’t the problem.”

Now, now Theia, Jilya probably needs a moment, and our help.

Umbrielle is right. Can you cloak us? The shrub is stupid but its master is annoyingly adept. I wouldn’t have put off Jilya’s revelation for the world, but he can’t have failed to notice it.

Draconia. Please. You do remember whom you’re speaking to, do you not? I cloaked us the moment we entered the chapel. The only reason Jilya was able to see Theia at all was we’d caught a hint of your presence.

In the distance, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps.

A lot of approaching footsteps.

Umbrielle, my dearest, most hated, most beloved Umbrielle, exactly how certain are you that your shadows could have hidden a True Blessing. My only True Blessing, I must point out, in centuries and the only one which I am presently maintaining.

The step grew closer and I knew who they were.

The Tenders. Four of them.

And at least a squad of conscripts.

Muscle power and magic enough to solve any problem within the grove.

Well, maybe any problem.

Fire burns a whole lot of things after all.

You’re only Blessing?

I am…I was lost. I am not what I once was.

Oh Draconia, none of us are.

Almost none of us.

You know of her? You can sense her?

My bones are the bones of the world. My blood is the blood of life. I am the Treasure and the Guardian. I am…I lost. I lost and she stepped in to protect us all. You stepped in.

I’ve only ever been a part of my greater self, Umbrielle said and I felt an impression of her ‘greater self’ that stretched out wider than the sky. 

Well, now I’m only a fragment of my true self as well, a tarnished treasure at best.

“No.” Anger snapped the word out of me. “You’re not tarnished. You’re mine and no one gets to abuse you. Ever.”

Ah, blossoming faith, Umbrielle said. Always so fierce.

“Oh yeah, I definitely sounded like that,” Theia, my intruder, said, meaning precisely none of the words she spoke.

You express your faith in your own manner. I find it charming, Umbrielle said.

“I’m going to need some explanations, a lot of explanations,” I said as the marching steps grew much too close for comfort. “But we need to leave. Now.”

“Aww, I was wondering if we were going to get to fight again,” Theia said.

“We will in about thirty seconds if we’re not out of here.”

“Ooo!” she said, gazing at me hungrily only to stop as her ears twitched up. “Oh, yeah, you’re right, we need to be elsewhere.”

We should be cloaked from them, Umbrielle said.

We should have been safe from them two centuries ago. Let’s not make the same mistake of underestimating them again, shall we?

“Do you know a better hiding spot?” Theia asked, stepping back close to me.

I wracked my brain for a moment trying to think of one, which was challenging since we were already at one of the safest places I’d been able to think of.

“Wait, yeah, I do know of a place no one will be at now. I don’t think we can get there though,” I said, trying to picture even the most unreasonable route that might get us to safety.

“That’s not a problem. Just hold it in your mind and hold onto me.”

And then she hugged me.

And then we vanished.

“In all things, we look first to the defense of the sacred tree. This is why the Thicket Wall has no gates or other weak points, much as we must eliminate the weak points within and among us.”

“But teacher, what could attack Holy Mazana?”

“Our enemies are debased mockeries of life, but without constant maintenance, even the most resilient of defenses can grow weak and frail. Ever and anon those beyond the Thicket Wall pressed against it and burrow below, seeking any ingress they can find or manufacture.”

“They’re really stupid aren’t they? I mean if they get in here the Holy Mazana will just be like ‘Die!’ and they’ll all die, right?”

“Indeed. The sacred tree’s prowess is unmatched and uncontestable. For everything there is a price though. Were the sacred tree to interfere, it would mean that we had failed in our duty. Become impure in our dedication, and what happens to the impure?”

“They’re tossed over the wall!” “They’re chopped up and chucked outside!” “They get sent away”

“Yes. We cast out the impure because where we receive the gifts of the sacred tree and nourish it with our love and devotion, the impure take and take and only give back sickness and disease.”

“I wanna fight the Impure!”

“And someday you will. When you are old enough to be called to service, you will stand as the sacred tree’s first bulwark with your faith and your purity as the truest of shields.”

– an except from Children’s Lessons for Boys, as delivered by the First Tender.

Golden eyes were locked onto my own and it felt like I could fall into them forever.

“You smell different,” my intruder said, searching for Holy Mazana only knew what in my features. “Better.”

“I purified this morning,” I said.

Because that was reasonable. Words hadn’t totally escaped me and I was fully in control of the situation.

“Hmm, no, not like that. You’re…something else?”

“No I’m not,” I lied. “There’s just something wrong with your nose.”

Could people smell the bad decisions I’d been making?

Could they tell I’d broken faith with…with everything?

Did I smell impure?

My expression slipped out of my control for a moment as the soul crushing horror of everyone being able to see what I was pounded my head with hammer blow after hammer blow.

“Rude,” my intruder said, and twisted her head to side to look at me from a different angle. “I said you smelled better now.”

“I don’t…listen, how I smell doesn’t matter. What are you doing here?”

There! I’d gotten a question out. The question!

“Looking for you.”

Which was not what the answer was supposed to be.

“Me?”

“Well, sort of. I didn’t think I was going to find anyone like me in here, but what is life if not a big old basket of surprises, right?”

“Uh, I’m not like you at all,” I said, the words instinctively leaping from my lips with zero input or consideration from my brain.

“Few people are, I’m a hard act to measure up to.” And then she struck a pose! 

“No. I mean, you’re not supposed to be here! If anyone finds you they’ll kill you, or worse, toss you over the Thicket Wall!”

Why that would be worse for someone who clearly was not Sylvan and therefor clearly had no place in the Garden wasn’t something I gave any consideration to, it was just the most horrible fate possible.

Right?

From my intruder’s confused expression, it was possible that wasn’t quite as certain as I’d been led to believe though.

“Don’t worry beautiful, I can land on my feet. I’m real talented like that.”

“Land on your…?” It was my turn to be confused. “You’ll be eaten.”

“Eaten? By what?” Her confusion looked to be, impossibly, as deep as my own.

“The things. The monsters. You know the…” I stopped.

And my mind nearly snapped.

My intruder wasn’t a native of the Garden. There’d never been a Sylvan ever who looked like her.

Which meant she had to come from somewhere.

Somewhere that was Not The Garden.

But I’d been told that all of the ‘Not The Garden’ places were filled with death monsters and despair beasts.

Girls with golden eyes who looked like they were my age and had about a thousand times the self confidence could not survive in places that were filled with death monsters and despair beasts.

“Where are you from,” I asked. I already knew the answer but I had to hear it. 

I didn’t want to. In fact, I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t process the words I knew she was about to speak. 

They couldn’t have been lying about THAT to us.

Not to all of us.

Not all this time.

“Goldflower Borough, Low Town,” she said, searching even more intently. “In the Third Wall.”

The.

What?

“Third…?” I started to ask what that could possibly mean, when I heard voices in the distance.

Far off in the distance.

Sorry. You needed the warning.

People were coming.

I was hearing people walking to the Chapel from much farther away than should have been possible.

“Much farther away” however was still far too close.

Without an instants hesitation for thought or panic, I reached forward, grabbed my intruder and hauled her onto the seat beside me as I rose to block her from view by anyone coming in the door.

Then I started singing.

Glory to the Holy Tree. Glory to the Pure and Faithful. Glory and Glory and Glory to Our Garden and All It’s Righteous Children!

And to the liar who had to practice alone.

It wasn’t hard to put a warble into the song to make it sound like I was practicing and needed the space to myself.

Over my song I heard the footsteps come to a halt before they reached the door.

Which clearly wasn’t possible. I should have drowned that out with my singing.

Please, do give me more more credit than that. Even your silly shrub could manage a gift that properly sharpened your senses.

I wanted to say I couldn’t be hearing what I was because I would never willingly use a demon’s gift, but even I wasn’t that stupid. If it meant staying undiscovered, I would happily accept the ability to hear trouble coming before it got to me, and offer a silent thank you to whomever or whatever provided me the chance to continue living.

If I had a heart, I believe I would be having a heart attack now.

I sang a few more verses, repeating myself as though I was practicing desperately to get the song right. The desperation part was real enough to be convincing it seemed since the conversation between the approaching people resumed as their footsteps retreated from the chapel without venturing inside at all.

“Thank the roots!” I gasped as soon as they were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear my song stop.

My intruder was sitting beside me, staring at me like I’d turned into something at once horrifying and fascinating.

“You’re strong than you look,” she said, making no move to get away or to attack me.

“Sorry,” I said, remembering that I’d grabbed her and plopped her down pretty rudely.

“No. No, that was interesting. I…hmm, and your smell. It was complex. What did you do there?” she asked, her whole body still and her eyes focused on me to the exclusion of all else.

“I sang something like the song they tried to teach us today,” I said. Why I was answering her questions, I had no idea. I was the one who needed answers, but losing control of the conversation made it like the rest of my life, which had apparently spun completely out of my control at some point.

“Why?” my intruder asked.

“I didn’t want anyone to come in here,” I said. “If they thought I was practicing alone, most people would leave the chapel for me to work on worshipping properly.”

“But, hmm, how can I explain this.” She looked away from me, searching for words in a manner which felt very familiar to me in that moment. “When you sang, what I’ve been calling a ‘bad smell’ came back but it was subtle. If you had my Blessing, you’d probably experience it in some other manner but, for me, foul magics, or corrupted divine power, those smell bad.”

“Foul magic? I wasn’t working any magic though,” I said, drifting right back into the confusion zone.

“Magic’s not always intentional. That song you sang though? There was magic in it. Ugly magic.”

“It was just a song of praise. Everyone sings them.” Though, to be fair, I did sing them well enough to be in the choir for Blueshine, and this wasn’t the first time someone had called my voice ‘magical’, though usually it was just people being nice or flattering.

“You were praising the big tree though right?” she asked.

“Of course.” Praising ourselves was a sin worthy of public humiliation.

“Okay, that explains why it smelled bad then. The thing is though, you also smelled really good too. Like actual Divine Blessing good.”

“I have a few of Holy Mazana’s gifts, but I wasn’t using any then,” I said.

I wasn’t using Holy Mazana’s gifts but…

Go ahead and complete that thought whenever you like, I’ll be here waiting.

But…no.

“The tree? Yeah, no, anything you get from the tree is corrupted as hell. It all comes from one of them.” She rose to look me eye to eye and then leaned in slightly closer to give me a sniff. “You…sorry, I know the smell thing doesn’t mean anything to you. I can sense, if that sounds better, something old from you.”

I was tempted to say ‘I’m no older than you’, but that wasn’t what she was talking about.

“Not something bad. Not the corrupted stuff that’s all over this place. This is something real. Something, I don’t know I haven’t smelled..sensed anything like it, but I think it might be related to what I’m here for.”

Oh look, a thought that wasn’t the one I wanted to avoid! I jumped all over that!

“What are you here for? This is so dangerous.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said and then added to no one in particular. “No, this was all your idea. I was just the idiot who volunteered. Hey, don’t blame Kalkit. Sure we listened to him, but can you blame us?”

I was silent.

There were easy, obvious questions I could ask.

Should ask.

Things like “who are you talking to”.

Take your time.

“Sorry,” my intruder said, shaking her head. “It can be distracting to be one of the Blessed.”

“The Blessed?”

I was not a good Sylvan. I had been possessed by a demon for years. My life was a shattered window hanging together for a moment before the wind of literally anyone’s awareness brushed against me. There was no version of the world in which I was ‘blessed’.

“It’s a whole thing,” my intruder said. “Turns out if you make the mistake of having a bit of faith and being a good match, you can become the home for a god, or a piece of one usually.”

“The gods are dead though. They failed the world.” Again my mouth opened and spit out words which had been driven into me since I could understand that syllables had meaning.

“Dead? Yeah. Sorta. Most of them. Their gods though, so in addition to being colossal pains in the ass, they’re also kind of a part of us, the Blessed and the rest. So if we’re here, then so are they.”

“But…wait…I don’t understand. If the gods still existed, they would be monsters wouldn’t they? I mean, everything beyond the Thicket Wall is broken isn’t it?”

“Beautiful, this whole world is broken. You, me, everybody. That’s why I’m here. See my God? She’s been protecting us, all of  us, and I think she’d like to take a break sometime before the end of eternity, so it’s our job to start putting things back together.”

“Have you given any consideration to the eventuality of rebellion?”

“That seems more like a problem you would encounter in your ‘Mount Gloria’. Or have you reconsidered my suggestion of organizing your servants into a worshipful mass?”

“Oh, my people will worship me. Me and not some silly overgrown plant. But rituals? Holy days? Structured observances? Mandatory public appearances? Ugh. No. Far too much work, far too little reward.”

“But the grace we can collect…!”

“I assure you, there are other, far less bothersome methods of extracting grace from a population.”

“Perhaps, but without their love you will always be in danger of the rebellion you are asking me about.”

“Love does not last, but fear? Fear can live on forever.”

“And you think fear will prevent them from turning against you?”

“Not in the slightest. They will all be against me. I will simply assure that they are set against each other even more strongly. That is a stratagem which will be closed to you should you desire their love however.”

“And should that fear fail and they find the courage to turn against you?”

“Visiting destruction on the occasional overly brave fool is a delight I look forward to with some glee.”

“Whereas I will not even need to lift a finger to destroy those who lose their faith in me. My people will strike them down for me and sing my praises as they do.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth and Sisarai discussing minor population maintenance issues prior to the Sunfall

The Garden isn’t a small place. In a sense it was the size of the whole world, given that the rest of the world was a sterile wasteland of death and despair.

Or at least that was what I’d been taught.

The things beyond the Thicket Wall were supposed to be the shattered pieces of the spirits of the Old World, remnants of the failure of the dead gods. By doctrine, they were near mindless machines of malice and destruction. If we could see over the Thicket Walls, we were told that all we would bear witness to was endless despair.

I’d never questioned that.

I’d also never questioned the idea that the Garden was beset by enemies from all sides, including below. Certainly, the enemies had to be real because they killed the defenders who were drafted with agonizing regularity.

So, who were they?

Not just broken spirits randomly lashing out at anyone who came close.

The veterans had plenty of stories of facing enemy troops, and the sorts of daring maneuvers each side pulled against the other (well, ‘daring’ for our forces, ‘underhanded’ for the enemies, because of course they were the hateful aggressors and we were the valiant defenders of the Holy Tree).

In not one of the stories though, and definitely in none of the doctrines, had our enemies ever been depicted as capable of speech.

They weren’t people.

They were monsters.

Which raised a question that filled my mind as I stalked back towards my home.

You just noticed that ‘your Intruder’ talked to you, didn’t you?

I’m not stupid.

What do you think the odds are that you’ll remember that?

Demons are never helpful.

I waited a moment on that thought, but of course no demonic help was forthcoming. She couldn’t find my Intruder for me.

Be very grateful of that.

My capacity for gratitude was as severely diminished as my capacity for rational thought.

Which might have been why I changed course.

I’d been heading home because that was the last place I’d seen my quarry, but she clearly wasn’t there.

Searching the entire Garden wasn’t an option since, as I’d noted, the Garden is impossibly large.

Also, people were already searching for her. 

Lots of people. 

Maybe the Tenders had focused the search in Blueshine. Maybe someone in the borough had caught sight of my Intruder, briefly, and the Tenders had narrowed their search so they wouldn’t alarm the entire Garden.

But that wasn’t how things worked.

Alarming everyone was absolutely their first course of action in most situations.

The True Sight spell they’d tried to teach us was proof of that. It was obviously a dangerous tool that they’d rushed to put in our hands at a time that could not have been coincidental with my Intruder showing up.

That the Tenders were keeping things far quieter than usual screamed that they were afraid of something.

But what could they be afraid of?

Holy Mazana hadn’t abandoned them.

Wait, had it?

I stopped and glanced up at the divine tree that was our sole sky.

I’d blasphemed against my deity, and I could feel the terror and the regret that was waiting for when I had a single instant to consider my actions, but my heart hadn’t abandoned the Holy Tree.

Only it’s minions.

Was god responsible for those?

Or were we supposed to listen to what the First Tender had taught us and work out for ourselves when people were falling short of the grace we’d been taught to cultivate?

I was pretty certain that was not how it was intended to work.

Wisdom and proper judgment were a gift given to us by those who were closer to Holy Mazana. If we thought we knew better than they did, then we were guilty of the sin of Hubris.

The same sin which destroyed the Old World.

I knew I was damned. I knew I wasn’t a good Sylvan. Even thinking the thoughts I was proved that.

Inside though a little spark of the fires of damnation still burned.

And the memory of saving Pulia lingered.

Who I had been was desperately trying to hold me back.

Desperately trying to bring me back to my senses.

Desperately trying to save my life, the life I’d spent so long defending.

I loved her. That girl I’d been.

She’d worked so hard. 

She’d endured so much.

I couldn’t throw away what I had. Not after all she’d invested in it.

“Sister, are you well?” The Tender had been walking past and should have continued, but something had given me away.

“I am blessed to stand in the light of Holy Mazana,” I said, injecting the kind of quiet cheer into my voice that was expected from a devout and faithful aspiring minister.

“What brings you to this place?” the Tender asked, his voice all concern, and his motives clouded.

“My class was released early after a mishap during our instruction. I was going to return home, but I did not wish to place a burden on my household. I thought to find a secluded place for prayer so that I could commune with Holy Mazana and understand how I might serve better when we are called on again tomorrow.”

It was a good lie, and I delivered it without a break or a pause.

Since it was what I was supposed to say, and since the Tender would be able to verify it later if he chose, he didn’t question it further.

“The Red Bark chapel is approved for silent prayer until nightfall,” he said and gestured in the direction of the chapel which I’d clearly already been walking towards.

“Yes Tender. Thank you Tender. If I may ask, is there a chapel approved for song? Our instruction today required an invocation.” I didn’t need to say any more than that. In fact I didn’t dare to. I didn’t need to explain that trying to think of a place where I could sing was why I’d stopped along the road. I also didn’t need to explain to him why I would be looking to practice a skill my class had clearly failed at. A lifetime of subterfuge had taught me that the best lies were the briefest and fewest ones.

“The Grey Deeps chapel will be empty for the next few hours, but you should go to the Red Bark chapel.” It didn’t have to be phrased as an order to be an order.

He was going to check in at the Red Bark chapel later. If he remembered. Either I would be there, or there would be word of me having been there, or he would know I’d been lying.

The smart move would have been to go to the Red Bark chapel, wait a couple of hours, and then leave to continue my search.

I couldn’t be sure I had a couple of hours though.

It felt like I didn’t even have a couple of minutes, but I knew that couldn’t be true I had to will that not to be true. 

I had time.

Not a lot of time. 

But some.

I put my thoughts together as well as I could as I walked to the Red Bark chapel.

And then kept assembling them into something adjacent to a plan as I walked right on by the Red Bark chapel and continued on to the Grey Deeps.

I’d been to the Grey Deeps chapel before. It was where the Blueshine borough celebrated its Renewal Day remembrances, and I’d sung in all of them since I was old enough to join the choir.

Seeing it again, empty and quiet, brought back memories of comfort and safety. The Renewal Day celebrations had been wonderful as a child, mostly for the treats admittedly. Later on though I’d understood the emphasis on remembering those who’d come before us, and had appreciated how the crowd of people kept attention away from me.

Alone in the chapel, those memories swirled around me and seeped in to give the “old me” added weight. The temptation to turn away from all the madness and crawl back into the life I’d worked so hard to build seemed so reasonable, and so right. 

My mother had made me a new tunic for each of the choirs I’d sung in. Could I walk away from that? My family had been so proud of my singing. Could I leave behind the love of everyone I knew? I’d felt like a part of something so much bigger than myself as part of the choir. Could I turn away from everyone who’d sung with me. Everyone who’d supported me?

And wasn’t that what demons did? Led you astray. Made you ungrateful for all the blessings you’d been given. Turned you away from the trust and love that had been freely shared with you.

Except that it hadn’t been free.

The tunics had been a coin paid in service to my mother’s prestige among her friends. My family’s pride hadn’t been in me but rather in the glory they could claim for being a part of a ‘prosperous house’. 

And feeling a part of something bigger?

The choir was a perfect reflection of my life. If I was a part of something bigger it was because I performed as I’d been instructed to. The words we sang weren’t my words, and I wasn’t the one who chose the notes or the tempo. The only role I was allowed to play, the only role that held a place for me in the choir, or in life, was The One Who Surrenders. 

The One Who Is What Someone Else Desires That She Be.

I sat down on one of benches at the back of the chapel. I could sing, or I could scream, cry or break out in hysterical laughter. I was free to rage or go mad and no one would hear or know. It was the perfect spot to put myself together and choose my future with a clear head.

If I’d been alone.

“You are a puzzle.” The speaker was behind me, hidden in the shadows at the back of the chapel, but I didn’t need to turn around to see that.

Or to know who was talking to me.

No one else sounded like my Intruder did.

“They told me you would be the first to let the hunters know where I’d been. But you didn’t.” She walked towards me as she spoke.

“They told me that you might hunt me yourself. Which it seems you did.” She stalked down the aisle beside me and I caught sight of that strange, fluid grace she moved with.

“They told me that you would make yourself bait for a trap, and that all you would do, no, all you could do, was to lure me to my destruction.” She walked down the row of the benches in front of me and stopped so she could sit opposite from me, facing me with her golden eyes.

“But that’s not what you’ve done, is it?” she asked, her eyes searching from something in mine.

“No. It isn’t,” I said.

It wasn’t hard. I’d made my choice.

“Our hands are not our own. Our hands are the hands which serve Holy Mazana.”

“All glory to Holy Mazana. May our hands perform your divine work.”

“Our tongues are not our own. Our tongues are the tongues which give voice to Holy Mazna.”

“All glory to Holy Mazana. May our tongues speak only your divine words.”

“Our eyes are not our own. Our eyes are the eyes which watch the world for Holy Mazana.”

“All glory to Holy Mazana. May our eyes keep watch for your enemies, always and everywhere, till Garden’s End.”

“Till Garden’s End. Amen.”

– The Recitation of Unity spoken at every service to the “divine tree”.

I wasn’t sure what I’d reached out to and I didn’t care what dark power I’d opened myself to. Not in that moment. What was happening to Pulia, my classmate who should have been my role model, was an abomination. It wasn’t just that it shouldn’t be happening. It should have been impossible. It shouldn’t ever have been a part of this or any other world. It was wrong, and the power that I’d called into myself through rage and fear was more than happy to destroy it.

The power took the form of flames, because what else could it be, and the flame was merciless.

It was gleeful.

It raged and hated with an abandon that pushed the entire class away.

Against the power of the Holy Tree it should have been nothing more than a dying candle spark. I should have been nothing more. Just a flickering, insignificant wisp, powerless to even be noticed by something so vast and eternal and godly.

But that wasn’t the story the flame told itself.

The flame didn’t care about how weak it was. It simply burned.

For all the roaring madness at the heart of it though, it didn’t burn out of control. It wasn’t wanton destruction. It had a purpose and a focus. Its searing heat devoured the vines and branches which were breaking Pulia. Its maw of blistering fire opened wide and tore the warped projection of Holy Mazana first into pieces and then into ash.

But it never touched Pulia.

The flames were rage against what was being done to her. To injure her further was unthinkable.

It felt like we baked under the glare of the flames heat for hours but in real time I’m sure it was less than a minute before they subsided leaving Pulia fractured and crumpled on the ground but free at last.

Once again, someone with more sense than me – Delia, I had at least enough awareness this time to notice who it was – commanded us, “She’s free! Healing! Now!”

That was all that almost two dozen Aspiring Ministers needed. We knew how to heal. We were good at it. And Pulia was one of us.

The damage she’d sustained was considerable, but the restorative power that over twenty healers can bring to bear when we do not care about exhausting ourselves was frankly as frightening as the flames had been.

Pulia wasn’t just restored to health. We raised her up in a column of verdant light, pouring so much rejuvenation into her that she literally glowed for a moment.

And then we brought her down to rest.

Delia was there to hold Pulia as Pulia descended and we turned from invoking our gifts to fussing over our formerly injured classmate to make sure we didn’t need to hit her with even more healing.

We did not. She was fine.

Well, except for the part where she was sobbing uncontrollably into Delia’s shoulder.

We’d healed her body. She was in perfect health, probably better than when she’d walked into class in fact.

Healing a body and healing a mind are very different things though. Magic could restore bones and muscle, could close wounds and restore lost blood. Taking away memories however? If there was magic for that, our instructors had never breathed a whisper of it and Holy Mazana had never gifted any of us with anything even vaguely in that domain.

One of the few wise choices they ever made.

Thanking my demon was impossible. Demons didn’t want our thanks, only our destruction.

But I was still grateful. I shouldn’t have been. Using that power had definitely damned me. But I was already damned, and it had saved Pulia, so…

So I didn’t care. 

It was worth it.

Even thinking that made my stomach tumble end over end.

“We should get back to our seats,” Delia said. “Instructor Garvas will be back with assistance soon and will want to see us in proper order.”

Of course. Of course. Put the mask back on. Be good. Be composed. Everything was okay. We didn’t have to be a problem at all.

I watched as a sea of expression shifted from shock and concern mixed with relief to silent, inoffensive, placidity. It was easy to do. Well, easy for me. I’d spent a lot of time working on my mask. It was simpler to put on that my night linens were.

How did the others manage it so well though? None of them had a lifetime of practice at hiding who they were? Right?

Not an easy thing to talk with someone about.

But why would anyone have needed to hide like me unless they were possessed too?

Did you learn to hide your emotions the moment we met?

Or had I been practicing that already…

Had that been what I’d been taught to do my whole life?

I cast my eyes down, like many of my classmates were doing, adopting a demeanor of prayerful introspection and calm, as ideas I’d always discounted loomed large enough to cast a shadow on all of my memories.

Had I ever known my classmates at all?

Did I know anyone at all?

I’d been focused on making sure no one knew me. Dedicated to carefully monitoring my behavior and reactions. Had I failed to notice the women around me doing the same thing?

An image of my father flashed through my mind. Sitting in prayer. Or was it “prayer”. Did I have any real idea what his thoughts centered on while we were praying together?

My mother seemed so clearly who she presented herself to be. She was so consistent in her demands that we be ‘good Sylvans’ and in her unwavering faith in the Holy Tree and the Tenders.

But she’d had so much longer to practice than I had.

Were they possessed like me? No. I knew when and how I messed up and I’d never seen them make those kinds of mistakes. And it was ridiculously unlikely that they’d have run into a demon like I had. 

They didn’t need to be possessed though. All they needed to be was afraid. Or ‘devout’. We were taught to ‘love and fear’ Holy Mazana and that always seemed strange to me. What was there to fear in the Divine Tree when we loved it and it loved us? It cherished and nurtured us. It kept us safe from the enemies beyond the Thicket Wall. It was what kept our fears at bay, it was what we prayed to for deliverance from all evils. Our devotion was supposed to be based on love.

It was because of our love that we gave our bodies, our hearts, and our lives to the Holy Tree, so that we could be judged a pure and worthy and given shelter under Holy Mazana’s boughs.

Always with the love though, there was fear.

Fear that we wouldn’t be able to give enough. Fear that what was offered would be deemed worthless. Fear that something we did would reveal us as impure to everyone.

Long before I became demon possessed, I’d known that fear. That if I was a bad Sylvan, if I disagreed, or asked to many questions, or failed to be what other people wanted that I would be denied a place in society. Shunned and cast out. 

Being tossed over the Thicket Wall was a physical representation of that but even people who hadn’t committed an offense worthy of that punishment could face others turning away. Could lose the very conditional respect which separated those who had a future and would live well from those who would be at best barely tolerated and even then only if they found some means to be useful to their betters.

My musings on the possible hypocrisy of our entire society was cut short by the return of our instructor, more than a few minutes later, with several other instructors in tow.

He looked stunned to find the class in order (Pulia had managed to compose herself and was seated with her head bowed in ‘deepest prayer’). The other instructors looked both relieved and incredulous, as though seeing our calm serenity made a lie of whatever report they’d heard.

“What happened here?” our instructor asked, looking at the Blessed Circle where he’d probably been expecting to find a girl torn to pieces by the ministry’s newest piece of divine vegetation. 

He hadn’t indicated which of us should answer, so we all dutifully waited to be called on specifically.

Or, the other girls probably did that.

I was wracking my brain for anything I could say other than “I burned a manifestation of the Holy Tree to ash when you ran away like a coward”.

“Delia. Recount.” Why he chose her I couldn’t say for sure but it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d looked up and made eye contact with him.

“There was a miscast of the True Vision gift. After you left to bring assistance, we moved to use our healing gifts to buy time. Holy Mazana intervened and sent us a gift of Fire which countered the miscast True Vision spell and allowed us to restore the damage which had been sustained with our combined healing gifts. With the crisis past, we returned to our assigned seats and have prayed for guidance while we awaited your return.”

That…that was such a better story than any of the ones I’d been cooking up.

Even better the whole class seemed to be complete agreement with Delia.

It wasn’t that one of us (me) had summoned fire to destroy a spell of nightmare that “Holy Mazana” had granted to Pulia. No, of course not. The casting of the spell had been what was wrong and Holy Mazana had intervened to save us.

Huh. And you’re not buying into that? Will wonders never cease. Maybe “sooner” actually is coming.

 I would be saying a bajillion prayer tonight to make up for today, but for the moment I wasn’t going to care what sort of blasphemies my mind was embracing.

Good.

Which it wasn’t, but for the time being I wasn’t going to argue that.

We’d saved Pulia, and if my being a bad Sylvan had been responsible then…

Then I had no idea what that meant.

“Yes, well, in light of mistakes like these, it seems that none of you are not ready to share in this aspect of Holy Mazana’s grace. You are all dismissed for the day. Leave here and spend the day in prayer and purification so that tomorrow you might be worthy to bear the burden of seeing what must be seen.”

It took us all a moment to understand that we were being given the day off.

It was weird. It was unsettling. It was unprecedented.

Normally if we failed a test (and they didn’t simply expel the failures), they confined us to the ministry’s chapel where we were supervised for at least a few hours of silent prayer. Or a few hours of exaltant hymns (until our voices gave out). 

Letting us go though? Home? Where was the punitive bite to that?

Unsurprisingly, no one waited around to find out.

In calm and orderly formation, we rose and left the classroom, exiting exactly as we would have at the end of the day.

But this time we had hours and hours open to us.

Time without any greater restriction on how we spent it than to seek a greater oneness with Holy Mazana.

The other girls peeled off, heading towards their homes, but I knew what was need to bring me oneness with my deity.

Prayer wasn’t going to help and meditation was waste of time.

I needed action.

I needed to find my Intruder.

“You’ve chosen the Sylvans as your primary peoples? The plantlings?”

“They are not plants, but yes. Quite lovely aren’t they?”

“Weren’t you the one chidding me about picking beautiful people for my city?”

“I most certainly was not. You, I hasten to remind you, claimed to be selecting for beauty and then you picked all of the most hideous specimens put before you, one right after another. That is what I was chiding you for.”

“Trust me my Most Honorable Sisarai, the people I have selected are very much the most beautiful, though it is also true that beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.”

“Perhaps, but even you must behold how splendid my Sylvans are?”

“Splendid dupes perhaps. Tell me, don’t you expect it will grow tiresome having them fawning all over you for eternity?”

“I can not imagine why it would? As the newly arisen gods of this world, fawning admires will be a cornerstone to continuing our ascension.”

“Right up until the turn on you.”

“Oh, my Sylvans shall never turn on me. After all they won’t be worshipping me directly. All their grace shall be directed towards the Holy Tree. I will merely remain a humble Accessor, though that title must fall away.”

“A false god makes for a clever receptacle I must admit. What if they should decide to burn it though?”

“If it comes to that then I of course will be the only leading the procession, torch in hand. Then we shall plant a new tree, a better tree, and the cycle will begin all over again.”

– High Accessors Dyrena and Sisarai comparing notes on the people they intended to save from the Sunfall.

I’d experienced mishaps with invoking Mazana’s gifts before. Pretty much everyone who ever sung for one had. Hit a flat note, sing at too little or too much volume, hesitate for a moment or rush one note into the next, there were so many methods of fumbling a gift and so many forms the backlash could take. 

The good news was that the backlash from a first attempt at invoking a gift was rarely significant or long lasting. Annoying and embarrassing in almost all cases, but never deadly or permanent. With the magic that we called being almost entirely external to ourselves and our ability to draw it in being as weak as it ever would be, most first time invokers were simply incapable of getting themselves into much trouble.

The bad news, because there’s always bad news where I’m concerned, was that the darkness that swallowed my sight was not a backlash. Like I said, I knew backlashes and what happened to me when I called to be gifted with Holy Mazana’s True Sight was not a backlash or a mistake on my part. I knew that but in the instant my vision vanished I knew nothing else at all.

Apologies. That was me.

Why my demon would Take My EYES AWAY was worrisome. Worse than that though, the fact that she could take Mazana’s gift away was terrifying on an existential level.

That ‘gift’ wasn’t what it claimed to be. At all.

But it was from Holy Mazana! Darkness and evil can’t overcome the Divine Tree’s light!

I don’t know why I’d suddenly rediscovered my faith, or maybe I hadn’t ever really lost it. Maybe the little crisis I’d been hit by had just been fatigue-induced stupidity.

Except I wasn’t feeling fatigued anymore.

Thanks to a demonic blessing.

I should reject it. It had to be putting my soul in jeopardy to be benefitting from a demon’s gifts.

You should open your eyes. I’ve been saying that for years, but this time I mean it in a ‘right this second’ sense. 

I did.

I shouldn’t have.

Listening to a demon? That was the definition of the corruption which led to eternal damnation.

But I had to. Because she was right. The whole class would have seen me fumble the invocation. The longer I suffered the backlash, the more they’d understand the depths of my failure. I could have been expelled for that one mishap alone.

I probably should have been tossed out.

I was listening to demons. 

And dreaming about intruders.

And I was going to do something very foolish in regards to the latter of those, I could feel it building inside me already.

But I opened my eyes anyways, blinking out the darkness to find the world bathed in a golden light, every little mundane piece of it shining with a magic that I wanted.

“That was an excellent attempt Jilya,” the instructor said. “You all heard the answer to the notes of the invocation did you not? Had she known the second verse of the song, Holy Mazana’s gift would have settled within her and we would see a her eyes alight with the green glow of the divine.”

I nodded in agreement, as did the rest of the class. That was the response to anything our instructors told us, and came as a pure reflex despite the vast gulf between what he was saying and what I had experienced. Or what I was experiencing.

You can let the blessing go whenever you’re ready.

She was right.

I could.

I didn’t want to though.

The world was gorgeous.

My classmates were ethereal.

Our instructor…

A lifetime of practice kept me from recoiling visibly but it did disrupt my concentration enough that I lost my hold on whatever gift I’d called to myself.

“You may return to your seat Jilya.”

I didn’t want to.

I wanted to stay there and find that gift, damned or not. 

But of course my feet carried me back at the properly decorous pace and I took my seat with an eager smile on my face to show the expected gratitude for having been called on to receive special attention.

Special and unwanted attention.

Attention designed to weed me out when what I wanted…

That wasn’t a safe line of thinking to follow. The instructor hadn’t been trying to weed me out. I was one of the better students in class at new invocation. Not the best, but definitely unlikely to fail badly enough to need any kind of severe correction.

I still didn’t want the attention though, what I wanted was the golden sight gift. The memory of how beautiful the world could be spoke to something in my obviously completely damned soul. How could I never have even caught a glimpse before of what the gift had shown me?

Was I refusing to think about what I’d seen when I looked at the instructor? Yes. Yes I was. Clearly that was a demon’s lie. That someone so blessed by Holy Mazaa could look…could look like that?

No.

I wanted the gift, but I didn’t want that.

Never that.

When you’re ready. And not in quite so much peril.

Demon promises. Doctrine says they’re lies. Always lies.

So why was I sure this one wasn’t?

You’re going to figure out the answer to that any day now. I’ve been telling myself that for years, but I still believe it.

Class had moved on to teaching the full formula for the invocation of Holy Mazana’s True Sight, but the details were complex enough that even my classmates, who hadn’t lost focus for a few minutes like I had, probably weren’t going to be able to keep it all straight.

“Let us see how well you all are following to this point,” the instructor said after several more confusing minutes. He started scanning classroom looking for another victim…no, I couldn’t think like that, ‘volunteer’ was the right term because we’d all chosen to be here. Anything that was asked of us we’d already agreed to when we chose this path.

Someday. Someday soon.

She sounded so tired. As though I was terribly wrong about something. Which was ridiculous. She was the demon. It was listening to her that was wrong!

“Pulia,” the instructor said, choosing a girl thankfully nowhere near me. 

 Pulia wasn’t going to have a problem with the exercise. Unlike me, she was as pure and dutiful as we were all supposed to be. We’d never talked much. We weren’t meant to talk since we were supposed to be listening, at least most of the time. On the few occasions where we’d studied together though, I’d been impressed with how peaceful she was, and how quick her grasp of the subject matter had been. 

There’s wasn’t much sense of competition between my classmates and I largely because we were all perfectly capable of failing on our own. While the tests we were put to were often harsh and difficult, there was never a limit to the number of people who could pass them. 

Or at least not an official one. Many tests over the years had seemed unequal in their application, with the students the instructors disliked being the primary ones to be tested to be their destruction.

Pulia had never been one of those students and if our instructor was calling on her, it was because he wanted to be sure the gift’s invocation was performed properly since no one else was likely to have followed his directions as closely or well as Pulia had.

She took her spot in the center of the Blessed Circle I’d stood in and raised her voice in much the same song I had.

For a too-fleeting instant, the memory of how she’d looked in the Golden Vision came back to me and my breath caught in my throat.

I’d been impressed with her talent for a while. How had I missed just how beautiful she was though?

I’m sorry.

My demon wasn’t apologizing for denying me the knowledge of Pulia’s beauty.

You are the only one I can protect.

I…I couldn’t make sense of that. Protect? Me?

Pulia’s scream cut right through my confusion though.

Flowers sprouted from her. Glowing with holy light.

They were followed by vines and then branches.

At all angles.

Angles a body should never have been twisted into.

But they didn’t kill her.

They weren’t that kind.

As the flowers bloomed open, each revealed a lidless, searching eye inside, and as each opened, Pulia’s scream rose, her song shattered and abandoned.

This was not a backlash either.

Not even for someone as talented as Pulia.

The instructor saw that.

But the flash of horror in his eyes bore no element of surprise.

He’d known.

I felt fire rising in my chest.

He’d known this could happen.

My skin began to sizzle.

We can’t…

Now was not the time to listen to a demon.

I didn’t growl.

Not audibly.

The instructor’s gaze nonetheless snapped to the rest of his class and then back to Pulia.

More branches stretched her out, pulling muscles and bones into agony.

And he fled.

Turned and ran from the classroom.

Without a word, without a sound.

For a moment the only thing I could hear was the sound of bone snapping.

“We need to help her.” 

I wasn’t the one who said it. I’m not a good Sylvan. One of my classmates was though. Or all of them, since we all leapt from our seats to fly to Pulia’s side.

Reflexively, no one touched her.

All of us knew the price of breaking the Blessed Circle.

It was the only thing keeping us safe from the horror that was happening to Pulia.

“Healing. We can share a healing gift with her,” one of my other classmates suggested.

A glimpse of memory hit me again. She was as beautiful as Pulia was. They all were.

All of them so brave (I was always afraid).

All of them willing to sacrifice themselves (I only wanted to live).

All of them at peace with what was right (And I was so, so very wrong).

But so was this.

I held out my hand with the rest and called on our gifts.

Pulia wasn’t going to die.

We wouldn’t let her.

She was mine.

Flame roared and for an instant all I saw was red and gold.

And all I felt was power.

So long dormant.

So long unclaimed.

So long to the girl I’d once been.

But if this was damnation, then it was glorious.

“And when your wall fails to keep out the undesirables?”

“It won’t.”

“You mean to say that your plan, in it’s entirety, which is meant to last forever and protect you against all manner of divine fragments, shattered spirits, and, presumably whatever scavengers manage to scrape together an existence outside our domains is to simply ‘not fail’? That’s really the beginning and end of your preparations?”

“Yes, though not how you are supposing.”

“Well then enlighten me if you would be so kind my dear Sasirai?”

“Certainly. Ask me this question though; given that the gods themselves are not proof against destruction, what defense can withstand any conceivable assault?”

“One which considers every possibly avenue of attack and plans for them all?”

“And this is your plan, in it’s entirety? To simply be so brilliant in the limited time we have that eternity itself cannot overmatch your cleverness?”

“We must each play to our strengths.”

“Oh, I am very much playing to my strengths. You see my wall will never fail because the Thickets aren’t the true wall which will defend me. They can be bypassed, or burned, or torn down, though it will take a rather monumental force to manage that. Enough that the divine fragments, and shattered spirits, and scavengers will probably believe them to be impenetrable enough to not even warrant an attempt at breeching them.”

“And for those who choose not to believe that.”

“Then they will find my people waiting for them. My loyal, faithful, and entirely expendable people.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth and Sasirai reviewing their plans for the defense of the Last Cities.

I ate my breakfast with a smile of relief. (Fake). Food at last! (I wasn’t paying attention and had no idea what it was) We could all agree that we were starving after that joyful assembly! (I was too full of worry to have any room in my stomach at all).

“Be home early tonight, we will need help preparing for your brother’s celebration” my mother said as I finished the last of the…I guess it was bread?…on my plate and rose to do my part of the clean up work after breakfast. 

Everyone was in a hurry and rushing through the chores which had been delayed by the gathering at the Roothall. That didn’t mean the work was sloppy though. My mother passed back every plate which wasn’t cleaned to a new shine since our period of judgment had started the moment we returned home and any impurity would be weighed heavily against us.

Not that there were any Tender Acolytes around inspecting the quality of our chores.

Why would there be? They didn’t weren’t actually measuring us for purity. All they cared about was finding an intruder they wouldn’t even tell us about.

I nodded and offered an unreserved and cheerful ‘yes mother!’ even as I felt my muscles turning to jelly and breakfast making a solid attempt at a return trip. 

It wasn’t Kam’s fault I was terrified and weak and sick. I had a responsibility to do my part for his celebration, so I would be there. If I couldn’t manage that everyone would be angry enough that they’d toss me over the Thicket without any need to notice I was possessed.

Here, my demon said and my nausea subsided. I’m not going to do anything about the worry. Not that she couldn’t, I noticed, she wouldn’t. That’s right. Wouldn’t. You’re enough of a mess, and I’ve never been a delicate touch with things like minds.

I couldn’t thank a demon. 

But I still felt grateful.

She wasn’t wrong that I was a wreck and keeping that hidden was probably only possible because people were so distracted by the upcoming festival.

Normally I would have had almost a half hour after breakfast for prayer, purification, and proper dressing. That wouldn’t have been enough for me to put myself together, not after a night without sleep, but it would have been something.

The five minutes I had to put on my Ministerial Apprentice robes and say the bare minimum of prayers not only failed to let me catch my breath, they drained what little energy sitting down for breakfast had given me.

My robes had to be perfect, as usual, and I couldn’t run to make up the lost time, both because I was too tired to manage even a jog and, more importantly, because Ministerial Apprentices were expected to behave with demure decorum at all times.

That’s quite convenient. For someone.

I knew that! Damn demon! Did she think I was stupid?

I couldn’t help it. Anger broke the serene rictus I’d held my face masked in. 

I wanted to cry so bad I felt tears welling up in the corner of my eyes and snapped them shut.

One foot in front of another.

Breath.

Go slack.

Rebuild expression.

Rebuild posture.

Keep walking.

Open eyes.

Smile.

Everything was wonderful

I was safe.

I was among the faithful.

I knew what was expected of me, and what I needed to do.

I was a good Sylvan.

I was a faithful Daughter of the Garden

I was untroubled and clean of mind and body, ready to give all that I am and all I could be to Holy Mazana from which all life and grace flows.

It wasn’t a prayer. It wasn’t structured or devout.

But that didn’t matter.

If I gave myself to it, if I believed, then I could make it real.

And if I could make it real, I could live.

And I wanted to live.

They wouldn’t take that from me.

No one saw that. You’re still safe.

My fatigue lessened (unnaturally, thanks Demon). My worry diminished (or at least it didn’t shatter me, but the lessening wasn’t unnatural, thanks weird brain juices). I continued on (because what else could I do?).

By the time I got to the Ministry of Piety, I’d regained…well if not my composure, at least enough numbness to put my usual mask back on.

My demon wanted to say something. I could feel…I don’t know…concern? Something. But she was quiet. 

Best to not provoke the mess of a girl you were possessing when she was so close to falling apart I guess.

You’re not falling apart.

My demons words weren’t a reassurance. They were almost a threat? Or a promise?

I pushed them aside and stepped into the Ministry to find the line assembling for my first class. I was late enough that I wound up third from last, when I was usually the second out of the twenty four girls I took classes with.

In quiet submittal, we filed down the hall when our instructor arrived, past all the younger children who were doing the preliminary work to be able to test into the Ministry.

I’d passed those tests years ago.

Despite being possessed.

Which probably should have told me something.

More blasphemy? I was too tired to scold myself about it.

I’ll remind you later.

Good. Good. Having a source of personal torment was great for remaining faithful it seemed.

You are not as incorrect as you imagine there.

Our instructor rapped on his lectern.

Apparently we’d arrived in class and I’d taken my seat.

“Many gifts have been granted to you by Holy Mazana though you are as yet unworthy of them. Let us offer a prayer of our unending gratitude that we may make ourselves a pleasing receptacle for Holy Mazana’s grace and wisdom.”

I was not a natural singer, but, even tired as I was, I raised my voice high in song along with my fellow students. 

The prayer was brief but it spoke to things I could still believe in. My unworthiness. The feeling of calm serenity that was gifted to us when we exercised the gifts Holy Mazana had granted us. Our pledge to strive for ever greater purity no matter how debased we were.

By the time the song was done, my mind was centered and my body was balanced enough that I was ready for the test which followed.

It wasn’t a surprise, despite there having been no announcement of a test today. Most of our classes were tests, either implicit ones where the instructors were watching for signs that our grasp on Mazana’s gifts were flawed, or the explicit ones were we were called upon to demonstrate the techniques for the coming lecture.

Failure in the explicit tests came in two varieties. For those who performed the new and untaught technique close to correctly, there was acceptance. For those who displayed a lack of the fundamentals the techniques were based on, there was dismissal.

Like many of the other girls, I feared dismissal because we had all grown old enough to be clothed as Aspirant Brides if the Ministry judged it had no need of us.

Some girls preferred that of course. They either knew who would select them as brides and were agreeable to the arrangement, or they held so little aptitude for the gifts Mazana bestowed on us that they didn’t see a point in struggling with the Ministry tests and being flunked out early.

I’d opted for the Ministry path for several reasons, one of which being that I found working on the gifts I’d been given soothing. It brought me closer to the serenity of Mazana’s light than anything else. (I’d also watched each season’s crop of husbands since I’d come of age and there really hadn’t been any winners in their ranks in years).

“Today’s test will be one of sight and perception,” the instructor explained. “With Holy Mazana’s blessing, our eyes can look beyond the mundane and glimpse the sublime glories of the heavens and the profane depredations of the hells. Through these glimpses we can understand where corruption lies and spy those who have been led astray.”

Should that have worried me? Better question, was I capable of worrying any more than I already was? Answer to question the second, no. Answer to question the first, also no.

In theory, if anyone could do what the instructor was requesting we do, I would have been instantly revealed and dead moments later. Since I was still painfully alive though I knew that Mazana’s gift of sight was for a different sort of corruption than the kind which afflicted me.

Mazana’s blessed sight revealed rot and fungal infection and other physical maladies. The claims of it revealing spiritual issues were possibly true, but only the First Tender or maybe a saint had a close enough connection to the Holy Light to reveal that sort of thing.

“Who will demonstrate the Blessed Eyes technique?” the instructor asked and swept the class with his gaze until, of course, because I am cursed, he landed on me. “Jilya. Rise and come show the class how the Blessed Eyes are invoked.”

Only invoked? 

Huh.

He was going easy on us.

Almost like he actually wanted to teach us something?

Like a good Daughter of the Garden would have, I rose immediately, made no complaint, showed no signs of discomfort, and went to the front of the class to stand in the Blessed Circle.

There were a lot of ‘Blessed’ things in the ministry. And a lot of ‘Holy’ things. And a lot of ‘Divine’, and ‘Sacred’, and so on things. In the case of the ‘Blessed Circles” though the term always seemed well warranted to me.

Asking untrained people to call on gifts they had, at best, dubious control over would have been perilous in the extreme without the ability of Blessed Circles to limit to scale and scope of the manifestations of those gifts.

I’d been afraid long, long ago that in using an unknown gift I might call my Demon out into bodily form, but the Blessed Circles had ensured that never happened, and so had earned a great deal of trust from me.

The slight tingle I felt as I stepped into the circle confirmed it was alive and once again I placed my trust in it.

Only for that trust to be betrayed.

My call for the unfamiliar gift of sight rose to Holy Mazana along with my song, clear and bright.

What descended and filled my eyes was neither though.

Mazana didn’t bless me with sight.

Instead darkness poured into me and the whole world went black.

“Rituals. Rituals are the lifeline by which we are led to the future. In their repetition, we strive ever closer to perfection. In our acceptance of them, we cultivate the humility to accept the greater wisdom of the Holy Tree and its speaker the First Tender into our hearts. Though we be flawed and sinful creatures, through their divine grace are we redeemed and made worthy of the lives they gift us and sustain through all the days we are allotted.”

– from the Children’s Catechism as taught to all young Sylvan as they prepare for their First Confirmation.

I wanted to fight to bring Kam back.

Which.

Wow.

Kam? Really? I mean, he was an annoying brat at the best of times.

And fighting the Tender Acolytes?

I wasn’t just tired. I’d gone insane.

Kam being selected for a special duty? That was an incredible honor! Our lives, our hopes, our every desire, Holy Mazana was due all of that and more. 

I was a daughter of the Garden. I wasn’t a good Sylvan, but rebelling against the Tenders? No. Absolutely not. I was not that lost. I would never be that lost!

“You will be able serve as well, sister,” the Tender Acolyte said.

I froze, a spike of ice spearing my heart as I forced my feature to show none of the panic that gripped me.

The Acolyte had seen my turmoil when they called Kam out from the line and I’d been impossibly lucky that they’d mistaken it for jealousy of Kam’s holy opportunity.

Idiots.

You’re not wrong about that.

I cast my eyes down and gave a solid nod to acknowledge that I had heard and accepted the truth of the Acolytes words.

Well, one of those wasn’t a lie I guess.

I kept my head firmly down and my face alight with the glory of having been spoken to by a Tender Acolyte. I’d been so lucky, to be graced with even a few words from one of them, and a promise at that! That I could be useful!

Those thoughts don’t taste terribly good do they?

They had to. I couldn’t be doing this. Not here. Not now. They were looking for someone and we could not let them find me.

We?

I, I couldn’t let them find me. My demon wasn’t going to help with that.

…

Silence? She wasn’t going to torment me further?

…

I exhaled a long, slow breath.

Of course she wasn’t. If I was found out, she would be too. Or maybe it was just that if I was tossed over the Thicket, she wouldn’t be able to torment me for very long afterwards.

The silence took on the quality of a huff of disapproval, but no words broke the sanctity of my thoughts.

That lasted until we reached the Roothall and found our seats, happily near the center of congregation.

When I was little, being in the center had been both terrible and wonderful. Terrible, because I always wanted to be closer to be able to see what was going on, and, if I was really lucky, be one of the ones selected to take part in whatever ceremony we were celebrating. Wonderful because it was so easy to feel Holy Mazana’s grace when I was surrounded by so many people united in song and prayer.

They promised us that union with the Divine Tree would lift our souls and carry us to the bliss of Mazana’s heavenly embrace, and in those celebrations I caught glimpses of that heaven. Everyone united in joy and purpose. An overflowing of love and clear sense of being part of something so much greater than our own tiny lives. 

Faith’s reward wasn’t immortality, it was to look on the beauty of creation and understand that we are a part of that beauty.

That was then though.

Before I became impure.

Sitting in the mid-section of the congregation was still terrible and wonderful, but the terror came from the pressing mass of people around me, denying me escape, or respite, or time alone to process my thoughts where I didn’t have to control every twitch of every muscle. The wonder, which held far less strength than it used to, came from the fact that the people around me were as much camouflage as peril. Any of them might notice something was wrong with me, but none of them did, or ever would, I believed, because none of them noticed me. 

I’d made myself the epitome of ordinary and in doing so ensured that I’d become something like a walking blindspot. I wasn’t seen because I wasn’t worth seeing.

Instead, at least in the Roothall, all eyes were on the pulpit, all ears tuned for what the Tender Acolyte who stood behind it was about to say.

I couldn’t look to see what my mother and father were doing. I couldn’t look to confirm how anyone was handling Kam’s loss. Were they ecstatic to have one of our own chosen for a special duty? Was mother secretly upset to have lost her favorite son? Was father concerned about the circumstances which required an unofficial draft? I didn’t know and I couldn’t know. I had to be lost in prayer. Just like all the others daughters of the Garden. Our role was always to pray, unless we were given other instructions.

So I prayed, or at least pretended to. It was hard to muster the proper piety when my imagination was tearing off in a hundred different directions though.

Before I could get far on formulating any of the questions which had arisen, the last of the families had gathered, taken their seats, and the Tender Acolyte began to speak.

“Welcome and good morning, Holy Children.”

So, the typical greeting. It relaxed people. Nothing too bad was coming.

“We have been called to attendance this day by the duty and obedience owed to Divine Mazana.”

No extra announcements. Just right to the point. Half the crowd breath a sigh of relief since that meant we’d be able to get back to our breakfasts sometime before lunch rolled around. The other half were put on edge again though since getting right to the point suggested something serious was afoot.

Guess which half I was in?

“A Divine Decree has been issued for a Festival of Purification!”

He sounded excited, so the congregation became excited.

“In one week’s time, all families shall come before the Holy Tree, proffer their love and devotion and receive a special blessing based on their purity and sanctity as a worshipping collective.”

So we were going to be judged by the worst member of each family. Great.

“Only your behaviors during the purification week will just counted for or against you. Already a Special Task Force has been assembled to search for impurities outside of your direct control, and at the end of the Festival they shall be rewarded with a special service held by the First Tender where he will dispense Mazana’s wisdom and allow them to ask the questions closest to their hearts.”

I had to look up at that to see if the Acolyte was being serious.

A service lead by the First Tender? For a simple cleaning duty? And they were allowed to speak to him?

From the congregation a chorus of pleased gasps rose up signaling to the uncertain members that this was a good thing.

Except it wasn’t.

A service with the First Tender was a far greater reward than a group organized to sweep up the unused areas of the Garden deserved.

Which meant they were going to be responsible for something far more important than sweeping.

Like, for example, finding a graceful intruder who’d somehow, impossibly, made it through the Thicket Walls.

Or the people she was with?

I’d been thinking she’d come alone, but how likely was that? Getting through the Thicket was impossible. Flying over it, or digging under it should have been impossible too, but what was impossible for any one person, might be doable if enough other people worked at it.

Images of an invasion flashed past my eyes.

Had my greed for keeping my own life doomed us all? We knew exactly what was outside the walls. Dead things. And broken ones. The residue of a destroyed world. Those who weren’t worthy of the Garden’s safety and the Holy Tree’s sheltering light.

We, the Children of the Garden were stronger and more righteous than anyone outside our walls and they hated us for that. It was why no one survived being thrown over the walls. It was why Holy Mazana had grown the walls in the first place. 

Together we could fight them, but the walls were a big part of that. If the monsters beyond the walls had learned to pass through them, blood, Sylvan blood, would run in the streets and if our faith wavered in the face of such an assault, the Holy Tree would burn.

That was the monsters’ true goal after all. For as much as they hated us, their fanatical devotion to Mazana’s destruction was legendary.

Legendary, of, or relating to a story passed down from the past.

Yes. Because we’d known that for as long as there’d been a Garden.

Or as long as the First Tender has been telling you that was how things were.

Blasphemy. To question the First Tender’s teachings was blasphemy.

So I had to reject her.

I should have rejected the demon’s assertion automatically. She was a demon. Nothing she said could be believed.

And yet?

To truly reject its words though, I had confess. If I truly believed that there was a threat to the Garden, no, worse, a threat to Holy Mazana, I had to confess.

I had to.

I had to.

I started gathering my courage.

It was time. I had to explain what I’d seen. I had to do everything I could to make sure the Holy Tree was safe.

Even if that meant sacrificing myself.

It was what was expected of us.

Our lives were given to us to serve the Holy Tree.

The highest duty we could fulfill was to die in its defense.

Countless Saints had done the same, and even the lowliest of us could rise and become a Saint too.

I wanted to live but I knew the Holy Tree was more important than I was.

Than anyone was.

I waited for my demon to taunt me. To poke at the corners of my argument.

To call me a hypocrite.

But she was waiting. 

Patiently.

Hopefully?

Was she a trial sent to test me? To see if I could find a path back to purity and the Holy Tree’s divine graces?

I am no test.

Wounded pride? I felt like I’d insulted my demon.

What else would be new?

My confession. That would be new.

I looked inside for the courage to do what I knew was right. What I had to do.

The Tender Acolyte was droning on about purity, and the value of the Tree’s blessing, and blah, blah, blah stuff they’d told us a thousand times already.

Why couldn’t he have just given us an hour of mediation? If he would have just shut up I would have been able to work up the nerve to rise and confess what I knew.

Blasphemy?

My demon wasn’t supposed to be the one asking me that.

But I was weak.

Much too weak.

I couldn’t rise.

I couldn’t do what was right.

I was too afraid. 

I didn’t want to die.

I didn’t want my family to be cast down because of me.

I was too weak, and scared, and not a good daughter of the Garden at all.

Or, and I know coming from me this won’t be something you can accept, but consider if you will this question; can you not act because you can’t do the right thing, or because you aren’t sure what the right thing is?

But I knew what the right thing to do was.

I’d been told what was right all my life.

Questioning that was a sin.

So why didn’t it feel like a sin?

I needed to talk to someone.

But it couldn’t be my father or mother.

Or Kam.

And certainly not the Tender Acolytes.

I didn’t want to even think the next words that came to my mind.

The intruder.

She was the one I needed to talk to.

I needed her to confess that she’d come to destroy the Holy Tree.

Then I could act. Then I would know for sure. Then my sacrifice would have meaning.

“Plants? You intend to protect your city with plants?”

“Not plants my dear Vaingloth. Thickets.”

“Which are plants are they not?”

“The ones you maybe familiar with? Yes. The ones which I will grow will be a bit more…divine in nature shall we say.”

“Ah, planning ahead. Good. Should you fail to capture your principal target though won’t you be in some additional peril?”

“Oh, it matters not who I can ensnare, any sort of divine energies will serve as the Thicket’s foundation. It’s true supports will be far stronger than the foolish deities we will overthrow.”

– High Accessors Vaingloth and Sasirai comparing notes on their planned domains prior to the Sunfall

So clearly, after the intruder’s departure, I went back to bed, fell instantly asleep and woke refreshed and unbothered in the morning. Also the Holy Tree is a tiny shrub, the Thicket Walls are soft and paper thin, and the Tender Acolytes are very forgiving of people just enjoying a lazy, sleepy morning whenever they feel like.

By the time Mazana’s glow began to rise after the long hours of the night, I wished nothing more than all of that could be true. Wishes, especially impure ones, never come true though. Instead, I was a wreck. A complete and total, sleepless disaster. Summoning every ounce of faith and piety I had, I willed my limbs to lift my dead tired body up and puppeted myself around, being certain to work all the little muscles in my face so that I would look as bright and quietly cheerful as always. 

Mazana’s gifts helped a bit with that. The bump I’d taken to the back of my head hadn’t been anything significant, but I’d healed it anyways just in case it made me flinch at a bad time or something. I didn’t need anyone questioning how I’d hurt my head if it came to light that we’d had an intruder. My healing took a bit of the edge off my fatigue too, but I knew I was going to need to pay that back at some point. Fortunately, I’d been hiding what I was for so long, that being quiet and going through the motions of the faithful so as not to attract attention had become an almost autonomous response.

Hiding my fears had too, which proved to be capable of hiding all the new ones I’d come up with while I spent the long, dark hours driving myself nearly mad with worry.

What if the intruder made good on her promise…no, threat, it definitely wasn’t a promise, promises were things held between people, and I absolutely did not want to see her again.

Which was probably why I had spent hours imagining nothing but that.

Was she going to show up in the prayer chamber again for the morning celebration?

Was she going to show up even earlier in the cleansing chamber? Naked and defenseless was not at all how I wanted to face an adversary, even though I hadn’t exactly been armed and armored when I’d run into her the last time.

She did not interrupt my purification ritual though. 

Nor was she waiting for me in the prayer chamber.

My father was though.

“Blessed morning Jilya,” he said without rising from his obeisance or turning to see that it was me.

“Blessed morning Beloved Father,” I said. Beloved was of course true, since all parents are beloved but I’d wondered for the longest while if he would have preferred a different appellation. Perhaps ‘Dear Father’ or ‘Cherished Father’ or, and this would be sacrilege though I suspected also the most appreciated, “Dad”.

I pushed that thought aside with greater force than usual. I was too tired still to trust myself with dancing anywhere near sacrilege.

It would do you so much good though, my demon said.

She’d been oddly quiet throughout the long night, and to my very great credit I didn’t jump or flinch in the slightest at her renewed presence..

I was thinking, she said. That was an interesting encounter we had last night.

Speaking to a demon was punishable by death. It had to be or the impurity could spread and if our impurity infected the Holy Tree than it would die and so would everyone.

Pfff, we’ve spoken for years now and that overgrown shrub is doing just fine.

That my demon was unimpressed with Holy Mazana spoke to the envy and spite common to all demons.

I suppose the passive aggression is better than those droning, monotonous prayers.

Prayers which I was supposed to be silently offering to Mazana rather than allowing myself to be distracted by the evil I’d been cursed with.

Honestly, she didn’t seem to be evil to me. Distracting, certainly, but if she’d bourne you any malice, she could have done quite a bit of damage and still escaped cleanly I imagine.

That was not a thought I needed to revisit, not after spending so long imagining a variety of different horrible outcomes to my encounter with the graceful catgirl, or worse what might have happened if I hadn’t confronted the intruder.

I also did not need to admit that my demon seemed to be right. She could have been far more violent but she’d chosen to be gentle. When she’d held me, it had been to stop any hostilities between us.

I shuddered at the thought. She’d been close enough to lick me! Well, my palm, which I’d shoved over her mouth. But still. How was Mazana not lighting me on fire for my sins and impurity?

Yes, yes, how indeed?

I redoubled my efforts at prayer which drew an exasperated sigh from my demon. Prayer had held her at bay for years though, and it had kept me pure enough to avoid being thrown beyond the Thicket, so, demonstrably, prayer had a lot going for it.

I could feel my demon’s immense irritation, though, oddly, it didn’t feel like it was directed at me.

I stumbled, mentally, and tried to pick up the prayer I’d been on before I’d allowed myself to be distracted. Maybe it was the fatigue but I wasn’t able to remember where I’d been in it, the memory of words blended together with the thousands of times I’d said them before.

So I started over. No one was going to complain if I spent a little longer on Morning Prayers than normal. It was encouraged that we perform them well, and I’d often given three silent recitations to ensure that. If I only got through two today, no one would notice or even be aware of it.

Not even your overly worshipped shrub.

Her blasphemy shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was such an expected part of my life after all the time I’d been with her that it sort of was?

Helps you not think more about your new friend.

Which, seriously, that was evil. One minute of peace from worrying about the intruder suddenly popping back up to kill me was too much to ask for I guess?

You’re not worried about her popping up to kill you.

All she needed to do was show up and say ‘hi’ to me in front of anyone else, and I was dead, whether she intended to kill me or not.

That’s still not what you’re worried about though.

Before I had a chance to form a proper response to that, my mother entered the payer chamber and tapped my father on the back.

“A special convocation has been called for today,” she whispered to him, loudly enough that Kam, me, and the rest of the family could hear her. “When you are done, tell everyone else.”

“When is the convocation scheduled for?” my father whispered back, again loudly enough for the rest of us to hear.

“Now. They want us to report to the Blueshine Roothall as soon as prayers are done.” My mother sounded agitated though it was hard to tell if that was because we were likely to be late, since we lived at the far end of the Blueshine Roots, or if it was because surprise Convocations rarely were held for anything good.

“No breakfast?” Kam asked at full voice, casting aside the pretense that the whispered conversation had not been intended for us all to hear.

“And no supper if you get called to the Draft early,” my mother said, exposing at least one source of her concern.

A draft call wasn’t usually cause for a special convocation. The troops which guarded Holy Mazana’s root systems from attacks below needed steady replenishment but the steadiness made the replacement drafts somewhat predictable. If the underdwellers had launched a major offensive though?

That wasn’t why they were calling a Convocation.

I knew that and it sent a chill radiating out from my belly.

Probably for the best we weren’t having breakfast.

Or, yeah, definitely for the best! I could claim any sleepiness was from a lack of food! Or I wouldn’t even have to claim it, people would just assume!

I crouched down behind that thought and it sheltered me from my worries about as well as a single blade of grass would have.

They’re not going to catch you. If they knew enough to catch you, they wouldn’t need to call a convocation.

Demons are not supposed to be comforting.

They are not.

So that left me confused and worried.

%#$@!

I couldn’t understand what my demon said, but I knew it wasn’t nice.

“C’mon, let’s not get stuck in the bad seats,” Kam said, committing the blasphemy of nudging me while I was ‘in the middle of prayer’. 

I didn’t bite his foot. I am not a good Sylvan, but I am practiced at being civilized.

In my role of Devout Daughter, I spent another minute ‘finishing up my prayers’. This was by no measure intended to annoy and vex my brother. Annoyance and vexations were merely a happy by-product of keeping up a solid ruse.

“So, early Draft do you think?” he asked as the greater familial unit marched in single file towards the Roothall.

There was no escaping being near him since the two of us were the closest in age among our siblings and cousins. We were probably also the closest in terms of him using me as a shield from his misdeeds coming home to roost, and my feeling a modicum of relief at knowing that of all the people in our family, Kam would never, ever pay enough attention to me to figure out how wrong I was. 

“You’ve got a year still,” I whispered back. I could have ignored him, but that would have led to more questions and more notice from our aunts and uncles. 

“Yeah, but if it’s a big draft they’d take me early right?”

Why he wanted to get drafted early wasn’t a mystery. According to doctrine, those who were called upon to defend Holy Mazana’s depths were given honor and renown for all their days. In Kam’s case however, it was that they were also given first choice of brides and held tremendous social prestige over those who hadn’t served.

He’d shared his visions of his future after his term of service was up, with the only details that changed being exactly which girl had currently caught his fancy that he would pick first (leaving aside the fact that by the time his service was up, they would all have been long since married off) and exactly how many rooms his estate would have (leaving aside the fact that he would likely be given one of the barracks estates an earlier draftee had ‘vacated’ to make his retirement possible).

“If it was that urgent, they would have just drafted you right away,” I said. It wasn’t that I loved to spoil his dreams. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want him to be drafted (though I didn’t, the big idiot deserved better than to die in the service of…)

You’re starting to get it! my demon cheered.

I clamped my jaw shut hard.

I had to be unbelievably tired if I’d put together a thought as blasphemous as that.

A moment later some even more blasphemous words came battering at the back of my teeth when we were stopped and Kam was pulled from our procession.

“Come on, you’re on special duty,” a Tender Acolyte said to him, as they took my big brother away, probably forever.

“The Sun has fallen, but the Eternal Night shall not claim us! The Holy Tree has awakened and its name is Mazana, Blessed and Divine and capable of sheltering those who are faithful where our fallen gods have failed to do so. Believe in Mazana and believe in me, the Holy Tree’s humble messenger and your new Lord.”

– The First Tender’s speech to the populace of the Seventh Garden as a Neoteric Lord, the day he called the Thicket Walls forth to keep out the spirits of the shattered world.

I can be quiet. I had a lot of practice at it since people tended to prefer that I not call any attention to myself unless they needed me for something. My demon said I was annoyed by that, but she never mentioned how grateful I was too.

Knowing how to be quiet meant that people didn’t look too closely at me. It meant they didn’t see the signs that I was possessed. It meant they left me alone.

It also meant that I had time to observe the odd intruder who was lurking outside the apartments, alcoves, and dens which made up my family’s estate.

She was graceful. That was the first thing that struck me. When we dance, Sylvan’s are light and flowing and move with the winds, but it takes effort and practice for that to look coordinated and purposeful. The intruder didn’t have the lightness of a dancer, but her movements were flowing and quick, without any of the effort dancing always seemed to require.

Her ears were as long as mine, but softer and tufted. Her limbs were about as long and her proportions similar but not quite the same as my own. 

What most caught my eyes though were hers. She glanced over towards me and the last flickers from the Holy Tree were reflected like golden fire in her eyes which were rimmed by the pitch black fur which covered her.

At first I thought that fur was all she was wearing but the lack of fuzziness around her chest, arms and legs suggested she was simply clothed in matte black and skin tight clothes.

She turned as I watched and sniffed the air.

So, she was searching for something?

At my family’s estate?

But we didn’t have anything special to find? No one in the Garden did. 

Or no one except the First Tender.

And the Tender Acolytes.

But they were special. Blessed by the Holy Tree and burdened with duties the rest of us were spared from by the their humble mission.

 The intruder caught some scent that intrigued her.

Which worried me.

She was heading towards our prayer chamber. There was nothing and no one in there.

Or there shouldn’t be.

Had my father left his cradle for a round of additional prayers? I knew he had trouble sleeping sometimes. I did too, and had tried prayer to win back the peaceful dreams which were eluding me, only to be discovered when he’d crept into the prayer chamber as well and made obeisance to our effigy of the tree beside me.

It had been our silent secret. By writ and mandate, the night was for sleeping, but neither of us believed that prayer would give offense to Mazana.

Maybe that was what had taught me the value of remaining silent in place of confessing my transgressions. Maybe it had saved my life.

I slipped out of my nook and crept after the intruder. I had no idea what I would, or even could, do to her, but if my father was in the prayer chamber I wasn’t going to let her ambush him.

Why assume she was hostile? Because she had to be. Everything else, everything from outside the Thicket Walls were dead, broken things which hungered to scour the last of the living away because they had nothing but unending jealousy that we’d been saved and they hadn’t been pure enough.

Why  this graceful, fluffy intruder would specifically be jealous of my father was a far stranger question, but I’d stumbled onto a demon when I’d only been looking to commune more deeply with Mazana, so I couldn’t really be surprised that the world didn’t make sense sometimes.

She reached the chamber and sniffed the air again, only to come up short. I had to flatten myself against the dining room’s outer wall to avoid her gaze when she turned to look behind her. 

For a moment I didn’t think I’d been quick enough but then I heard her open the door to the prayer chamber and move inside.

Was following her a wise idea?

Is there a benefit to answering silly questions like that?

Did I follow her anyways?

Do I seem like the sort of person who was sensible enough to go back to bed and let whatever was happening be someone else’s problem?

The actual idiocy of what I was doing slammed into me as I crept past the threshold and into the prayer chamber.

Idiocy, in this case, involved being tackled from above by a night black furry body.

Yeah, I don’t think so, my demon said and hurled the intruder away with a strength I was pretty sure I did not possess.

The intruder was not phased by that at all.

By the time she hit the opposite wall of the room twenty feet away, she had flipped to land with her feet on the wall and her body coiled and ready to spring back.

Brilliant gold eyes illuminated a feral smile as she hung on the wall for a timeless instant and then launched herself back at me.

That’s not…my demon had time say be a hand caught me around the throat and drove into the wall behind me.

Violence, I discovered, is not fun!

Also, as a bonus lesson, I learned that I was terrible at it.

The knock to the back of my head scrambled my thoughts enough that all I heard was my demon finish her thought with ‘…good. That’s not good.’. 

Thanks so much demon. I could tell it wasn’t good all on my own.

What I couldn’t do was respond with any coherency or speed, which meant the intruder was able to pin my left arm to the wall with her right hand, and position her left knee up against my abdomen to hold my body in place too.

Then she sniffed me.

“There’s what I’m looking for.” Her voice was a whisper which made my blood run cold.

Why had I thought she would be after my father, or anything else when the strangest thing on our estate was me?

“But you’re not her?” the intruder said, her whisper turning confused and vaguely annoyed. “What is going on here? Where’s her blessing? What have you done with her?”

“What are you talking about?” I whispered back. It wasn’t hard, she was holding me by the throat but she wasn’t exerting any more force than was needed to keep me in place and with the feel of her claws at the side of my neck, not much force was required to convince me to stay right where I was.

“Not screaming. That’s good. Surprising, but good,” the intruder said, speaking to herself and no one else as far as I could tell.

She had a point though. One good scream and I could have everyone in the estate awake in a heartbeat.

And they would come.

All together we’d be able to drive off the intruder too.

But did I want that? No. No I did not. Because the moment the intruder was discovered, people would start looking for what was out of place. And if they found me with the intruder? They’d want to be sure I was okay. They’d want to test that I was still pure. That I hadn’t been part of this desecration of the Garden.

And they would find out exactly what I was.

So, no, I didn’t scream.

I had other options.

I’m no good at violence, but I did have Mazana’s gifts.

In my free hand, wind gathered at my command.

“Wait, what?” the intruder asked right as I released the wind in a silent burst of force to propel her away.

It was a tricky gift to use like that, but you don’t spend years being a diligent and dutiful daughter of the Holy Tree without having something to practice on and get good at.

“Ugh, now it’s gone, and wrong,” the intruder said. “What is that.”

“You shouldn’t have snuck into the garden, serpent,” I said, misquoting scripture but with the same fiery vehemence as the First Tender used when he spoke of those who’d been lost in the Sunfall and what remained of them.

“Serpent? I am not a serpent!” the intruder was still whispering but her indignation was louder than her words. “You’re the serpent, or you were. Now you just smell like offal.”

The air around me did not smell like offal. I did not smell like offal. The air and I were both scented with the honeysuckle which grew among Holy Mazana’s branches.

“Who are. What are you doing here?” I hoped the answer to either or both of those questions would provide the answer to the more important one of how to get her out of the prayer chamber, our estates, and the Garden as a whole.

Predictably that was not the case.

“Looking for you,” she said. “Or you’re my next stepping stone I guess. Why are you here though, you not like the rest of them?”

There were a lot of scary things she could have said.

But that was the scariest.

“What do you mean?” I should have whispered that. I was glad I hadn’t screamed it.

“I mean…,” she said as she cut through the winds I cast at her, “that you’re special.”

“No, I’m not.” It wasn’t the best counterargument. I knew that. I just didn’t have a better one.

“You’ve got something in you beautiful. Something no one else here does. Something that can show me where I need to go next.”

Hmm, curious, my demon said when what I was thinking was ‘do I kill her?’

“I like that look in your eyes,” the intruder said and stepped towards me.

Could I kill her? I had to kill her, right? She knew. And the others would capture her. It was inevitable.

And then she would talk.

They would make her talk.

The only way I could keep her from talking was to kill her.

It wasn’t even wrong, was it?

She was from outside the Thicket Wall.

She was dead and evil and I was going to die if I didn’t kill her.

That stupid smile she was wearing was not helping. She was enjoying this. I ought to kill her just for that.

“So how about we drop the act then,” she said and closed the distance between us again. 

Whatever she’d intended to say next was cutoff by the sound of someone stirring in the dining room.

I’m sure my eyes went as wide as hers did, though hers might have been because I clamped my hand over her mouth. Sure she could have killed me, but ‘could have’ was different enough from ‘absolutely would have’ which would have been the result if anyone else found me so I was willing to take the risk.

“Be quiet.” It was a command, whispered with the force of a hammer, which, happily, was enough to compel obedience.

There was a clank of a plate and the ting of a utensil.

Kam.

We hadn’t been overheard.

My oblivious brother was hungry and had snuck out to raid the food stores. Like he always did and always got away with.

How he didn’t hear my breathing or the crashing thumps of my heart, I have no idea, but as a slow, agonizing minute dragged on I heard him assemble whatever bedtime meal he’d decided on and finally, finally leave the dining room via the door that was closer to his sleeping nook.

“Interesting,” the intruder said, pushing my hand away from her mouth when I sagged in relief.

Yes. Very, my demon said.

“And now you smell wonderful again.” 

I had no idea how to react to that and even less how to react when she licked my palm!

“Eww, something’s still off though,” she said  and hopped backwards away from me. “Tell you what beautiful, I’m going to go figure this out, and I’ll see you later.”

I had to stop her.

For myself.

For my family.

For the Garden.

But I didn’t.

She was out the door we’d both come through in a blink, and I didn’t do anything to stop her. I was stuck on a thought.

Had her last words been a threat, or a promise?