“The tree is life, the tree is shelter, the tree sustains and nourishes us and I need to get the hell away from it or burn it to ash.”

– Ki-song Calm, the First Apostate against Mazana, the Tree of All Life following the Sunfall.

I am not a good Sylvan. Good Sylvans give thanks and praise to Holy Mazana each morning as its leaves and branches turn to the radiant hues decided for the day. At mid-day, as the colors blend together, good Sylvans raise their voices in ecstatic prayer, and each night as the day’s colors fade away, good Sylvans fall silent for the hour of contemplation of our Sacred Duty and Unity.

So did I not speak the words of praise in the morning? Of course not. My lips formed the same chants as all the good Sylvans. Otherwise they might have known.

Did I fail to pray at midday? Never. My prayers were sung so sweetly people had called me blessed since I was a child. I had to sing high and sweet and perfect or they might have known.

And as the night crept down and Holy Mazana grew as dark as the world beyond our thicket walls? Silence had never been a problem for me. Silence was the easiest thing in the world to hide in. No one would ever know I wasn’t a good Sylvan in the silence.

They couldn’t. Because if anyone knew I wasn’t a good and righteous little plant girl they might discover that I was something far worse.

“Jilya? Sis? Come on, the last leaf went dark a while ago, you can rise any time now,” my brother Kam said and nudged me from my prayers with a foot in the ribs. “Or did you fall asleep?”

It wasn’t true that the ‘last leaf’ had gone dark. Holy Mazana never let “all” of its leaves go dark. Even at the darkest hours of night there were still some bits of the Great Tree which gave off a bit of light. Not enough to work by of course. The divine mandate and purpose for nighttime was that we would sleep then and wake refreshed for the following day to perform the duties which awaited us.

“I’ve never fallen asleep.” Which was true. “That’s you’re failing.” Which was also true.

Kam could be forgiven for falling asleep once in a while though. Boys were meant to be little problems once in a while. That was why they were sent to the militia training Kam was a year away from. To forge that unruliness into the sort of discipline and strength that could never be drawn from someone like me.

You call yourselves plantlings, but you never consider that plants don’t separate into the categories you assign yourselves, my demon said, taunting me like she always did.

Good Sylvan are many things, but possessed is not one of them.

Not that you’re actually plants. You’d think the whole ‘bleeding’ and ‘walking around’ would be a clue there, but then maybe it’s just your brains that are made of rotten cabbage.

Shut up! I try not to talk back to my demon. Interacting with any supernatural entities imperils every one of us, and, more importantly, while I’m stuck listening to the demon, it never listens to me.

Well now that’s not true. I listen to you all the time. I’m here to help you after all.

Demons do not help anyone.

 You really like saying that don’t you. I mean, you know it’s untrue, as I’ve proven time and again, but you’re just won’t give it up.

Prayers to Holy Mazana are not guaranteed to drive demons away, or at least my prayers aren’t, but they were enough to buy me a few moment’s peace after the demon huffed at me and said, “Typical. If you’re going to be like that, we can talk later.”

I want to say I’d never talked to the demon.

I want to say I’d gone and confessed my sins the moment I heard the demon’s voice echoing within me.

I want to say a lot of things, but silence has been so much safer and, I suspected, always would be.

Mazana’s Garden is the only home left to the Sylvans. Once our world was a bright and vibrant place, but people, other people, sinned so deeply that everything was cast into death and darkness.

Everything except the Garden. Alone in all the world, the Sylvan people were pure enough and devout enough to claim their place in Mazana’s Garden, to be sheltered by its light, nurtured by its winds, and slaked by the waters of its roots. 

Around the Garden, the First Tender grew the Thicket Walls, which kept out the broken and dead spirits which were all that remained of the fallen world outside Mazana’s light. So long as they stood, nothing evil could ever creep in and threaten the purity of the Last People.

Why we should be the ‘Last People’ was something I’d never understood. If the world was dead, then why not bring more of it under Mazana’s light? 

That was the sort of curiosity that led to poking around in dangerous places. Forbidden ones.  Places where demons waited to possess anyone stupid enough to touch things because how could a pretty thing be dangerous?

My demon laughed at that and I schooled the annoyance away from my expression.

When I looked mad or upset people asked questions and any of my honest answers to them could have proven that I wasn’t pure anymore.

I could feel the demon itching to respond to my thoughts, but she stayed quiet. She had a vested interest in my lies after all. The moment I was discovered, I would be cast out, as in literally thrown bodily over the Thicket Walls.

Some people survived the fall. No one survived long afterwards though.

Some parts of the scriptures which were taught to us seemed too fantastical to be true, but no one doubted the fact that darkness had swallowed the word, or that there were things in the darkness which hungered for our destruction.

That our faith was our shield was manifestly true as well, confirmed by the sheer fact of our existence, and the blessings the First Tender shared with us.

To be discovered as impure wouldn’t destroy only me though. Everyone I knew would be tainted by association, and my family…my family’s penance would be severe. I wouldn’t survive my punishment. They might live through theirs but I would probably be the one who was better off in the end.

It was with those happy thoughts that I left our family’s prayer bower and climbed to my sleeping nook. Whoever had been on linens duty had left me a clean sleeping shift so I slipped out of my day clothes, folded them, said the Prayer of Cleansing, and deposited them in the collection bin before saying an abbreviated Prayer of Thanks and donning the simple linen nightwear. 

No one could hear my prayers, so I could easily have skipped them. The words had no meaning to me any more and I’d long since lost the belief that Holy Mazana could hear them. Maybe from other people? Ones who hadn’t strayed outside it’s light?

Or maybe it could hear them and it held them back from the First Tender.

Maybe it was giving me time to fix the mistake I’d made, to become pure again.

That thought had been my lifeline for years. That there was a method, or a practice, or something I could do which would absolve me of not just the demon, but the doubt in my heart which had drawn it to me.

Because that’s what was really wrong with me.

Oh, the demon possession would definitely get me killed the moment someone found out about it, but my real sin, the real proof that I was broken was that I’d doubted Holy Mazana, and I’d doubted the First Tender. 

I’d had to see the dead world for myself. I couldn’t imagine that we were alone. It felt…it just felt wrong. Like somewhere beyond the dark horizon, there had to be someone else left in the world. 

Maybe they weren’t as pure as we were. Maybe they didn’t belong in the Garden. Maybe the First Tender hadn’t shepherded them into Holy Mazana’s light because their lack of faith would have led us to the same ruin which befell them.

But I hadn’t been able to believe that.

There was more out there. More people. More places. More beauty.

And I’d wanted it.

There was something missing in me. Some goodness, or grace, or inherent worth that everyone else in the Garden possessed, and I’d been so desperate to fill it that I’d destroyed myself in my foolishness. 

I curled up in my nook and tried to push those thoughts and memories away. Mercifully, my demon remained quiet, but my traitorous heart failed to follow the demon’s lead.

What had I been attempting to find all those years ago when I slipped out of my nook, and ventured down among the Mazana’s roots? I remember telling myself that I was looking for a deeper connection with the holy tree, but had I been? Or had I known even then that my connection with Mazana was flawed at best and so had been looking for something older, and deeper, and far more terrible?

It would almost have been comforting to imagine the latter was the case. If I could be dark and evil, then maybe I could be dangerous enough to survive beyond Mazana’s light.

But that wasn’t me. For all that I wasn’t a good Sylvan, I still wanted to be.

My options for making that come true had dwindled away other the years though. I’d attended holy festivals with with the fervent hope that being submersed in the joyful cries of true believers might drive out my demon and banish the doubts which had only grown darker over time. I’d taken to attending every prayer service I could and had praised by the Great Tree in song and word and deed. I’d even competed and won the chance to receive a blessing from the First Tender in his role as the Garden’s Neoteric Lord.

That last one, meeting our Neoteric Lord, had been flirting with self destruction, but at the time it had seemed worth it. I’d told myself that I would walk out of my meeting with him cured or I wouldn’t walk out at all. Because surely someone so close to Holy Mazana would sense the evil within me.

But he hadn’t. 

It had been a short ceremony. A simple meeting and a quick anointing, but even so I’d expected him to see what I’d brought before him. I’d expected to burn at his touch on my forehead. I’d expected…I’d expected something.

In the wake of that failure, I’d been forced to confront the reality that if I was going to be free of my demon, I was going to have to be the one who rid myself of it.

If my lack of faith had damned me, then I would redeem myself by casting aside my doubts, stifling the voices inside, and choosing to submit to the pure will of those greater than me.

Unsurprisingly, the thousandth rendition of that declaration did not bring sleep rushing in.

Instead, it left me awake enough to hear the sound of something moving outside my nook.

Good Sylvan’s do not sneak around or hide in the shadows. Everywhere they go, they bear the light of the Holy Tree within them.

I am not, as I’ve mentioned, a ‘Good Sylvan’ though.

As quietly as I had the first night I abandoned my nook, I slipped from my bed and down the trunk where my family’s boughs had been grown. I considered calling on Mazana’s gifts but since it was at least a minor sin to be awake at all so long after the “last leaves” went dark, I decided to play it safe and find out who or what I was dealing with first.

And ‘who or what’ was the question.

Outside my brother’s room, looking for the hatch to lead it inside stood something with skin the color of the night around us clothing a form which was was so close to a Sylvan’s and yet so very different too.

I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew it was not one of the ‘Last People’.