“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?