“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?

“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’.