Cloaking every Priest Templar's face is a metallic façade: smooth-faced and unlined, emotionless. It shows no joy, no fear, no frown. Its color is a stale gray, and its form bears soft, effeminate features—an unsettling countenance, strangely tempting to the beholding eye. This much is common to all Priest Templars.
What sets them apart from one another are their linear, dagger-like horns, which resemble rays of sunlight. Initiates bear no horns while they are mere entries; upon becoming full priests, they receive two horns, marking them as devils. As they rise in rank, so too does the number of these daggers, striking outward—until the highest rank in their order, the Padre, whose mask is decorated with seven dagger-rays of rising light.
To an unwary eye, it may seem that they wear masks to hide their visages. Yet in truth, they conceal beneath those meticulously crafted faces—faces that feign simulated emotion—the image of uniform, blank, unfeeling masks. A disguise that serves as the truest disguise of all.
—History & Traditions of the Persean Sector,
by Professor Levy Rosmon,
Gordsi's National University of History and Politics.
"What are you looking for, Lina?"
His voice was cold and vacant, the harsh edge of it shaped by a life steeped in death, pain, and the silence that follows both.
"Leave her alone, Dalen. If she wants to look, let her look," a man nearby called out.
Lina knew the voice. Ruk. He was kinder than Dalen. His words carried no comfort, but they were not empty either there— lingered in them a quiet hope, brittle as frost, waiting only for the right moment to vanish and shatter to scattered dust. Ruk and Dalen were much alike—both tall, both equal in height, their frames broad and heavy. Hunger, despite the long years it had stalked them, had failed to gnaw much from their sizable statures. They shared the same hard-set features, the same blunt symmetry; it was difficult to believe they had been born worlds apart. One could have taken them for brothers—twin brothers—were it not for the quiet differences that hunger could not reach.
And in a way, they were brothers—brothers in chains—each of them stripped of family, of home, of everything they had once held dear. Beneath that shed, every soul was bound by the same loss, and if they were brothers, then they shared only one little sister. Lina. And Lina, in her heart, counted only Peter as her true kin.
She felt the ground tremble beneath her tiny legs, the quaking swelling with each colossal step until it rose to a near-convulsion that forced Lina to stumble back from the wall, certain it would give way and bury her beneath its fall. Then, without warning, the vibration ceased—ending in a thunderous shudder and a dull, crushing thud as Tonol dropped beside her, his immense weight jolting the earth and punching the child an inch off the ground.
"Pter… scoldiers," Tonol rumbled softly, his words tumbling over one another. "Ptre shut… Ina no look. Tonololo… look. Ptre shut."
The gentle giant frowned in concentration, struggling to shape the sounds, mismatched syllables spilling from him as he tried—clumsily, earnestly—to express what he had witnessed through his overarching, high-set eyes.
Lina couldn't look away. She peered through the pocket-holes that ash and sand had gnawed into the iron walls of the slave shed over countless years. Those holes had been patched with a gigantic quilt of rags—hundreds of tattered scraps sewn together into one sagging sheet by the shed's only needle.
To see outside, Lina had to lift the pieced cloth that kept the bite of the wind at bay. Each time she did, she felt a sharp tug through the thinning threads that bound the fabric to the iron, heard the old patchwork rip and sigh beneath even her weakest pull. Fear clenched her fingers—one careless motion might cleave the cloth for good. She steadied her hands, tightened her grip, sharpened her fingers, and gently parted the sooty veil, peeking through the wounds in the wall to glimpse what waited beyond. The pocket-holes were only wide enough for her juvenile eyes to peer through, and beyond them there was nothing but darkness—pitch-black night scattered with stars, a thick white band stretched across the sky like a wound of light. The blistering wind stabbed at her eyes like needles, forcing her to blink again and again. She clutched the little wooden pony in the tiny fingers of her left hand, its worn shape familiar and steady, while with her right she tugged the cloth aside, holding it back against the cold with a trembling grip. The stallion was larger than her palm, too big to grasp unless she used both hands, and yet she clutched it with one—cupping it from the hooves, tracing its features with her fingers. This was the leg she held, one of the four horses had instead of two, as Peter had once told her. With her pinky she felt the narrowing at the very end, the hardness beyond it—a hoof. Peter had explained that hooves were like fingers, only horses had four of them instead of ten. Lina listened only distantly to the argument between Dalen and Ruk. They were speaking of her—of her restlessness, of Peter—insisting he was clearly dead. She paid them little mind. Their words drifted past her like wind through cracks.
Her attention rested instead on the horse in her palm, her gaze fixed on the darkness beyond the ragged cloth. The worn piece she held was called a tail. Many animals had them, Peter had said, though Lina had never seen any beast besides the horse, and she could not tell what purpose the tail served. She traced the wooden creature along the curve of its belly, then over its smooth back, and from there to the long, strange shape Peter had called the neck, up to the head with its pointed protrusions he had named ears.
Of all the odd shapes carved into the wooden thing, only the eyes and the mouth felt familiar—though Peter preferred to call the mouth a muzzle. Lina moved her fingers to another leg and closed her hand around the hoof, holding fast.
"He isn't coming, is he?" Lina asked the old man, who nibbled at a crust of dry bread.
He gave no answer. His gaze sank to the dirt at his feet and stayed there, weighed down by sadness—or perhaps by shame.
"Even if he's alive, he won't find the shed in the dark. He's gone," Dalen said, his voice flat with a certainty that left no room for hope.
The girl's fingers tightened around the wooden horse, pressing its worn shape into her palm as though she could keep him close by force alone.
"You must eat, Lina. For Peter—you must eat," Ruk urged, settling beside her with a loaf of hard bread cradled in his hands.
Lina had never been a picky eater. She had never known any taste or texture beyond the coarse, unseasoned bread the slaves were given to chew and swallow. She had been little more than a babe in a crib when she was taken, dragged away with her mother—whose memory lingered only as a blur: a vague silhouette in a vague dress, standing in a vague, dark street. That final image was the only imprint left to her, burned faintly into her subconscious—the moment the guards tore her from her mother's chest, her veil slipping as she screamed, her arms reaching in helpless reflex.
Her mother had cried something then—a memento, perhaps—but it was as indistinct as her face, her clothes, the street itself. Even her milk, whatever warmth or sweetness it once carried, had been lost to Lina.
Bread was the only food she knew.
And the only toy she had ever owned was the wooden horse—Peter's horse—the one he had given her with a shy pride, as though gifting her a treasure.
Peter was her brother in all the ways that mattered. Eight years older, the only other child in the shed, her only playmate, her only constant.
He often told her stories of trees and birds and rivers, and of all the other wonders the girl had never seen, things so distant from her world that she took them for inventions of his mind.
Peter explained to her that birds sang the most wondrous songs, and that they could fly. Flying, he explained, meant floating in the air. Birds floated by moving with the wind, by flapping their wings—limbs like arms or legs, he said—beating them hard and fast, up and down with force, until they lifted from the ground and stayed aloft, so long as they did not stop.
Wings—Ruk spoke of wings too.
He called them the tastiest, most delicious food of all. He would describe their color after a process he called cooking, a ritual that used fire and an awful amount of multicolored substances he named spices. Among them, he always lingered on pepper, paprika, rosemary, and thyme—names he said worked wonders on a bird called chicken, which, once cooked, was reborn under the grander name poultry.
In fact, many birds could become poultry, Ruk would chant, his voice drifting as his mind wandered far from the shed. In those moments, Lina could almost see him there—preparing, cooking, and devouring all kinds of imagined meals, feasts shaped wholly from memory and longing. She knew them for what they were: figments conjured by hunger, dreams fashioned from a world of fantasy, one made of lies.
Among all the pretenses Ruk and Peter babbled about—the outside world she had never seen—one thing fascinated Lina most: the pear tree.
A pear tree. A fruit tree. A mirage born from Peter's telling. A tree that bore things called pears, globose at one end and oblate at the other, sweet, Peter would say—though he could never explain what sweet meant to her. Moist, he would add, trying to show her by soaking a piece of moldy bread in cold water, as though texture alone could translate taste.
Lina could not imagine anything tasting different from hard bread. She could imagine colors—many of them. Shapes, too. She understood smell, and she could sort the world into countless arrangements of form and scent and hue. But taste? Taste had only one template. Bread—hard, moldy, stale. Nothing else.
So whenever Ruk or Peter spoke of flavors beyond that—of tastes that were soft, rich, sweet—she was never certain such things truly existed. She would raise an eyebrow, doubtful, even as she wished the rumors were real. Yet the sour tang that lingered on her tongue reminded her again and again that life, as she knew it, had only one flavor—and even if the world held others, her fate would never allow her to know any other.
"Don't you want to eat?" Ruk pressed again.
Lina did not turn from the wall. She clung to her narrow view as though looking away might undo what little hope remained. Peter would come back. He had promised. He would show her trees and birds, a sky so blue it hurt to look at, and countless other wonders she had never seen but carried whole in her faith.
"I will eat when Peter returns," Lina declared.
Ruk exchanged a glance with the old man, Jaro. He himself was faring little better than the child; he too had lost a friend, and unlike Lina, he held no hope of his return. Yet for the girl's sake, he could not yield to that truth.
He pushed himself upright and limped across the shed on his good leg, moving toward the corner where Lina peered into the dark world beyond the walls. He lowered himself between Tonol and the girl, his hand brushing her hair in passing before coming to rest, gentle and steady, upon her shoulder.
"Lina, sometimes we lose things—like the time you lost the horse, remember?" the old man said softly, his voice settling into the gloom. Lina drew the wooden horse closer to her chest, her fingers closing around it with a newfound, tentative hope.
Lina sprang at Jaro's words and turned to him, a sudden spark lighting her tiny green eyes.
"Yes, I remember! I lost the horse—and then Uncle Ruk found it for me after six days!"
The old man faltered, stunned by her eagerness, by a naïveté so pure it could belong only to a child of seven. How could he shape the truth for her? he wondered. Lina had never learned what loss truly meant; she had never known a mother long enough to feel her absence. This life—this shed, this ash, this waiting—was all she understood. She had no memory of better days against which to measure the worse.
Jaro steadied himself. He swallowed hard, forcing down the knot that swelled in his throat. He drew a ragged breath and spoke at last, his voice stripped of anxiety and emotion alike, as though he had driven all of it inward—into his lungs, which now burned like a banked red fire inside his heart.
"You see, Lina," the old man said softly, "sometimes when we lose something, we can't get it back."
Lina stared into his green eyes. There was a visible sadness there—the reddened lines of recent tears, the lingering wetness that promised another spill at any time. Annoyed, angered by what she saw and what she refused to accept, she dropped back toward the holes in the wall and shrugged.
"Peter promised to take me to a place with trees and birds," she said. "I want to see what they look like. Peter won't break his promise."
Her hope was relentless. She did not even know what a tree was, yet she wanted one with all her heart. The way Peter had painted them for her—with words alone—was as entrancing as the way Ruk spoke of chicken: succulent, mild, salty, soft, yeasty. She wanted to taste this chicken Ruk described so fervently, though she could not imagine it tasting any different from the stale bread she knew so well. That, at least, she could envision.
Chicken had a shape, if not a flavor.
But a tree?
She had never seen a tree—nor anything like one—nothing that could give her even the faintest image to hold onto.
"Uncle Jaro… have you ever seen a tree?"
The sudden question caught the old man off guard.
"Well—" He hesitated, then nodded. "Yes. Yes, of course."
His answer carried a faint, uncertain lift, as though he were testing the truth aloud.
"What do they look like?"
Jaro turned and exchanged a glance with Ruk, who looked just as startled. He swallowed, then faced Lina again. She was still gazing out through the holes in the wall, not looking at him—waiting, listening.
"Oh… there are many kinds of trees," Jaro began slowly. "Some are small. Some are large. And some…" He paused, searching for words. "Some are larger than Tonol. Wider, too."
Lina turned at that.
"What's the biggest tree you've ever seen?"
"The biggest…" Jaro rubbed the grit of half-sleep from his eyes, memory stirring at last. "Those would be the Sentinel Sapient Tree-Gods of Giliad and Epiphany. Their trunks are as wide as mountains—" he exhaled softly, "—and they rise four mountains high."
Lina faced him fully now.
She looked into his eyes, and there she saw it: no wavering, no doubt, no invention. Whatever else Jaro might have been, he was certain of this. He was not lying—not about the trees, not about their size.
"That much?" Lina scratched at her scalp, her head tilting as she turned back toward the wall. "What is a trunk?"
"It's like legs," Jaro said. "Trees stand on them so they don't fall. And they have feet called roots. They sink into the dirt and the ground, crack rocks, help them drink… eat…"
"But Peter told me trees eat with their leaves," Lina said at once. "They eat sunlight. Right?"
Jaro's gaze drifted to the wall—to the quilt of rags sewn into the iron, to the holes Lina strained to peer through, searching the velvet-dark night for Peter. Then back to her.
"I'm no botanist, girl," he said gently. "I don't know all these things."
"What is a botani—" She stopped, then asked instead, "Are there only two of those mountain trees?"
Mountain trees.
Jaro almost laughed.
"No. Well… Giliad and Epiphany are places, not the names of the trees. In Giliad there are five of them. In Epiphany… I think three."
"How do you know all this?" Lina asked.
"I was born on Giliad," Jaro said. "And trees like that are hard to miss."
Lina turned fully toward him now, a small spark lighting her face.
"Can you tell me more?"
"About what?"
"Do these trees have names?" Lina asked. "Colors? A scent? Anything unique? Do they have pears?"
Jaro sighed, weary with age and with the girl's ceaseless questions—yet any child her age would have asked the same. Curiosity was the nature of children. It was only that there was so little here to be curious about: soot and ash, the occasional crystal glittering under the sun, death and carnage, cold and tasteless life. Yet all of it had failed to crush the child's mind. She still sought the world she had been robbed of.
"Ah… I am no Pather," Jaro said at last, "nor do I know all their names. Only one of them." He paused. "That tree was called Ernest. Its leaves were pink."
"Pink?" Lina cut in at once.
Jaro stopped, considering. "Pink like the gem Peter found at dawn," he said slowly. "And its trunk—its branches too—were a deep brown, like your wooden horse."
"Peter's horse," Lina interrupted again. "I'll give it back to him when he comes."
"Yes," Jaro said softly. "Peter's horse. Though I think he likes it better as yours now. He's outgrown it."
He went on, his voice gentler now. "Ernest also had green leaves—green like my eyes, and yours. And mushrooms grew at its base, spreading far from the trunk. Yellow and red mushrooms. Yellow like the fire at its heart—the fire that burns. And red like the fire at the edge of the flame—the fire that warms."
"Mushrooms?" Lina echoed.
Lina twisted at the waist and turned toward Jaro. Behind him, Tonol chewed through three loaves of bread at once, untroubled, his jaws working as though his teeth had evolved for no purpose other than conquering the hard, unyielding bread no other mouth could gnaw.
"What are mushrooms?" Lina asked again.
"They're little trees—about this high," Jaro said, lowering his wrist as close to the ground as his stiff joints would allow.
"How can trees be that big and that small?"
"You'd have to ask a tree," Jaro replied with a tired smile, "or a botanist."
Lina turned back to the night, waiting for Peter. It had grown darker—colder too. She felt it in the wind that slipped through the holes and stung her eyes like thin needles. At last, she let the rag fall and turned fully away from the wall. She took the bread Ruk had passed to Jaro, disappointment weighing down her small shoulders, but she did not bite into it.
Like the wooden horse, she only held it—clutching and twisting it in her little hands—until the dry crust tore at the edges with a soft, hollow crunch.
"Can trees grow here?" Lina asked, her head lowered, her gaze fixed on the floor as she twisted the bread in her hands, her thoughts wandering somewhere far beyond the shed.
"No," Jaro replied. "They cannot. And perhaps that is for the best."
His voice was stripped of kindness, an unfamiliar grimace etched into his face—something close to disgust, stitched tightly to grief.
"Why not?"
"A tree should not exist here," Jaro said. "It would be unnatural—out of place, even evil. A tree that sprouted in this ash would only suffer, and so would we, for it would remind us that life is meant to be more than this." His voice hardened. "Better that we do not see a tree at all. Better that we see this place for what it is."
Lina felt the urge to look again, to lift the rag and peer through the holes, but she already knew—no matter how much cold wind she could endure, Peter would not be waiting on the other side. Melancholy had swallowed her appetite, though she still believed, with a quiet certainty, that Peter lived.
Her eyes drifted to the fire pit at the far end of the shed. She watched the flames and imagined the mushrooms Jaro had described—yellow at the heart, red at the edges, like fire itself. Only then did she notice her legs trembling, the cold gnawing deeper than before. She turned toward the wall—not the holes, not the rag, just the iron wall—and in her mind she pictured the darkness outside, the cold made perfect and complete.
She wondered how cold Peter must be now out there in the dark.