Chapter 2
Stop hacking at the roots like a drunkard with an axe," Ben grunted from behind me. I froze mid-swing, the blade buried in the thick, gnarled base of the ironwood tree. Sawdust clung to my sweaty forearms. "You're wasting energy. Cut *here*." He tapped a spot just above the soil line with his boot, where the bark shone smoother.
I'd spent the morning chopping down trees under my father's watchful eye, just like every other day since I could hold an axe. The forest around us was thick—full of trees I'd planted and felled in turn over twelve years. Their leaves rustled as if laughing at my clumsiness.
Ben didn't wait for my reply. He strode off toward the cabin, leaving me to wrestle the ironwood down alone. The wind carried the scent of damp earth and resin through the clearing. I wiped my face with my sleeve, tasting salt and pine.
By the time I dragged the last log to the pile, my hands were raw. I flexed my fingers, thinking about how my friend Jorik had left the forest last winter to apprentice with the alchemists in Stoneya. I'd stared at the empty space where his house once stood until moss crept over the foundation. Now, standing among the trees I'd raised and felled, I realized I'd never touched anything but wood and soil.
The golden lamp felt foreign in my pack. When I'd asked Ben how it worked, he'd just said, "Rub it when you're ready to stop pretending." His usual cryptic nonsense—except this time, his knuckles had whitened around his mug. I'd never seen him afraid before
.
Darkness pooled between the cave mouth's jagged teeth as I arrived at Stoneya's entrance. My torchlight flickered against wet walls that glistened like the inside of a beast's throat. Somewhere deep in the tunnels, water dripped in a rhythm that matched my pulse.
I almost turned back when the first whispers reached me—not from the cave, but from the lamp itself. A sound like distant wind through reeds, forming words I couldn't quite catch. The pack straps bit into my shoulders as I stepped forward. My shadow stretched long and thin ahead of me, as if eager to enter first.
The air changed abruptly twenty paces in, from earthy dampness to something metallic and sharp. My boot dislodged a pebble; it skittered ahead before vanishing into a crevice with no sound of impact. That's when I saw the carvings—crude figures chipped into the rock, their elongated fingers pointing deeper into the tunnel. The torchlight made their hollowed-out eye sockets seem to blink.
Something crunched underfoot. Bones—small ones, bird or rodent—arranged in deliberate spirals that led off the main path. The lamp grew warm against my hip. I hesitated, then knelt to rub its surface with my thumb. The golden patina flaked away to reveal sigils that pulsed like embers.
A hiss echoed from the darkness—too rhythmic to be water, too liquid to be stone. The lamp's heat spiked suddenly as the carvings began to weep thick, black sap. Last thing I saw before the torch guttered out was my own breath frosting in air that had no right to be so cold.
The darkness didn't just swallow sight—it muffled sound, thickened my pulse in my ears until even my footsteps vanished. Only the lamp remained, its glow now casting jagged shadows that moved independently of my shaking hands. The whispers resolved into a voice like grinding stones: "*Turn back,*" it rasped, "*before you count thirteen
.*"
My fingers found the knife at my belt out of habit, but the blade's edge dripped with the same black sap when I drew it. Thirteen paces ahead, the tunnel floor dropped away into nothing. At its edge stood a figure made of stacked stones, its hollow chest cavity pulsing with the same ember-light as the sigils.
One of its pebble-fingers uncurled toward me. The lamp's voice shrieked in my skull as the thing's jaw-slits parted: "*Twelve.*" I stumbled backward, feeling the weight of all the trees I'd ever planted suddenly pressing against my ribs. The cave exhaled—wet, rancid—and the torch flared back to life just in time to see the stone teeth close where I'd been
standing.
The walls weren't just carved—they were *watching*. Faces bulged beneath the rock's surface, their features distorted like reflections in a frozen pond. My knife dripped black onto the spiraled bones, which began to writhe and click together. The lamp's heat seared through my tunic as its sigils rearranged themselves into a single command: *
Rub.*
The stone figure's chest cavity split open with a sound like splintering oak. Inside, a vortex of fireflies swirled—except their light was wrong, casting shadows that slithered *toward* the source. The whispering voice became a chorus: "*Eleven.*" My fingers moved without thought, smearing sweat and soot across the lamp's surface. Golden dust ignited in the air between us.
The cave *screamed*. Not sound—*sensation*, as if every tree I'd ever cut down had just toppled onto my spine. The stone figure's ember-light exploded outward, revealing the truth of the tunnel: we stood inside a gargantuan ribcage, its ceiling arched with fossilized branches. The lamp's glow hardened into a blade of pure daylight in my grip. The figure whispered "*Ten*" as I swung.
Black sap rained from the walls where light touched them. The bones at my feet assembled themselves into a skeletal hand that seized my ankle—then crumbled to ash when the lamp's radiance hit them. The stone creature staggered back, its pebble-fingers clutching at its chest cavity where the fireflies were now fleeing. One landed on my wrist. Its bioluminescence spelled a word in Old Tongue: *
Run.*
The lamp's voice cut through the chaos like a honed axe: "*You carry my roots.*" Suddenly I understood—the trees I'd planted weren't just trees. They were anchors. And this cave? A throat. The stone figure lunged, its gaping mouth wide enough to swallow me whole. I thrust the lamp forward like a shield. Its light crystallized the creature's outstretched arm into petrified wood mid-reach.
Then the ground vanished. We fell through the ribcage floor into a chasm where the roots of my forest hung upside-down, their gnarled tips dripping with the same black sap. The stone figure's scream became the sound of splitting timber as the roots impaled it. The lamp's final whisper warmed my ear like a father's breath before a first hunt: "*Now you see.*" Then the roots wrapped around us both, and the counting stopped.
I woke beneath the hollow tree—the first I'd ever planted. Moonlight filtered through the carved initials Ben and I had left twelve winters ago, now stretched wide by the trunk's growth. The lamp lay cold against my chest, its sigils dull as river stones. But the fresh sap on my hands smelled of ironwood, and when I pressed my palm to the hollow's inner wall, the bark pulsed once—slow, like a sleeping giant's
heartbeat.
The cave's whispers still curled at the edges of my hearing, but softer now, shaped by the wind through leaves instead of stone teeth. My knife lay nearby, clean of sap, its edge glinting with ordinary wear. Only one thing proved it hadn't been a dream: the tiny firefly trapped beneath my collar, its light spelling nothing at
all.
I rubbed the lamp again—gently, like polishing a memory. This time, the golden dust swirled into the shape of Ben's face, his mouth forming words without sound. Behind him, the forest I'd planted stretched impossibly far, each tree marked with carved initials I didn't recognize. The vision lasted only a breath before dissolving into pollen. I tucked the lamp away and stood, knowing suddenly why he'd been afraid. Every tree I'd ever cut had been a lock. And I'd just opened the first door.
The firefly crawled onto my palm, wings shuddering. When I lifted it toward the hollow tree's opening, the creature burst into blue flame mid-flight, etching a single rune into the bark—one I'd seen carved into Ben's axe handle. Sap welled up black around the mark, hardening into something metallic when I touched it. A key. The wind carried the scent of burning cedar, though nothing smoked
.
Deep in the forest, something huge shifted. Not a sound—a vibration, like roots tearing free after centuries. The lamp pulsed against my ribs in warning. I ran toward the disturbance, leaping over ferns that curled away from my shadow. Beneath my boots, the soil warmed unnaturally, sprouting mushrooms that glowed like the firefly's corpse-light. They formed an arrow pointing to the oldest oak—the one I'd planted with Ben's hands guiding mine.
Its trunk split vertically with a groan, revealing a cavity lined with what looked like wet parchment. My fingers brushed the surface before I could stop them. The "parchment" was skin—human skin it showed worlds that I haven't seen.