Khalen pushed himself upright. The motion made his skull throb once, a dull reminder of the night's edges. Heat ghosted under his skin, not fire, not yet, just the memory of it. He drew a deeper breath on instinct, and the air pressed back, gentle but immovable, as if the grove had put an ear to his lungs and decided how loud he was allowed to be.
He hated that he couldn't tell if it was a restraint or a conversation.
Lys stood first, slinging the crossbow in one smooth movement that didn't read like aggression. Therrin rose more slowly, gaze tracking the canopy's seams like he was trying to see where it would give.
Khalen's eyes went past them, past the ring of villagers that had held all night without loosening an inch, and toward the direction his ship should be.
His ship, asleep under spears.
Every minute she stayed silent felt like leaving a blade in his back and calling it strategy.
From the corridor ahead, Ned's voice came, plain as ever. "Up. We're done."
Khalen pushed himself upright. The motion made his skull throb once, a dull reminder of the night's edges. Heat ghosted under his skin, not fire, not yet, just the memory of it. He drew a deeper breath on instinct, and the air pressed back, gentle but immovable, as if the grove had put an ear to his lungs and decided how loud he was allowed to be.
He hated that he couldn't tell if it was a restraint or a conversation.
Lys stood first, slinging the crossbow in one smooth movement that didn't read like aggression. Therrin rose more slowly, gaze tracking the canopy's seams like he was trying to see where it would give.
Khalen's eyes went past them, past the ring of villagers that had held all night without loosening an inch, and toward the direction his ship should be.
His ship, asleep under spears.
Every minute she stayed silent felt like leaving a blade in his back and calling it strategy.
He swallowed the urge to run. There was nowhere to run to inside a living ceiling.
Ned waited at the mouth of the corridor, tall enough that the canopy light caught him before it caught the people around him. In daylight he looked different than Khalen had expected, or maybe Khalen's eyes were simply less willing to lie. Ned was lean, not broad, all rope and wire and old endurance, a man who had survived by being hard to grab. The Root-Tongue Diadem circled his brow, colourful crystal ribs threaded with spore-silk. It flexed once with his breath and the grove's hum shifted with it, like the forest took cues from his lungs.
Ned's eyes flicked over Khalen's face, the way you checked whether a storm had fully passed.
"Walk," Ned said.
No congratulations, no warning, and no lecture about what Khalen almost did. Just the next step.
They followed.
Khalen did not let himself look around the way Lys and Therrin did.
He could feel wonder trying to get in through his ribs, but he shut it out. Wonder was how you forgot you were trapped.
All he wanted was the Valkyrie awake again, and open sky.
The grove made that desire feel like begging, the way it made everything feel earned. Every surface was alive in a way stone never was. The ground wasn't soft, it was attentive. The roots underfoot held warmth like muscle held warmth. Even the air carried texture, a faint pressure that shifted whenever Khalen's breathing deepened, as if the forest was listening for the moment he might decide to shout.
Ned walked like he had nothing to prove. The grove adjusted around him in small, precise allowances, and the allowances felt less like magic and more like habit, the kind you only noticed when it stopped. Moss thickened where his foot would land. A root arch eased higher without creaking. Spores drifted aside as if they'd been asked politely, and had complied.
Khalen's skin prickled. The back of his neck tightened the way it did when someone watched him through a scope.
He glanced up into the canopy and saw only green light and suspended spores.
Still, the feeling didn't lift.
OH's skull sat at Khalen's belt, seams dimmed to a thin, cautious glow, a relic he'd pulled from the ancient ruins of a fallen Titan city beneath a prison colony. It had been quiet since the morning's first word. Too quiet.
Khalen wasn't sure if that meant OH was respecting Ned's territory, or if the grove was doing it, the way it had quieted the Valkyrie's heart.
Either way, it put Khalen's nerves on edge. He didn't like anything that could silence OH without asking.
When OH spoke, it didn't come through the skull's seam-hum. It arrived inside Khalen's head like a fingertip pressed to the back of his thoughts.
Ned led them along a path that wasn't a path until it decided to be. One moment there was only moss and root and a wall of trunk ahead, and then the wall softened into an opening, as if the grove remembered an old corridor and chose to lend it to them.
They came to a rise where the canopy's light brightened, and Khalen felt the grove's hum deepen through the soles of his boots.
A seam opened in the green ahead, the trunks parting without sound.
Khalen's gaze caught on a vertical mass of bark and moss so enormous it didn't read as a tree at first. It read as a pillar holding the world up. Its trunk disappeared into the canopy above and into the ground below, and the roots that webbed out from it were thick enough to be roads. He could feel them under the soil like a second landscape.
The centre, the place everything branched from.
Lys's breath went out soft. Therrin made a sound that might have been awe, might have been calculation.
Khalen felt only a hard pull in his chest.
If the grove was a body, this was the spine.
And they were walking toward its heart with his ship asleep behind them.
Ned stopped at the base and tilted his head, listening.
The Root-Tongue Diadem flexed once.
Overhead, the vinework shifted, tendons tightening where there had been slack.
A bridge of vine and living root eased into place above them, without snapping down or unfurling with theatre. Vines tightened, relaxed, settled into a new angle. The path opened in the air like an invitation that didn't bother pretending it wasn't also a test.
Khalen stared at it, and anger flared in him.
Not at the grove.
At himself.
Because part of him wanted to admire it, and admiration was how you started forgiving cages.
Ned didn't look back. "Up."
He stepped onto the first living span as if it had always been there.
It held him.
Khalen stepped next, careful not to show caution as fear. The bridge didn't sway like rope. It gave under his weight in a slow, living way, then firmed again, a pressure that traveled up his legs and into his gut, intimate in a way he didn't consent to.
He forced his expression into calm.
Lys followed, then Therrin. Behind them, villagers watched from below, silent, not hostile, not welcoming. A perimeter at a distance.
As they climbed, the grove's light shifted. Greens deepened toward blue, then slid back again. Spores drifted past in curtains, fat and luminous, popping softly somewhere out of sight with damp little sounds that made Khalen's skin crawl.
His senses were wrong. Not heightened, not sharpened. Unshielded.
Everything felt close. Every breath felt heard. Every heartbeat felt like it might echo.
Khalen's gaze kept snagging on dark spaces between leaves, on pockets of shadow that looked deep enough to hide a person, or a thought.
He couldn't shake the feeling that if he stopped moving, something would step out and stand behind him.
OH's voice came in his head.
Not through the air, not through the skull's little speaker hum. Inside, like someone leaning close to his inner ear.
Careful. Quiet. Unmistakable.
"You were drawing from me."
Khalen's jaw tightened.
He did not look down at the skull. He did not speak aloud.
His thoughts came hard, controlled. When.
"Last night," OH said, and there was no humour in it. "When the tea stripped the future out of your hands. You reached, and your fire went looking for a larger furnace. It found me."
Khalen felt cold under his ribs, sharp enough to cut through the lingering euphoria's residue.
I almost burned them.
"You almost burned everything," OH said, still quiet. "And Ned almost let you. Until he didn't."
Khalen's eyes flicked toward Ned's back.
The man moved like a plain fact, like gravity, the kind you only noticed when you tried to fight it and found out it didn't move.
He showed power, Khalen thought. The grove did, but he… guided it.
OH didn't answer right away.
That delay made Khalen's skin prickle more than any words would have.
Ned reached the next landing where the bridge met a platform grown from the trunk itself. The "platform" wasn't built. It was an extension, a shelf of living wood that had thickened over time under the repeated weight of feet. The surface held warmth and a slow pulse, faint enough to be imagined, steady enough not to be.
Ned paused again. The diadem flexed, and somewhere above, another bridge shifted into place with that same measured compliance.
Khalen's anger kept simmering.
He didn't like how easy it was for Ned to do this.
He didn't like how the grove listened.
He didn't like that Bastion didn't come here anymore, and now he understood why.
He felt Lys glance at him, quick and subtle, a check-in without words.
Khalen didn't give her anything back.
He couldn't.
If he opened his mouth, the wrong truth might fall out.
The thought of last night's honesty made his throat go tight.
OH spoke again in his head, softer, like a memory being slid under a door.
"You wanted to see what you can't see."
Khalen's focus snapped. Yes.
He hated that OH was right. He hated more that he needed it.
They were inside a living organism that could put a hand over the Valkyrie's eyes.
He couldn't fly blind in a place like this.
Before Khalen could shape the thought into anything like a request, OH continued, and the tone changed. It wasn't instruction. It was story.
"You need a way to map a room without eyes," OH said. "We've seen that before."
"Vathereon learned it by accident," OH said.
Khalen's breath caught.
Vathereon.
The name carried weight in their world, half myth, half warning, the kind of figure archivists wrote about in careful ink because the stories never stopped multiplying.
Khalen kept walking because Ned kept walking, and because stopping would feel like kneeling.
OH's voice stayed low inside him, threading itself through the hum of the grove.
"He went into the Shifting Sea chasing power," OH said. "An artifact buried under moving sand. A field that made the dunes behave like water, and made anything alive inside it behave like hunger."
Khalen pictured it without wanting to, dunes rolling like waves, sunlight cutting off shards of salt and glass, the horizon bending like heat.
"He found the artifact," OH continued, "or it found him. He reached for it with hands that thought they were steady. He was blinded for the mistake."
Khalen's stomach tightened. He could feel the lesson waiting in the story like a knife under cloth.
"Out there," OH said, "blind is not helpless. Blind is honest. You stop trusting your eyes. You start listening with everything else."
"What hunted him," OH went on, "wasn't a single beast. It was the Sea itself reshaping predators around the artifact's pull, predators that rode the dunes, slid under salt crust, learned the taste of Breath and followed it. They didn't need names. They needed meals."
Khalen felt his scalp prickle. His own fire shifted under his skin, restless at the idea of being tasted.
"Vathereon fought them," OH said, matter-of-fact, as if talking about weather. "Hordes. Night after night. He learned how to send his Breath outward, not as light, not as blast, but as a pulse through sand and stone, a wave that returned what it touched. The dunes spoke back. The world gave him shape again."
Khalen could see it, the way you saw a story when it landed too close to you.
A man in a moving desert, blinded, breathing his will into the ground and letting the ground tell him where the teeth were.
"He gathered tribes," OH said. "Not by promising them the future, but by keeping them alive in the present. He built a settlement where there had only been wandering. Together they pushed the predators back, not forever, but far enough that the Sea stopped owning every step."
"And then," OH added, and there was something almost amused there, almost sad, "he left. Because Vathereon never stayed where people began to worship the thing that saved them."
The story ended like a door closing.
Khalen's heart hammered. The grove's hum pressed in around it.
He wanted the technique. He wanted it now. He wanted something in this place to belong to him.
He didn't ask OH how to do it.
Not aloud, not as a request.
His body asked first.
His fingertips dragged along the living trunk as if he needed balance, and he pushed a small pulse down through the wood.
The grove answered like a slammed door.
A white crack went off behind his eyes, bright enough to erase the canopy for an instant. Sound vanished, replaced by pressure, a concussion inside his skull. His teeth rang. His ears filled with thick silence, hot as poured wax, and for one awful heartbeat he couldn't tell if he was still standing or already falling.
He lurched.
The world tilted, then dropped.
Khalen hit the moss on his side, his right hand clawing at the ground, his left arm reaching out on instinct, grasping for something that wasn't there. He curled tight, forearm over his face, clutching his head like he could hold the blast in.
Bootsteps closed in, careful but fast.
Lys was there first, dropping to a knee, crossbow still low. Her free hand hovered near Khalen's shoulder without grabbing. She didn't shake him. She didn't crowd his airway. She watched his pupils, his breath, the small tremor in his jaw.
"Khalen," she said, level. Not panicked, not soft. Present. "Hey. Eyes on me."
Therrin crouched on Khalen's other side a beat later. His gaze swept Khalen's face, then the canopy above, then back again, searching for cause and finding only aftermath.
"Is this the tea?" Therrin asked under his breath, more uncertainty than question. "Is this… supposed to happen?"
Khalen tried to answer and the pressure behind his eyes pulsed again, smaller this time, like an aftershock.
OH's voice came quiet from Khalen's belt, the skull's seams dimmed to a thin, cautious glow.
"That one's on me," OH said.
Khalen's hand tightened on moss. "No," he rasped. The word came out clipped, because his head still rang. "I did it."
Lys's eyes narrowed a fraction, not accusing, just recalculating. "You did what?"
Khalen swallowed. His throat scraped. He tasted honeyed earth and something bitter underneath it, like ash.
Nothing he could say would sound sane to them, not here, not now.
"Too much," he forced out, and hated how true and useless it was.
OH didn't argue.
There was a pause that felt deliberate, like OH choosing restraint instead of cleverness.
Then, softer, to Khalen alone, and only because Khalen needed the truth more than he needed comfort, OH said, "Wrong angle, wrong force. That wasn't entirely you."
Khalen squeezed his eyes shut, waited for the ringing to stop being a world.
It faded, stubbornly, then finally.
When he cracked his eyes open again, Ned was standing a few paces away.
He hadn't rushed in. He hadn't barked orders. He hadn't shown concern.
He had simply stopped moving, because the grove had stopped moving around Khalen's fall, and Ned listened to the grove the way other men listened to weather.
Ned's face was unreadable, not because he was mysterious, but because he didn't waste expression on things that didn't change outcomes.
He looked at Khalen on the moss, then at the trunk Khalen had touched, then back again.
His diadem flexed once.
The grove's hum shifted, subtle as breath.
Ned spoke, plain as soil. "Walk."
No reprimand, no question, no pause for weakness.
Lys helped Khalen up without making it a spectacle, a hand under his elbow, a steady pressure that asked, Can you move, and did not allow him to answer no unless he meant it.
Khalen straightened, head still buzzing, pride bruised, anger back in his throat where it lived.
He glanced once at the trunk and felt a flare of resentment, irrational and immediate.
You hit back.
The grove did not care.
They continued.
As they climbed higher, the architecture revealed itself more clearly. It wasn't a village in trees. It wasn't huts or houses perched on branches like decoration.
It was the organism choosing to make space for humans without becoming human.
Platforms thickened out of living wood. Rooms bulged from the trunk like knots grown hollow. Vines braided into railings that tightened under weight and loosened when nobody touched them. Everything adjusted a fraction with each step, slow, respectful movement, like the earth turning.
Ned stopped at the base of the largest trunk, the one Khalen had sensed from below as the grove's centre. He tilted his head, listening.
The Root-Tongue Diadem flexed once.
A bridge above them shifted.
Not fast, not dramatic, more like a joint settling into place. Vines tightened, relaxed, found their hold. A path opened in the air, an invitation that didn't bother pretending it wasn't also a test.
Khalen stared at it, and anger flared again. Not at the grove. At himself.
Because the grove could do this, and the Valkyrie was still asleep, and Khalen had walked into another cage with his eyes open.
OH's voice came once more, quiet at Khalen's belt. "I'm going to shut up now."
Khalen didn't answer.
OH continued anyway, but only a single line, almost an apology and almost a promise, and then it was gone. "I won't distract you. Not here."
The silence that followed was cleaner.
Ned stepped onto the bridge first.
It held him.
Khalen followed, head still tender, senses still too open, skin still alive with the feeling of being watched.
He tried not to flinch every time the grove's hum shifted.
He tried not to think about Vathereon blind in the Shifting Sea, learning to listen to the ground because his eyes had been taken.
He tried not to imagine what it would feel like to be blinded here.
The bridge carried them to a cluster of interconnected living chambers, high enough that the grove's light seemed thinner, more like moonlight than lantern-glow. The "homes" weren't built. They were grown, bridged by vine spans that flexed underfoot and sighed softly as they settled, like the organism exhaling after accommodating weight.
A bridge, a door, a ceiling, all alive around him, all deciding what he was allowed to do.
Khalen felt the cage everywhere now.
Ned stopped at the mouth of one of the chambers and finally looked back.
His eyes met Khalen's, and the look wasn't hostile.
It was practical.
This thing can burn us, the look said.
So we treat it like fire.
Ned spoke, plain. "You sleep here."
No welcome, no warning, and no patience for gratitude.
Then, because he was the kind of man who believed the only mercy worth giving was clarity, Ned added, "You don't touch what you don't understand."
Khalen's jaw tightened, because it was exactly what he'd failed to do.
Ned's gaze flicked to Lys, then Therrin, taking their measure again without ceremony.
Then back to Khalen, and only Khalen, as if leadership was a scent Ned could track.
"You want your ship awake," Ned said.
Khalen didn't pretend otherwise. "Yes."
Ned nodded once, like the answer had been inevitable. "Then you learn where your hands are."
He turned away.
The grove moved with him, small and precise.
And Khalen stood on a living threshold, head still ringing from his own mistake, skin still prickled with unseen eyes, and wondered, not for the first time, what it meant that Bastion had stopped coming here long ago.
Because whatever Ned was hiding, it wasn't a trick.
It was something that had taught an entire city to stay away, and call it wisdom.