A Brief History of Ympe-Tre

[Eurydice]

((Idea for this story came up over the summer when I was designing Maura's "dream temple" (www.freewebs.com/mmordrellyn/). Not entirely sure the timeline is going to be entirely correct by the end of this, but close enough... and besides, there's chaos, so nothing makes proper sense anyway. Ranges from the first day Maura was shown her area of dream to the day before Maura's death. I think. Maura's 20-ish at the time of the Frost Reach campaign, and she dies at age 26, and the story says that it spans six years, so that seems right. Right?

Split into two posts because posts are too damn small.))

The elegant knight in green and silver led them to an empty place. The trail that they seemed to have taken on the way had long since faded into the neutral grayish-brownish-green of the field underfoot, and a vague, non-threatening haze hung lightly over everything. The mist stuck to the air they breathed, the clothes they wore, and the dull grass carpeting everything, water beading the surfaces until they were all faintly bejeweled.

Maura looked over the field. The knight, who seemed to be some projection of the sword (or was it the other way around?) had said that her house, or her temple, as Cora had put it, was standing, waiting for her to shape it. She knew that they had ceased to move, but their seeming destination was in no way designated as such, not even in any way that she could innately sense. Hesitantly, she stretched out her senses again, aching to penetrate the slim veil of void that seemed to coat everything here, but nothing earth-shattering revealed itself. It was a space in Morabrenin, empty and untouched, and that was all.

Standing there a moment, she sensed rather than saw that Cora was hanging back. "What's wrong?" Maura asked.

"Nothing. Waiting for you to be ready. Invite me in when you are."

The green and silver knight stood close. Maura could feel his presence at her side, cool and solid, and she took comfort in it. "Shape it," he said. It was not an order, nor a suggestion-- simply truth. It was what she was supposed to do. "Start small. Something that has meaning to you."

Maura closed her eyes.

As beautiful as Cora's temple was, Maura knew that such a structure wouldn't really suit her. Its beauty was too hard, structured, ornate, and even the columns about the exterior only promoted the illusion of height so much. She could imagine that perhaps Ranial's temple looked something like that; such graceful beauty befit the princess. But it wasn't hers.

She thought of her father's keep. She had come to think of it as a sort of home, before it had shattered. But that, too, was structured, hard. Besides, it was so heavily based on his ancestral home in the waking world; Maura could claim no such home on which to base her temple, and the thought of basing hers on her father's keep chilled her completely.

Angelina's ice fields, she imagined, would have been quite a sight to see, when they were truly hers. The wild abandon of cold air, frozen flowers, glassy surface like a ballroom dance floor-- that was the kind of organic beauty that Maura could conceive of as home.

She tasted memory, tentative at first but gradually dipping deeper into the well of recollection, remembering the nights on the run after she'd left Liara's service, sleeping out under the stars, accompanied by the trickle of a shallow stream, waters clear and cold, the bottom coated with hard, round pebbles. She remembered sitting back against a thick tree trunk in late autumn, the one tree of the grove that was not yet bare, that still carried the ghost of reddish-gold dressing. She remembered looking up at the slender smile of the moon, shadowed by twisted branches, locking into the bare arms of the trees beside it.

She felt the green and silver knight nod, a soft but palpable wave of approval. "Fitting."

Not even aware that she had been directing the pictures in her mind's eye onto the blank canvas before her, Maura opened her eyes to find herself standing in a roughly formed circle of trees, thick-bodied and dressed for the autumnal months, the limbs of one tree interlocking with those of its neighbor to form an irregular but united roof. Within their circumfrence, the grass had taken structure and hue, not the bright, verdant grass of spring but a parti-colored blend of a sun-dried green, yellow, and brown.

A happy, surprised laugh escaped her lips. She reached out again, with purpose this time, summoning up the memory of those patchy forests along the creek from two years ago, and when she opened her eyes, the ring of interlocking foliage had thickened, two or three trees deep all around. Across the clearing, Asriel wove in and out of the grove, pressing his face against the trunks to claim and inspect.

Outside the grove, the clink of china on a metal tray signalled that Cora was ready with the refreshments. "May we come in and have tea, Maura?"

The new-made mistress of the grove turned in a slow circle, surveying her territory. There was so much more that she wanted to make of this place, a hundred ideas, but she knew it would take time, and all her impatience and eagerness to explore wouldn't shape the place any faster or better. A work in progress, it would be.

Cora ducked in, bearing the tea pot and two cups on one tray; a stacked caddy of sandwiches and pastries floated in behind her. "Very foresty," she said mildly, pouring the hot, fragrant liquid. "I like trees. They're like columns, all upright and such, only they flow." Having poured two cups, she glanced over at the knight. "Will you be having tea, sir?"

"No, thank you."

The woman nodded, nibbled a cucumber sandwich. "Do you have a name or two that I might call you by?"

The knight regarded her in grave silence for a moment. "Jaded Heart is what most call me."

Maura sipped the tea, which tasted of cherries and smelled like roses, craning her neck back to look at the sky peeking through the bright leaves scattered about the branches. The sky overhead had brightened to pale blue, pocked with wispy clouds, and in pale outline, she thought she could see the day-lit outline of a crescent moon.

***

In the days to follow

Logic dictated that this circle grove should either be one of the extremities of the temple's borders or the core from which the temple would expand, but Maura had far too much exploring and experimenting to do for her to bother with silly things like logical progression. She had built up the forest in all directions and branched off to form what would become the bulk of it to the east before realizing that perhaps she should start designating purposes for areas, dividing and naming the pieces of her creation, like a god might do whilst creating a world.

She called the first grove that she had created that day the Founding Hall and moved on from there.

The forest sprawled, branched out to the east, tapered and thinned out to the west. Her sense of the way the place was growing told her that the Founding Hall was closer to the western border of her wooded kingdom, and many nights, she walked that wing of the forest, seeing what had sprung up in her absence and how far she could go before she began to feel the bond with her place begin to wane.

One night, she decided that she might like to have a place to sit and think, a place to sleep in shelter, and as she sat perched amid the thick, convoluted roots of one of the tallest, most stolid trees in the western arm, pondering whereabouts such a shelter might go, the purple-yellow-red flicker of one of the spirits Ranial had introduced to her whistled through the arms of a few sturdy branches.

There was a flicker of energy, and then the branches began to move and grow, not quickly, but unnaturally none the less. Dull wooden planks began to take form, the branches reaching up to steady and cradle them, longer timbers settling into the slats of rooftops; tall fences and walls sprung up and wove together, with floors and supports under them layering and relayering until at last, there was the perfect tree house miniature of a castle strewn among the tops of four or five closely spaced trees. There looked to be half a dozen rooms within the light brown walls, and the sweep of some of the spires almost resembled the exterior of her father's keep.

With a laugh of delight, Maura went the trunk of one of the castle trees, and as she ran her hand along the textured bark, narrow planks of a ladder-staircase settled themselves in a spiral around the trunk. Climbing up through the floor, she found empty rooms, clean and brightly lit, slanted afternoon sunlight seeping through windows.

The spirit, ornate and bird-shaped, was strutting about the otherwise vacant floor, cooing with what seemed like approval. Maura bowed low. "Thank you, friend! It's lovely. May I take your design and try to build something similar, elsewhere in my forest?"

It chirruped noncommittally and gracelessly flapped over to her shoulder, perching there, waiting patiently.

Maura remembered, with a smile, Cora's suggestion that she add plenty of furniture.

Two nights later, she finished furnishing simple living quarters, a dining room, and a space for study, and with the purple-yellow-red bird anchored to her shoulder, she set off to find new places to experiment and build amidst the interlocking, autumnal branches.

In the arm of the forest to the south, she found three adjacent trees that suited her needs. She began to shape them, create from their structure, and when she was finished, it did not flow quite as naturally as the first suite that purple-yellow-red bird had crafted, but the principle was generally where it needed to be. The woods to the south were generally darker-hued, twisted and more flexible, and instead of a single ring of rooms about the supporting trees, Maura had opted for three split levels, distributing the weight more widely. The other main structural difference of the southern wing was the fact that the ceilings were left open, covered only when the thin, upper-strata of branches stretched overhead.

In the arm of the forest to the east, she opted for a more straightforward set-up, similar to that of the western arm, a ring of ten rooms instead of six, and a second story with four more rooms, slanted roof peaking towards the sky. She offset the bright yellow and orange leaves, light bark, and mostly clear skies by staining the wood dark red. By this time, her talent for shaping the treetops had grown considerably. She managed to incorporate porches for some of the rooms, clean glass for the windows instead of open space, and labyrinthine stairs leading between the floors, rooms, and ground level. She experimented with rope ladders and swings, and the purple-yellow-red bird flapped along beside her as she swung from the upper-level deck to the ground, shrieking with abandon and joy.

In the arm of the forest to the north, the forest stretched much higher, some treetops reaching fifty meters tall. Amidst a cluster of the tallest three, she wove a support structure of thick braids of thick rope braced against the thickest arms. Where all of the previous structures had adhered to some sort of unification, the northern suites were asymetrical and random, here an open deck, there an over-sized hammock, elsewhere a covered structure, but one completely open along one wall. There were very few actual rooms, but there was plenty of open spaces to walk about safely, plenty to explore, the thick slings, ladders, and swings hanging from the branches like ornaments. Despite the irregularity of the place, there was a kind of weird beauty to it, so long as one was not inclined towards a fear of heights.

In the core of the forest, she spent several days nurturing the foliage until she had a thick, hollowed-out trunk to transform into a three-story sitting room. A sun-dappled terrace surrounded it, and as soon as she had set up tables, chairs, and sideboards in a way that seemed pretty, Cora was stepping into the clearing with a large picnic basket and a large bottle of hot water for tea.

***

In the weeks to follow

Maura heaved a sigh of relief to see that the seed of a small lake to the south-east had finally taken root and spread into an acceptable size, enough that she could finally, rightly call it a lake.

The shallow stream trickling cold along the western border had grown without too much effort; she didn't know why the lake had turned into such a difficult project. It had become a matter of stubbornness rather than any particular inclination to have a lake in the landscape; she simply refused to accept that she couldn't affect the dreamscape to her desire in this way. But she had proven the victor now, in the matter of the lake, and could move on to other adventures.

She and Asriel stepped along its borders gently curving borders, glancing in at their reflected selves. Willows dotted the shore and shallows, their shadows breaking up the bright regularity of the mirror sky. Maura made a seat for herself of twisted roots and hard-packed earth and let her feet dangle in the water. Fingering the green grass that hung over the edge of the bank, she watched figments and ghosts of insects running along the ground. Asriel ducked his head to sniff at them, ever curious at the creatures inhabiting the dream, and occasionally dipped a paw into the water to bat at her feet and ankles, their images warped slightly by the water and light.

Finally, she couldn't resist; the water was so lovely and warm, so inviting. Stripping off her light green tunic and binding her hair back in a metal clip, she slid off of her makeshift chair and waded in as deep as her waist. The lake's floor was much softer than she'd thought it would be, billowing up to cloud the water with every step she took. Maura took a deep breath (from instinct only, for, as she reflected on it after doing so, it seemed most unlikely that her own dream keep would drown her) and let herself sink, poking at the silt experimentally, seeing where it might yield the growth of tiny plant light. A splash behind her sounded; evidently, Asriel had no intention of being left out and was already paddling towards the deeper regions.

Maura flipped onto her back and lazily kicked after him, closing her eyes and imagining that the world entire was a giant bowl encircling her silly little lake, and in that bowl, the world was gently rocking her to sleep, as gently as a mother's embrace. She even fancied she heard a lullaby, but surely this was just a dream within a dream.

Somewhere in that daydream, the lullaby became more tangible, the voice so close to familiar. She didn't dwell on where she might have heard the voice, content to lie there, drifting in and out of wakefulness. Stretching her fingers out, she ran her senses along the bottom of the lake, feeling for a shallow area that she might coax closer to the surface; an aquatic tree just left of the center might be very pretty, and if she didn't get caught up in another amusing project too quickly, she'd have to explore the possibility. Of course, it was entirely possible that such a tree might spring up of its own accord, merely at the suggestion, but one could never be sure of how the forest would grow and shape itself.

Wading ashore, she wrung the water from her hair until it sprang back to form light brown ringlets, drying in the breeze. Asriel was romping in the shallows, making a muddy mess, but given five minutes undisturbed, the grit would fade back to the bottom of the lake, and no permanent damage would have occurred.

She sat. Cool breeze ruffled the tunic that clung to her oddly where the gritty lake water had not yet dried. The dampness magnified the cold, and Maura shivered slightly, drawing her knees to her chest and tucking her chin on top of them. Slow, wispy clouds had started rolling past the sun, highlighting its beams as they shone out in irregular bursts. For the moment, none of them reached her, but the clouds would roll away again soon, and the transitional, mild autumn would take over the dreamscape again.

She shivered again, realizing whose voice it had been singing the lullaby, pulled from some preconscious strand of memory, and in the same moment, she knew why it was so unsettling to hear that voice whilst drifting in a lake. Half an instant later, she realized that the lake needed a name, and under the circumstances, the only name she could settle on was Niobe.

Asriel, reacting to her disquiet, romped out of the lake, shook himself dry, and came over to urgently rub his face against her shoulder and under her arm. Maura giggled, glad to have that strange moment broken by something benign, and wrestled him into a mock headlock to scratch his ears and chin, digging her fingertips against his rough fur until he growled happily and rolled over onto his back, legs curling and kicking the air. Maura flopped back against the bank, ignoring the twigs and dirt that would get caught in her hair as she lay there, back against the hard ground, taking comfort in its presence, solid as anything could be here.

When the willow in the middle had started to grow a few nights later, she decided that she needed company, and after a moment of concentration and a spell to beckon through the currents of Morabrenin, she opened her eyes and saw two familiar figures standing at the foot of the shallow hill that sloped away from the forest proper to the open space where the lake lived.

Her heart glowing at the sight of them, Maura raised her voice slightly and waved. "Lorelai! Vanir!"

***

In the months to follow

Asriel raced along the stream towards the Gold Tree that was billowing in a wind that was more lusty and bold than usual, howling and hallooing to the reverberate hills. It was one of the rare occasions that Maura painted the sky in midnight blue, stars winking at her through the branches as she sprinted after the fleet-footed wolf. She was barefoot, as she usually was when exploring the forest, and although there were broken branches and concealed pebbles to batter at her soles, she had grown accustomed to it far too much to care.

They hadn't played in this part of the forest for some time now. The nights she spent in Morabrenin, Maura picked whichever arm of the woods suited her fancy, and much of the last month, she had spent fortifying the platforms in the Treetop Suites to the north and fine-tuning the system of rope swings and ladders that served as the navigation therein. Her "work" on this area was constantly punctuated by periods of lounging about, crawling along bare branches, learning what shapes and patterns she could construct with the foliage, determining which energies ran through which regions, and which could be tapped for her use.

As such, she was slightly surprised, if not entirely so, to find that the terrain was somewhat different from what she remembered last. The stream, formerly a puny little thing, had started to etch its way into the ground as if it had been there for many years. The Gold Tree, a strong but flexible maple with leaves that were always a somewhat unearthly yellow, dipped its toes in the stream's fast-flowing waters; it had filled out into a fine, thick trunk, and its leaves were as bright and abundant as ever.

Up ahead, Asriel had paused and darted into an unfamiliar thicket, and she, with eager and uncertain gait, followed, her hands and heightened senses stretched before her.

She had been unsure as to what would lie beyond the patchy foliage, but whatever it was she might have expected, it was not the deep turquoise lagoon that she found there, fed by the stream but holding deeper and darker waters than should have resulted from the pooling of the cold, clear liquid that curved from the southern borders to the western desolation. Shadows and dark underbrush dappled the shore, and yet the depths of the pool seemed illuminated, although by what source, she could not say, unless the water itself somehow glowed.

Asriel, usually the first to plunge into Lake Niobe during their nightly visits to the murky pond, stood, unexpectedly cautious and respectful, a few steps back from the water's edge, but Maura could not bring herself to show any such restraint. Transfixed, detatched, as if operating within a second dream, she stepped up to the water's edge and knelt, eyes rooted in eyes' reflection; fingers stretched out to hesitantly brush the water's surface, and everywhere that their touch rippled the water, the glow under it changed fractionally, here in color, there in intensity, elsewhere in pattern.

The shifting lights coalesced into images, here and there, until finally, two figures dancing at a Solstice ball came into focus. Maura started back a moment, then lowered herself onto her belly to peer more closely at their faces, but there was no doubt that it was Alshalys' sweet face and Tiberious' gruff smile.

It was two months shy of Solstice now, though. Was this the future?

Perhaps it was the past; for now, the image was of ten figures strugling to rise out of the water at the shore of the island called Trilarese. Maura chuckled. It had been only a few years past, and yet it felt like another lifetime entirely. She'd known so little of herself, then, nothing of her potential or parentage.

As soon as the thought of her parents arose, it lingered in her mind long enough to bring back the image that the dopelganger had showed her of Bryant and Niobe, before she'd even learned their names. Her gaze lingered on Bryant a beat longer, and the translucent scene in the water shifted once more to a barren place, one she didn't recognize. Angelina was there, looking colder and somehow more solid than Maura had ever seen before. Her stomach lurched as she realized, in the same half-second that Angelina seemed to realize, what was about to happen, but she swallowed her distress and watched as Bryant ran the Herald through, weeping as she died.

The water around the scene rippled sharply, pushing outward in what looked like a shockwave. But it went beyond the edges of the pool, shifting the magical composition of the dreamscape, sending a heavy wind through the trees, setting the branches to clacking against each other raucously. Asriel looked to the branches overhead, snarling softly.

Maura stood, circling the bank to where Asriel crouched and knelt to scratch his head, watching as the images of color and light shifted-- the entrance hall to her father's Morabrenin keep, a lithe figure in armor that she didn't recognize who was fighting alongside with her, a field of snow, and a single white rose, coated with either glass or ice. Forcing herself to turn away (the images felt compelling and hypnotic in the way that only the very dangerous ever feel), she and Asriel resumed their moonlit jog through the twisted paths in the woods of Ympe-Tre.

She wasn't sure, but Maura had the unshakable notion that whatever it was letting those images in, through the pool's surface, would let other things in as well, a notion which worried her deeply. It was not, she decided, safe to dabble in those images too much. It would be better to leave it alone until she understood how it worked.

She was back the next night, though, to watch image of Ranial, as she had been when she first met Bryant, and she was back the night after that, watching Aethmyr, as he had been before his wife and children were taken from him.

What exactly directed the pool or the images under it, she never did properly find out.

[Eurydice]

In the year to follow

Cora pointed across the Core as Maura poured the smoky tea into mismatched porcelain cups. "That wasn't there last time. What is it?"

Turning her gaze away from the sitting room, Maura blinked.

Cora was entirely correct, of course. The gnarled, knotted trunk coated in smooth black bark had not been there before. Maura was unsure as to which was more unsettling: the fact that the new construct had sprung up so suddenly, or the fact that it had surely been standing there the whole time without its very existence jumping out at her.

Its ebony hue was so intense that it almost hurt to look at for very long. Twisted branches held open hands up to the sky as if daring the stars to send down their worst.

Shaking her head slightly, Maura set the cups on saucers and divided the little cookies and cakes from her rucksack onto plates. "Sometimes the forest just... modifies itself. Usually the changes are subtle things, but that..." She struggled for some sort of verbal handle on the tree and gave up. "Oh, Cora, I have no idea what it is. It feels like it belongs there. Like, it feels right, in here--" She put a frustrated fist to her chest. "--for it to be standing there, but it just..." She shrugged helplessly.

Cora was sipping and blowing on the tea, eyeing Maura over the black liquid in the cup. "It makes you nervous, doesn't it?"

Maura could feel her fingers trembling around the tea cup, and she fought to keep them steady. "It makes me feel... uncomfortable. But it's not, like, something-sneaking-up-on-me uncomfortable; it feels like..." What did it feel like? "It's like... you know how if you have a shortcoming-- you're not very good at art, or at keeping still, or something, and you know you're not good at it, and it's part of who you are..." She blushed, staring down into the cup. "Sort of like that. It doesn't feel right... but it feels like it's supposed to be there.

"I wish it weren't," she added, as an afterthought.

Cora nodded thoughtfully. A soft breeze had picked up; it was quickly cooling the tea to a more palatable temperature, but it left Maura feeling oddly cold and exposed.

Finally, Cora took a long drink and looked up. "Intuition is an important thing in the Dream, Maura, here in your temple more than anywhere. This place is created by who you are and what you want and where you are going; if you have a hunch about something that this place makes manifest, it will be true, invariably, in some form or another.

"The tree..." Cora wrinkled her nose. "It tastes funny. It tastes of death and strangeness, and I don't know what in you brought it here. And if you aren't sure why it's here either, that's fine, you've got time to figure it out. Just... be careful about it, I suppose. Making things here isn't like making this--" She gestured to the tea, the strainer and leaves beside the pot. "It's more than just a sum of parts."

"You mean," said Maura dubiously, "that it's got a life and will of its own?"

"I mean," Cora replied, "that it will have, if you don't tend it carefully."

Wind ruffled dried leaves over the floorboards, and Maura really felt that she was not in her Dream Temple or under a roof of interwoven branches, but outside, and not in a good, undert-the-open-sky-to-roam-as-she-pleased way, but naked to the elements, unsheltered. And she too could taste that strangeness that the tree brought to the setting, the the taste of dead dreams.

Cora, in the meantime, had finished her tea and was swirling the dregs around the bottom with an expert flick of her wrist. Maura spoke slowly as she watched the hypnotic motion. "I know it's different, since it's in my Temple and not yours... but do you have any intuition, any hunch about it? The Death Tree?"

In a swift, clean motion, Cora upended the cup on its saucer. She let it sit a moment and then turned it over again, cupping it in her hands, eyes half-focused on the patterns of the leaves at the bottom of the cup, half-focused on something beyond. She stared for a long time before speaking again.

***

Three years following

It was not the first time that Davin Arkov had taken a portal into Morabrenin, but even so, he was mentally checking himself for functionality as he came through-- all four limbs were there, check, none of his face had rearranged itself, check, and he could still think coherently, check check check. He managed not to shiver. It was base instinct prompting him to doubt that he had come through alright, anyway, and mentally walking himself through the process gave him something to focus on.

Asriel nuzzled at Davin's arm insistently until the young man reached out to scratch the wolf's head. Asriel rumbled what sounded like a kitten's purr.

Maura stood a few feet away, watching and smiling. She was dressed in plainly, functionally, in close-fitting blacks; Crescent hung at her left, and Jaded Heart, in the form of a dagger, at her right. "Asriel, want to lead the way?"

Asriel barked assent, looked about to orient himself, and plunged into the underbrush with the unabashed enthusiasm of a three-year-old. In Maura's glance, Davin could read a plain, "Well, go on!" and with an obedient nod, he darted after the pale form of the wolf, disappearing into the trees ahead. He heard the soft, rapid patter of footsteps along-side him, saw the faint glow of a floating light that sped just ahead of them so that they might mind their feet and not trip over any protruding roots or pebbles. He rather suspected that Maura couldn't have tripped over anything here if she'd tried.

After a few minutes' jog east, the trees opened up into what would have been a plain, had it a little more room. A few large rock forms that might have once been a small cove or the entrance to a cave were the only major landmark. Davin's brow furrowed. "Mistress... I thought you said we were going to a temple."

Arms wide, Maura laughed. "The entire forest is my temple. D'you really think I'd shut myself up in a stuffy castle if I wanted to make a temple?" She knelt by a patch of dirt and drew a quick map with her finger, outlining the highlights of the place. "Most of the forest is connected by treehouses," she said, finishing up the quick tour. "Back when I started building, I was going to try to use other elements for building, like this stone here. It didn't really work, and I just sort of gave up on it. Asriel really likes it here, though," she added, unnecessarily; Asriel was scrambling about the rocky ruins, howling at the stars and looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

Davin nodded. It still felt a little odd, being completely immersed in Morabrenin, but he kept himself rooted on the fact that it was just an extension of Maura, and this was just an extension of their training together. He drew his sword.

Maura had drawn hers as well and was going through a few forms, slashing Crescent through the clear night air experimentally, with strong, sure power. When she seemed satisfied, she raised the sword in salute to him and assumed a defensive stance. "Come at me."

Hyperion humming with energy, Davin sprang at her.

The clash of metal on metal, Davin thought, was slightly muted in this place, much like the dampening effect that a heavy snowfall has. In contrast with that, his vision seemed clearer now. He could be more precise, disciplined. He wondered whether it were a natural characteristic of the landscape or simply an exercise, a test.

Some small part of his balance seemed to lurch; Davin spared a fraction of a second to glance down and saw that the plants near his feet were parting, the ground beneath them shuddering slightly. Eyebrow raised, he spared another fraction of a second to check how much of his surroundings were being affected and another fraction to see if it was affecting Maura.

The combined time, however, was enough for her to press the advantage and send Davin toppling. He blinked owlishly, running a hand along the ground. "Is it... allowed to do that?"

Maura took his hand and pulled him back to his feet. "It's allowed to do the same as your opponent is allowed to do, which is anything that'll distract you." She resumed a fighting stance. "Again."

Davin took a breath to steady himself, and another, and he attacked.

As before, it was a few seconds before the strange pitching underfoot kicked in. This time, he let himself feel the motion, give in to it a bit more; he was nearly thrown several times, but he managed to keep on his feet until a better idea struck, and after feinting back a few steps, he leapt up onto a rocky outcropping. He heard Maura shout, "Good!" as she followed him, matching him blow for blow. And then he felt the rocks under his feet, not moving away as the ground had done, but vibrating as if struck with a great hammer. The effect was disconcerting, but he kept his feet moving, focusing on the vibration of metal on metal in hand.

He pushed her further and further back, eyeing the edge of the rock behind her feet, but then he caught a characteristic flick of her wrist, and that was his only warning before she threw Crescent aside, and drew Jaded Heart as a bastard sword, soaking up the moonlight.

And so it went through the night.

A few hours later, Maura called a halt. With Asriel trotting ahead, they made their way towards the Core for refreshments, both of them bruised, battered, and exhaustedly happy. The dark, lumpy form of the Death Tree loomed large in the clearing, and Maura could see Davin looking at it, perplexed. The thing felt like it had grown every day since it had been there, and yet it never took up any more space in the Core than it had the previous day.

At any rate, Davin was too well-mannered to comment on the tree, incongruous black against the patchy autumnal background.

Some of the branches near the top were tipped with ice, and Maura wondered if it might snow; it had happened in Ympe-Tre, rarely, but most pleasantly.

***

Five years following

Maura sat, cross-legged and still.

She was at the top of a hill, inside the carefully shielded circle of trees that she used when looking in on her father, which she did occasionally. She knew the gravity of his state, and she had been warned, by Ranial, Alshalys, Tiberious, Nolan, Cora, and just about everyone else whose opinion she respected, to stay as far away from him as she could, for there was no curing him, and he himself had begged her to stay away from him once his descent began.

That didn't mean, though, that she couldn't look in on him. She was very, very careful. Every ward she could imagine was cast on the circle, every spirit of protection she could influence kept watch over her there as she watched.

Sometimes, "watching" her father just meant sitting in the circle, thinking about him really hard, and having nothing for her efforts but a headache. She could usually catch a brief glimpse of him, though, and even though that glimpse was of a cold, hardened man, the shell of her father and nothing more than that, it was enough.

Tonight, she could see him clearly, standing on the edge of a wood, looking out over something, probably a city or town that would be demolished by morning. He looked almost sad, which was more emotion than was usually visible in his eyes.

And then realization hit Maura with the force of an avalanche; she jerked back and looked around wildly.

Her father wasn't on the edge of a forest near a town. He was on the edge of her forest.

Asriel sat up against her and whimpered. Dense clouds hung low overhead, and they could not see even a hint of the starry sky beyond.

Maura stood and strode out of the circle down towards the forest proper, casting about, left and right. Closing her eyes, she sent out invisible fingers to seek out each intangible, ephemeral servant that she had befriended in her years of training, every ally she could imagine, sending them out into the night with a single command.

Find him.

A crack like thunder behind her made her start; even as the sound retreated, just as swiftly, images superimposed over her vision: the Mordrellyn keep melting into nothingness, and the stagnant waters of Angie's ice fields, dark and dead. Looking back at the circle, Maura half expected to see that lightning had struck the trees, razing them to the ground, but they merely stood there, dark against a darkening sky, as if to remind her that nothing would change by her simply standing there.

In another flash of realization, she knew where she had to be next, and she sprinted through the northern wing. Gargantuan tree trunks flashed past her, as did the bright leaves of Furon's Avenue, the small grove of dark-trunked trees with ever-red leaves decorating their branches. Wind whipped the loose leaves into a frenzy; Maura could hear Asriel yelp in surprise as twigs and dirt were kicked up into both of their faces, but neither slowed their pace. The winds were shaking the forest with the force of a tornado, to the point where Maura should not have been able to stand any longer, but she never slowed.

The Core was unusually bright for a starless night; she could see that clearly, even from a distance. As the two runners broke into the far end of the clearing, gasping for breath, Maura felt her eyes fix on the dark scar marring the landscape.

The Death Tree's branches were perfectly still, alone in the sea of battered, battering branches being crushed into each other by the wanton winds. But beyond being unmoving, and still more wonderous, the branches were aglow, and she could not tell if they were leaves, lit up from within, or simply flames dancing along the black limbs. The Death Tree had never spouted leaves before; even as the trees around it were awash with a sea of colors, it sat, the same bleak shadow that it always was. Now, dancing with red-orange light, it looked beautiful and terrible.

At the foot of the tree stood a man, pale as death, and Maura did not need to see his face to know his name. He was looking up at the glow, as if he had found his life's work to stand there staring up at that tree. She saw his lips move, whisper something. She saw him raise a hand, as if in farewell.

And in a flash, he was gone. The flaming glow of the tree faded; the winds subsided to a quiet moan. Maura screamed his name, trying against hope to call him back, but there was nothing of him, as if he had not been there at all. Asriel darted forward to the base of the tree, pawing at the ground and baying at the branches.

On numb feet, bare but unfeeling to the twigs and stones underfoot, she padded towards the tree, ran a toe along one of the roots. She just wanted to have him back. She was Bryant's bastard, and even if Aethmyr had always said that with the deepest disdain, it was who she was, and she wanted her father back, to smile at her successes, berate her failures, make her complete. She couldn't feel the slightest piece of him anymore, in any place of her mind that was not memory. Whatever last part of himself that had existed in that walking shell of death must be gone now, and she would never see his eyes light up in recognition of her again.

One last possibility struck her, and she ambled towards the Gazing Pool, straining to think of Bryant with every thread in the fabric of her being, but she found the pool dark, devoid of comforting pictures from the past, present, or future. The water below the surface was dark as any normal pool of water would be, and the banks were beginning to frost over. She sat on the bank and, as if with any other lake or swimming hole, let her legs dangle in the water, ignoring the biting, numbing cold that spread up her calves and thighs. Asriel paced the shore restlessly, howling his complaints to the heavens, if they would listen, but Maura sat in numb silence, and she did not remember the night's events when she awoke into Mirdral the next morning.

***

Six years following

At the farthest edges of Ympe-Tre, there were stretches of reality that simply tapered off into nothingness. There were no walls or drawn borders deliniating her lands from those of any other dreamwalker; there were simply the edges, palpable and real, ephemeral and fleeting.

The edge to the northwest was particularly odd; it was the only place where, Maura imagined, she could see past the veil into other parts of dream. On the other borders, the setting just faded into a thick mist over a nondescript field, but here, she could sometimes see through into castles, lakes, stolen kisses, imagined monsters. When there were no dreams for her to steal, she saw only void, a dark abyss.

Standing on the lip of the abyss, wondering why it was she was standing here tonight, Maura looked over her shoulder at the western arm of Ympe-Tre.

The ground had frozen hard. Many of the trees had lost all of their leaves, branches freezing solid and falling to the leafy ground. Those few branches that clung to their dressing were clad in brown, curled forms, long parched beyond repair. Frost crept along, through the dirt and over the dying foliage. The Gazing Pool was frozen, ice over dirty water, lifeless and visionless. Maura hadn't been down to see Lake Niobe, but she had the dull impression that it was probably better that way.

Maura had the impression that something was missing. Asriel wasn't with her; maybe that?

No, no... she had sent him to... take care of something. Somewhere else.

She shook her head, trying to clear it of the cold cloud of indifference that hung around her like a cloak.

It was so hard to remember.

She had wanted to be here alone tonight. She was sure of that much, although she was not sure why. She needed to be alone when she came her tonight so that... so that she wouldn't hurt anyone? It was the answer that sprang to the forefront of her mind, but it made no sense.

She turned away from the bleak, empty forest behind her. There was no clean blanket of snow to cover the icy dirt and crackling leaves, let her pretend that the cold, ugly death wasn't there beneath; and there was no touch of spring on the horizon to painfully wrench the life back into the place, force it into well-being once more. She didn't want to look on it anymore.

Why was she standing here?

She was here for a reason.

She was here because... she was summoning her...

Maura heard the sickening crack of a dead branch surrendering its grip on the tree, falling to the quiet forest floor. It was a faraway sound, and she wondered why it should have registered with her as it did. The entire forest was falling to pieces, these days, and one more branch made no difference.

Maura felt a tug on her heart, a summons, as she had been summoned before, and again, and again. She closed her eyes and awoke.