When the bone collector spider skittered back into the firelight, Aissaba figured it had been at least a day. On a planet locked in eternal night, Aissaba’s sense of time came mostly via the blink-link. One moment, Cassandra was making friends with a girl named Emily, the next, she was being invited to a diplomatic meeting with the Pentagon.

Suddenly, cat-Styxx was sitting next to her. “How do my bandages look?” he said, angling his throat toward her. He didn’t wait for an answer, clearly too excited about whatever he was about to say. “What you want is answers, right?”

The bone collector spider crawled into Aissaba’s lap and dropped cat-Styxx’s mind pebble. Then, it crawled through the campfire, shook off the embers, and ascended into Tassadu’s lap. There, it dropped something else.

Tassadu picked up the green pebble and inspected it. “This doesn’t look like answers,” said Tassadu. From the tone of his voice, he was done with cat-Styxx’s antics.

“That,” said cat-Styxx, “is a life pebble from a very special tree a very long way from here. If you knew what I had to go through to get there, you’d be more impressed, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure,” said Tassadu.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” said cat-Styxx, rising to his feet and strolling dramatically through the fire and back. “Instead of recruiting you, I now find myself having to beg you for help. If answers are the only thing I can provide in return, then so be it.” When no one answered, he said, “Ask me anything. For example – what does the Rot want with Earth? What’s so special about the Johnson twins? And what’s so special about the two of you?”

Aissaba looked at Tassadu and, for the first time in days, found that he was looking back at her without looking away. Wanna go first? he said, with the raise of an eyebrow.

No, you, she said, finding that she was blinking back tears.

“Alright,” said Tassadu, rising to his own feet. He was about the same height as cat-Styxx’s ghost. It felt like a hundred years had passed since the two of them had faced off in a sparring match, and it was a shame that she’d never see the outcome of a fair fight between them. “Who are your Masters of Rot?”

“My elder Masters of Rot are, what you might call, transcended. Unlike myself, they left their human bodies behind several million years ago.”

Tassadu rolled his eyes – looking strangely like Orion in the process. “Millions?”

“Millions, yes,” said cat-Styxx, letting it hang in the air as he paced through the fire, kicking up neither ashes nor embers. “One of them has become distributed throughout this forest – which spans the continent we’re on. There are a few ancient trees where you can still have a normal conversation with her, but you have to know where to look.”

As he spoke, the life pebbles in the trees began to pulse – a slow heartbeat, brighter than the campfire one moment, completely dark seconds later.

“You can think of her as equivalent to your Master of Life, though much older,” said cat-Styxx. “I worked with her very closely. The two of us have more in common than you might expect. A specialization in life magic for one thing.”

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Tassadu ignored this, tossing the life pebble and catching it a few times. “The human race hasn’t been around for even a million years.”

Cat-Styxx shrugged and smirked – back to his old self for a moment before, apparently, remembering that he was supposed to be getting off on the right foot this time. He cleared his throat. “Sorry, was there a question?”

“Are…” said Tassadu, then reconsidered. “Were… the Masters of Rot human like you?”

“Indeed,” said cat-Styxx, with an excited light in his eyes, as if he was enjoying being interrogated by Tassadu almost as much as he’d enjoyed being physically attacked. “They were human. Several million years ago.”

Tassadu looked at Aissaba, thoughtfully this time – no trace of Orion’s sarcasm. “Then, would I be correct in assuming that time is passing differently on this planet than it does on Earth?”

Cat-Styxx feigned swooning against a tree, hand on his heart and bandages looking wet. “Tassadu, in another life, in another time, if I wasn’t dead and if you weren’t in love with Aissaba, you and I–”

“We’re not in love,” snapped Tassadu, so firmly that Aissaba felt it in her stomach. “What’s the time dilation factor between Earth and here?”

“About one order of magnitude,” said cat-Styxx, softly – almost like pillow talk. “Anatomically modern humans appeared on Earth about three hundred thousand years ago in the continent now called Africa. Multiply that by ten, and you get about three million years – which is the age of the offshoot of the human race that dwells here.”

From the way the two of them were looking at each other across the campfire, it almost seemed like they were an item.

“And where are all the people who supposedly dwell here?” said Tassadu.

Cat-Styxx indicated the shadows all around, “This particular continent is only sparsely populated. There are a few outposts, usually clustered around the largest and oldest of the trees. They guard those trees jealously, which is why I had to go through quite the ordeal to get that pebble I got you. I notice you haven’t asked about it yet.”

Tassadu ignored this. “So, I’ll assume for a moment that you’re telling the truth – that ancient humans came here three hundred thousand years ago Earth-time, three million years ago by this planet’s frame of reference. What shall we call this planet, by the way?”

“On this particular continent, many call it Shah,” said cat-Styxx. “It’s also what they call the Elder Master of Rot whose mind permeates the forest. They don’t draw a sharp distinction here between the forest, its spirit, and the planet itself.”

Aissaba could tell that Tassadu was getting excited, his scales tinging slightly orange. The evidence was hard to see in the firelight, and he seemed to be trying his best not to let it show. But it was there.

“Okay,” said Tassadu. “And what does Shah want with Earth?”

The pebbles in the trees brightened, replacing the shadows around the campfire with an eerie green light. If there wasn’t so much mist, you might have been able to see for miles.

“That is a complex question, and I’ll most certainly answer it,” said cat-Styxx. “But I feel compelled to remind you that every minute here equals ten minutes on Earth, where a carefully planned apocalypse is unfolding very swiftly. By the time I finish telling you what Shah’s intentions are, many of them will already have come to pass.”

Aissaba felt a chill come over her. It suddenly made sense why the blink-link had seemed so sporadic lately – so discontinuous. In one blink Cassandra was working through the most basic of pebble magic equations; the next she was sitting for her first map magic exams. Aissaba had assumed she was merely precocious.

“As I understand it, the story begins long before the planets Earth and Shah were created – in a time where the stone you call the Master of Virtue was worshiped as a god by the ancient creatures you call dragons. It was a time when the power you call ‘pebble magic’ was employed in the creation of new life-bearing planets,” he said as the lights dimmed – as if the forest itself were exhaling. “The Earth’s sun is less than five billion years old, and it was around this time that the Rot was supposedly destroyed once and for all. A triumph of Virtue over its mortal enemy.”