II. Cathedral Day

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What write you, Zoe? Tavirr’s voice asked.

I’m writing about the rain.

It was raining around her, but there was no water, just the sound of a hissing rumble. Lightning flickered, but Zoe wasn’t afraid.

Dreaming, she saw her mother again, hanging a shiny eklil stone out of reach on the wall above Zoe’s crib. Her mother’s own stone pendant swung in circles above her baby self’s reaching hands, the jagged notch on the bottom mesmerizing her.

She saw a wolf fall, and her dreaming baby self asked her mother why. Her mother looked at her and reminded her again that she was much too young to remember this.

Then her mother was gone.

The eklil stone hanging on her wall split apart with a crack (the wolf fell again) like the sound a gunshot, legs upon legs upon legs forcing themselves out of the broken stone.

She felt her mind being pulled through her mother’s pendant into a world she didn’t want to belong to anymore.

It’s gonna be okay, a different voice said. Hold still. Something stabbed into her shoulder, and she wanted to beg it to stop, but it was raining, and she couldn’t speak. Drops hit her eyes, her cheeks. She tasted salt.

Zoe half-woke again several times, but she didn’t know where she was. All she could hear was the gunshot. A kind man with dark skin helped her to a toilet at some point, averting his face while he gently supported her as she relieved herself. After that, he carried her back to a cushion that was still warm. She tried to look around, but she was so tired.

The curving walls were a nacreous white that shimmered with hints of subtle hues, and watching them slowly shift made her eyelids too heavy to fully wake. The drumming sound of rain lulled her into sleep despite the heavy, insistent pain in her shoulder.

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Hello, journal. I can’t talk to anyone else about this, so I have to talk to you, but I still have to be vague, just in case.

I promised Matty I would go somewhere with him, and then I got scared and didn’t do it, and now he hates me. Really hates me. He hasn’t talked to me since I broke my promise, but Grandma said I wasn’t ever to go you-know-where at night, because the vo’ai would get upset, and now I’ve lost my best friend.

After I asked Grandma if I could go with Matty and she said no, she stared at the sketch Mom did of Dad a few years before he died working in the mine.

I still miss him so much. It wasn’t as bad before Mom got Chosen, but with just Grandma and me, the house feels empty sometimes.

Grandma never talks about either of them. Even if I only mention them, she’ll just tell me to go practice my writing.

I practice my writing a lot.

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When she opened her eyes next, Zoe was in the med center back home. The walls were made of humming alien wood, and a pair of kriuulu wandered among the beds. They looked odd in their white smocks, one of the few times Zoe had ever seen them clothed in anything but their own glowing plumage.

Her head felt thick and heavy, her thoughts dripping slowly into awareness.

Someone coughed, someone else wept quietly, a man’s voice she’d known since childhood, when it had been the voice of a boy.

“Eat, be well, and grow strong with us,” a fluting voice murmured as it stopped at each bed along the opposite wall. The kriuulu’s wing-claws were sheathed in the white gold feathers that marked them as ethnically vo’ai.

Another vo’ai placed a rind of what looked like bread on Zoe’s lap, and she took a bite without thinking. It was soft and porous, like beeswax, but there was nothing at all like honey about the taste. Instead, it was dry and sharply bitter.

“You have to eat, Daria, you have to, you’re still sick,” that familiar voice said. Zoe carefully didn’t look up.

“You know I can’t stand that shit, Matteo. Please don’t make me eat.”

“Just one bite, honey. It’ll help. Then I swear I’ll eat the rest. Here.”

A whisper of cloth. “Don’t touch me, I’m probably still contagious.” A sigh. “Fine, I’ll have a bite.”

Zoe nearly spat her own mouthful out, but she was overwhelmed by an irresistible craving that made her teeth rip into the bitter egg-flesh, her mouth watering greedily.

She knew Daria would be devouring hers now, too.

In caring for their human charges, nothing in kriuulu life was wasted. Living wood from grandmother trees housed them, humming and whispering the music that gave humans heavy, restful sleep. Egg-flesh, left over after hundreds of tiny kriuulu nymphs dug their way out into the world, cured illness and injury.

Egg-flesh was nourishment; it was medicine, given as devotional sustenance. The vo’ai gave of themselves, as Inur law demanded of caretakers.

Night and day, the vo’ai surrounding the New England Plateau cared for the humans living there. Zoe had never seen a vo’ai sleeping, and now she wondered if kriuulu of any race ever did.

When Zoe finished, she let herself relax into the soporific numbness of the devotee. She settled into the blankets, still hearing the sound of soft weeping.

She fell asleep gripping her eklil stone.

Tomorrow was Cathedral Day.

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“You can either sleep in your father’s den tonight, Rrucho, or you can break your fool head against the side of the mountain for all I care.”

Vala folded her arms in stubborn fury, closing her useless wings with a pointedly loud snap. Her mate growled past her but otherwise refused to acknowledge that there was anyone else in their den.

Tavirr stood in the shadows, letting his spotted fur blend with the pale stone of the den his ancestors had chipped into the side of the ancient lava cave of clan Drusik. No adult lysk in the clan would even look at him except his sister. She and his nephew were the only reason he stayed.

When the big shaggy male turned at last to clamber down the lava tube, Vala’s wings relaxed. Tavirr looked away from them, not wanting to see the scars from where the shredded membranes had needed to be cut away from the long digits.

He still blamed himself, no matter Vala’s reassurances.

She must have caught his expression, though, because she rattled her bony wings the way she’d learned to, a sound that could make any lysk in earshot shudder.

“So,” she growled. “You’re still chasing the thing that took my wings.” She tapped his forehead with graceful fingers, her retractable claws so different from a man’s fixed talons. “Did you have any time to just sit and think when you were recovering?”

“Too much,” he admitted.

She sighed. “And did you, at any point, wonder whether the injury to your wings was maybe a warning from the very thing that took mine?”

He stared at her. “You… you have not spoken of that since…”

“Of course not,” she hissed. “I love my mate, as pebble-headed as he may be. He’s a good man and a good father. Why would I jeopardize that? And why, by the winds, would I ever—ever—be idiotic enough to attract that thing’s attention by speaking of it?” Vala shook her head. “Rrucho performed Zassik’s blooding while you were away. With his own talons, my gentle son took the life of a fawn, and he did not flinch when father tore son’s palm to let Zassik’s blood mingle with the lifeblood of his prey. He even joined Rrucho in the wind prayers, unafraid!”

Tavirr found himself backed up against the den wall, pinned by the fierce gaze of a mother showing pride in her son.

Shrugging her bony wings, she looked away. “You have seen impossible things. And I don’t envy you. You even saw what comes at the equinox—stop!”

Tavirr closed his mouth on the useless denial. “What am I supposed to say, then?” he growled in frustration.

“My brother.” She touched her forehead to his. “What you hunt, it isn’t in the winds, or even in the mountains.” She smiled.

“You don’t want me here, I know. I hold you and Zassik down.”

“Pebble-head. I do want you here, and I wish you could be in Zassik’s life. Every boy should be so lucky as to have an uncle like you, Tav. But he’s a man now, and…”

“And I can’t exist for him anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Tavirr.”

He took her hand, squeezed it gently. “Don’t be. After all, I finally got to meet a human, no?”

Vala chuffed in amusement. “Was it everything you hoped? Mystery and adventure and strangeness?” When Tavirr didn’t respond, she showed her fang tips in a wicked grin. “Ahhh. I see now. The human. It was a female.”

“I won’t stoop to answering that.”

“Ha! You just did.” She sobered. “Get out of here. Go to your adba. Jasse was always a friend to both of us.”

“Sister, for the wind’s sake, learn to pronounce the subsonics. I flinch every time you say ‘h’abda’ and ‘h’Jasse’ wrong. When I come back—”

“When you come back, you’ll still be the only lysk in the clan who can pronounce the unpronounceable. Go. I love you, and so does Zassik.”

He wrapped his wings around his sister, smelling the spiced oil she loved to wear in her crest. They shared a few moments of comforting purr.

Then Tavirr walked out of his sister’s den, out of the cave system, and into the night.

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A cacophony of screaming jerked Zoe out of hypnotic sleep the next morning. The unearthly wails were nothing like a human cry, and they were too unmusical to be kriuulu.

She could almost have gone back to sleep, but hard laughter stabbed through her pleasant haze. She knew that sound far too well.

Dressing quickly despite her complaining shoulder, Zoe dashed out of the med center. Old bruises ached in her memory, following the sound of the screams and ugly cheers.

Zoe cursed. Most folk sent to the mines were serving some sort of time. Others were miners by trade, doing honorable work. The vo’ai would only rarely compel any to live, eat, and sleep in the mines, but Matteo Carpenter was one of them.

She wondered how Daria could have possibly put up with him this long.

He held up an eklil by one of its crystalline legs; several other men held the other gangly limbs as the eklil struggled, but Matteo was the only one laughing.

Zoe realized he was wearing a jacket made of sloppily tanned and sewn wolf hide. She could smell it from where she stood, Zoe pushed her way between the onlookers and spat at him.

He looked straight at her, giving a friendly little wave and a wink.

“Hey, Zoe, we got a live one!” he shouted at her through the crowd growing around them in the town square.

“Let it go, Matty!” She clutched her eklil stone pendant, seeing again the image of the crack in her mother’s stone as she fingered the jagged place on the underside of the one she wore.

Still gripping the poor creature’s leg, Matteo grabbed Zoe’s necklace strap and yanked it from her neck and out of her hands with a snap.

They had been friends even before her mother had been Chosen for the Cathedral; it was another several years after that when Matty’s father had been Chosen.

Matteo had turned into a different person almost overnight.

She knew it wasn’t her fault, not really, but the old guilt nagged at her every time she saw him. Of course, since he’d been made to leave off woodworking and take up the pick instead, they rarely saw each other anymore.

The folks around Zoe muttered to each other in curiosity, cheering in horrified amazement as they realized just what Matteo and his fellow miners held, what they meant to do.

“Let it go!” she repeated. “Please! You don’t have to—”

But when Matteo saw Zoe, his smile widened, his eyes alight with grim amusement. “Aw, but our holy guardians pay so well for these suckers,” he snarled. Then he called out, “Let’s do it!” to his cohorts. “Pull!”

The other men, all wearing the determined expressions of miners hoping to earn extra rations, gripped the eklil’s legs.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The six-limbed creature had no head, no eyes, nothing that looked like sensory organs, but somehow it seemed to know what was about to happen. It flailed and shrieked again.

“Are you pussies?” Matteo snarled. “I said pull!”

The eklil stopped struggling, and Zoe had the disconcerting sense that it was looking at her. Then Matteo finally succeeded in yanking off the leg he held, and one of the other miners relaxed his grip in startlement.

There was a sharp crack that sent a shockwave through the crowd, blowing the miners off their feet as the eklil’s carapace splintered and shattered.

In the momentary silence after the eklil’s death, something deep within Zoe… shifted.

She bit back a scream. Out of the jagged seam in the dying eklil’s shell, a long, many-jointed leg appeared as if from some unknown hell, probing the ground below it.

Another jerking crack echoed as something else shifted, opened—and another, and another, and with each crack, more alien legs spidered out, until the sickening entirety of the thing had climbed out of the poor dead eklil.

She held the shattered bits of her lifeless eklil stone close in terror, but its precious magick had already dissipated. The freakish thing skittered drunkenly around, between—through?—the people diving for the gleaming stones, before finally slipping into the shadows between two houses.

Reality snapped back into focus.

As the rest of the shell of the dead eklil broke into a shivering pile of stones—as Matty yelled the crowd back from the magickal riches—Zoe realized that the weird, impossible thing which had shivered its way into the world had vanished.

And that she appeared to have been the only one who’d seen it.

Time seemed to speed up as she stood there, her eyes searching through the growing shadows for the… whatever-it-was. People around her continued to stuff eklil stones into their pockets or shirts or skirts, wincing at the fresh, crackling magick that stung their hands.

As the sun slipped behind the tree-lined horizon, a vo’ai took her by the arm in his gentle, implacable wing-claws. She tried to flinch away, but his deep black eyes would not let her go, and she felt herself relax under his mesmerizing gaze.

“It is time, daughter,” he said. Zoe recognized him with a start as the one who had always attended to the schoolchildren. “The Cathedral stands empty.”

The ritual phrase sent ice down her spine, and she blinked at them in dawning, horrified comprehension.

Another vo’ai had once said the same thing to her mother.

“The Cathedral vows await you. Before sunrise, you and the other Chosen novitiates will join the holy order of blessed seclusion.”

Behind her, she heard Matteo yelling. When she looked, his wife Daria was also being led away, a look of compliant peace on her face. Zoe decided, as her feet began to move under no will of her own, that her face probably looked just like Daria’s.

The crowd parted for her and Daria, as well as several others, each paired with a vo’ai elder. Children gasped in delight, and everyone broke into cheering applause for the lucky few who would get to spend the rest of their lives in the holy work of the Cathedral that ruled and protected them.

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The page is old, the thick paper ragged and wrinkled around the outer edge as if someone had wanted to rip it out but decided not to. Its words are scratched through, but still legible:

I’m so sorry, Mom.

I wanted to say so in these pages where, hopefully, no one will read it. I understand now.

It’s been three years since your Cathedral Day. I was so naive then, but… I suppose that’s what it means to be a little kid. I was so proud of you when I was little—I had a mom who was Chosen to serve the great Cathedral of Trees, to grow strong together with our vo’ai. It’s the Path, after all, right?

Our graves nourish the roots of the grandmother trees, just as the vo’ai nourish us with the egg-flesh their young have hatched from. And every year, there’s always the honored few who take their place in that “blessed seclusion” to serve the grandmother trees.

Last Cathedral Day, my friend Matty—he’s training to be a carpenter, you remember him. Or you would have, anyway. You always liked him.

His dad was Chosen.

He snuck out that night to watch the ceremony. He wanted me to go with him, and I should have gone, Mom, I should have been there for him, but I didn’t know.

I should have gone.

This isn’t coming out right. My handwriting is too shaky, just like my head right now. I need to breathe for a while, I guess, and then try again.

The rest of the page is dotted with smudged ink drops where the author had put quill to paper but hesitated too long.

A human scrivener would have copied only the words, perhaps explaining in a footnote how, in the original version, the author had scratched them out.

The person who now read the book, however, was not human. She chose her brushes carefully, precisely replicating every shaking word, every halting drip and careless smudge.

Taking the smallest brush in her archivist’s arsenal, h’Jasse Tav’h even copied the tiny whorls of an ink-stained fingerprint at the bottom.

“Well?” Tavirr couldn’t help asking.

H’Jasse raised a silencing finger at him, her eyes never leaving the journal propped on her wide desk. As she turned the page and resumed reading, though, her quill missed the ink pot, stabbing into the wooden inkstand instead, and the scales on the big burchar’s horny crest flared red in sudden alarm. Her four legs bent slowly to lower her bulk to the ground as her hands flipped delicately to the next page.

She looked down at the lysk who stood at her knee. “My h’adba,” she rumbled, “I must speak with this human of yours, but… but I fear I may not get the chance.”

“Come now. I have wings, I can bear any message to her that you require.”

Her crest dulled to yellow, and she shook her great saurian head. “We don’t even have the time for me to pen a note, Tavirr. Fly to her now, with all speed, and pray to the wind that it’s not too late.”

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They stood just outside the sacred Cathedral of Trees, in the confining circle of smaller mother trees that served as the narthex leading into the Cathedral.

In the near distance, thunder rumbled.

Zoe had only been to the Cathedral of Trees a few times, of course. Her father’s funeral, her mother’s Choosing ceremony. The night she’d finally given in to curiosity and Matty’s hateful glares, and watched in secret as that year’s batch of Chosen had entered their blessed seclusion.

The long scar on her right leg was why she always wore trousers now.

The town leaders were all in attendance, human and vo’ai alike, along with the close kin of the other Chosen. Several other vo’ai stood to the side, across from the Chosen, but Zoe couldn’t bear to look at them. She didn’t recognize any of the families—none, except for Matteo Carpenter.

He would lose his wife tonight. Of course, she knew he would also watch her be taken into the Cathedral, the same way he’d watched his father. The same way Zoe had finally seen the truth, a year after she’d been too frightened to go with Matty.

Maybe now, thought Zoe, Matty’s hatred for his onetime friend would have closure. At the end of her time in the world, she could even forgive him for the wolf.

Zoe hoped there were no illicit youngsters tonight like Matteo—or Zoe herself—had been, sneaking out of their houses with that dreadful curiosity too strong to ignore. There were already enough people working in the eklil mine, strangely unable to speak of what crime had sent them there.

And sometimes, the curious ones would simply not come back. Eventually, the Cathedral was everyone’s home.

A vo’ai ceremonially robed in deep purple walked among the Chosen, offering the ritual communion meal of moist, living egg-flesh, the membranes over those honeycomb pores stirring with tiny embryonic nymphs. Zoe stood, watching in sickened fascination as the others, even Daria, ate. Bloody purple juice ran down their chins, but none of them seemed to care.

Zoe waited patiently, deliberately, until every eye was on her.

Then she opened her hands and let her communion portion fall to the ground. It hit with a wet sound as a few of the undeveloped nymphs burst from their protective cells. Their weak struggles lasted only a few moments before they died.

At this, a few of the attendees whispered to each other, but the kriuulu among them ruffled their feathers in disapproval, silencing the mutterers.

It was more than just symbolism, of course. She had seen the numbed expressions on the faces of the Chosen twice before.

The three who had been Chosen alongside Zoe’s mother had (she’d thought then) simply looked peaceful; her mother’s refusal to eat hadn’t made any sense to her young self, so full of faith. But then again, neither had her mom’s parting words.

Build your own house, Zoe. As soon as you’re big and strong enough to do it—and ask Matty to help. Use good, strong oak, none of that damn singing wood.

Why, Mom? she had asked.

You’ll understand when you’re older, sweetheart. I love you.

Matteo never had helped her, though; she’d been too afraid to ask. Zoe still lived in the house she’d grown up in, built from logs dropped, already perfectly shaped, by the largest mother and grandmother trees in the forest. Their humming whispers still lulled her to sleep every night, leaving strangeness in her mind the next day. The vo’ai know best, the house would sing.

She hadn’t believed that in over a decade.

Tabitha Mayor stepped forward, wearing the dark red sash of Cathedral Day. One by one, she put the right hands of the Chosen into the left wing-claws of their vo’ai sponsors, murmuring what sounded like a blessing to every pair. Each vo’ai in turn plucked a feather, handing it to the mayor, who held it until it dissolved into dust. She sprinkled the dust onto the bowed heads of the dumbly blinking Chosen.

When she reached Zoe, though, the mayor took Zoe’s hand in hers and looked her in the eye for a long moment, until Zoe understood that Tabitha had no choice, either.

Until Zoe’s kriuulu took her hand himself.

Her old schoolmaster, who’d brought her to the Cathedral, the same one she had adored as a child. The one who always called kids his sons and daughters. It made her sick.

“Zoe—Ulwio—I bind you together,” Tabitha Mayor said as she pressed Zoe’s hand into the kriuulu’s wing-claw. Then she leaned in. “But,” she whispered, “I do not send you to peace.”

Frowning in confusion, Zoe looked between the kriuulu who held her hand in its hard grip, and the mayor, who gestured at Ulwio. The kriuulu plucked something from the undercoat feathers beneath its thick outer white-gold plumage. Zoe didn’t recognize it at first, because it was black as a shadow.

That wasn’t a vo’ai feather, but no one beyond the three of them seemed to see that.

Ulwio placed its feather in the mayor’s palm. She closed her hand around it, then mimed sprinkling dust on Zoe’s head. Her gaze caught Zoe’s, and she folded the young woman’s fingers around the black feather. “Trust him,” the mayor whispered urgently. “Help us.” Then she strode back to the small group of congregants.

“Can we… can we say goodbye?” one of the Chosen asked in a drunken mumble. It was Matteo’s wife, Daria. When her request was met with silence from her kriuulu keeper, Daria seemed to shrink quietly back into herself, her arms folded, hands buried in her long sleeves. Zoe belatedly realized she had refused to hold hands with her vo’ai guard; it held her by the shoulder instead, with the same sense of ownership radiating from all of the paired-off vo’ai.

“You fucking parrots,” someone in the congregation snarled. It was Matteo. “You should all be caged! The Cathedral oughta be burned till it’s nothing but black stumps!”

The others in the congregation tried to shush him, confused at his outburst during the sacred celebration. But then Zoe’s vo’ai stepped forward.

“I am Ulwio. I belong to the lineage of the Voice.” The other kriuulu stared at him, hissing in sudden, strange hostility, and Zoe abruptly understood they had never known about his black undercoat. “I will allow my blessed Chosen to speak.”

The distant thunder sounded again, this time directly overhead. A furious hope filled Zoe, and she gazed at Matteo. He looked back at her, astonished, his face folding into tears. Do it, he mouthed. Do it.

Zoe felt the psychic reins bridling her being loosened just enough, and Ulwiu gave her a nod. Gritting her teeth against a sudden humming from the trees, she spoke.

“Every single one of you,” she said to the families, “has probably suspected the worst. Why aren’t we allowed to ever see our Chosen loved ones again?” Someone in the group watching nodded. “Whatever you might have thought about what happens—about why the faithful are never allowed in the Cathedral except for funerals and, well, this—pray for us.”

She felt Ulwio, that canny old schoolmaster, place his wing-claws encouragingly on her shoulders, and continued.

“Just pray, but not to the trees. Never to them. Pray to the wind, or the rain, or the sun, whatever. Just… pray you never get Chosen.”

She watched the unpaired kriuulu gather up the families, herding them out with soothing words for the questioning ones as the trees hummed their hypnotic lullaby. Matteo tried to stay, tried to say something to Daria, but one of the kriuulu cuffed him viciously. Daria cried out for him, but her vo’ai shook her.

“I’m sorry, Matty,” Zoe called. “Now get out of here.” She turned and walked through the arch of interlaced branches into the Cathedral proper.

The grandmother trees were huge. Even at night, their leafy branches stretched high overhead, hunting the absent sunlight. Their other branches, though, coiled around their trunks or snaked about, searching hungrily along the ground.

Between some roots, she saw the mounded earth of a recent grave. She couldn’t remember where her father had been buried, but she knew his body would have been long gone anyway.

One by one, the other Chosen filed in behind her. Their vo’ai came with them.

Ulwio took her by the shoulder urgently. “Have you my feather still?” he whispered. She put her hand in her pocket to check and nodded. “Swallow it. It will protect you for a time.”

Zoe glanced at the other kriuulu, but they were all staring intently at their own Chosen, who stared numb-wittedly back. Quickly, she pulled the black feather out of her pocket and put it in her mouth.

It was surprisingly tasteless, given what egg-flesh was like, but it left a tingle on her tongue that swept through her body like a flash fever. She stumbled against him, her legs feeling watery. “Why…?”

“It will pass soon, daughter. Why what?”

“Why…” Zoe gasped, “black… feather…?”

“Because I’m not pure vo’ai. The kriuulu who sired me was an envoy from the tchy’et region, over a century ago. I have his memories. His time came for spore and root, so he sought out a mother grove south of here.” Ulwio hissed. “That grove is now where the communion egg-fruits are gathered from. I was… lucky to survive, even luckier to be able to pass as vo’ai.”

Zoe found her feet. “But—what will happen to you… when they find out?”

His laugh was grim. “The vo’ai were ever fond of their supposed purity. I believe your human term is ‘karma’.” He took her by the arm, pressing his sharp, bony mouthparts to her forehead in an imitation of a kiss. “Goodbye, daughter. I must be far from the center when I root. My sister trees will shield me from vo’ai ignorance as I grow unnoticed into their lineage.”

Even as he spoke, Ulwiu’s feathers had begun to dissolve into spores that drifted in the air, moving toward the eager trees, mixing with the spores of the other kriuulu now entering their rooting ecstasy.

Zoe’s stomach churned at the sight of the featherless vo’ai, their bare, wrinkled skin mottling hard. One vo’ai hissed in delight as its eyes began to melt. It threw back its head as strands of bark forced their bony fingers out through its cracking skull.

The other Chosen began to come out of their numb trances, but it was too late. Only Daria stood still, a look of fierce resolve on her sweat-soaked face.

As viny tentacles tore out of their abdomens, the kriuulu clawed for their Chosen. The humans screamed as the rows of thorny mouths opening in those fresh vines bit into them, ripping gashes in their flesh. Even the mature trees began to frenzy, their flexible branches whipping around blindly for the source of the blood scent.

A rooting kriuulu tried to bite into its human using its facial mouth, but that orifice had sealed itself. Blind instinct was moving it now, and its tentacle mouths thrashed against its victim, tearing, chewing, humming in orgiastic delight.

Ignored by the carnivorous vines for the moment, Zoe hurled herself to the ground, crawling for the narthex, but the smaller mother trees there had closed ranks, the soil heaped and broken from trees dragging themselves by their roots. She caught a glimpse of Matteo, who had somehow pushed himself through the crowding trees, and he was reaching out for what remained of Daria—

His body vanished into a storm of ravenous branches.

Then something wrapped around her legs, driving Zoe into a panicked rage. She curled over her own pooling blood and bit savagely into the mauling, hungry vine.

Thunder roared above them, drowning out the sounds of carnage, and lightning split the sky. The vine released her with pained squeals from its many gnashing mouths, but something else had hold of her now, something that burned and stung wherever it touched her as it dragged her, screaming, into the sky, into the familiar sound of rain.

Below, the Cathedral of Trees surged in its frenzy of blood.