In the soil beneath the clouds, a sapling grew. It started off with just a single white shoot that slowly hardened and turned brown. Then leaves emerged, pushing their way through the soil.

The farmer whose rice paddy it had appeared in grabbed his machete and stalked over to the sapling. He grabbed the tip, bent it over, and clink.

The machete blade broke in two. The farmer exposed his five remaining teeth to the world as his jaw dropped open. The sapling had turned to stone.

Slowly, the sapling turned back into wood, then its roots began to grow.

Months passed and in each rice paddy where a vine was growing, a sapling also started to grow. The roots of the saplings tangled themselves around the roots of the vines, burning them, crushing them, destroying their stranglehold on the earth.

Of course, the vines didn’t like that… they crushed as many saplings as they could, but there was something about the way they fought, they’d fight for an hour and then give up - like they had better things to do.

And so the saplings grew to be trees and the trees produced sweet fruit that the farmers with only five teeth ate and made into beer and sent to markets and because the farmers saw how good the trees were for business they fed the trees with ox manure and minerals and stopped burning the trees the way they did the vines that come from the sky.

And because the trees had the best soil and didn’t have to waste energy on healing themselves from fires they started to wipe-out the vines, killing off their root systems until one by one all of the vines were just hanging from the clouds with no connection to the earth. Then the trees started to grow - taller and taller until their tips reached up into the clouds. There, they joined together, winding all their tips into a root system, and the root system into the body of a person. At first, the person was woody and slow-moving, but slowly its bark changed to skin, a mouth formed, then eyes and finally Sparrow stood in front of the vine god.

Sparrow remained almost unchanged - but the god was a different story.

His skin had grown into a pasty-white, his hair had fallen out and his eyes were a withered grey - no longer like the surface of the earth, but more like a dead planet left to ruin.

The god’s voice croaked, ‘A-a-another time… play it again for me.’

From the clouds came a loud sigh, ‘Not happening buddy.’

‘Please my nightingale - sing for me!’

Sparrow peered through the clouds, they were parting to reveal Zoe with her mandolin. She was encased in a cage of vines which grew large purple fruit.

‘You’ve heard the same song every day for three years,’ she yelled, ‘I made up a new one, it’s called the insecure balding dude who still thinks he’s a god.’

Instantly a cage of vines tightened around Zoe. She struggled against them, but the vines kept constricting her chest until she couldn’t breathe anymore.

Sparrow stepped forward to stop the god but his legs, which were used to being a wooden trunk, flattered and he fell straight onto his face on the soft cloud.

‘You just spent three years as a tree,’ Sparrow reminded himself, ‘Walking’s going to take a moment.’

He looked up at the god, but the guy didn’t seem to have noticed Sparrow, ‘SING.’ The god commanded.

And bobbing her head slightly, Zoe began to sing.

The skin of his thumb can shred the throats

Of a thousand gods

His feet are weary

From a thousand roads

But when his eyes stare at you

They know. They know.

As he watched her play, and her voice shook the sky around him, Sparrow grew stronger. Her words found their way to his legs and he pulled himself up off the clouds. But he didn’t attack - he couldn’t. All he could do was listen to her song.

Stolen story; please report.

Song

And then the final chorus came like the end of a golden sunset and the start of the night. Zoe looked up, she was staring at Sparrow.

He swallowed, nodded to her, then turned on the god.

‘Oi!’ Sparrow called to the god who sat humming the final verse, ‘guess who’s back?’

The god blinked a few times, ‘back again? I hope you brought me another songbird.’

‘Sorry, the only thing I brought you was a punch in the face,’ said Sparrow, ‘For years I’ve killed off your vines, one by one, now I’m going to finish the job.’

The god laughed - ‘Did you not hear my nightingale? Did you not hear that the skin of my thumb could shred the throats of a thousand gods? Did you not hear that my fate is to know all there is to know? To wander every road in the universe? To…’

The god stopped talking, his breathing became scratchy and he looked down to where a single tree branch had pushed his heart from his chest.

‘No. I didn’t.’ Sparrow said.

The god’s body flopped backwards through the cloud and as it did everything around him dropped with it.

Sparrow allowed Gravity to take him for just a few seconds before he started to speed up his rate of descent.

He scanned the sky around him for bodies until he spotted a woman clinging to a mandolin topping head over heels as she fell through the sky.

Sparrow tore off towards it, the ground was getting closer and closer - highlighted by the corpses of a thousand withered vines.

He reached Zoe a metre from the ground. Sparrow actuated stoneskin and bounced - hard into the centre of a grassland area. His body left a giant dent in the soft ground as he bounced upwards then rolled over and over.

Sparrow let stoneskin fade away. He rubbed his lower neck - he hadn't been able to go full stoneskin in time and his neck had been thrust an inch forward.

Sparrow took three deep breaths then pushed it back into place with a nasty click!

He looked around for Zoe and found her storming towards him with her mandolin in her hand. She slapped him so hard across the face that Sparrow felt his neck click again.

‘Three years!’ she shouted, ‘three years of my life wasted at some loser-god’s cloud palace - do you know how many times I’ve had to sing his stupid little song? Do you?’

Sparrow rubbed his neck, ‘I’m sorry. He killed my body so I had to spend three years transforming myself into an army of trees capable of suffocating his root system.’

She paused, ‘Three years as a tree?’

‘As a forest of trees to be exact.’

Zoe looked at a cut on her elbow, ‘Okay, maybe I was a little fast with that slap.’

Sparrow’s hand gently touched the skin neck to her cut, his healing energy was already sparkling green and blue and Zoe watched as her skin regrew itself.

Zoe watched with an eyebrow raised, eventually, she sighed, ‘I don’t know how to say thank you Sparrow. But thanks for saving me.’

Sparrow gently reached out and touched his palm to her elbow. Healing light rippled across her skin.

‘I think you played just as big a part in saving yourself,’ Sparrow said, ‘the god was a thousand times stronger than me when I started to grow. I wondered why he never fought back with all his strength - just two vines could’ve strangled every last bit of me. But now I know - it was your voice.’

Zoe blushed and looked away, but Sparrow gently tilted her chin to meet his, ‘Zoe, your voice has power.’

They found the blue diamond in a tree. The precious stone had fallen so fast it had torn the tree in two, bits of wood lay everywhere while the gem sat in s stump on the ground.

'Sometimes I don't know why I keep this thing.' Sparrow said, 'The only reason I consider it valuable is because other people do - and they only consider it valuable because I do! It's stupid.'

But Sparrow put it in his pocket anyway.

****

They walked five days before they reached a village. In that time they slept in caves and under a fallen tree. Sparrow told her the things he’d done and she turned them into songs. But when he asked her for her story all he got was the shake of her head.

‘It’s not that I don’t trust you, Sparrow, it’s just that as far as I'm concerned my story only began when I hit the road.’ And Sparrow nodded because he knew what she meant.

One night they climbed a lotus pass and marvelled at the mountains and rivers before them. They spent the night huddled in a cave eating snow bunny and winter lettuce and talking as they waited for dawn to rise.

‘Sure we could’ve flown,’ Sparrow was saying, ‘But I've spent the last three years as a tree. It’s always good to stretch your legs after being a tree.’

Zoe laughed and put up her hand, ‘Cage-bound for three years, I don’t mind walking.’

She stared at Sparrow’s face as she plucked the strings of her mandolin slowly, ‘Sparrow?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I know we’ve already killed a god and I have a hundred songs in my head, but how would you feel about having a companion on the road?’

Sparrow stared at her and slowly his eyes drifted away. The silence lasted so long that eventually Zoe whispered, ‘Sparrow?’

Sparrow blinked, ‘Sorry. I was just thinking…’

‘Thinking?’

‘That it’s a bad idea. I’m sorry Zoe but at the moment I'm trying to squeeze as much out of life as I possibly can and the best way I can do that is by myself.’

Zoe touched the side of his face - ‘Look at you - The one who walks alone.’

She brought her face closer to his until he could feel her breath on his lips, ‘But Sparrow, you told me your stories. You told me who you are. I know that the harder someone clings to you, the sooner you’ll leave. I’m not asking for forever, I'm just asking for a little longer.’

She touched his chest, ‘I promise you’ll enjoy it.’

And Sparrow, despite all his beliefs, was still a young man, so he nodded his head, ‘Okay. Okay.’

And Zoe grinned, her mouth grazed the side of his face as she whispered, ‘You’re not going to regret this.’

And outside the cave, snow began to fall.