Burning legs. Muscles strained to the limit. Screaming joints. Fire in my lungs.

I ran.

The Hag had been right to run. And I was a fool for wasting the seconds that I had. Droplets of numbness fell from the sky. They fell on my back and created puddles that splashed against my feet. Sapped me of my strength.

The black rain fell around me, and nothingness flooded the night. The lights blinked out as if ink were running over a canvas of stars. Gloom rain fell, falling like bullets onto my shoulders and staining the ground in liquid ash. There was no moon. No sun. Light escaped me, draining away into the splotches of void pooling along the soil. Light and color ran into them like water into a drain, unable to even scream as it was swallowed into emptiness.

And even as the rain roared, I heard nothing. There was no sound in the world. Nothing but the muted splashing of my footsteps against black water and the persistent, echoing sound of dripping.

No birds, no breeze, no crunching of leaves. Only the sound of the chase.

Sounds came from behind me. Wet, slithering movement. The whispering of a million drowned lungs. They were out in the darkness, coming from something in the corners of perception where my eyes could not reach.

I couldn’t let it catch me. So I kept running. Stumbling.

I knew, somewhere, deep inside me, that I had already been caught. I felt it. The vastness. The thing that heard me, it wasn’t something I could fight or even comprehend. It simply was, in all sense of the word.

Power. Inevitability. Eternity.

The closest thing to a god that the world had ever seen.

The world around me disappeared until only emptiness remained. A void, inescapably vast, remaining visible to my senses even as it flooded over the horizon’s edge. I backed away, pale, until something bumped into my back.

I screamed. Leapt back. I spun, fist flailing, and turned to see—

My body stopped.

There was no enemy behind me. No eldritch abomination.

There was just a tree in the void. One that was familiar in many ways, but different in many more. I stared at it in confusion, trying to process what I was seeing.

It was a strange thing, the tree. It was jagged. Piecemeal. Some parts of it were healthy, others withered, and some were charred by still-glowing embers. Some branches held green leaves, and others red. Some held none at all. It was as if someone had torn up several different pictures of the same tree and put the pieces together without much thought, leaving it as a chaotic imitation of the real thing.

But I knew what this tree was.

It was the Singing Tree.

And next to it, nestled into the roots, was a man in a cloak of raven feathers. Listless and weak, arms fallen to his sides. His hands were the only things I could see—shriveled and desiccated, wearing a ring made of gold and wood. He looked drained of all life. And yet, the cloaked man was breathing. I saw it in the subtle way he moved. In the faint rise and fall of his back.

Warily, I approached. I stopped in front of him, looking down at the human-shaped husk.

I was certain.

I reached out a hand to touch his shoulder, but as I drew close, his form shuddered. Turned to static, as if threatening to shatter out of existence if I drew any closer. I hurriedly pulled my hand away.

It seemed that had caught his attention, however. The man tilted his head up, ever so slightly. I saw the line of a jaw and a pair of wilted lips, pale and white. The rest of his face was obscured by the shadow of his hood. The man looked at me, and I knew.

He was dying.

“You’re the voice in the hollow,” I said, looking at the man. “You’re the man who lives in the Singing Tree.”

He nodded. Faintly.

“And you are the boy who learns my songs,” he said, and I frowned.

That way of speaking was becoming more and more common. There was no was. It was as if they refused to acknowledge the past. Just like the Hag. Just like the Fae. They spoke in the present, the future, and nothing else.

I looked around the void we were in. At the empty place that held only a tree and a man I’d known for years, but was still practically a stranger to. But he was looking out for me. That much was clear.

And he had answers—ones I needed to hear.

“Is father alive?” I asked.

Another nod.

“He lives.”

“And mother?”

“She stays with him. Her medicines kill the blight in his lungs.”

I nodded and a weight fell away from my chest. Over the last few months, the unanswered question had left me afraid. Afraid for father’s safety. Afraid that the Fae had backed out on his promise.

Afraid that losing my Name was for nothing.

Feeling the tension drain from me, I sat in front of the man in the cloak. I looked around us. At the infinite darkness, and whatever was lurking beyond it. I turned my eyes to the Singing Tree’s voice.

“Can I get an explanation from you?”

He tilted his head, “Ask. I will try to answer.”

“What is this place?”

“It is nowhere.”

I frowned. “Okay. And what was chasing me before I got here?”

“Nothing.”

“Who are you?”

“I am myself.”

“This isn’t helping me.”

“It does not need to.”

I groaned in exasperation, scratching at the back of my head. I motioned to the world around us, full of nothing but darkness. “You have to throw me a bone here. Please. You taught me how to play. To an extent, you’re the reason I’m even here.” I set my bansuri down in front of him, the worn wooden instrument resting between us. I tapped the ground in front of it. “Give me something I can use to… to understand. I don’t get a fraction of what’s even happening to me. There has to be something you can tell me.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The cloaked man seemed to think for a moment. He stared at the bansuri in silence, and ever so slightly, I saw his lips shift into a faint smile. He became more whole, in that moment. I felt a fraction of the kind voice I listened to as a child return to his body. His head turned up to look at me, and I saw silver eyes behind the shadow of his hood.

He held a shriveled hand out to me.

“Help me stand,” he said.

Blinking, I stood up from where I sat. He seemed different, somehow. Stronger. More… real. I grabbed his hand and pulled him up, surprised at how light he was. It was like lifting a feather. I hardly even noticed the weight, and yet another detail caught me off guard.

His grip was strong for a man who felt like he could turn into ash at any moment.

I watched the man rise to his full height, and I was surprised to find that he was taller than I was. It was only by a few inches, but I was part troll. We were giants. Even as a half-blood, seeing someone taller than me was a rare sight.

He turned and began striding away from the tree, seemingly gaining strength with every step.

“Follow,” he said.

I did.

The man led me out into the shadows, away from the safety of the Singing Tree. I walked close to him as the atmosphere around us changed. The air turned cold and the ground uncertain, and I was suddenly unsure if I was walking or simply drifting forward.

As we walked, we passed patches of… things.

They were these splotches in the void that somehow registered in my senses. Shapes and forms; shifting, unsure of what they were. Pieces of living nothingness that were emptier than the emptiness around us.

Some were the size of houses, drifting forward in silence. Others were like wolves, little patches traveling in packs.

And one was like a mountain. A gargantuan thing in the darkness, unseen. Hidden, lumbering forward with a presence like gravity, weighing everything down around it. I felt my heart thunder in my chest as it passed over us, wondering what kind of thing could possibly feel so vast.

I realized that perhaps it was a good thing that the darkness shrouded their real forms from us.

I don’t think I would have been able to handle seeing these things for real.

The man in the cloak walked me around each one, giving the creatures a wide berth. I stared at him, as he did. Observing.

He was silent. Completely and utterly silent.

When I walked, I could feel myself move. I could feel myself stretching against a… tapestry, of sorts; a weave of song that filled the air, distorting at my presence. I disturbed it with my passing, and in the past, I had watched the Fae walk with it, bending the song of the world to his will. Every movement a rhyme, every motion a voice to orchestrate the chorus.

But the cloaked man wasn’t like that.

He passed through like a ghost. The world didn’t notice his movements, as if he’d tucked himself away so well that he was invisible to the forces of reality itself.

We walked, and I found myself frowning.

How long had we been walking for?

An hour? A minute? It felt like less and more, as if there was no distinction between the two. The internal clock ticking inside my brain found itself confused. There was no constant here. No time to measure, no distance to count. All things happened at once and apart, together and at a distance.

Ahead of me, the man began to speak.

“The Fae give you the idea that the tongue has a name,” he said. “A̷̮͛v̸̞́n̵̩͑l̸̼̀a̸̠̐s̷̪̊c̷͖͘e̸̺͆, they say. Do you know what that word means?”

He glanced at me, and I shook my head. He nodded.

“A̷̮͛v̸̞́n̵̩͑l̸̼̀a̸̠̐s̷̪̊c̷͖͘e̸̺͆, is not a language, but a place. It is here.”

The man pointed to the ground below us, and I looked down into the infinite darkness beneath my feet. I felt patches of gargantuan nothingness in the distance, all around us, in every direction. They were countless. Each one had a push to its presence. A weight, announcing its existence. Their senses unknowingly swept over us, and I was certain.

Whoever this person with me was, he kept us hidden from them. His aura’s silence extended to mine, muting the disturbances I slashed into the weave. It made me invisible. Safe. I knew immediately that if I had dared to travel this place alone, I wouldn’t have lasted a second before I was found.

Found and killed like the insect that I was.

I shuddered, “And where is here, exactly?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere,” the man said, shrugging. “Both. It exists in all places, but it remains unseen. And the only way to enter is to let it find you.”

“…The black rain,” I realized.

He nodded.

“If the world is a lake, then this place is the undercurrent. Invisible, but present. It looks for disturbances on the surface—in the world of mortal men. You are Nameless. You know the tongue unspoken. You are no longer a part of that world, and to use A̷̮͛v̸̞́n̵̩͑l̸̼̀a̸̠̐s̷̪̊c̷͖͘e̸̺͆, on mortal affairs is to cause a ripple on the surface of that clear lake. It makes you sink to the bottom. It makes the sharks beneath aware of the ripples you emanate.”

I frowned at the tone of knowing in his voice. “You’re talking about when I saved those merchants from the glekk. How did you know that?”

He smiled at me, shaking his head. “You ask the wrong questions. Unimportant ones.”

“Then give me answers to the ones that matter.”

“Very well. What do you know of Names?”

“Nothing.”

The man breathed out a short laugh through his nose, and he turned to point a finger towards himself. “Names are how the world defines you. It is how it acknowledges you. It is your face, your presence, and the memories of the people that know you. It is a condensation of all that you are. Your Name is lost. Taken. And so you have none of these things.”

“How did the glekk see me, then? How did my songs affect the caravan when I saved them if I technically don’t exist?”

“The consciousness of the world considers glekk animals, and so they are such. They do not contribute to your Name. Animals do not tell stories. The worlds does not think them capable of remembering as men do.”

“And the caravan?”

“When you played, they did not see you. You bent the world around them with song, but they did not know its source. That is the loophole we immortals work under. If the world does not recognize us, the real us, it does not need to acknowledge who we are. Only the effects we leave in our wake. The fake Names that we create.”

I nodded, frowning, listening to every word. Trying to understand was a messy affair. Every question answered only gave rise to several more, and every bit of knowledge I gained only allowed me to understand how little I truly knew.

“So that’s it, then?” I asked, my shoulders sagging. “I can’t interact with normal people anymore?”

The man shook his head. “You cannot interact with mortals. You have not learned how to step away from the in-between of reality and A̷̮͛v̸̞́n̵̩͑l̸̼̀a̸̠̐s̷̪̊c̷͖͘e̸̺͆,. But you will learn how to dance between both in time. Do you not notice? Here, you sense nothing. When you walk the world without a Name, you sense little. And when the colors and the scents return…”

“…I step into reality.”

“Very good.”

I nodded at him and took a step forward, then paused as my foot pressed against something soft. There was a squelch. Mud. I looked down, and below me, there was a patch of swamp in the void where my leg had landed.

“Ah,” the man said. “It seems the time for you to leave has come. Most cannot stay here for long.”

He leaned on his back foot, crossing his arms.

“Do not return here a second time without proper training or disguise—I cannot save you twice.”

Slowly, I watched the patch of reality spread, and the blackness of the other world began to flow away as if water had been splashed against a canvas of ink. The man watched it all happen before turning to me. His smile was faded, now. Resigned. He pulled an amulet away from underneath his cloak and held it out to me.

It was a pendant of gnarled wood, wrapped in a web of silver string.

“Take it,” he said. “It belongs to you.”

I took it from his hands, and he nodded.

“Many things will happen,” the man said. “They happen now, even as we speak. Big things and little things. I hope you find yourself safe in good company for what is to come.”

“You’ve been a big help to me. Thank you.”

“I see no reason to not be as such.”

“Will I see you again?”

He smiled, then. The first real one he showed since we met. He gave me the wry and crooked grin of a man who knew many things. It made me want to be like him, somehow. To be able to show a smile that carried so much history behind it.

“Yes,” he replied, “But not in a way that you would expect.”

I nodded and jerked a thumb behind me, into the rapidly forming swamps, “Any chance you could help me get my bird back?”

“No.”

“Damn.”

He laughed at that, and I grinned. The blackness shrunk.

And when I next blinked, the man in the cloak of raven feathers was gone.

I stood alone in a swamp, in front of a bald cypress. Crickets sang all around me. Lightbugs floated over the water, and stars lit up the night. Twin moons watched the world from above. I followed the constellations with my eyes: Wrynn, Farrus, Vin. And then Pilas, a hand-shaped collection of stars, pointing north.

I started walking.

North, to where a Hag made her home in the corpse of an Ancestor Tree. Where she said she was waiting for me, waiting with a cup of tea.

That was good.

Just as long as she hadn’t eaten Venti.