Miko:

Climbing for hours, I was several hundred feet above the roots now, only looking down long enough to check my progress, else I be tempted to jump and get this over with. After another hour of climbing, there appeared to be some form of a cut in the trunk’s shape, sloping inward far enough for me to rest. When my hands started to hurt, I found a position to hold my weight up with just my heel in the joint between the bark by leaning forward as far as possible with my forehead resting into the crevice of two ridges. This gave my hands a short rest, returning the strength and flexibility in my grip. If you climbed for too long, your fingers started to ache, retaining the form they held while climbing. When I went to rest them, my fingers uncurled painfully, staying locked, pointing outwards, and unable to move. Eventually, after pressing my fingers and palms against the tree, their strength returned, allowing me to ball them into a fist. Each knuckle cracked with a loud click as their grit returned, prepared again for the climb. Every move added to my confidence, but as I let my neck peer into the sky, I lost every ounce of it. This tree reminded me constantly of how small and insignificant I was. After nearly a year in The Garden of Need, I found myself hating this tree more and more. It had not wronged me directly; I mean, it was a tree, but all it did was stand here and tower over all existence forebodingly.

Reaching a hand above me onto the ledge and stepping high, I drug myself with my hands until I was lying on my chest in a small crevice that dented into the tree’s perfectly cylindrical frame. The spot was free from the breeze, providing a pleasant warmth after the climb, so I pulled myself a little further in and placed my bag against the back section to offer me a more comfortable place to relax. I was tempted to continue climbing — to push myself harder for Maleki’s sake. For a brief second, I entertained that thought before something poked against my back through the bag. It wasn’t my discs; I kept those in a sheath to protect the blades and myself. Opening my bag, I fumbled around and readjusted my belongings until the object found my hand. It was a book. When opened, it was roughly the size of my hands and certainly didn’t appear unique; only crafted with a grey spine and black covers. The only writing on the front and back covers was a title, Arms & Armour, by an unmade author. A book I had read many times, though as of late, reading had not been a passion I could enjoy. Firstly, because I wasn’t able to move for so long, but even after my body regained movement capabilities, I found the act to be a distraction from what was necessary. Truthfully, these books from Grandpa’s collection had been engraved into my mind so much so that the contents appeared without having the book in my hands. That helped me for a time, soothing the loneliness I had felt here. Now, something else in the book clung to me. I flipped to the page I had in mind on the first try and began reading a passage that was now starting to make more sense to me. The book itself taught two guiding principles for blacksmiths and apprentices, and the rest of the book detailed the process and equipment needed to create the frames of weapons and armour. The passage I was enthralled with was about one of the principles. Unnaturally, I found myself reading aloud, hearing a voice I was unfamiliar with — realizing I had not spoken in so long, having no one to talk to. “Among blacksmiths, a moral stone must be laid before you ever seek to temper your first steel. You must make the hard choice of dedicating your life to one of the two forms of metal. You will bend and mold for hours, sweating in the heat of the forge, to craft a fine ligament that a soldier will bear. Will you make weapons whose steel is sharp, heavy, or jagged, serving the sole purpose of harming or killing those it seeks — for protection? Or, will you make armour whose steel is weighty, sized, and shined to perfection so that it can be bore upon a soldier to protect him and harm those he seeks? For a man to be successful in the art of the smithy and not be consumed by his forge’s flames, he must decide what kind of blacksmith he will be. An Armer, or an Amourer.” I wasn’t sure how it applied to me, but every time I read it, I thought about it for too long, forgetting to turn the page and continue the rest of the book. Maleki spent more time in the forge than I did, and there was never particularly an interest in inheriting Grandfather’s profession by either of us, so it always left me confused. What about this passage was so important to me?

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Without intending to, I had drifted off, waking again in the morning to discover one of my arms not working. That would have worried me, but I prepared for that by training rigorously to strengthen both my legs and my arms in the event this occurred. Climbing would be different, but it would be no more difficult than before. Legs are more robust than arms, allowing more power to be distributed to the movement. However, this predicament did make climbing more interesting as I was forced to be more flexible and creative to move up the tree without hanging as often.

The leviathan tree and I became familiar with each other as I climbed higher and higher each day. For the first time in a long while, I slept every other night, a routine I had not kept up since I was comatose. Tired and aching were states that I found comfort in as the ground got further and further away. The first few days I climbed were the most interesting, as the patterns were fresh and cultivated thought as I tested the best ways to path and climb. That disappeared on the fourth and fifth days when the climbing began to be performed by me without preparation or thinking. My body acted as if the muscle fibers were shocked and grabbed with a life of their own. The sixth through ninth days were no different, so on the tenth day, I forced myself to become lucid by getting bold and jumping to skip ledges. That worked at first, keeping me occupied until one of my fingers slipped as I lept through the air, forcing myself to crush my feet into one of the bark joints to prevent myself from falling. My heart skipped a beat, and I never tried it again out of fear. That brazen action scared me into lucidity for the next few days of climbing until I rested on a small malformation where the bark cupped the side of the tree. I rested here, looking out into the distance and to the ground. The valley in front of me was an evenly sorted array of trees that spread out into the horizon as far as the eye could see. However, the ground was blurred, so far away now that there were very few details for me to focus on. Instead, everything below became patches and plots of colours with only basic shapes persevering. Laying on my back, I looked up, stunned at what stretched out above me. How had I not noticed it before? Two days of climbing and the bottommost branch of the tree would be within arm’s reach. The limb was colossal, almost insurmountably large. A family of loggers could carve away at one of these branches for three lifetimes without ever making a dent, supplying their kingdom with enough wood to build thousands of homes.