Half past ten in the morning:

A discordant, meaningless string of syllables marched out of her like a frenzied procession. Jessica Wright coughed and took a deep breath. She stood up and tried again, this time picturing the whole village standing before her. Nothing came out this time. The "words" stuck in her throat like a tonsil stone she could feel but refused to budge no matter how hard she tried.

With no set vocabulary, consisting entirely of meanings that depended completely on context with absolutely no meaning to individual words, Jessica might have been right. The Old Tongue was the first language people spoke, and as such it stretched the meaning of language. It was vague, dreamlike, and almost Edenic in character. It was the language of the wind and the rocks and the trees, which would have made it very useful were it not for the fact none of those things spoke.

She would gladly learn any other language than this one. Anything. Unfortunately the Old Tongue was the only other language she knew existed. See, Jessica's world was rather small but we'll get to that in a second.

"How would you even live without using nouns, for crying out loud?" Jessica thought to herself.

She coughed hard, fumbling over the pronunciation slightly better than last time.

Jessica would rather have done anything else with her time. Anything. But if you asked her, there was nothing else she could do or was particularly good at.

Ten to Noon

On the top of the sward stood a rickety little hut, right by the village palisade. Right between everything she knew and everything she had absolutely no clue about. She felt a visceral repulsion to the Wilderness that was mitigated by an equal and opposite attraction to it, the latter of which she found more difficult to explain.

Jessica looked out over the village: nothing but timber buildings, straggly grass and trampled dirt, and thought of the hundred-or-so people who shared it with her. In the middle of the village stood an enormous silver tree. It towered over the rest of the village, its bark glistening brightly in the winter sun.

"The Holy Tree." thought Jessica.

The sight of it brought her comfort. It was a beacon of familiarity in a strange and terrifying world.

She walked down the path, zigzagging towards the town hall.

High Noon

In the middle of a hall, a tall young woman with messy brown hair stood with one foot on the seat of a bench, the other on the floor. She was dusted with snow, some of it melting into her jerkin.

"And I could see demons' footprints in the snow..." she said, gesturing towards the ground.

Jessica sat on the other table facing away from her sister as if to hide from her.

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"Hey, Jess!" she said cheerfully.

"Hoy." Jessica mumbled.

"What're you up to?" asked Carter.

"The usual. Keep telling us what happened. I don't want to interrupt." Jessica droned.

"Oh, okay." Carter said, "...and then I realized that -"

A bespectacled old man wearing a tall black hat with a belt buckle watched angrily from the other side of the hall. Once Carter had finished her story and the commotion had died down, he took her aside while she was on her way out. He glowered at her with cold severity. Jessica stared at the bottom of her bowl and listened.

"You've been sneaking out again, have you?" he said.

"Father Isaac-" Carter protested.

What followed was a typical one of Father Isaac's lectures.

But then Carter mentioned something interesting. "I saw another Holy Tree. It had a silver trunk and blue flowers. It was smaller than ours. But I heard a loud crash and everything was covered in dust. I couldn't see three steps ahead of me, but when I looked behind me there was a shadow of a demon on two legs, skinny like a corpse, with a head too big for its neck. And I ran across a road-"

"A road?!" said Father Isaac, "Do you have any idea what you're talking about?"

Two past Noon

A dozen other children stood in the town square right under the Holy Tree. Jessica stood in the back, shivering in the cold.

Father Isaac gestured towards it with an open hand. "We live in strange times. You don't remember, but there used to be other towns and cities filled with more people than you can imagine. Five years ago they disappeared. Now there's nothing but a forest full of demons who eat our livestock and steal our crops."

A little hand in a blue mitten rose up.

"Yes? Gregory." Father Isaac said.

"Aren't they just wolves?" Gregory asked.

"Good question." Isaac smiled. "Demons take the shape of something we recognize but they look twisted because their souls are evil. The ones we know take the shape of wolves because they know we fear them. But since God rejects them they always look a little off. You can tell they're demons because they're not grey or brown like a wolf's supposed to be, no. They're all kinds of colours: red and pink and orange and purple. There is absolutely nothing in nature that colourful. They're not wolves. They're not part of nature. They don't belong in God's creation. They are demons!"

The crowd listened with rapt attention.

"That is why we hold this play every year. Isaac continued. The Holy Tree is God's gift to us and by playing out the deeds of our ancestors we stay connected to her. This strengthens the tree's magic. Look how it continues to grow even as our crops perish."

Jessica took center stage. She chanted the story of how the world came to be in the language nobody knew.

Six past noon

Jessica grabbed on to the handle of her axe and tried to pull it out of the log. It wouldn't budge. She planted her foot on top of it, this time using the leverage to her advantage. "Damn it..." she groaned.

"It's fine, it's fine!" Carter said as she wrenched her axe out with one swift motion. "Thanks for helping, but I think you should - I know, if you're going to come here so often why don't you stay? I mean both of us are-"

"No. I want to live alone, by myself." Jessica said.

"Jessica, you're twelve!" Carter said.

"It took me so long for Father Isaac to let me stay my own house." Jessica continued. "I'm not going to move in with you."

"Why?"

"We're orphans. That makes us adults."

Half past Six

Jessica downed a bowl of onion soup. She wiped her mouth.

"Why was there a road?" Jessica asked. "Father Isaac always says there's no more roads anymore."

"It wasn't any road like the ones in books." Carter said. "It wasn't a dirt path, nor was it paved with cobblestones. It was this long, continuous rock. Hold on, let me show you..."

A gleam appeared in Carter's eyes. She took out a little blackboard and two sticks of chalk and started scribbling with great enthusiasm. She was always curious, but now her passive curiosity had grown into an obsessive fervor. With two long strokes and several dots she drew a road. Along the middle there was this dotted yellow line. Then she held it over her face.

"You ever wonder where that road goes?" Carter said.