Elsewhere, at a different time...

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The air sucks moisture from every exhalation and parches his throat on each breath taken back. Naeed fingers the strap of the waterskin on his back, half as large as himself and nearly empty. To his right, a wall of pale yellow rock rises straight up from the ground as if it grew that way. At this angle, there’s no way for him to gage how high is, but it doesn’t matter. He couldn’t climb it even if a flood were on his heels, and the wall on the opposing side of the dry riverbed is no better.

He’d welcome a flood.

He picks his way around another sun-bleached animal skull. This is his fourth day walking along the dry riverbed and he is beginning to wonder if it was unwise to leave the grasslands. Not that he has a specific destination, but out in the grassland he wouldn’t struggle so hard to find water.

Back there, the plants were friendlier and much more willing to point out where he might dig and easily break through to wells near the surface. As things stand now, Na’Stra spends hours scouting on his behalf so she can direct him to the closest brackish-tasting puddle or a hidden pool with dangerously colored fungus scumming the top.

She mocks him less than usual. That is concerning.

The few plants that grow here are angry hoarders. Scattered scrub bushes cling desperately to the cliff face in hopes of catching the rare rainfall sliding down, while cacti loaded with moisture bristle with protective spines. None of these will tell him where to find water.

He wonders if the desert ever adopts lost children as the forest does. If so, would the desert’s children be harsh like the land? Would they feel like they were drowning if they traveled to moister regions?

A short whistle from behind prompts him to stop and stretch out his arm. A voidflyer sails past his head and keeps on for two seconds, then banks left and circles back toward him. She unfolds her legs as she slows her approach, then grabs onto his wrist with her claws and runs up his arm to the shoulder, then across to the other shoulder, draping herself around the back of his neck in a fluid transition. She squirms, adjusting her position so that the small pack tied to her stomach lies flat.

He winces, inspecting his arm for punctures. Over time Na’Stra has improved her landings, but it still hurts.

The black dragon snorts from her sprawled perch. “Treeboy too much boy,” she needles. “Trees no hurt by little voidflyer landing.”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t point out that if she’d landed that way on an unprotected human arm, it would be torn open by her claws. A human would be screaming for a healer by now. Instead, there are only a few small chips in his bark that will repair themselves soon, so he drops his arm and keeps walking.

She flicks the tip of her tail up into his face, but he doesn’t react. Silent, he waits for her report. There’s no contest of patience between Naeed and Na’Stra. In another forty-two seconds, he is rewarded with a bored yawn and a grumbled, “Caves ahead, right-side path between rocks. Heard drips.”

Immediately he angles right, pressing his hand to the canyon wall, worn smooth.

Water, he thinks. It must have been water wearing it down, patiently grinding away the canyon like time itself. He marvels at the control water has over stone. Yet even when he drinks that same water, he can’t do to stone what water can.

“Water head first, m’kay? Too shrivelly up here.” Na’Stra pokes a claw into the mass of moss and leaves on his head and he winces. Usually it’s so thick and springy that she can’t touch his head. Today, her claw grazes the tender scalp beneath.

He presses his lips shut against the words rising hot to his tongue. She’s just worried. Na’Stra has looked out for him since the day he left the forest… and has mocked, poked, and scraped him just as frequently. Not to mention the whole business about headflowers, which is probably why she wants him to water his head first.

She wriggles around on his shoulders until she has reversed position, with her head where her hindquarters had been moments before. “Slow. Treeboy all boring quiet today. Moves like legless crawler,” she grumbles. “Hurry up to good water!”

Every time he opens his mouth to answer, he loses water to the air. Instead, he focuses on breathing slow through his nose to conserve what moisture he can. He stubbornly keeps a steady pace.

Abruptly, the rock wall vanishes under his right hand. Surprised, he turns his head and sees that he has arrived at a narrow cleft dividing the sheer wall from top to bottom.

“Told you told you toooooold you. Now go that way until you find cave with drips.” Na’Stra bounces a little across the back of his neck.

Naeed wonders—not for the first time—at what age voidflyers run out of energy. Na’Stra is too old to be a nestmother, but she acts like every juvenile he’s ever heard snarling at an intruder or boasting about its hoard.

Squeezing into the cleft, he trails his hand along the wall again. The shade is welcome, though it is still fiercely hot. He turns his eyes upward, watching the wide blue sky narrow to a winding sliver crushed between hundreds of feet of stone.

If he were a little taller and broader, his shoulders would scrape both sides of this passageway. Na’Stra must have saved her wings by scrambling along the pebbled floor and shadowhopping to check this route.

Ahead is the cave she mentioned and in due time he plods to the waist-high opening. Ducking inside gives immediate relief that sinks through his skin. Cool air washes over him.

“Finally!” Na’Stra hisses in his ear. “Now stupid twigman only gots three more hours till he gets to water. Go faster!”

Kneeling, he crawls forward, opening his mouth to taste the air. He follows a faint trail of moisture as it grows stronger. Denser.

The light fades to thick darkness as he turns a corner, but now he can hear water dripping and it’s just ahead. Moments after, his hands splash in a shallow pool as water dribbles onto his head and back.

Three hours my rootlets. He traps those words behind his lips, but sheer relief quickly washes away the irritation. His pores open up, soaking in the liquid through his skin. He briefly assesses the content of the water, but there is no poison to filter out. It is cold and tastes of old stone, earth, and minerals. He slakes his thirst, motionless with his hands in the puddle, a silly grin on his face. This is the best source he’s had in days.

The weight on his shoulders slithers off, plopping down with a splash and slurping noisily. Briefly, he regrets his stubbornness. Na’Stra probably didn’t stop to drink before rushing back to retrieve him.

As his need lessens, he splashes water over the rest of his skin, soaking his tunic and rinsing off days of accumulated dust. He fills the waterskin, capping it with intense satisfaction. Still, he hesitates to return to the canyon. It is comfortable here and he doesn’t like wandering the desert.

Why did we turn this way?

Because he’d never seen anything like this canyon before, with its yellowy-orange banded stones and tan-white sands. And Na’Stra came because she always follows him. Just for his headflowers, she loudly proclaims, and the chance to find unique blooms in lands she’s never seen before.

Even so, he isn’t ready to return to picking his way around skulls of creatures that didn’t make it out there.

“Na’Stra?” he whispers.

“It speaks!” she shrills down by his wrists. He hears quite a lot of splashing, and as his eyes adjust, he makes out a wriggling black body in the pool, a snake-like shape darker than the rest of the cave. “What it want that it finally speak to know-nothing voidflyer what leads it to water, huh?”

All the irritation returns. Sighing, he mumbles, “I want to rest here awhile. In the water. Then we can move on.”

She’ll probably moan and groan and give me a hard time, but then she’ll find a spot to curl up in for—

“Yah sure fine.”

He blinks in the dark. “Ah… you… won’t be bored?”

“Been bored hours already. Gonna go ‘splore cave. Whole place shadow. Is best place ever already.”

He frowns a little. “Be careful—” he stops. The ripples in the water are already calming. There’s no splashing. She’s gone.

The frown morphs into a full glare as he mutters, “Watch out for anything that might like a flying snake for a snack, okay? Yah, Naeed, that’s a good idea, I’ll try thinking ahead for once.”

Creakily, he stands to his feet and maneuvers directly under one of the steady drips. He shuts his eyes in pleasure. He’s sated, but this sense of unlimited water is a rare comfort on his travels.

Too soon, there is a loud splash by his feet and a shrill voice yelling, “Twigs-for-brains done standing around? You gots ta see this! We go down far. Come now!”

For a full minute, as she winds around his ankles and jabbers, he ignores her. He likes it here in the cool pool. She came back too soon. He isn’t ready to go.

On the other hand, she isn’t asking him to go back out into the sun. And she did him a kindness, finding this place for him. He wavers, and the moment the excitement in her voice begins to wilt he scoops her up in his arms. Depositing her on his shoulder, he mumbles, “Point the way. You see better. Be gentle.”

“Yeah yeah babyskin, no scratching,” she jeers, but when she takes her place across his shoulders, he doesn’t feel any sharp points. He walks forward carefully, and when she nudges his right cheek with her snout or the left cheek with her tail, he turns immediately. The water laps at his ankles. The current curling around his feet is as much his guide as Na’Stra’s insults.

“Bend over. Low ceiling, acorn-breath.”

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“Careful. Steppings down.”

“Hey wormywoods, no walking at wall! Gonna try crush voidflyer? Left! Leeeeeft!”

Naeed pictures her screechy words sliding off him like heavy rain on saturated ground. He adjusts his direction or grunts. She won’t get under his skin. He always wins the patience game.

Following her directions, he continues to crouch, crawl, and turn at the correct time. The shallow stream follows him with a barely audible shhhh-shhh-shh, though at other times it sounds like a throaty chuckle over loose rocks and down short drops. Naeed traces its course down tunnels slanted so steep he clings to the side to keep from sliding down the slick rock.

He is beginning to acclimate to the dark, as well as to Na’Stra’s endless stream of directions, so he falters as he rounds a sharp turn. There, in front of his nose, hangs a gentle splash of blue glowing brightly in the dark.

“See? See!?” Na’Stra whips her tail against his shoulder, triumphant. “Is only start, now follows! Follows it, never guessing. Never guessing whats be next!”

He lifts his fingers to the blue, encountering a patch of velvety growth on a damp rock wall. The growth searches his fingertips, cautious. Curious.

Hello, he greets it. Much of you, or only a little?

A friendly surge hails him from the algae patch, inviting him inward and down. A great, sprawling network opens to his mind. He becomes aware of hundreds of thousands of patches like the one he is touching, interconnected with communities of fungus and even flowering vines. Tunnel after tunnel maps into his mind with clear directions, locations of every source of water, and places where mobile creatures are clustered.

He pulls back, his head swimming with an abundance of information and friendly welcome. He swallows the urge to dive deeper, his skin already crawling with this reminder of his solitude. Still, he is grateful, so he uncaps his waterskin, dips his fingers in, and sprinkles a little over the algae.

“Stop with asking plants what next!” Na’Stra growls. “Is cheating.”

Naeed’s lips curl smugly as he strokes the patch of algae farewell and follows the streak deeper in. Na’Stra still grumbles at him, but with the stream at his heels and the image of the tunnels the algae imparted, her directions are now redundant.

The whorls and streaks on the wall grow denser the further he travels. Not more than an hour after he encounters the first algae patch, he slides through yet another opening and drops a few feet to the ground.

He stares, overwhelmed by the sight of the chasm he has entered.

This place would engulf the whole of the canyon he left behind. It looks as if an entire ravine dropped underground and gained a ceiling to separate it from the world above. The walls slant inward toward the bottom, but each slope has been carved like a giant’s staircase. Each massive step forms a great tier full of gently lit openings dug into the rock.

The openings are rounded, with some curtained off and others opened wide to spill candlelight, soft voices, and gentle strains of music into the open space. The rooms begin at a height just above his head and continue up, the tiers sloping away to the top of the chasm. There is enough ambient light for him to see a multitude of ramps placed at even intervals, connecting lower levels to higher ones.

At the bottom lies a river the width of thirty men’s armspans, filled with specks of light swimming about in schools. Its banks are padded with thick swaths of shimmering grass and trailing algae glowing in blues and greens. Overhead, dozens of rock spires hang from the ceiling, cloaked with curtains of algae and glorious vines in luminescent yellow, giving the effect that the cavern ceiling drips gold.

Bright rope bridges cross the gap between the walls, strung like laundry lines between each level at even intervals. The glow these bridges give off is more muted than the foliage and the fish, but even so he can see each one clearly.

Vegetation is everywhere. A riot of clinging vines with gourds, algae, and uncounted variants of fungus—all glowing brightly—cling to every available surface of the chasm. It provides a dense, natural tapestry that flows around the outside of every room, though it stops short at the path lining the doorways. Their luminescence is a far cry from sunlight, but after hours of crawling around in the dark, the soft twilight they provide is a welcome change.

Na’Stra grumbles, “Toldings you, but you cheating surprise by ask plants.”

Naeed can’t find a suitable response. He doesn’t move from where he fell, a bit above the riverbank in a patch of mushrooms with thin, flat caps bigger than his head. The stream he followed burbles down the drop and flows around him to join the river.

Nearby mushrooms are already nudging him with the curiosity of their network, which is gradually becoming aware of his presence. He is an outsider and a strange one, but also like them. There are so many questions, and he has plenty of his own.

Flicking her tail, Na’Stra mutters, “Going all blank-eyed now. No ears for voidflyer no more. Fine. Be boring little bit. Talk at’em plants little bit,” she stresses. “Not too much. Finding you later.”

With another flick of her tail, she dives off his shoulder into his shadow and vanishes.

Naeed barely notices, pressing his fingers into the algae carpeted ground. Within moments, he leaves the boundaries of his skin behind and falls headlong into the welcoming embrace of this underground network.

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Something wants his attention.

He doesn’t want to give it. He is understood and secure and a thousand years could pass before he’s ready to take another breath of air through his lungs.

There are no secrets or mistakes here, only an infinite amount of minute facts to examine. Ponder. Consider each for a hundred years before moving on to the next. And the network has just as many things to consider about him.

Screeching. Something is dragging at him. He doesn’t want to go.

The network understands… something. Something it didn’t realize. Something about him. Now they are… rejecting him?

No. Never rejection. But there is suddenly a new, somber knowledge that this connection is not good for him.

Not good? Not good. Not—

“Do I gots to drag firetongue down here?! Light you up like pretty bonfire?! Wake up!”

Claws dig into his scalp. Sap runs down the back of his neck. He jerks, struggling to swat his attacker. His hands tear free of the floor, flinging soil and rock as he reaches toward his neck. New, thin rootlets have sprouted from his fingers for the purpose of connecting to the network.

He freezes, unsure why he broke contact.

A weight slithers down from his head and hangs off his chest. Wings batter his face. A familiar voice yells, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Up! Gets up before root forever! Up now!”

Confused, he lifts his… he… he can’t lift his leg. None of his limbs respond.

A winged animal pounces on his leg, attacking the ground around it. It—she—digs viciously at the algae that has grown up around him. He flinches as she claws through his new rootlets.

“Leaving you alone two seconds to be boring not mean go be tree!” she screams. “Promised them to be watching you! Stop making root!”

He blinks, considering her words. Not go be tree. Stop… making…

Some of the fog in his head lifts. This isn’t some animal. It’s Na’Stra.

He grabs hold of his knee with both hands and hauls back, dragging it free. Na’Stra immediately slips over to claw at his other leg. Once braced on his free knee, he’s able to pull the other leg out.

He wobbles to his feet, stumbling a few steps to the river and collapses there. He plunges his face into the water, opening his mouth to gulp. Closing his pores, he focuses on the water flowing through his lips, over his tongue, and down his throat.

It’s simpler to absorb the water through his skin, but it’s also simpler to let go and be a tree. He’s not. Not yet.

He finally raises his head, wiping his eyes and shaking the remaining water from his face. Na’Stra sits at arm’s length from him, her nose pointed away and wings raised over her head. Her tail lashes the ground and she spits from time to time, muttering angry nothings.

He reaches out to her with his thoughts… he focuses on stretching his arm out, his fingers brushing the raised spines on her back. “Na… Stra…” he forces her name through lips that move like carved blocks. How long was he lost in that incredible network?

She whips her head around, baring her teeth at him. She hisses, her wings rising a bit more.

He halts, letting his hand drop. His head falls forward. “…Ssssorry.”

And he is. Mostly. He hasn’t been in that deep in many years. But this is a new network, unfamiliar to him as he was to it, and they wanted to know each other. It hadn’t wanted to harm him, just to understand him.

He still wants to understand it. His fingers twitch.

Still, it was only a few moments.

Was it?

There’s too much root growth for it to only have been a few moments. He looks at his hands, with their feathery roots coming out from the sides of his fingers and the palms of his hands, uneasy. “How… long?”

Na’Stra’s tail twitches. She doesn’t answer.

“Na’Stra? How long were you… was I there?”

“Day.” The word comes hard and clipped.

He reels. A day lost deep in a network. Shaking free and getting used to being himself again is going to hurt. Already fear and need claw at him.

Where were you? rises to the tip of his tongue.

He quells it. She is already as angry with herself as she is with him. Silently, he reaches his hand out to her muzzle. This time she lets him stroke her. Her wings droop, then fold up against her sides as her neck relaxes.

After a few seconds, she sneezes, shaking her head. “Trim fingers,” she mutters. “Tickles.”

With that, she slithers up his arm and drapes herself across his shoulders. “Yah whatever. Be sorry whatever. Up get. Now! Walking toward lights up there. Plenty people, fix you good. Eating dinner tonight.”

He winces. “I’m not hung—”

“Eating! Dinner! Tonight!”

Chastened, he adjusts his waterskin, then stands.

Tries to stand. His limbs do little more than shake as he strains to make them move. Solitude rolls through his body in jagged waves.

I am one. Alone inside myself. It is all wrong, all wrong!

“Hey! Hey you! Big muddy scoopclaws!” Na’Stra yells from his shoulders, her claws digging in. “I see you! Not sneaky dumb-dumb. Done staring? Get helping!”

A voice like gravel grinding together grumbles, “Why? Is not villager. Not ours. Is visitor?”

“‘Course is visitor, ugly rockeater! What else we be?”

There is a pause before the answer. “Rude. Pest. Bandit. Many other things. You mightbe.”

Naeed crumples to the ground, fingers clawing at the algae. He needs back into the network, but it shuts him out. It will not let him return. He cries out a low, wordless wail at the horror of being trapped in his own skin.

“Not bandit! Visitor!” Na’Stra hisses. “Visitor whats needing help. Needs be with humans fast! In with lights! Warms! Food!”

Something large and whuffly is near Naeed. It sniffs from his head all the way down his back, but he doesn’t look up. His eyes are fixed on a single, stodgy mushroom he’s seized by its stem. His wooden fingers wrap around it. I am you. I am you!

A trace of sadness reaches him, then even that is closed off.

Arms thicker than his body scoop him up and away from the mushrooms, pressing him against a scaly torso. Limp, he rolls his head back to stare up at the muzzle of a burrower awkwardly cradling him. It sniffs his face, its teeth gleaming from under a lightly raised lip. Its nostrils flare, blasting his face with hot air. Its scales are alight with the same luminescence of all the creatures he has seen since entering this place, shedding gentle bronze and gold hues.

Every rootlet he has strains against the scales, but there is no network to connect with. This is just another mobile creature bounded by its skin.

Na’Stra curls her body up under Naeed’s chin, rubbing her head against his cheek and murmuring, “S’okay, s’okay big stupid treeboy. Yelling at you later, just stay here now. Get you fed. Get you better. S’okay. Not alone. Has Na’Stra. Has Yettle at homeplace, thinking of you. And glowy thing, whats-is-name?”

“Remara,” he grinds out between his teeth.

“Yah yah, noisy nosey ‘Maras. Was looking for, yes? Gonna find more? How findmore if you stuck, hmm?”

“Can’t,” he rasps. Can’t find more if I root. Can’t stand being trapped. Can’t move. Can’t stay still.

Na’Stra nuzzles him, nattering in his ear as he’s carried farther from the plants and toward the cliff face. The need to lose himself in an endless sea of thoughts roars through him again and his world shrinks down to fragments.

His body.

Na’Stra.

The arms holding him.

The rocking gait that carries him forward.

The vibration of a voice from the chest he rests against.