Lisa cared for her siblings for the next two days, the first two days of their long house arrest.
The adults cleared their schedules for the ritual in that time, which was sooner than she deserved. They didn’t do it for her alone, they insisted. They had to speak to their uncle in any case, and some had no projects to pursue since they had come home.
On the morning of the third day, she accompanied her mom and a team of others to survey the Whisper Tree.
Lisa would rather have had house arrest.
The tree stood far from the Nest, about halfway between the rain lake and graveyard, and it was impossible to miss. At the beginning of its containment zone, they stepped not onto soft forest duff but onto sand. The area was littered with unnatural gullies formed by the tree’s initial resistance when the Allmother had stretched this forest.
Some opened up into underground caverns. In others, fleshy roots poked out on which bountiful flowers and fruit grew. A sweet lure drifted on the wind.
Lisa enjoyed the brief moment of heat. From below, the illusory canopy did nothing to block the sun. The sand sank and slipped beneath her feet, and she used her wings for balance as she scaled a dune.
They crossed the border and stepped back onto forest soil. It wasn’t far from there.
The tree wound like a spire of muscle into the sky. Its fleshy bark revolved around it. The branches of its crown spread out like veins from a bulbous peak like a beating heart.
Pale birds of a dozen different species perched there, red trickles running from their ears. Naysayers. They twisted their heads as they listened, unnatural quiet.
An unease crawled up Lisa’s spine, not as a shiver but as a warm embrace. As if the Mother Herself was sliding up to her ear behind her to hug her and—
Whisper.
Whispers. They filled the air. There was no bird song, no chirping critters, even the wind quieted as if to carry the broken phones, struggling to form morphemes, more clearly.
It was beautiful. Also, disgusting.
Her parents had used to sit her down here as a child. They would make her practice magic in the radius of the tree’s whispers, hoping she would pick something up through auditory osmosis.
One of them would always stay and warn her not to get too close.
Lisa hadn’t heeded those warnings. Another time, she had snuck out to sleep under the base of this tree. It had been peaceful on her approach—of course, it had been. It had felt warm against her scales, like a good bed, and kind, which had made sense to her young mind.
The Mother had used to sit under the tree and whispered Her sorrows to it when She had been unable to speak to anyone for fear of hurting them. Her voice alone had changed it. As the Mother had whispered to it, so did it whisper echoes of Her voice back to the world long after Her departure.
Lisa had grown up hearing her family ramble on and on about their studies, and projects, and history, and travels, and lessons, and she’d thought if they were all like that, it must be because the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Mother must have been vibrant in life.
So she’d sat under Her favorite tree and dreamt of having a conversation. She had hoped for a monologue. She would have settled for a single word in an echo of Her voice to know what She had sounded like.
Instead, she had woken up to the feeling of the tree trying to eat her alive.
Lisa understood why her family let it live, though it was a threat to the world. Aside from the knowledge they could gain from listening to it, it was hard enough to throw away your own child’s metaphorical blanket or stuffed animal. That of your missing mother?
Even if it was a threat, this world was just one of many. Like Rose, her family had every intention of leaving it behind to join Her someday.
Still, if Lisa had her way, she would have burnt it to the ground the moment she’d learned how to breathe living fire.
She supposed that was a blasphemous thought, but if Mother hadn’t descended for Her children’s tears, Lisa didn’t care if She smote her for wanting to burn the trash She’d left behind.
Not that she’d ever say any of this to her family. She would never hear the end of it. Instead, Lisa glared, ignored the whispers, and turned to her mom to see if they could end this sooner. “Are we simply scanning for roots or has its behavior changed?”
The tree’s roots didn’t spread beyond the bowl of sand around its territory—at least, not on this plane of existence. Its roots wound through tears and twists in space out into the wider forest where it hunted or drank from veins of power.
It had also drunk from the rain lake long ago, the site they cultivated to bend space, and could now hide its roots in pockets to avoid detection or reach places it otherwise couldn’t—like their vaults and stores.
Mostly, it used those to spy on them. So whenever they did something like this ritual, they had to track its roots and torch them like the weed it was.
“Both. This is routine, but its behavior has changed while you were gone. It has been taking south.”
Lisa frowned. “Why?”
Her mom smiled. “Why don’t you tell me? Infer.” She could infer from her expression, her mom wanted to resume her lessons, starting with this.
Lisa went through the basics: what did the tree want? That was easy. Survive. It was surviving, though. Unless it felt threatened?
In a way, it was. By them. Even if her family was reluctant to uproot it, they would if they had to, if they had not left this world and it grew to be a threat to them or the Nest. They had done worse for less.
So it had to hide its growth, or bide its time, or grow rapidly to challenge them.
An idea clicked, and Lisa turned south. “No. The Five Cities?”
Her mom blinked and for a moment, Lisa thought she had guessed it in one instead of having the answer dangled out of her reach throughout a lecture.
Then, her mom huffed out a puff of smoke. Annoyed, not surprised. “No. Why would it go there?”
“I thought— I mean to say, the tree might gain power quickly if it could level?”
“Ahh. No. I can see why you would think that, but even it is wise enough to avoid that trap. It would get entangled in its web. That place is just another bubble of power waiting to pop. Like the Eonian Empire.”
Huh? Lisa stopped walking and started panicking. What did she mean, ‘trap?’ And the web, did she mean the Tower essence? How would— Why? But she—!
“That just goes to show, never build an empire on a cache of power, it’s like building on a volcano.”
“Uncle Brum sleeps in a volcano?” she said meekly, mind going over the notes she’d compiled for her parents.
People left the Five Cities all the time to try to set up private fiefdoms in other parts of the world. She’d collected accounts, court records, newspaper clips.
Time and time again, those people failed.
The further they went from the Towers, the slower they leveled, the longer it took for them to learn new Skills, the longer it took for active Skills to ‘recharge,’ and the weaker they became. The comprehension boost from Paths disappeared, optimized spells and physical Skills became sloppy, losing power, speed, efficiency.
The only true things they kept were the passive enhancements from Skills and levels, which was why fighters were more likely to succeed by using force—at least, for a time. You needed more than [Lesser Intelligence] to succeed after all.
Overall, leaving was discouraged. But those were psychological factors. Lisa had barely gotten anything out of her levels so she wouldn’t care if she left for good.
Neither would the Whisper Tree. Where was the trap?
Her mom scowled. “Your uncle Brum started a cult, okay?” she snapped. “That’s the only thing he should be used as an example for: what not to do.”
Lisa cringed. “Mom, what do you mean, the Five Cities are a trap?”
“That is a question you should answer for yourself, no? If you continue your project.”
Her voice went up. “Yes, but—”
“Let’s not wander from your lesso— ah, your previous question too much. The Whisper Tree is growing its roots south. Again, how would you infer why?”
Lisa’s thoughts split to consider two problems at once. “It wants to survive. It needs to grow?”
“What does it need to grow?” her mom encouraged her.
How did her Skills afflict her? Stagnation? Skills were resistant to change once they were ‘obtained,’ but that did as much good as it did bad—without Spells, Lisa had to maintain her spellcraft abilities the same as any other talent, or how humans had to maintain their bodies through training. Skills slowed that down considerably.
Ryan’s dad took it to an extreme: as a [Guard] who stood around all day, one of his Skills kept him fit, Ryan had mentioned.
Besides, you could improve Skills with time and dedication, like Stephanie did. Those improvements stuck.
“It already drinks from veins a power,” the other half of Lisa’s brain mumbled for her mom’s benefit, “a volcano like Brum’s wouldn’t help it much; otherwise, it would dig its roots down.”
“It has,” her mom commented.
Oh. Lisa hadn’t known that. How did lava even taste?
“I suppose it could want a spark of life in case its veins of power run dry? But how it would obtain one without eating us … or trapping us and siphoning from us …”
She shuddered at the thought. Was that what it had tried to do with her?
“It won’t try to eat one of us anytime soon,” her mom said in a dark tone. Not entirely for her benefit. “It knows: it dies if it does.”
Lisa furrowed her brows at the ground and imagined its roots, the resources it fed on …
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” her mom nudged her. “In more ways than up and down.”
Huh? Lisa took her words literally and looked up and— What was the other way she was looking? What it wanted … the future … the past?
The idea clicked when she saw the birds in its crown, a dozen different breeds and colors turned nearly identical in their pale plumage and bleeding ears. What did it want, that was unique to it, to the conditions of its creation?
“The Naysayers! Their ancestors heard Her voice. Where have they been migrating?”
Her mom cheered in delight. “South, but not for warmth. Those sturdy enough to attempt the journey have been migrating to the south pole.”
“What’s there?”
Her smile wavered and she joined her with a pensive gaze. “We don’t know.”
Lisa had heard that phrase more times than she could count. People in her family said it all the time, but they said it with a fervent excitement—a challenge to rise up against.
This?
“If a Drop of Her Blood survived, I wouldn’t know why it would travel that far south,” her mom mumbled. “The two drops still alive that we are aware of, it isn’t seeking out.”
“Lady Heswaren is in Lin?”
“As impressive as she is, I doubt she can speak His tongue. A true Vim, perhaps. That would be worrying enough on its own …”
Her mom turned back. When she saw the fear in her eyes, she shifted tones as Lisa had known she would. She rose up to a reassuring stance and reached out to cup her face. “Whatever it is, we sent a team of the best. They will be able to handle it.”
Lisa nodded into her hand. Just when she was about to speak up, her mom dropped it and called out to check in with the others.
They had been working while they spoke; her mom as well. Finding roots. With a bit of magic, she parted the earth. All over the forest, others did the same.
A salty screech filled the air, followed by a quivering whistle: “On my signal,” one of the myconids said in their wordless language.
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Her mom inhaled—
A sharp whistle came.
—and she breathed a river of flames.
The Naysayers took to the sky, screaming, “NO! NO! NO!”
The Whisper Tree was motionless as it glared at them. Its whispers did not change.
Lisa glared right back and when her mom took a moment to catch her breath, she bent down to breathe her own flames into the earth.
----------------------------------------
The first of their offerings was the daylight: the sun became a hatch of darkness in the sky. It had no corona as it would during a solar eclipse, and the stars were absent.
The second of their offerings was sound: all over the Nest, children hunted unheard and unseen. Their prey turned and bolted—too slow. Scaled bodies barrelled into them and sunk their teeth deep.
The cries of triumph that would normally warn others never came. Not far from where one animal was being eaten, another stood unaware until it was taken down.
Others still used the darkness and silence to attempt an escape. The renewed security for their house arrest imprisoned them long enough—and then it was too late.
The third of their offerings was wakefulness: her family continued to work even if they didn’t attend the ritual. They wrote notes, shaped flesh, welded metal with conjured flames, or had animated discussions over tea.
Those of them that had mouths worked them, but no sound came. They needed no sounds to converse; they used a mixture of body language, sign language, pollen, and magic, every word chosen deliberately.
Slowly, sleep claimed them all. Myconids spread roots and let their caps tip. Scaled deer curled up, heads against their stomachs. Dragons snored in their labs, in the path, on either side of the Nest’s wards, and among their kin and half-eaten prey.
Lisa’s eyes adapted to the dark. She walked past bright bodies in shades of yellow, orange, and red, and the cold purple outlines of humanoid bodies on her way to the rain lake.
The path declined, and a forest of black pillars rose like walls on either side of her. In them, gutters and flumes shaped from living roots lit up.
A shining fractal fluid flowed here like liquid glass. It passed through thin membranes in the flumes, pooled in five-dimensional flowers, sprayed in waterfalls into and through the Sea of Dreams, and back out into the crowns of trees again where it splashed against leaves.
She could only see its glow against the bark of the flumes, and the aerosol sprays, and it looked as though a glowing spider web in the night.
All of the flumes led to the same destination: a small lake, even by myconid standards, far below the surface that looked like a glistening disc of white light.
They gathered in the cavern there: one stag, three myconids, seven dragons, and a drake.
No time like the present. They were performing the ritual as soon as they could, on the sixth day since Lisa’s return. Six was Its number, the youngest. An auspicious number.
A fissure in the ceiling revealed the blackened sky. It would have looked like a tear in space if not for the absent stars.
Roots protruded from the earthen walls, and the roots in the ceiling dripped a shining fluid instead of drinking it.
Where the droplets caught the light, it fractured like a prism. Colors, from ultraviolet to infrared, danced and mixed in the chamber until they looked white.
Pink were their eyes.
Gold, the Heswaren’s.
White, silver, lustrous black—the space in-between was its true light, though maybe white was the closest they could get to perceiving it.
If Lisa had to name it … ‘space essence’ wasn’t the right word. To bend space was among the least of what this power could do. Yet, among the hundreds of dragons alive and thousands in her family, only a handful could do anything other than bend space with it.
That they could do that much was a miracle, the same way that it had been a miracle Lisa had been able to manipulate mana.
It was a foreign power to them. They cultivated it here the same way they cultivated life essence: by feeding their sample with similar, distilled essences until they consolidated, slowly diluting it over time.
If she had to give it a name, it would be ‘reality essence.’ They needed nothing less than the lake itself today. Not as a resource, but because the walls between worlds were thinnest here.
Rose had prepared the ritual so they could make their offerings. She’d also drawn a ritual circle in the chamber they stood in.
Lisa was surprised to see a bit of Five Cities’ ritual style mixed in with their own … though old and archaic. Had the Five Cities learned from them?
The other six dragons in attendance linked their magic to activate the circle and raise up containment wards.
With permission, Lisa drew on her life essence to steady herself as she was escorted onto a circle of grass that reached into the lake.
She led this ritual. It was partially for her after all so it was expected from her, but Lisa had still had to argue and plead with her parents for the right as they went against tradition.
“Wings up, neck high, stand tall, my daughter,” her mom said in an instructional tone.
The purple outline of Faer walked a circuit around the cavern, brushing a hand along the wall, his large cap tilted back as he inspected the roots.
“Do it right,” her dad sounded more stern, “if you make a mistake, and It kills you, all of the time and effort we invested in your upbringing will have been for nothing.”
Lisa flinched.
“Dear,” her mom said reproachfully, “keep to the rules. Remember yourself when you speak.”
He frowned, gears slowly turning, and turned to Lisa to lie, “I’m sorry. I still love you. I only want what is best for you.”
Rose walked up behind him. Relieved, Lisa looked to her for rescue. Her dad had to step back to give her space, and he took up position near the entrance with one of her myconid uncles to keep their perception on the world outside of this chamber.
Rose brought her an intricately-carved chest with the rest of the ingredients, and Lisa sorted through them.
As she consulted a journal with instructions, Rose picked out a small pouch from the pile and peeked at its contents. “Where did you find this?”
Lisa glanced at the pouch and suppressed a wince. She’d hoped nobody would notice that. “I uh, I have a source.”
“Hm?” Her aunt hummed curiously and sprinkled the hair onto her hand to weigh it. With a claw, she separated a tiny tuft—less than what a barber might remove with one cut—and returned the rest.
“I’m taking this,” she said. Her voice booked no argument. “You only need that much. Your crystal will be durable enough.”
She tucked the tuft of Micah’s hair away into a pouch in the lid of the chest.
Lisa nodded and resumed her work. Bottles of distilled essences went into the lake, to supplement their offerings. The moment the green and purple liquids touched the water, they vanished.
Next, she retrieved a worn wineskin and gave it to Rose, who passed it to her mom, and who passed it down the line to one of her aunts who seated a humanoid, amphibian creature on the opposite side of the lake.
It was about the size of a human and looked like one of the frogs she’d fought in the Tower, but it didn’t move on its own.
Her aunt opened its mouth to pour an inky black liquid down its throat.
Lisa tipped a bowl and a hundred black mana rings tumbled into the lake.
As before, the moment they touched the bright surface, the rings vanished. This time, however, the entire lake turned pitch black.
Final ingredient, Lisa reached through an imperceptible ward in front of her and drew on her life essence to shape her flesh. A single, shining drop of blood fell into the lake.
“Ara,” she spoke, letting the life essence fill her voice, “By kinship and sacrifice, I summon You. We have prepared a puppet for You. Speak with its tongue to shield our mortal minds and answer my call: Awaken.”
Like a puppet on strings, the frog rose up and stared at her with twin pools of darkness. Wisps escaped its mouth as it said, “Good morning.”
Lisa pulled her hand back and gasped out a smile. It worked. It actually answered her. Part of her had doubted It would but … the Allmother’s sibling.
For a moment, she wondered if this was what Ryan felt when he stood near Garen.
She resisted the urge to bow. That was not appropriate here.
Remembering her script, she gestured at her family standing around the lake. “We have prepared gifts for You. We give these freely, for You to do with as You please.”
At once, her family dropped sacks and crates of food, gemstones, currency, potions, vials of blood, alchemical ingredients, magical and normal batteries, pieces of Overseas technology, rare and unique artwork, crystallized hearts, and so much more into the lake.
A large fortune. Lisa properly could have bought a house near one of the Towers with it.
They gave these offerings regularly as a kindness, despite the fortune it took to even awaken their uncle. After all, Ara had no free will of Its own, nor the means to act—no magic, no body, no resources. It had to be given those things, and every time It woke, every word It spoke, every action It took consumed some of Its stockpile.
“When another asks, and if it pleases You, you may lie about Your possession of these gifts and who gave them to You, and You may keep them for Yourself instead of using them if commanded otherwise.”
It gave a sigh, “Thank you.”
A waste of energy. They didn’t do this for gratitude. It hadn’t needed to say that, but It had chosen to.
“You’re welcome. Besides that, we have also woken you today to ask for Your aid. I give to You now the materials and energy needed to create an object I desire.”
She dropped them into the lake: the pouch of hair, the vial of reality essence, a few gem-cutting tools, potions filled with kinetic energy and magical charges, and lastly, Sam’s crystal.
She hesitated before she dropped it, and her heart ached as she watched it hit the black lake and vanish.
There wasn’t even a ripple on its surface.
“I give to You next the instructions on how to create this object, as well as an in-depth description of its qualities. I command You, follow these instructions to craft the object and deliver it to me as soon as You finish—”
Lisa dropped a scroll into the lake. The instant it touched the surface, a gleaming red jewel fell into existence in front of her, nestled within the grass.
She’d known what to expect. Even still, she froze. Slowly, Lisa picked the crystal up, along with a blade of grass, and tested it by willing the grass inside.
It disappeared. With another effort of will, she pulled and the blade reappeared in her hand intact.
There had been a chance it wouldn’t work. Not because their uncle’s craftsmanship was flawed, but because of a mistake on their part. They’d gone over the materials a hundred times, passed the instructions along a hundred hands to proof-read them.
She breathed in relief. “Thank you, Ara. Thank you so much. I wouldn’t have woken You for such paltry gifts and requests normally, but we were hoping to—”
“Converse,” the frog said.
She hesitated. “Yes, but …”
Past the frog, Faer signaled her. The Whisper Tree had noticed them. It was listening in. It was best to cut this short.
“A calamity approaches—”
Lisa blinked. “What?”
As their uncle went on, her family hissed corrections at her, to speak more clearly, or to ask certain questions, but It drowned the jumble of voices.
“If you continue on this path, it will bring you only grief.”
“Which path? My— my Path?”
Pink eyes flared and her uncle Aber cut into the conversation, “How can we prevent this?”
“You cannot. The words will be spoken. A conqueror will stand. The crown will be made to fit any head so long as the women who wear my sister’s skin live.”
Rose sounded confused. “East?”
Lisa took a step back. This conversation escaped her. She had expected to ask Ara how It was feeling, if anyone else had interacted with It recently, maybe if It could share some of Its wisdom, a story of their Mother, or a hint of where She might be—not this.
“We can murder them, Uncle,” Aber said and his pink eyes shone gold, “we can storm the Towers, all of us, and topple their thrones.”
“One of you would die. Always.”
That gave them pause. Her family had let one of her uncles murder innocents for years rather than try him. When they finally had, they’d done it out of love, not justice. They weighed a life of their own over any number of others.
“It would change nothing,” their uncle went on. “I tell you this not to alter the future, but as a kindness to my sister. You have years to prepare yourselves.”
“At least,” Lisa spoke up, “tell us, what will happen?”
Rather than moving on its own, the frog turned as if pulled by strings to regard her.
It answered simply, “A Tower will fall.”
Lisa pictured a scene. The Towers were over two kilometers around, over half a kilometer wide. They reached impossibly far into and through the sky.
For the last three years, at least one of those impossible pillars had split the horizon in the corner of her eye at all times and now, she imagined it slowly … tipping …
They were supposed to be indestructible!
Garen. Allison. What about her friends?
She blinked the sting out of her eyes and looked ahead. The frog collapsed, strings cut.
The invisible screen around the lake vanished. She expected that to be the end of it. She was prepared to force her family to start the ritual anew. She would command their uncle to explain if she had to.
One look made her reconsider. Her cousin cried out an alarm, her family stumbled back, and she realized: they hadn’t been the ones to drop the wards.
A figure of shadows rose from the lake. With It, a monochrome stain spread to consume the chamber.
It looked like a humanoid figure with four arms and broad shoulders. Its head was nearly cylindrical, and It had six oval eye sockets. It reached out with one hand—
Lisa blinked and then it was a small dragon made from shadows instead.
The bodies of her family around the lake were painted in shades of grey, and her colder myconid family members were nearly invisible in the dark.
Almost simultaneously, they all drew on their sparks of life. Pink eyes and mycelium lines flared as they fought against Its influence.
Lisa found oceans of life within those eyes. She remembered her parents’ eyes luring her to sleep when she’d been young and frightened, after they’d taken her from her Nest to live with them and everything had been so confusing.
Their eyes had made her feel safe.
Her vision dimmed, the borders closing in, as she almost lost herself to that memory and the sweet lure of sleep. If she only closed her eyes, she could find peace.
Then, she too clutched that spark within her with an iron grip, so much that it hurt, and she lurched awake.
Just in time for the figure’s hand to cup her cheek. Her skin numbed, withered, and died where it held her, and wisps of dead tissue drifted away.
Her life essence immediately healed her, and the two forces warred in her cheek, creating a tingling sensation as her flesh fell away and knit itself back together over and over again.
She could almost hear a smile in Its voice as their uncle sighed.
YOU REMIND ME OF HER.
The words were unfiltered. It spoke in Its native tongue. Instinctively, Lisa did as she’d done before, all those times she had sat near the Whisper Tree, and pushed them from her mind, trying to ignore them.
Her life essence took that instinct of hers and amplified it, fusing her ears shut.
Her heart pounded in her chest. One wrong move and It could end her. Permanently.
Its title was the Sleeper, youngest of the Six, Its essence was apathy, and It would not care about its actions unless it was made to. It had been.
Their fourth offering had been love. It had been intended as a last line of defense. So that some small part of this being would love her, however temporarily, the same way her family did.
“Her?” Lisa’s voice shook. Even deaf, she heard the words:
MY DECEASED NIECE, THE USURPER—
It tried to speak a Name. At least, Lisa thought It did. It didn’t work.
To her, the world seemed to freeze like a picture that slowly drifted away. Darkness spread around the edges of the picture, as if she’d closed her eyes and imagined a scene. And that scene cracked and fragmented like glass.
For an impossibly long time, all was still and … peaceful. She struggled to think, to feel, to perceive the passage of time.
A voice woke her up.
[Summoner Class changed!]
[Conditions met: Grand Summoner Class obtained!]
[Grand Summoner level 19!]
[Skill — Heightened Cast obtained!]
[Skill — Hold Thought obtained!]
[Spell — Magic Circle obtained!]
She woke up in her parents’ bed with a splitting headache. Her dad crowded her, and her mom pulled back with furrowed brows. She’d sensed it, too.
“What was that blessing just now?”
Lisa groaned. Her ears worked. Had she undone that?
“I … leveled up.”
Her mom blinked. “You did what?”