#a subversive story that pries at the holy see's authority

[nakovesh]

The Girl for the Trees

Glittering embers flickered from the fire, twirling in their lazy dance skyward to play as stars for a canopy too dense and nubilous to have ever allowed anything celestial through. A husky, though oddly dulcet voice lofted with the embers in a language strange and wild. Shifting beneath a heavy mite thread blanket, a girl looked down at her bandaged middle. She winced as she placed her hand over the tightly bound gauze. It still hurt, but the waiting was worse. She was so tired of resting, of not hunting with her sisters. Eyeing her father’s form, silhouetted by the campfire’s light, she wondered how distracted with the song his mind and ears would be. Placing her hands on the ground by her hips, she used their admittedly shaky strength to lift herself just slightly from her bed, shifting back silently from under the blankets. Only one small foot hung over the edge of the wooden platform that served as her resting place when the song abruptly stopped. Her father didn’t even turn to look at her. He didn’t have to. 

“Koko,” the man chided gently, a throaty chuckle just barely held back. “There will be no spontaneous hunts tonight. Get that little hind paw back under your blanket. Rest.”

The girl’s chin jut forward stubbornly in a pout. Defiant in her sluggishness, she lifted her foot to retreat back under the Blanket of Unending and Boring Punishment. 

“Fine,” she huffed, resigning herself to sitting back against her blankets. “Then will you please tell me the story again? The one of the princess, the farmboy, and the smuggler?” Her tone was hopeful, distracted from her frustration with her own idea, her pout replaced with a fond grin. “I would like to hear again about why the old man let down his sword and allowed Inquisitor Vadert to strike him down! I still do not understand that, father.”

When the man finally turned toward his daughter, the edges of his eyes were crinkled with a grin, toothy and wide, a mirror of her own. “Because, my dear little huntress, the farmboy needed to understand that some weapons cannot be seen. That the edge of love and mercy can cut far deeper than any blade of steel.”

The girl drew up her knees, hugging them to her chest as she pressed a check to one, resting her head as she listened. As her father went on to illustrate the scene, quoting the actors, and moving his hands animatedly as a painter to a canvas, the girl’s eyelids began to grow heavy. Try as she might to listen to how young Luc cried out for his mentor from across the waterfront, the words soon gave way to her own dreams, her hands falling limply to her blankets.

An inky canopy that rarely saw even the light of the moon gave way to a harsh and unrelenting sun. Nako blinked and squinted in annoyance at it, throwing an arm over her eyes to shield them. Licking her lips found them chapped and laden with sand, mouth parched. She rolled onto her belly, climbing to her hands and knees. How had she gotten here? 

Octavius. Her sword. So much fear and blood.

So much blood, but upon looking herself over, none of it was hers. So why then was it so hard to rise to her feet? Why did it feel as if she were standing on a mat someone was trying to pull out from under her?

Finally getting her feet beneath her, she staggered blindly forward, her vision swimming and shifting before her. Sparse trees, a worn cobble road, behind her an enormous bridge, to her right volatile aether, buzzing like a swarm of bees. Highbridge, she realised, and Wellwick. Not far from home. Nako closed her eyes and drew an unsteady breath, before staggering up the road. When released that breath and her next step landed, her boot was not met with the expected dulled crunch of sand upon stone, but something yielding and soft. Blearily, her eyes flickered open to the sight of… moss and loam beneath her wobbling feet.

Swinging her head drunkenly upwards, Nako beheld tall trees and a winding path lined with steadily more verdant foliage as it went on. The Miqo’te paused in her steps, not quite able to fathom what had happened. Had she not just been in the heat of Thanalan a moment before? Had she lost that much time as she journeyed? She was certain she had only taken the single step, but then perhaps she was more addled than she realized.

I didn’t matter, she reasoned. She needed to go home and rest. 

Home. Nako allowed the word to roll about her mind lazily as she plodded up the forest path. It was a strange word, or concept, transient and liminal. Recently she had thought that home meant her friends, her family of the heart, not bound by blood. But, somehow, that was not where her feet were taking her, not where her very soul seemed to pull thread-thin as it strained to grasp something. Dimly, almost as if observing her own actions from afar, she realized this was strange. She should go to one or more of those she held in her heart, as she knew they would help her, but her feet would not allow it. Something would not allow it. 

As Nako continued to be tugged along toward the center of the wood, the canopy ebbed from verdant to abyssal as pulsing din grew more distinct in her head. The song that was no song and without sound, felt like an exhalation of a long-held breath, or breeze buffeting through grass, low and humming, with a beat like a slowly snapping branch. A hymn at once horribly familiar and alien.

Her toe, catching the edge of a stone, sent Nako stumbling for the treeline, one hand outstretched to catch herself upon the trunk of a tree. A rosewood, she faintly realized as the scent caught her nose. She sagged there for a moment, closing her eyes tightly as she tried to distinguish her own breath from the chorus in her head. For a moment it seemed to quiet, as if she had fallen into a still pool, all stimulus muffled. 

At first Nako thought her hand was moving of its own accord as the bark seemed to shift. Her head swayed toward the tree as she reluctantly opened her eyes again. The bark, dark and scaled as rosewood’s should be, was flattening out, the flakes of wood drawing in toward the trunk, snagging the skin of her palm as it retreated. She stared in abject awe as the tree began to turn from a rich brown to a fuzzy green as moss spread over its surface and bloomed between her splayed fingers. She lifted her face toward the boughs and found no familiar almond shaped leaves, but needles and berries of the yew.

Gradually, the not-song, returned, consuming more of her mind this time.

Even in her addled state, Nako knew she was now deep within the Twelveswood. Absent for years as she had been, she still knew the moss and the groundcover of the deepwood instantly, the very scent of the air, dewy and thick as it clung to her skin.

Though Nako observed her next steps as unsteady as they had been since coming aware in Thanalan, they no longer felt labored. She seemed to drift on, like the needles flickering toward the ground from the branches above her. Or below her? She was no longer certain. A tree grows up as much as it grows down. A bee is just a grub with means to traverse air rather than soil. Nako no longer felt distinct from these things, she realized. Flesh or loam? Did it matter? Countless crawling things still found home in it.

Drifting on unfeeling feet, Nako found herself in a small clearing where moonlight seemed to touch, if faintly. In the middle stood a stout tree, its trunk bowed like a cauldron, buttress roots coiling like veins into its bark, small leaves bursting stubbornly upward only trail down on viney branches that tickled at the moss on the clearing floor. Beside it stood a figure, turned away, broad shoulders slightly hunched as it looked at something in its hands, silver ears flicking in her direction. The figure turned as it tucked a book under its arm, revealing luminous golden eyes with a familiar crinkle at their corners.

Nako thought she might have said his name, but wasn’t certain until his lips turned up in a sad smile. A smile so much like her own in its toothiness.

“Koko,” he said softly, extending a rough hand toward her. “I wish we could have reunited under better circumstances. I pictured Ishgard, and you in polished armor, and me with new stories.” He pulled her close for a hug that made something distant within her ache to feel it. He lifted his hands to gently draw her hair away from her dirty face and looked into her eyes for a moment, a hint of anger clenched at his ashen face. 

“I was so arrogant then,” he whispered. “I should not have played as I did with things I did not understand.” He leaned forward and pressed his lips to her hairline and Nako distantly noticed a creaking sound ebbing from the tree, barely heard over the strange aria and her father’s words.

“But now, I suppose it does extend your life, hm? After I repeated again and again, the very foundation of Conjury is to not draw upon your own...” He trailed off almost uncertainly, taking hold of her shoulders and gingerly turned her toward the tree. “Forgive me.”

For what? She wondered, not that it much mattered as she neared an opening in the tree trunk that hadn’t been there when she arrived. Just past the rent in the bark, a soft, verdant effulgence pulsed as if with a heartbeat. Idly, she lifted a hand toward it and met a wall of viscous ichor. Sap, she noted, absently as she drew her hand away and sticky thread clung to her finger.

“Forgive me, Koko,” she thought she might have heard again as the hands on her shoulders seemed to stiffen and press her body toward the tree. She lifted a foot to steady herself on a root and offered no protest as she sunk into the gelatinous sap, obscuring everything but the drone of the not-song.