Light filtered through a canopy so dense and interlocked that it reached the wooden platforms in pieces, in long broken bars that fell at slow angles across the planking, warm and faintly green where it passed through the youngest leaves overhead. The air carried the smell of damp bark and something floral that had no name Millow knew, something between crushed herbs and rain held in wood grain overnight. Below the platforms, far below, the forest floor was only a rumor of brown and dark. Up here, all of it was light and green and the low industry of lives lived without urgency.
Elves moved across the hanging bridges in the early hours with the ease of people who have never needed to think about the crossing. They carried woven baskets on their backs or balanced against their hips. They wore simple tunics of undyed linen and cotton in greens and grays, their pointed ears catching the occasional shaft of light as they turned to speak to one another in passing. Their conversations were brief, and what carried across the open air was less the words than the particular quality of a community at ease with itself: the low exchange of two women pausing on a bridge, the easy laughter of a man descending stairs carved into the bark of a tree as wide as a house. Somewhere overhead, someone was singing, a low, unhurried melody that belonged to no occasion in particular, the kind of song people sing when they are simply working and the work is good.
Children wove between adult legs and across the narrower walkways with a sureness that should have been alarming and was instead beautiful, their pointed ears and dark-lashed eyes and the small bare soles of their feet finding every plank by some instinct older than caution. Near the base of one of the great trees, two women worked side by side at a long piece of cloth laid across their knees, their hands moving in the same rhythm, their talk so low it merged with the general texture of the morning. On a platform three levels up, a young elf was fitting new planks into a gap in a railing, testing each board with his weight before nailing it into place.
No one argued. No one moved with the particular tension that says something is owed or something is wrong. Whatever need existed here was met and known and quiet about it.
Millow stood at the edge of one of the lower platforms with both hands wrapped around the railing, and the look on his face was the look of someone trying to memorize something they are not sure they will be allowed to keep.
They built this, he thought. All of this. Around living trees, with the trees, and none of it feels like an imposition on anything.
He turned his head slowly, following the line of a bridge from one great trunk to another, watching the way a woman adjusted her basket as she walked without breaking her stride, watching the way a butterfly landed on the carved wood of a post and opened and closed its wings twice before lifting away into the green. The faint sunlight shifted as a cloud passed somewhere above the canopy, and the whole place changed color for a moment, deeper green, then opened again into gold.
No machines. No hard sounds. No smell of burning or refuse.
His chest carried something he had no category for. Not quite grief. Closer to the feeling you get looking at a thing that is very old and very good and realizing it will still be here long after you are gone.
What would it be like, he thought, to have grown up inside something like this? What would I feel living as a citizen of such peace? Are there still other possibilities to explore a content life like this? What would it be like? To know the wood of this particular railing. To know which bridge makes what sound in what weather.
And then, arriving the way those thoughts always arrived when he let his mind go quiet: the absence. The place where memory should be and was not. The clean blankness that the Emergence had cut through him, taking whatever it took without asking what it was worth.
He gripped the railing a little tighter.
Here there are no pollution. There are no wards. And there are no... wait what?
There are no Outworlders here.
He had noticed it slowly, the way you notice something missing from a room once you have already been standing in it for a while. Every face was pointed-eared and calm and belonged here. None of them wore the particular expression he had seen on his own kind, that mix of bewilderment and calculation and grief that was the face of someone trying to reconstruct what country they were standing in. Here there were only faces at ease.
No Outworlders. Not a single one.
A small hand closed around his wrist.
Millow turned. The boy who had taken hold of him stood barely to the height of his chest, dark-skinned and fine-boned with short brown hair and ears that came to a sharper point than any of the adults Millow had seen from a distance. He wore the same rough green rags Millow was wearing. His eyes were watchful in the way of someone who has learned to assess before speaking, and right now they were assessing Millow with the frank attention of someone who had expected to find him still asleep.
"You're awake? Where are you going?" he asked.
Millow retrieved his wrist gently and looked at the boy's face the way he looked at everything here: without alarm, without performance, with only an open and genuine attention. The pointed ears registered and passed. The green rags registered and passed. A boy. A face. A question.
"I don't know," Millow said. His voice barely cleared the sound of the birds calling somewhere in the canopy above them.
He looked around again. He could not help it. The view kept asking to be taken in. "Where am I?" Millow asked, not facing the boy.
The boy's brows drew together in the faint bewilderment of someone watching a person get distracted mid-conversation by a wall.
"Emphmeiraol Gladeon," the boy said shortly.
Millow let the name rest for a moment without saying it back. It was a long name and a precise one and it felt like it had been spoken into this exact air by many mouths before his.
"What a beautiful name for a place like this," Millow said, still looking out at the platforms and bridges and the green filtered light. "Do you know it's the first time I've seen a village built in the trees?"
"Of course," the boy said. "You're an Outworlder."
Then his voice dropped and sharpened. "And they cannot see you here. Come on."
He grabbed Millow's arm and pulled.
Millow was dragged rather than led. His body followed before his mind caught up with the direction, and by the time it did they were already crossing a short bridge toward a door the boy shoved open with his shoulder. Inside. The boy pulled the door shut behind them and stood with his back to it, both hands at his hips, watching Millow settle onto the edge of the bed where he had apparently spent the night.
It was a small room with low ceilings and walls of fitted planking. A table of light-colored wood sat against one wall. On it, folded into a flat square, lay a bundle of cloth in colors that did not belong to this place: pastel gold and rose and cyan and violet, patched and mended many times over, the edges of some patches darker where something had soaked into them and dried.
Millow looked at it for only a second before he looked back at the boy.
"What happened? How did I get here? And who are you?"
"You don't remember?" The boy's expression did not change much, but something in it became more careful. "I found you with all your other kind dead around you. You must've killed them."
The word landed in the room and sat there.
Kill.
Millow's eyes went somewhere the room was not. He was back in the dark, back with the weight of what had passed between him and the thing whose name this boy would not say. The shapes of those deaths. The absolute dominion exercised with a cold precision that left nothing doubtful. One by one.
I watched them go. I watched all of them go and I stayed.
"I did not kill them," Millow said. "Neroth did."
The boy took a half step back. His hand came up as if to stop the name from traveling any further in the air between them.
"Ne-" He cut himself off. His jaw worked once. "The name that can't be spoken." His voice was lower now. "You met him? That's impossible. You should've been dead. Or..." He took another step back, and his eyes moved over Millow with a new quality of attention. "Or are you him? Disguised as someone else?"
Millow's gaze drifted to the table. To the folded patchwork cloth. To the dried darkness in the folds of it.
No. That's mine. That's what I was wearing. That's the evidence of what I am and what I survived.
He looked back at the boy.
"I am Millow," he said.
"The one who killed him."
The boy's mouth opened. Stayed open. He stood very still, the way people stand when a sentence arrives that requires the whole body to receive it.
"But that's impossible," he said, finally. "He's a demon lord of the old age."
"He sacrificed himself," Millow said. The words were quieter than he intended. "For me. Technically, I killed him."
Something crossed his face that he could not account for and did not try to account for. The loss of something you did not want and did not ask for, the weight of a death you are somehow both responsible for and grateful for, and the particular cruelty of not knowing which feeling is the right one.
"We talked about some things," Millow continued. "And then I woke up here."
His eyes moved back to the boy.
"Are you the one who brought me here?"
The boy nodded.
"Thank you," Millow said. "Thank you so much." A pause, the kind that carries more weight than the words around it. "I could have died out there. Well..." His voice did not drop, exactly, but it changed in quality, became something less certain of its own right to exist in this room. "I should have died with the others of my kind."
The boy said nothing. He watched Millow the way a person watches a fire they are not sure will stay within its boundary.
"Those Outworlders you said were dead around me," Millow said. "What happened to them?"
"I don't know." The boy sat down on the edge of the bed, a deliberate distance away. "My mother saw us and insisted on keeping you here. But the other Outworlders who woke up in our Gladeon are under the Elders' care. The order is that any Outworlder found in the Gladeon is to be gathered to the Elders' Grove."
"I see, this is a Gladeon and maybe one day I can reach that Grove?" Millow's hands rested in his lap. "Anyway, what was your mother's reason for keeping me here, apart from that?"
"She said she feels unknown energies inside you." The boy's voice carried the flat delivery of someone repeating a thing they have been told before and have decided not to evaluate. "She's an Aider, so she says such things. Things we can't understand."
Millow looked at the boy for a moment.
An Aider? She felt something she couldn't name and acted on it anyway. She chose a stranger's life over the safer path. Is that what being an Aider is?
"Thank you again," Millow said. "To you and your mother. I'll do anything to repay what you've done. What can I call you?"
The boy's chin lifted slightly. The assessment in his eyes was ongoing.
"Uhm." A pause. "Okay, Millow. I'm Nijel. Nijel Veladona." Another pause, shorter. "I'm still unsure about trusting you. But I trust my mother."
His voice was even. It was the particular honesty of a person who has decided that pretending to feel what they do not feel is a waste of everyone's time.
"That's understandable," Millow said.
He sat with that for a breath. His chin found his hand.
"But..." The hesitation in his voice had the shape of someone choosing from a shelf of words and not being quite sure any of them are right for this. "Can you take me back to where you found me?"
Nijel's brow curved. "Huh? Why?"
Millow's gaze went to the window. Outside, through the gap in the planks, a branch moved slowly in a wind he couldn't feel from in here. The leaves turned over, pale undersides catching the light before they settled back.
They had things, he thought. They had reasons for being alive. More reasons than I can think for, and I can't think for my own.
"I feel... guilty I guess," he said. "They had their own memories when they came here. Lives to come back to. People they loved, or people they were angry at, or dreams they were still in the middle of. Passions that were still theirs to carry." He looked at Nijel again. "Their very own lives. While I'm the opposite. I have none of that. And yet I'm the only one who lived."
His voice stayed even. The grief in it had no performance in it.
"It's unfair for them. They deserve peace at their deaths. Or at least to be remembered by someone out there who knew them, who cherishes them. Anyone would be devastated that they would've never known what happened to someone they love, someone that had been killed without any chance to live in this new world."
Nijel observed him. His face did not move much. But the quality of his watching changed, the way the quality of light in a room changes when a cloud passes and the sun comes back.
Millow's hand came up fast and pressed against his eyes. He laughed once, short and surprised at himself.
"Haha. How silly of me. I have no right to say such things."
He wiped his face with both hands. The laugh faded back into the quiet.
Nijel watched him for another moment.
"You have no memories," the boy said. "How do you know you're an Outworlder?"
"I don't, exactly." Millow's hands came back down to his lap. "I just... don't know. But." He looked at Nijel. "Can you? Take me back there?"
The door opened.
The woman who entered was the one Millow had seen when he first woke, and the sight of her brought a particular kind of steadiness into the room. She was pregnant, her belly round and low under a simple linen dress of faded green, and she moved with the deliberate care of someone who has renegotiated their relationship with gravity in recent months. Her ears were long and pointed. Her skin was warm brown, and her face carried the ease of someone who has decided, at some point, that worry is a resource worth rationing carefully.
She held a bundle of clothes against her side. She pushed the door shut behind her without looking at it.
"You cannot go back out there," she said.
She crossed to the table and laid the clothes down beside Millow's folded patchwork. Her eyes moved over Millow briefly, the way an Aider's eyes move, taking things in without making an event of the looking.
"I heard from the others that the Elders will try to study those Outworlders. Exile them, if they're deemed enemies of the Elves."
"I see." Millow looked at her. "And you are...?"
"Faern Veladona." She smiled at him. It was a full smile, the kind that reaches the eyes without asking permission. "And you?"
"Millow Aurum."
She crossed to the far side of the room, where wooden baskets were stacked against the wall, and began unpacking them with the efficiency of long habit, setting things on the table with a small rhythm of soft sounds: wood on wood, cloth against cloth.
"Who are you, Millow?" she asked. "What were you before the Emergence?"
"He doesn't remember, Mother." Nijel's voice had gone a register lower. "How can we trust him? Maybe the Elders would know what to do with him. We could be in trouble if they found out we kept him."
Faern's hands kept moving.
"You still don't remember your father's words, son?"
Nijel's breath shifted almost imperceptibly. His jaw tightened.
Millow leaned forward slightly, chin lifted, drawn into this exchange the way he was drawn into all exchanges that held something real between the participants.
"What does Father have to do with this?" Nijel asked. The spite in his voice had a thin seam of something older running through it. "He's gone, isn't he?"
Faern lifted a wooden bowl and set it on the table beside two cups. The smile she wore now was smaller, turned inward, aimed at a memory only she could see.
"That as much as any herbs need their soil for growth, any lost soul needs a home too." She poured water into each cup from a clay vessel. "That's what he said, remember?"
"Yes." Nijel's voice tightened. "And that was before the Orcs invaded our homes. Before we ended up here because we sheltered one of them, while he was still alive."
Faern set green leaves and fruit into the bowls and kept her eyes on the work.
"He's not an Orc," she said. "He's different from any Outworlder I've seen yesterday."
"How can you be assured of that?" Nijel stood from the bed. "How can you when he told me earlier that he killed the name that can't be spoken."
"He did?" Faern confirmed and Nijel nodded. Faern blinked rapidly before cfixing her composure.
"I was sure when I was healing his blood loss," Faern said, "I felt his energy welcoming the divine." She sat at the wooden chair in front of the table. Her hands folded in her lap. "Too welcoming. More than I've ever felt before. The Goddess must have embraced him in her arms at least once. There must be something about him that she chose, or possibly connected to how he killed the demon lord of the past."
Nijel looked at her, then looked at Millow.
He's probably deciding, Millow thought. He's already decided part of it, and now he's checking whether the rest of the decision fits.
"Mother," Nijel started. He stopped. He looked back at Faern. "You're right that there's no hostility in him. But if he truly defeated the name that can't be spoken, he should be marked by the darkness. His presence could draw other forces of demons to us." His voice was firm, carrying the conviction of someone who has thought this through and does not want to be argued out of it. "He cannot stay here long."
"I... he's right," Millow said, the word right arriving quietly. "I don't have to be a burden on either of you."
"It's not a burden. You actually must be celebrated for being able to do an unbelievable feat like that." Faern's voice was easy and final in equal measure. "It has been too long since our kind met any other races. Your face is a welcome one. You can stay as long as you like."
She gestured at the table.
"Come and eat. It's Nijel's favorite."
Nijel crossed to the table. He sat across from his mother with his back straight and his eyes elsewhere, though the attention in his posture was absolute, the way a person who has decided to tolerate someone stays acutely aware of every move they make.
Millow stood. He looked at the food for a long moment before looking at Faern.
She made this? She's feeding a stranger she found half-dead? How kind of her.
The warmth in his chest was not the pleasant kind. It was the kind that reminds you what you have not had.
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you a loy. I'll repay everything I owe. Is there anything I can help you with?"
"Nothing." Faern considered for a moment. "Well. Maybe some chores. I can teach you the ways of living in the Emphmeiraol Gladeon." She patted the chair beside Nijel. "Sit. Your stomach has been waiting longer than your manners have."
Millow sat.
"I'd look forward to that very much," he said. He looked at the bowl in front of him, at the greens and the small round fruits and the scent of something lightly herbed rising from the leaves. "I want to learn everything about this world. I'm truly lucky for everything I have now. Imagine if I had woken up somewhere where every shadow held something waiting to kill me, somewhere where the first face I saw was one that wanted me—"
"The food won't wait for your ponderings." Nijel picked up a wooden spoon. His eyes stayed on his bowl.
"You're right." Millow picked up his spoon and tasted.
Oh.
His shoulders moved. He could not help it. The flavor was something green and alive and faintly sweet and nothing like anything he could name, and his face did what his face did when something good arrived without warning: the wide uninhibited smile, the small unconscious motion of pleasure.
"This is delicious!" he said ecstatically.
Faern laughed. It was a quick sound, light, surprised out of her.
Millow ate with the appetite of someone who has gone too long without food and has only now remembered that the body has opinions about such things. Between bites:
"I want to learn how to cook something like this."
A pause.
"I also want to go back to where they found me. The bodies of my kind. If there's ever a chance."
His expression shifted. The pleasure in it went deeper, where it lived alongside the other thing.
"And I want to..."
An image arrived without invitation. A face. A particular quality of voice. Words spoken from an absolute limit, the last gift of a thing that had run out of everything else to give.
What did he tell me, exactly? The Thaumaturge Academy? He said I have to go there. He said what happens next depends on it.
Millow set his spoon down.
"I want to reach the Thaumaturge Academy." He said it the way you say something you have been carrying since before you knew you were carrying it. "Do you know where that is?"
The sound of two wooden spoons against two wooden bowls.
Both of them looked at him.
Faern's expression had gone somewhere between careful and alarmed. The kind of alarm that stays very still because it knows that moving will change the shape of the moment.
"Millow," she said. "How do you know that place?"
Nijel's eyes were waiting.
Should I tell them something? Not everything? There are things in this that would frighten them, and some fear is useful and some is only cruel, right?
"Neroth told me," Millow said. "I have to do something."
I cannot tell them the rest. The catastrophe, the shape of what's coming. It would not help them. It would only take something from them that they don't have enough of to give.
He looked at the table.
Faern's voice came from across it, measured and careful.
"The Calvian Kingdom. Heron Continent. It's continents away, to the far side of Terraldia." She paused. "Crossing oceans to its nearest coast is the only path to it." The expression she wore now was the expression of someone recalibrating what they thought this meal was going to be. "Are you sure of going there?"
"I..."
Millow's hands in his lap were trembling very slightly. He had not noticed until now.
Should I tell them? It wouldn't be fair not to. They sheltered me. They fed me. They chose me when every reasonable instinct was telling them to hand me over.
"I'll tell you everything," he said.
"It's..." He looked for the words. They were there, somewhere. He just couldn't find the order of them yet.
Faern's eyes moved to his hands. She looked at him for a moment with the attention of an Aider, the attention that reads the body before it reads the words.
"You have all the time to tell us," she said. Her voice carried no urgency. Only the particular patience of someone who has learned to give a person room to arrive at what they need to say. "For now, eat."
She smiled at him.
Millow looked at her as if she had just done something he would think about later, in the quiet.
"I see," he said. "Thank you, Faern."
He picked his spoon back up. Nijel picked his up a moment after.
"You're always welcome, Millow."
She turned back to her bowl.
Her hands stopped.
Her eyes moved to the table beside the stack of clean clothes she had brought. To the folded bundle there. The colors of it sat wrong against the plain wood, all those pastels, all that rose and gold and cyan, the patches sewn with different hands over what must have been years, the whole thing darkened in places with dried blood.
Millow, she thought.
She said it inside herself, the way you say the name of something you are still trying to understand.
Is he the reason Nijel was able to leave the Gladeon? After all this time, after all we stayed and all we lost staying, is this boy the reason the boundary could be crossed?
She watched him eat, his shoulders still carrying that faint motion of pleasure at the taste, his eyes already drifting back toward the window. She could not keep her attention from him, and she knew that. And knowing it meant she could not let her guard down either.
Who are you? Just who are you, Millow?
She looked at the patchwork clothing for a moment longer. Then she picked up her spoon and ate.
-
She was standing. Her feet were steady under her. Her hands hung at her sides with the practiced loose readiness of someone whose hands had been trained never to be idle when the body was assessing a threat.
She opened her eyes.
The hall stretched away from her in all directions at a scale that required recalibration. Wood pillars rose in rows on either side of her, each one as wide across as three people standing shoulder to shoulder, their surfaces carved from base to crown in flowing patterns: vines and leaves and interlocking lines that coiled around one another in a continuous motion, the whole length of each pillar covered in this patient and intricate record of someone's devotion to the work. The floor between the pillars was level woods, worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic into a low faint shine. Above her the ceiling receded into gloom, broken only where the rock above had fractured along old fissures and admitted thin columns of amber light that fell at long angles to the floor and lit the dust circling in them. Around the hall's perimeter, lanterns of hammered metal held slow-burning lights behind their grates, and the orange warmth they cast moved against the gray woods in a constant low rhythm.
Wood bridges crossed the space overhead, wide enough for two people walking abreast, connecting structures on either side of the hall at heights she would have needed to climb to reach. Beyond the bridges, the walls rose into alcoves and recesses, chambers carved into the living rock, their openings dark. The whole place carried the particular quality of something that has been standing for a very long time and has no intention of stopping.
Process, she told herself. Process the space.
The air was dry and faintly resinous. The floor was cold through her shoes. The hall was large enough to hold a significant military formation with room for movement. The bridges above were potential positions if she needed them. Exits: she could identify three from where she stood, two at ground level and one accessible via the bridge above. The lanterns were set in regular intervals along the wall, which meant whoever maintained this space did so with consistency, which meant a maintenance rotation, which meant people moved through here on a predictable schedule.
She was wearing the dress she had been wearing when the white light came.
The regal blue of it was undisturbed. The sleeveless panels fell to her mid-calf, the fabric heavy and fine, its embroidered lines of pale cyan and white running along the collar and the hem and down the outer panels in the ordered geometry she had chosen precisely because its weight sat correctly and its construction allowed full range of movement without restriction. The azure flame at her right cheek, that sharply geometric mark in cyan and electric blue that she had applied as a record of one specific moment, was the same as it had always been. She looked at her hands.
Her hands were her own hands. The callouses at the trigger finger and the right thumb. The particular way the skin sat over the tendons of her forearms. All of it intact. All of it in the correct order.
Not dead. Confirmed.
Her jaw set.
She assembled what she knew. She had been reading. She had been sitting in a field chair in a tent that smelled of canvas and damp earth, with the sounds of a camp operating badly somewhere outside, and she had been reading something that mattered on a screen she was holding with both hands, and then there had been an incoming call on her personal line and she had answered it on speaker because it was faster and then the voice had come.
The call returned to her with the clarity of something played back in good order. Low, controlled, each word arriving at measured intervals with the quality of a person who had decided long ago that economy of language was a form of discipline. The kind of voice that carries no warmth in public and reserves its rare exceptions for people who have earned them over years.
The memory arrived in pieces, the way memories do when the body has been through something it does not yet have language for. She looked at her hands first.
The callouses were where they belonged. The right thumb, the trigger finger, the heel of the palm where the rifle's grip had pressed thousands of times into the same patch of skin until the skin stopped objecting. The fingertips on both hands, hardened at the pads from years of the same deliberate contact with the same surfaces. She turned her hands over. The backs of them. The line of her forearms in the sleeveless dress.
All of it intact. All of it correctly ordered.
Alive. Confirmed.
She let the memory come.
The tent had smelled of canvas and something metallic that had been in the air for so many consecutive days she had stopped cataloguing it as a separate smell and begun thinking of it simply as the smell of the camp itself. Damp fabric. Ground that had been walked over too many times. The particular quality of air that has been filtered through cloth walls for weeks.
She had been sitting on a field chair at a battered wooden table, the table's surface scarred with rings from cups and cuts from blades and the accumulated evidence of its many uses before it arrived in this tent. The light inside came from two sources: the lamp at the table's corner and the diffuse gray brightness pressing through the canvas walls from outside. The tablet in her hands cast its own low light upward against her face, and she had been leaning toward it in the way she leaned toward things she was reading carefully, the particular forward tilt of her spine and the narrowing of her pale eyes that meant she was not reading words but examining them.
"Into the unknown," she read.
From somewhere outside the tent came the sound of a man in pain. The voice rose and peaked.
"It hurts! It hurt-"
Then it stopped.
She did not lift her eyes from the screen. The sounds of the camp moved through the canvas walls with the regularity of weather, and she had learned to sort them the way you learn to sort rain from the sound of it: what required attention and what did not. A voice stopping suddenly was a finished thing. A finished thing required no action from her.
"Diving onto future," she continued, her face an inch closer to the screen than it had been at the previous line. The words had a quality she was still taking apart. Whoever had written this had been reaching for something specific, and she was not yet sure whether they had reached it.
"Barefoot, running, then marching."
The vibration came from the table beside her right hand, a low sustained buzz, and she picked up the phone with her left hand without looking away from the screen and pressed the speaker before she looked at the caller.
She looked at the caller.
Of course.
She set the phone flat on the table, screen down, speaker up.
"Cyan Capri, do you hear me?"
The voice that came through the speaker had no warmth in it at that pitch. It never did at that pitch. Low and even, each syllable arriving at the measured interval of a person who had decided long before any given conversation that the space between words was not wasted but deliberate, that silence between clauses was a form of precision rather than hesitation. The baritone of it carried weight without raising volume. It was the voice of someone who had been choosing every word for so long that choosing had become automatic, and the automaticity had produced a speech pattern that felt, in its evenness and its economy, almost mechanical. Almost.
"I hear you, Old Seer," she answered.
Get to it.
"Good. Now care to tell me why you stayed with the old route?"
"Lack of preparations on the suggested alternative," she said. "The path you indicated carried too much risk. The positioning records from the last two years show their presence at both contact points."
"And you proceeded without my input?"
She did not answer immediately. She let one breath out through her nose and looked up for a moment at the canvas ceiling above the lamp, at the way the lamp's light caught the underside of the fabric and gave it a faint warmth. Then she looked back at the phone.
The answer is yes. He knows the answer is yes. Explaining why the answer is yes will not change what the answer is.
She said nothing.
"Very well," the voice said. "I cannot risk the discovery of the headquarters. This damage falls on you." The line went quiet in the way a line goes quiet when the person on the other end has made a clean cut rather than a gradual withdrawal.
She picked the phone up and looked at the screen for a moment before setting it face-down on the table again.
"Damage," she said to the table. "If it hadn't been reliable, it wouldn't have reached the outpost."
He knows that too. He just doesn't like that I made the call without him.
She picked up the tablet.
The text was still there, waiting where she had left it. She had been in the middle of something. She went back to the place she had marked with her thumbnail against the screen's corner and began reading again, her posture resettling into the forward lean.
Why this log? Out of everything he could have been reviewing, why this one specifically? What is he looking for in it?
"Towards the bitter end of freedom."
She read the line once. Then she read it again.
Her eyes went still in the way eyes go still when something inside has stopped to listen more carefully than the rest of the body.
I know this.
The certainty arrived before the source of it did, which was how certainty sometimes arrived, the feeling of recognition outrunning any explanation of what was being recognized. She had read this before. She had read it in some other place, at some other time, in some context she could no longer fully locate, but the words themselves were not new to her. They had weight in her mouth from before.
I know this. I have always known this. Where do I know this from? Where-
The whistling came from outside.
High, incoming, the particular pitch of something falling fast through air toward a fixed point.
The explosion was outside the perimeter. The ground pushed upward through the chair legs into the soles of her feet with a single blunt pulse, and outside the canvas walls someone began screaming with the full-body investment of sudden injury. She set the tablet on the table.
Direction: perimeter. Distance: far enough that the tent held. Ordnance type, based on that pitch: incoming projectile, not ground detonation.
She was standing before the assessment finished.
The second whistling came before she reached the tent entrance. Closer. The pitch was wrong in a way that registered in the back of her throat as a different kind of wrong, and she had time to turn her back toward the sound and drop before the blast lifted the table sideways and the lamp hit the canvas wall and swung on its hook and the whole tent shook around her with the particular loose violence of a structure designed to survive this exact thing but only barely.
She was on her feet inside two seconds. The table was on its side. The tablet had slid to the floor. The lamp was swinging.
"No fucking way," she said, flat and precise. "Is this what that asshole means on damage?"
Check: uninjured. Check: both exits functional. Check: no fire yet.
She crossed to the zipper entrance and took hold of it.
The white light came before she pulled.
It came from everywhere at once, from the direction of outside and from the canvas above and from the space between her hands and the zipper, filling everything in the tent without casting a shadow from any source, without the heat that should accompany something that bright, without any of the physical information that should accompany light of any kind. It was total. It was absolute. It took the tent, the table, the swinging lamp, the sound of screaming outside, and everything she was in the middle of knowing, and it took all of that with equal disregard.
She came back to herself looking at her hands.
The callouses were where they belonged.
She lifted her eyes from them and looked at the hall around her, at the stone pillars and the amber lantern light and the cold that pressed up through the floor, and she held all of it in her vision the way she held every new space she was put into: open, recording, committing the exits and the light sources and the distances to the permanent inventory she kept of places she had been.
Not dead, she thought, and the thought arrived the same way it had arrived when she first opened her eyes here, flat and immediate, a condition confirmed rather than a relief felt.
Her jaw set.
"I can't be dead, I can't-"
"How bright do you think I'll be with the Goddess up there?"
The voice came from behind her, bright and young and carrying the particular texture of someone who believes entirely in what they are about to participate in, and her head turned before the rest of her did.
Her eyes moved first.
It seems she was standing behind a tree.
That was the first thing she noticed, and noticing it required a full stop in her assessment of the rest of the space, because the tree had not been there when she first opened her eyes and surveyed the hall, which meant either she had moved without knowing it or the tree had, and neither of those was an acceptable explanation in a space otherwise made entirely of wood.
She stepped backward and looked up.
The trunk was a deep brownish-red, the bark ridged and close-grained, its texture carrying the quality of something very old and very dry. It rose from the wooden floor with no apparent seam between root and rock, as though it had grown through the floor rather than been placed into it, its trunk widening at the base into heavy roots that pressed against the wood in long curved lines. The branches spread overhead at a height well above the bridges, and from them hung leaves shaped in crescents, each one dark red and almost black, their pointed tips curling slightly inward at the ends. The whole tree sat in the lantern light and the lantern light made the leaves look lacquered.
She looked at the rest of the space around the tree and saw it now: a wide circular clearing in the center of the hall, the floor here carved with symbols in concentric rings around the base of the tree. Curving lines, angular marks, each one deeply cut into the wood. The notation was unrecognizable to her.
What is this? she thought. What is this and why is it here? And is that a ceremonial space? Yes it is, and is there a sacrifice protocol associated with it? Because if there is, I need to know about it before anyone knows I'm here.
"You will be bright as the stars with the evershining Moon."
A man's voice. Calm and full, carrying the easy confidence of someone who says things like that because they have said things like that many times before, in this place, in this way.
She moved to the edge of the tree and looked around it without moving her feet from where they were planted.
The young woman was standing on the far side of the carved circle. Bright orange hair pulled back from a face of pale skin and pointed ears, wearing brown elegant cloth cut in the manner of ceremony rather than daily use. Her hands were clasped in front of her. Her face carried the bright openness of someone who believes entirely in the thing they are about to be a part of.
The man standing just behind her wore green and gold and silver. Ceremonial robes of layered cloth, the kind whose construction requires many hours and whose wearing signals the weight of an office. His headdress was silk in several colors, pinned to braided blonde hair. He held something low at his side, and the curve of it caught the lantern light once.
Assess. What is the blade's reach? What is her position relative to his? Is there time to cross the distance? How many steps?
"That would be—"
The orange-haired woman's throat opened.
The crescent blade moved and then the body fell and the man straightened from the motion the way a person straightens after completing a task that required precise attention, without expression, without ceremony in the moment of it.
"Indeed," he said. "Be bright with the world as we need."
There was a small smirk. His eyes rose.
And found her.
She was already moving, because there was nothing else to be done, and her body understood that before her mind finished confirming it. She turned and covered the distance toward the far wall with her arms low and her stride long, and then the door was there, a heavy wooden door in an iron frame, and it was shut and it was heavy and it refused to move when she hit it with both palms and pushed.
She turned.
He was close. The blade was still in his hand. The smirk had left his face and in its place was the particular cold focus of a person who has committed to a necessary action and is completing it.
Distance: too short for the exit. Angle: wrong for the bridge above. Options: limited.
"Please," she said, and her voice was even, completely even, "I won't tell anyone what happened."
It was a practical statement. It was true. The man saw this, saw the expression on her face, which was the expression of someone saying what they mean and being willing to stand behind it, and for one beat something in him hesitated.
"And you never will," he said, and raised the knife.
"Halt!"
The voice came from the direction of the tree, and it carried the weight that certain voices carry, the kind that comes from long practice saying things that people obey. The man with the blade went still with a discipline that said obeying this voice was automatic.
The old man walking toward them was elf, dark-skinned and weathered, his white hair catching the lantern glow as he moved, his age carried in the forward curve of his spine and the deliberate way his weight settled through a wooden cane with each step. He wore the same ceremonial layers as the younger man, but without the headdress, and the difference made him look like someone who had been wearing these robes long enough to stop performing them.
His eyes were fixed on her, and they were the eyes of someone running an inventory.
"That clothing," he said. "I've never seen a Terraldian dressed like that."
He stopped some distance away.
"And how did she trespass here?" He looked at the younger man. "Shouldn't we interrogate her first?"
The pale eyes on the woman stayed steady. The pale cyan of them, that almost colorless blue that sat in an otherwise entirely composed face, gave nothing away. The azure flame at her right cheek caught the lantern glow once.
"I don't know how I got here," she said. "I don't know where I am or who any of you are. Tell me how to leave and I'll no longer be your concern."
"You don't know?" The younger man's voice carried skepticism the way stone carries cold, as its base condition. "You expect us to believe that?"
"She might be speaking the truth. Look, child. The Great Tree." the old man said, and they all turned their eyes towards it.
The crescent leaves had begun to change. Each one took on a deep, dark red internal light, as though something within each leaf had been briefly and terribly kindled, and then one by one they began to spark at the edges, small bursts that came and went too fast to track individually, and then the stems released and the leaves detached and fell, all of them, every single one, in a slow and continuous rain of dark red that gathered on the floor around the tree's roots and lay still.
"A severance! The Great Tree did not responded on our sacrifice, the veil of our Gladeon this month would continue to weaken but it wouldn't be enough for Terraldians like her to instantly infiltrate us like that, even with the greatest magic against our pact." The old man stated as he looked at the leaves of the crimson tree.
"What?" the man with the knife responded and turned around, only to see no response of the trees as if something should've happened, the horrified worried face of the man had his raised hand to Cyan holding the knife to lower down. "This cannot happen! Should we try to get an another sacrifice?"
"No." The old man's voice was final. "That would endanger the lie of ascension we have already begun. Bring her to the pact's runes."
The younger man's hand closed around her arm.
She went, because the blade was at her side and the exits were both too far, and because the person who had stopped this man once could stop him again, and the person most worth staying close to right now was the one with the cane.
Document, she told herself. Document all of it. The tree's reaction. The carved symbols' positions. The old man's exact words about the connection between the Emergence and the veil. The younger man's hesitation. All of it is information and all information has a use.
They brought her to stand in front of the body.
She looked down.
The young woman with the bright orange hair lay on her back. Her eyes were open. The cut at her throat had been precise and deep and had finished quickly, and the blood on the carved floor had spread into the cuts of the nearest symbols and pooled there in the spaces between lines. Her eyes were aimed upward and slightly to the side, at the space where a person standing in front of her would be standing.
At the space where she was standing now.
She thought she was ascending, Cyan thought, flat and factual, and behind that thought a second one arrived immediately: And why am I fucking here? Of all the places the light could have taken me, why here?
The carved symbols around the body occupied concentric rings, geometric and angular, each segment a closed form that connected to the next at precise angles. She catalogued their arrangement regardless: the spacing, the depth of the cuts, the positioning of the body relative to the central mark.
"If the Great Tree is dead, we're finished," the younger man said softly.
"It is not dead yet." The old man crossed to the tree, moving past the fallen leaves without looking down at them, and pressed one palm against the bark. His eyes closed.
He stood that way long enough for the quiet in the hall to settle back into itself around him.
"Weakening," he said. "But the change in it happened in an instant. Its connection to the other trees has become scattered and uncontrolled." He opened his eyes and stepped back. "Whoever caused this is near."
He looked at her.
The younger man looked at her.
"Put her blood in," the old man said, "and we'll see."
The knife was at her palm before she finished registering the motion. She winced. The cut was sharp and practiced and no deeper than what the purpose required. The younger man pressed the blade into the central mark in the wood beside the body's head and straightened.
They both looked up at the tree.
She looked up at the tree.
The branches began to move.
All of them, at once, turning on themselves with a slow precision that had nothing in common with wind, nothing in common with growth, nothing in common with anything her understanding of what branches do had prepared her for. They twisted, the full length of each one rotating along its axis, the motion traveling from the smallest tip to the widest point where it met the trunk, and the sound of it was low and continuous and carried the quality of something very old and very deliberate choosing to do something.
The old man made a sound that was not a word. It came from the back of his throat and carried the specific quality of absolute dread in a person who understands what they are seeing.
"It is not her," he said.
"This has never happened before?" she asked.
"It should not happen," the younger man said. His eyes were still on the tree, which was still moving. "It is exactly what we would expect from a blood that has no root in this world's nature. You are not the cause." He turned and looked at the old man. "Which means..."
"You are an Outworlder." The old man faced her. His hand, raised to point at her, was trembling at the wrist. "Your blood has no root in this world's nature thus the reason it was repulsed by it. You are not the source of the rot, and the loss of the sacred leaves is not your doing. But your blood carries an energy I have felt somewhere before today." His eyes went distant. "Not from you. From somewhere near us when I felt its energy as it lost all its leaves."
"Then the prophecies were true," the younger man said. "Today is the Emergence of Terraldia."
"Terraldia," she said. "Then how do I return to where I came from?"
The old man's face changed. Something arrived in it, careful and particular, the thing that arrives in the face of someone who has lived a long time and has just understood something that all that time was waiting to show them.
He looked at the younger man. He nodded.
"The prophecies speak of your kind coming to our world to save it," the old man said. "Saving us marks the end of your purpose here and would mean the end of your stay."
"Then how do I save you?" she said.
The old man looked at the tree for a long moment.
"By saving the Great Tree. The veil began weakening when your kind arrived here. And yet Outworlders should have no connection to this world, to us, to this pact." His brow drew together. "How can that be coincidence?"
"Who are you," she said, "and what is the pact?"
The old man turned toward her, and for the first time, the weight of his age showed as something other than endurance. It showed as the accumulated cost of decisions made in rooms like this one, over a period of time longer than she could easily calculate.
"You ask the good questions, I have a feeling we will achieve great things together," he said. "They tell me something about you."
A pause.
"I am Vervain Sedge, High Elder of Emphmeiraol Gladeon. And this is Hemthorn Datsbane, my successor."
"We are the protectors of the pact," Hemthorn said. "The reason this place exists and the reason you can stand on its floor."
She looked at the body.
"Protectors? Of a pact like this?" she asked.
"The necessary cost of lives given willingly," Vervain said. He had turned back to the tree and was looking at it the way you look at something that is the only remaining version of itself. "This is the last Great Demilune Tree in all of Terraldia. It was given to us as a chance of survival. It veils this Gladeon from the threats that have already taken everything else we had. Everything that blooms and grows in this Grove blooms and grows by its will. The food, the shelter, the lives of our citizens: all of it rests on this tree."
"After every invasion and every slaughter we endured," Hemthorn said, "this is the final thing that was left to us. And now, at your arrival, it will be gone before long."
She looked at the young woman on the floor. At the carved symbols. At the blood in the cuts of the floor.
"But you sustain it by the lives of your own people," she said.
"What you witnessed is half the truth of the divine, Outworlder. We believe that at death we pass into the Goddess's arms. The ascension we promise our citizens is not a lie in every part. They are raised to the light. The manner of the raising is the cost we carry." He looked at her, steady. "Who are you and what do you believe in? Do you believe in that, Outworlder? Do you believe in honoring what has always sustained what we have?"
Can I be honest when they've been honest with me? Yes. It has always been easier to be honest. Harder in some directions, but easier in the ways that matter.
She let one breath out through her nose.
"I'm Cyan Capri," she said. The name came out the way names come out when you are using them as an anchor, a confirmation that the person saying it is still the person they think they are. "And I also believe in the reliability of what has worked."
She said it quietly. The way you say something when admitting it costs you something small.
"Then you are the Outworlder most capable of understanding what we have held," Hemthorn said.
"And you still believe you will be received by your Goddess?" she said, her eyes moving to the body again, "despite what you are doing here?"
"We believe in the moon and its dark sky and the Goddess's light in it together," Hemthorn said. "We live within her will, yes. And we also live with our feet on the same floors as everyone else. Faith and survival are not the same obligation."
Vervain's eyes were still on her.
"You must live as well. And you need to return. Think of what you now know that no one outside this tree has ever known." He paused. "The prophecies marked your kind as our salvation. I believe you are the one they pointed to."
"How?" she said.
Vervain was quiet for a long time. Then: "We gather all the Outworlders who arrived in this Gladeon. Some will disrupt what we hold here. Others may help you carry the most significant task you will be given."
"What do you mean?" Hemthorn asked him.
Vervain faced the tree.
"The Great Tree's connection to its creator has been severed. But look at it carefully." He raised one hand, a gesture of attention. "The leaves fell. Yet the whole tree stands."
"From your teachings," Hemthorn said, his voice going careful, "is that what it means? Is that actually what that last passage says?"
"It is the only explanation that truly speaks for all of it, Hemthorn."
"That cannot be possible. He cannot be dead."
"Who?" she asked. "What are you talking about?"
Vervain began to walk in a slow circle, his cane making its rhythmic sound against the floor, his free hand at his lips with one nail between his teeth. He was not performing thought. He was inside it, and the thing inside was large enough to require the full use of him.
She watched him. Hemthorn was watching the floor, and his face carried the expression of someone running a very fast count of everything that would be lost if a specific conclusion turned out to be correct.
"Even denying it to myself," Vervain said at last, "it is the only answer. The only old knowledge that is relevant now and was never relevant until today."
"Uncle. Are you certain it was that last passage in the tome? The final one?"
Vervain looked at him. He nodded.
They both faced her.
"The tree weakens because its connection to its creator has been cut," Vervain said. "But it is not yet dead, and it only rots slowly, because a faint connection remains. Not to the creator. To the creator's killer. And this is tied to the Emergence from what I felt in your blood."
She looked at him. "How can you be so sure?"
Vervain and Hemthorn knelt.
The sound of the cane falling against the floor came first, a single hollow knock that rang in the vaulted space overhead. Then both of them were on the floor with their faces pressed down and their hands flat beside them and the whole weight of what they were asking laid bare in the posture.
She stepped back. The reflex was involuntary and she allowed it because it was the correct physical response to something unexpected in a closed space with limited exits at her back.
"Please," Hemthorn said from the floor. "Save us."
"What are you doing? Stand up."
"We beg of you, Cyan Capri of another world." Vervain's voice came from the floor, muffled and clear at once. "Find the killer of the name that can't be spoken. Bring to us the sole responsible of everything, the one who's possibly your kind, the Outworlder that killed our revered lord of the elves, Neroth Aconite."
She stood in the amber lantern light with the name landing against her like a physical thing.
The camp came back. The tent. The screen. The words she had been reading before the call interrupted her.
The voice on the call. Low, controlled. Deliberate.
The explosions. The white light.
I have to go back, she thought. Whatever happens here, I have to go back. I have to find whatever the route out of this is and I have to take it.
She looked at the two figures on the floor. The old man with his white hair against the gray rock. The younger man with his braided gold and his ceremonial robes and his face pressed down.
"Stand up," she said.
They raised their heads.
She stood in the lantern light, her dress still the regal blue it had been when she arrived, the embroidered lines of pale cyan and white still precise at the collar and the hem, her pale fox eyes taking in both of them with the flat steadiness of someone who has already decided and is now only determining the order of the required actions. The azure flame at her right cheek, sharp and geometric and unmoving, held its color in the amber glow. Her jaw was set. Her hands, loose at her sides, were the hands of someone whose body had just finished cataloguing a room and a problem and was already preparing for what came next.
"I'll do it," she said. "Let's gather all of my people. Then we'll determine the next steps."
The two Elders looked at her.
They saw a woman who had arrived from nothing into the center of everything they had kept secret for longer than the youngest of their citizens had been alive, and she was standing in the lantern glow of the hall their tree had built, and she was already planning.
Somewhere in Terraldia, a person was walking with the blood of Neroth Aconite on their hands and no understanding of what that blood had already set moving in the world around them.
An Outworlder, Vervain had said. Possibly her kind.
The chase had no name yet. It had begun before anyone thought to give it one, in the moment the white light came and scattered its people across a world that had been waiting without the awareness of its own waiting, and it would reach across oceans and into the oldest kept things of a civilization that had never once prepared itself to be found. It would ask of both the one who pursued and the one who was pursued something that no amount of training in either craft prepares a person for: the slow, unbidden recognition that the person at the far end of the distance is not a foreign thing. That they are, in ways that resist examination, a version of the self that took a different turn at a junction neither of them chose.
This is what the people who carry blades prefer not to examine. The hunter and the hunted are not opposed natures. They are the same disposition at different points in the same movement, and the movement does not distinguish between them. It only requires that both of them keep going.
The person she was being asked to find was carrying something of the same kind, whether they knew it yet or not.
The blood of Neroth Aconite was not an ordinary weight. A demon lord of the old age. A name that could not be spoken in certain places for reasons the Elders of this Gladeon had not yet fully explained to her. Whatever a person had to be, whatever they had to pass through or be broken by or stumble into without preparation, to end something of that age and that nature, they were carrying the consequence of it now in every step they took across a world that was already reordering itself around what they had done.
This is what power does that the people who wield it with the greatest care are always the last to reckon with: it does not stay at the point of contact. A choice made in a dark moment, a choice that felt like the only answer available to a question with no good answers, keeps moving after the hand that made it has been withdrawn. It passes through walls. It arrives in rooms where people are eating breakfast, where people are fitting new planks into old railings, where people are singing because the morning calls for it, and it tells them the ground has shifted without asking whether they were ready.
The Gladeon outside these halls had held its shape for longer than any of its living citizens could reckon. The elves who carried their baskets across the hanging bridges in the early hours believed they were living inside the Goddess's keeping, and the belief was genuine, and the singing was genuine, and the food that came each morning from the governing stores was real food that fed real bodies, and the children's bare feet on the planking were real children living real lives, and none of it required them to know what took place in the Elders' Grove at the month's turning. The lie that sustained all of it was not cruel in its intention. It was, in its particular way, a gift. It gave an entire community the grace of living in a world that had a reliable floor, a reliable sky, and the reliability of where a person went when the living was done.
What a lie of that kind cannot survive is contact with a truth it was not built to hold.
A floor built over a concealed thing is a different floor from one built over bare wood, even when both floors bear the same weight without complaint. The difference is not in the bearing. It is in what happens when something arrives from outside the calculation, something the concealment was never designed to accommodate. The floor does not give gradually. It gives all at once, and everyone who was standing on it arrives at the same moment of discovery together, which is the particular cruelty of communal deception: the fall is shared, but the knowledge that there was a fall to begin with was kept by only a few.
Outworlders had arrived.
The tree had shed its leaves.
And the pursuit that was now beginning in the amber lantern glow of this underground hall was not simply a hunt for one person. It was something older and stranger than that, the kind of pursuit that changes both parties in the course of it without the permission of either. The hunter, precise and restless, carrying her own country of questions she had never quite finished asking, and the hunted, carrying a death that had remade the world around them in ways they could not yet see, each of them already certain of what they were and why, each of them already wrong about how much of themselves the chase would require before it was finished.
Every sustained pursuit does this. It requires the hunter to inhabit the mind of the hunted, to think along the same lines, to understand the same fears and the same instincts and the same choices that look reasonable from the inside even when they appear monstrous from the outside. And it requires the hunted, in turn, to become intimate with the quality of attention being paid to them, to feel the shape of it, to begin, in time, to measure themselves against it. The hunter becomes necessary to the hunted's self-understanding. The hunted becomes necessary to the hunter's. The chase of the same kind becomes the only place where either of them is asked to be entirely what they are.
This is what duty conceals from the people who live by it. Duty gives a person a task and a reason and a structure of days, and those are not small things. The baskets carried across the bridges are real baskets. The planks fitted into the railings hold real weight. The veil that keeps the Gladeon concealed from the forces that have already taken everything else is a real veil that does real work. The order that sustains all of it is worth something, even when what sustains the order is something no one outside the Grove is supposed to know.
But the question that lives at the heart of any order built on a kept secret is not whether the secret will eventually surface. Kept things always surface. The question is what the people who were living on outside the secret decide to do in the moment it becomes visible to them. Whether they find that the good that was built over the concealed cost was worth what was paid beneath it. Whether they look at the blade and ask who decided it was necessary, or whether they pick it up.
There is no clean answer to that question. There has never been a clean answer. Every governing body that has ever decided its people could not bear the full truth of what holds them has faced this, and every one of them has concluded, in the moment of deciding, that the lie was a kindness. That the people eating breakfast deserved to keep eating breakfast without the weight of what made it possible. That the children whose bare soles knew every plank by feel did not need to know the name of the girl who had stood and killed in the Grove the night before and believed she was going somewhere good.
This may even be correct. A truth that destroys what it exposes serves no one still standing in the rubble. And a lie that holds a community fed and housed and singing is doing something real, something that cannot be dismissed simply because the people benefiting from it would choose differently if they knew.
The price of this understanding is that it can justify almost anything.
What kind of society is truly justifiable? The one with order and peace through lies and cruel sacrifice? Or the one with chaos and diversity through freedom and authenticity?
Cyan Capri stood in the hall the Great Tree had made possible, and she had just agreed to something, and she was already past the agreeing and into the doing, because that was how she had always worked, and because the alternative was to stand in a room that smelled of old resin and dried blood and have feelings about it, and she had never found feelings particularly efficient at that stage in a situation.
Somewhere across, the person she was being asked to find was going about whatever this morning looked like for them, carrying a death they may or may not have chosen, in a body that had survived something that should have killed them, in a world that neither of them had arrived in by any decision of their own.
Two people, neither of whom had asked for any of this, on opposite ends of goals that was already closing without either of them moving yet.
One had to go somewhere new, while the one had to go back to what was old.
Now the greatest game of cat and mouse begins.