Home at last—a defector from the Endless War—Dathderu Falbrod trudged up the winding track to the valley of Grandmother Oak. The sun had swung to the west and now punched straight into the canyon, so that shadows fled to the small corners, and even the buzz bugs stuttered from the heat. The north wind carried the incense of baking weeds and dust from the Bear’s Forge, the great smoking mountain on the edge of the horizon, so hot it pressed down on his shoulders, and only an act of will allowed him to stand upright. He drank from his water skin, letting the drops fall on his chest, smearing across the sooty grit, and hooked it back to his belt, where his tattered shirt hung around his waist. He turned and looked down the ancient gash carved in the earth. On the left ridge, all was blackened from the fire that had destroyed his village, Shade of the Fern. To his right, the flames had skipped like a stone, hitting this patch, but not that one, all the way down to the expansive grasslands below, the landscape dancing in the waves of heat.

Home, and yet not home.

The fires set by the enemy had devoured his family—mother, father, & brother all scorched to death defending their home. Dathderu had received the news, helpless in his tent barracks many marches to the south, as everything he knew exploded in mountains of flame. Fleeing home, he’d returned to a graveyard of crumbling foundations and a life without connection.

In the shocking blankness of his mind after this discovery, he sought the comfort of Grandmother Oak. Surely the Grandmother would crack him open to wisdom. Give him both an anchor and a direction.

This path to the tree had been a secret in his family for generations. The first Ibisans to explore this far south had found the hanging valley above the canyon and wondered at the enormity of the oak there, its mighty branches stretching from one rock wall to the other, its trunk as thick as a house, its knotted toes clutching the rocks where countless snakes and digger squirrels lived and died. Even the Vasran, half blinded in their hunger for new lands, had paused beneath its branches, felt the thrum of something mysterious and primeval vibrating up from the earth or through the air around the old tree, and so they named it Zalmadar—meaning grandmother—in their ugly tongue. Before the first invasion, his father’s grandmothers gathered acorns here, and surely, they too had wondered at the mystery of the tree, dwarfing any other oak for as far as a man could walk in a string of days.

No one knew, for certain, how old it was. Its only access was this—one single, difficult foot path traveled by Dathderu since he was a boy, and his grandfathers before him, extending back into the murk of history. As a child, his family would picnic in the valley every year, and Dathderu had always thought that one day he would bring his own children here to do the same. He had pictured them in his mind so many times that he knew them already: a wife with loving eyes and a strong back, his daughters and sons frolicking in the shade of the oak. They would spread a blanket in the dappled sanctuary under the branches, drink fidi juice and spicemeat pies, then doze in the lazy comfort of a summer day.

He came to a small footpath that led away from the canyon floor with its rolled river rocks, up a few dry slopes, thick with wind thistle, to where a tower of black cliffs climbed to the grassy plains above. He loved this walk: first through the soft sandy boulders, long-ago blankets of underwater mud—or so the old ones said—up through the layers of bended rocks, heated and tumbled in the earth, to the top layer of blackrock that had once flowed from Bear’s Forge, red and molten. All of it fashioned over eons, then carved again, just as slowly as it had been formed, by the creek below. Time at this scale comforted Dathderu, and gave perspective to all his recent horrors. He, his lost family, the monstrosities of war, were but wisps of thistle down blown on the wind, represented in only the top two fingers of soil at the canyon rim, of no interest to the sheer drop of history below or the layers would one day form over the top, whether by water or blackrock or the patient folding of the ground. From this vantage he could look out over the charred slopes—up to the southern ridge where his family home had stood for generations below the village—and see the wiggling threads of green life pushing up through the ashes, and know that in the grand scheme of things, none of it mattered.

These thoughts, and similar ones, had made him a poor fit for his apprenticeship to the smith at Shade of the Fern, a worse fit for the military—he saw no sense in the ceaseless killing—and an awkward guest at the water dances put together for the young folk of the village. Women, at least those his own age, tended to giggle when he spoke, then wander away. And so, Dathderu hiked alone, making this pilgrimage in the space between his time on the front and whatever happened next. He had no plans, or at least none that tethered him to earth. Grandmother Oak would be an anchor.

A hawk cried high above, and he had a momentary vision of himself from the bird’s perspective, glistening brown shoulders, the black pebble of a head.

The trail ended at the canyon wall, where the mud swallows clustered by the dozens, weaving the air around their nests. Or, at least, the trail seemed to end. He wiggled into a clump of tangle vine, first an arm, then a foot, then—turning sideways—the rest of his body squeezed through to the center, where a long narrow crack had formed in the rock wall. He pushed into the tight slot canyon, shaded and cooler than the exposed furnace of rock just beyond. This cleft ran thirty paces deep into the cliff face, a tunnel of shade that would open at the end into the Valley of the Oak. Dathderu paused to catch his breath and enjoy the chill of moist rock against his back. He took another drink of water and pushed on.

At the end of the rock alley, sun bedazzled his eyes. He blinked into the waves of heat and light, confused by the glare where only stippled shade should meet his eyes.

Had he made a wrong turn? Had he—

“No! No no no!”

Dathderu ran forward into the oven of the sun, of all that should have been cooled and cradled under the arms of Grandmother Oak.

Only a stump remained, tall as his chest, wide as a house, riddled with harsh carvings in the ugly runes of the Vasran.

He stepped closer to the trunk, reached out trembling hands to touch the wood rings, and felt…nothing. That hum of life was silent. Old bones littered the now dry and barren ground. A makeshift rock hut stood empty, its door ajar. Before that, a fire pit overflowed with refuse, and a grim flag had been thrust into the ground—a dry branch waving the severed tail of a digger squirrel.

There was no spring in the valley of Grandmother Oak, but something bubbled up in Dathderu all the same, red and liquid as the blackrock flowing from Bear’s Forge. It scorched him from the inside, rising in the tube of his body. He bellowed like a wounded tusk beast. He found an abandoned war axe and swung it at the walls of the hut, satisfied by the crumble and give to its walls, untroubled by the splintered handle of the axe. He had borne his losses, in war and at home, by holding his place in the scale of time, against the scale of things that last, but this violence against the tree, against his last secret and sacred place was an act against time itself.

Dathderu raged.

The violence that failed him as a soldier now exploded to the surface, and he could have killed every last one of those Vasran bastards, smashed their heads like rotten corpse melons. He swung the axe, over and over, its rusted head ringing out against the rock walls, unheeding of the wind thistle tearing at his pants. He hollered and wept and bashed at the ground until, exhausted, he fell to his knees at the great stump and sobbed like a lost child.

He curled up like an armor bug, like a star exploding inward, and waited for the fury to end him. And like a dying star, he became void that swallowed everything in its great sucking emptiness. He would not move again, only condensing heavier, denser, and colder into nothingness.

When opened his eyes again, the early afternoon was now evening, and he lay spread eagle on the dirt, two vultures circling the updrafts overhead. His body was lead and ash, and he struggled to sit, his back against the rough stump of the great tree. To lie down in the heat of the sun was certain death. Dathderu fully expected to die—to the extent that he had expected anything—and he was bewildered as to what he might do next.

He found an acorn laying in the dirt next to his knee, and picked it up, rolling it in his fingers.

Years earlier, when his grandfather died, Dathderu had peered into the urn and been surprised to see that the remains were not ashes like those in a fire pit, but a grainy substance, with bits of bone still visible. On an impulse, while the rest of the family gathered around the food of memory in the other room, Dathderu had plucked a small bone from the ash—Was it a little toe? A tiny bone of the ear? —and popped it into his mouth, swallowing in one guilty gulp. His grandfather with him forever. With a similar impulse, Dathderu separated the acorn from its cup, put the smooth seed on his tongue, and swallowed. The nut was far too big and lodged on the way down, an ache behind his breastbone. He drank from his water skin, gulping over and over until the thing had passed into his stomach. He remembered, too late, that acorns were meant to be leached before eaten, but he couldn’t muster the energy to care, or to remember why. The act comforted him, and Dathderu imagined he felt once again the subtle hum of life, finding focus in his belly where the little acorn was even now perhaps poisoning him with whatever it was that made an acorn a thing you weren’t supposed to eat raw. Under his legs he felt the old roots of the tree, not dead, he suddenly imagined, but pushing their nutrients out and down, into the soil. He sensed all the little acorns, the children of the great tree, underground, waiting for the autumn rains to send out their sprouts and shoot their heads to the surface.

He stood up and brushed off his breeches, pulled his tattered shirt back over his head. Evening was coming, and he had nowhere to stay for the night. Finding a few more acorns on the ground, he picked them up and put them in the purse tied at his belt, with its two lonely coins, thinking that when the place was right, he would plant them. Then he turned, slope-shouldered, toward the shadowed and narrow exit to what was once his secret valley.

With his eyes to the ground, he saw the egg adder before it noticed him. An ancient thing, its coils as thick as an arm, spiraled around itself, its head swayed back and forth, facing away from him, tongue flicking. Dathderu tripped, sent a heavy stone tumbling, and the serpent turned to face him, it’s eyes old as time. The snake looked away again, offering only one brief, irritated buzz of its tail. Dathderu followed the serpent’s gaze.

An old woman, as dark and dry as tree bark, sat on a boulder near the slot in the rock wall. Her hair was a white puff, barely hiding the scalp underneath, with a few twigs and leaves tangled in it. She wore ragged wide-legged breeches so that her ankles thrust out, completely exposed above a pair of tattered fish-skin slippers. Her tunic was dusty, smudged from a fall, it seemed, and Dathderu wondered how she had gotten herself up here in the heat. She clutched a gnarled walking stick, worn smooth from use. She muttered, swaying side to side, eyes closed, bobbing her head as if listening to music or nodding in agreement to a conversation he could not hear.

She did not see the danger coiled inches from her feet.

“Don’t move, Auntie!” said Dathderu. “There’s a snake.”

At the sound of his voice, she turned to him, still bobbing her head, and opened her eyes. They were the milky white of the profoundly blind, and Dathderu, despite himself, drew back.

The snake slithered into the thistle.

“Auntie, are you well?”

He rushed to the old woman’s side and took her hand. It was dry and light as last year’s leaves.

“How did you get here? Are you from the village?”

The old woman tipped her head as if hearing a distant, curious noise. Her mouth opened in a toothless vague smile, and she patted her hand toward him in the air, as if searching for something. Her tunic, once fine, had been intricately beaded in patterns of leaves and vine. Rusty stains smudged the middle, and Dathderu feared they might be blood. Some were more maroon in color, spongey and moist.

There was no way she had come here on her own. The trek was a vigorous one, even for Dathderu, fresh from the wars and in the best shape of his life.

“Is there someone with you?” He asked. But then, receiving no answer, he shouted into the open canyon below. “Hello!” he called. “Is someone here?”

The buzz bugs swallowed the place where his voice had been.

Had someone brought her here with evil in mind, and then fled at the sight of him? The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he spun around a few more times, reassuring himself that each shadow in the canyon wall was only that—a shadow.

He had no way to send for help—and no one in the village to summon, in any case. To leave her alone in a place like this would be to kill her.

“Can you hear me?” he asked. “Do you need a drink?”

The old face cracked open into another smile, and she nodded.

Dathderu unhooked the skin from his hip and held it to her lips. She wrapped her hands around his and eagerly tipped the vessel back, taking deep swallows, stopping only to gasp in a raspy breath before greedily gulping at more. How long had she been out here?

He looked closer; the stains on her shirt were most definitely blood.

“I think, Auntie…I think you might have hurt yourself. You’re bleeding. May I look?”

Again, with that strange bobbing motion of her head and the toothless smile—well, not toothless, exactly, she did have one—she smiled.

“Thhhsh’fiiiiine.” she said, in a voice that might have been the clacking of old branches.

“Okay. I’m just going to…” Dathderu reached out to the hem of the filthy tunic. “I’m going to lift this a bit and…. Seven Hells!”

Her torso was wrapped in a sticky bandage of moss and grass mat, frayed and dirty, with blood seeping through on all sides. Dathderu dropped the hem of the tunic and stood, his thoughts fracturing. He’d have to carry her, find a healer in a village somewhere, though how he’d do it without hurting her more, he couldn’t imagine. Had the enemy brought her here to die? Again, he scanned the surrounding area, but they were alone.

“Auntie, I am going to carry you.”

She shook her head, and her hand fluttered on his shoulder like a moth wing.

“We must get you to a healer!”

She let out a wail of despair, or pain.

Dathderu moved to help her up, but her grip tightened on him, and the tips of her fingers dug into his arm, hard and strong as old wood.

“No…” she whispered. “I ssshtaay.” Her lips where soft around the words, as if just learning to speak them.

The old woman’s eyes bored through him. Dathderu couldn’t be sure, but the milkiness of them seemed diminished in this light. They were simultaneously darker, and a little brighter, and had focused on his face.

She said something, but he couldn’t understand the words, leaned in closer. She spoke again. “Purssse.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“In…your…pursse…Dathderuuu.”

How did she know his name? But then her hand snaked out to his hip, appeared intent on searching his purse on its own, and Dathderu backed up a step, a little frightened.

“In your puuuurse.”

Dathderu reached in and pulled out one of the acorns he’d collected. “This?”

He held it out to her, and she closed her fingers around his, folding the acorn and his hand into her own. She smiled again.

Where her hand closed over his, he felt a pulsing. Nearly indiscernible. Like a heartbeat, but slower. And where a heartbeat was red in his imagination, this pulse was green, and mossy, and secret.

“You will ssseee,” she said.

He wanted to pull his hand free, but, then again, he did not.

She squeezed his fingers again and—like thick liquid slipping through the neck of a bottle—Dathderu felt himself, or what he thought of as himself, slip from his head, hang up momentarily in his throat, then slide down his arm and into his hand. The heat of the afternoon, the eyes of the old woman, the worry blinked from existence, and he became, instead, the acorn.

He fell into the hard roundness of it for only a moment, then the texture fuzzed, grew soft, and tendrils, tiny tap roots, reached from the seed, deep into the old woman, into the empty body of Dathderu Falbrod, into a past as the body of Grandmother Oak, into each limb and leaf and cell and fiber. With a shock of instant comprehension, Dathderu became the body of the great tree. Time turned backwards, counted in storms and wasps and bird nests and digger squirrels and full moons in the thousands, until the mighty tree was, itself, another, older acorn, and then another tree. The pace accelerated, so that the seasons were merely flickers of the light, going back and further back in time, seed to tree, seed to tree, until they were no longer oak, but some other ancient thing, and unknown creatures lumbered around its trunk. Giant bearlike animals with talons like scimitars, cats with long tusks. And then further back, further, past the time of scale beasts, past dry land and the dream of dry land, the pace so fast that epochs became a smear.

Then, the great greening of beingness on the water, the sunlight, the first breathings of life. For a brief pause he hovered here, a few nascent bodies bobbing the waves of a vast water world paradise. Then forward again, an infinity of life, to roots, unfathomable and connected to all the children, over time, of that first greening on the waters, to the deep breathing massive consciousness of it all, as it was now, tangled and surging, but riddled with great aching bald spots and rot.

With an abrupt jolt, his mind landed back in the body of Dathderu Falbrod. He could feel the chest of the body heaving, tears on its cheeks.

“You know this, my son.” The words were not spoken by the old woman’s lips, but were a resonance, like a memory of someone haven spoken inside of his head. The vibration of the words thrummed through him, and through the consciousness of the thousands upon thousands of ancestors, from oak down to that first greening, like a child’s spinning wheel.

Inside him, two branches of the future: one, his wife of the loving eyes and strong back, their children growing like weeds in the sun, without the shade of Grandmother Oak; the other…

“You will choose,” she said.

The grief of either branch unchosen. The vast future of the other. How could he possibly contain it?

The old woman’s eyes were still on him, but had grown dull and soft, and the hazy white blindness had returned.

“You won’t.” She patted his hand. “You won’t contain it, Dathderufalbrod.” She took a strained breath, her tiny chest puffing up the filthy tunic, then exhaled, and her out breath was the rattle of wind on dry leaves, the surge of storm across a forest, the dropping of branches and seeds and squirrel nests. One exhale of a vast knowingness.

And then she was gone.

The dry hand over Dathderu’s emptied of life. The blind eyes half-closed, and the muscles of the face slumped over bone, no longer human, but like a face you might have imagined in the rocks or in the bark of a tree.

For a moment, he looked to the slot canyon exit from the valley and longed for those future dark-haired children, playing in the sun. He felt the arms of that ghost wife around him. Then, wish a shuddering sigh, he tore himself away.

Toward the eons and the multitudes.

He took one step toward the stump at the center of the valley, and the acorn in his belly leapt to life.

The sense of being a self tattered, leaving only a vague remembrance, like a story someone had told him once. He looked back at the body of the old woman, but she had already gone. Only the dirty rags of her clothing beneath the boulder where she had sat. His muscles had stiffened. His skin felt dry.

Night was falling. He would sleep here, in the valley of Grandmother Oak. Slowly—movement seemed so…distant…somehow—he pushed forward. He made his way, each step more deliberate than the last, to the grasses where he had napped beneath the stump. Was it his imagination, but did the light flicker like a candle by an open window? Did a family of robins nest in his hair before he had taken three strides? He reached out his arms—so broad and strong they had become—and toppled the remainder of the enemy’s hut. This one last act of Dathderu Falbrod burst in his limbs with a great, green joy. The moon and the sun wove a patterned dance over his head, spinning faster and faster, as he returned, each step taking years, to the crumbling stump, seat of his youthful hope and young man’s despair. How…shortsighted. With a feeling of great contentment, he rooted, pulling the wisdom of Grandmother Oak into his knotted his toes. He stretched his arms wide, welcoming buzz bugs and beetles, owls and woodpeckers, as generations of deer mice and wolf pups chased themselves around his trunk and the sun greened his leaves and the world beyond the hidden valley spun itself into a great flaring blast of noise.

And then silence.

Grandfather Oak was home at last.