Chapter 346 - 345: Roots and Reach
Location:Seven Peaks — Spirit Garden, Verdant Spire, Observation Terrace
Date/Time:TC1854.01.21-22
Elian woke before dawn and knew the tree was calling him.
Not calling — that was too loud a word for what it did. The tree didn’t call. It hummed. A slow, deep vibration beneath everything else, like the mountain’s heartbeat had found a rhythm and was asking if anyone was listening. He’d felt it since the golden rain, months ago. A thump. Then a pause. Then another thump. Too slow to be alive in the way people understood alive, but too steady to be stone or soil or the formation network that Silas maintained with such fussy precision.
Something beneath all of that. Something old.
He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling. The living architecture of the residential wing glowed faintly — bioluminescence that responded to the ambient spiritual energy, greens and soft golds that shifted with the formation network’s rhythm. Aren slept in the bed across from his, blanket pulled to his chin, frost patterns crawling across the fabric where his ice affinity bled through in dreams. Small crystals on the pillow. It happened more often now.
The humming was stronger today. Not louder — deeper. As if the thing beneath the mountain had been sleeping with one eye open for eight hundred years and was now, slowly, considering the possibility of opening both.
Elian slipped out of bed. Pulled on shoes. Paused at the door.
Aren was already sitting up.
"You’re going to the garden," Aren said. Not a question. His ice-blue eyes were clear, fully awake, as if he’d been waiting.
"I have to."
Aren threw off his blanket. Frost crystals scattered across the sheets like shattered glass. "Then I’m coming."