“One woman standing, the other kneeling, holding—”
“An axe,” Vi finished for him.
“What?”
She pushed off the bed, starting for the door. “See? It was a good thing you told me. Because I know exactly where that last apex is.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Mother Tree,oldest of all the trees in the North, was at the center of the fortress. It was into this tree that Dia—a star from the gods—had fallen. On her descent, she had become mortal. Under its leafy boughs was where the Mother was said to have gifted her the axe.
This had to be the location of the next apex.
It was easy to identify it by its height and overall grandeur. But it was harder than one would think to get to. She had to spiral around smaller—but by no means small—trees, go up to go down, and spend nearly a half hour getting to the end of what should’ve been a five-minute walk, had she been able to go straight to the center. It was made worse by sneaking around in the dead of night, constantly looking over her shoulder to ensure she was alone.
But she saw no one and now the final barrier to her goal was before her. Vi was almost breathless from her haste. She stood on the other side of a living wall. Groundbreakers had woven saplings together to make a beautiful fence. Beautiful… and without any sort of clear entrance unless one had the magic to manipulate the trees to unweave themselves.
Vi looked up and around cautiously. The sensation of someone watching her was back. But Vi was certain it was nothing more than paranoia. She’d heard no footsteps and had seen no eyes peering at her through the darkness.
She stared through the woven barrier to the base of the Mother Tree. Shaded in an alcove was a ceremonial room that Vi had only been in a handful of times. Once for the blessings of Yargen to be placed on Ellene shortly after her birth, then twice every year since, for solstice rituals. The Mother Tree was a highly sacred place; Vi didn’t blame them for keeping people, or wandering princesses, out most other days of the year.
The bark of the natural barrier bit into her palms as she gripped it tighter. The room would be opened soon for the upcoming solstice; she could wait and not risk discovery now. But Vi doubted she could find a time to confidently come alone during the handful of days it was open to all in the fortress. Now she was certain to have time alone to see her vision, and speak with the man who came after.
Furthermore, Vi continued to try to rationalize her decision, she was a Child of Yargen too, wasn’t she? That meant it would be acceptable for her to trespass on the most sacred space in the North.Not trespass,she couldn’t trespass as a child of Yargen, right? Vi quickly tried to tally up the pros and cons in her head, before pushing the thoughts away. Rationalized or not, her path ahead was clear. She wasn’t going to back away now, not when she was this close.
“You understand, right?” Vi whispered to the Mother above, looking up toward the heavens. Nothing changed and Vi took that as tacit permission to begin climbing the woven barrier.
Luckily, its lace-like weave made plenty of gaps and spaces for hand- and footholds as she climbed. From the ground, it looked much shorter than at its top, and Vi employed great care in swinging her legs over and starting down the other side. Thankfully, she’d spent a lifetime trying to keep up with Groundbreakers in the jungles. Tree climbing was easily a strong-suit of hers, and Vi moved with swift confidence.
Feet back on the ground, Vi raced underneath the arch that led to the hallowed room that very much mirrored Sehra’s throne room. Except in place of a throne at the center, a barely-visible sculpture of two women stood. One was kneeling, her long braids nearly touching the ground—Dia, the forest star—and the other was said to be the Mother, imparting an axe upon her to carve out a new civilization from the raw earth she’d created for all mankind.
“A giant tree, a statue of a woman holding an axe.” This had to be the apex Taavin had seen.
Vi held out her hand and readied herself. Whatever the vision showed her this time, she would be ready. She could handle it. At the very least, she wouldn’t shout in horror and alert everyone to her presence. Good or bad, she was trained to be an Empress, and should not startle so easily.
Her eyes were wide. She could not look away if she tried. Yet the vision that possessed her was different from all the others. It was clearer, sharper. Now it was as if time itself flowed through her, posing her at its edge to peer through its secrets.
The world around her shifted. Days turned to nights. Stars spun across the sky. Flowers blossomed, saplings grew into trees, and vines knotted further over the remains of a civilization progressing quickly toward decay.
The fortress around her took shape and quickly changed, time and again. The city of Soricium grew and retreated with the seasons becoming more and more scarce—fading into a grayish stasis—as the trees withered, decayed, and exposed a sky larger than any Vi had ever seen, unbroken by treetops, to Shaldan’s barren earth.
Finally, the spinning top of the progression of time stopped on a desolate landscape.
Vi looked out over a barren field. Rubble lay like tombstones around the rough stumps of trees that looked as though they had been shredded to toothpicks. The great giants of Shaldan—trees that had stood from the dawn of time—lay on the ground in charred husks.
The Mother Tree was little more than sawdust.
She could almost taste the ash in her mouth, bitter and still smoldering from what looked like the aftermath of a battle that far exceeded even the horrific stories of the siege on Soricium during the War for the North. The smell of rot somehow reached her and brought Vi to gagging, as the remnants of what could be called men and women had been left as carrion for the birds.
Each corpse was contorted into angles of agony. They twisted with open mouths, locked in an eternal scream. Their eyes were wide and absent of all color—gone completely white and glossy. Deep trenches cut into their skin from where they had clawed at the white and rocky parts that coated their bodies between veins of still-glowing red.
Without having ever seen it, Vi knew that this was the ultimate end of the White Death: a stony, cold agony that kept one trapped for eternity in its suffering.
Vi half-wheezed, half-retched, gasping desperately for a breath of fresh air—for sound, liberating sound from the deadly silence that surrounded her. There was nothing but silence and death. It was then that her eyes turned skyward.
The heavens had been broken.
An all-black sky, void of stars, was ripped apart by a bloody slash trimmed at the edges with white. Drifting through the bleeding fragments of a broken cosmos was the form of a serpentine, winged monster, wide talons dipping to tear off pieces of the world below. Red lightning cracked around its body, as if charged by the ripping of reality itself.
