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She turned toward the sound and breathed in.

Vague hint of wolf, but not overbearing.

She saw no signs of danger between the grey trunks.

She made her way forward, dust drifting off of her cloak, her boots crunching on the decaying bones among the roots.

The unnatural light of the leaves made the forest floor particularly treacherous, but Esterra was a tractwalker.

She had climbed over the cracked bricks and tiles of many a dead city, had travelled through deserts of rolling pebbles and razor-sharp crags, had cut her way through thick jungles with slippery moss covering the ground.

Her feet fell with the certainty of an executioner’s axe, without question or doubt. Her right arm was already lost. She wouldn’t risk any of her healthy limbs.

Ahead, the trees ended at a shore, with water lapping darkly along the edge.

She listened for a long moment, ignoring the enticing draw of water, listening for any sound of animal life.

There were none.

Esterra studied the bone dust for any tracks.

None whatsoever.

Stars, this better be drinkable , she thought, dropping down from the thickness of roots to the water below.

The stream was shallow and wide.

The luminescent leaves reflected on its rippling surface like living butterflies of light, spinning out of sight just as one glimpsed them.

She cupped her hands into it, watching the white dust wash off. Bending down, she breathed in gently. No odd scent, no scent at all. It likely contained some of the dust which coat the entirety of the tract, but that was fine. She’d been forced to drink worse in her life. She lifted her cupped hands. It was clear and clean. She sipped a very little. It was tasteless, as good water should be.

She filled her calabash water gourd, and drank mid-stream, where it flowed quickest.

The water reached halfway up her calf, and she wiped what blood and dust she could from her clothes and skin.

Hopefully it wouldn’t contaminate her body any more than it already was.

Someone whistled, and she whipped her head up.

A knobbly cane propped up a wretched ghost on the opposite shore.

Dust covered the figure, from the crude, drawn bow in its hands to the scarf that covered its face, all the way down to its twisted and malformed leg.

Tufts of grey hair poked out between the long strips of cloth wound about her head.

One dark eye peered out, looking her over.

“Come here”, the figure said, a female voice, but pitched low and rough, “Throw your knife first”. Esterra tossed her knife onto the shore, then approached as the woman retrieved it and redrew the bow. “From the hollow?”

“Aye,”

Esterra answered, walking to the shore.

“Heard a wolf not half an hour past.”

“Won’t be hearing that one again.”

The woman raised her single white eyebrow, glanced at Esterra’s curved knife. “Never killed it with this, I know. You blessed?”

Esterra laughed. “Not to my knowledge. Cursed more like, and damned hungry, too.”

“Don’t be making jokes about curses here, girl. You going to be trouble?”

“Not if I have no reason. What can I call you?”

The old woman eyed her up and down, squinting through the jaundice and wrappings.

“Kera, if you must. Yourself?”

“Esterra.”

Kera nodded, and lowered her bow, returning the crooked arrow to the quiver on her back. She gestured for Esterra to walk ahead, cautious. Esterra nodded and walked.

“Is there a village in this tract, Kera?”

“There ain’t nothing in this tract, wanderer, except death. You’ll be safe enough if you stay with me, though.”

“I don’t plan to stay long.”

“I know a tractwalker when I see one,”

the old woman growled, and Esterra turned to face her.

Covered up as she was, Kera’s age was indeterminable.

She might have seen fifty Circle years, she might have seen a thousand.

Her gait betrayed a limp, but that brought no sympathy to Esterra’s heart.

Everything was a threat until she decided otherwise.

Verpace held only predator and prey.

Esterra knew she herself was the former, but she was acutely aware that there were better predators than her, and sometimes they were deceptive in their guise.

So Esterra kept her guard up as the old woman hobbled after her, crutch sinking into the dust, raising little clouds which drifted away in the gentle breeze.

“How did all these bones come to be here? Do you remember?”

Kera hacked out a laugh. “Remember? I’m not so old as to remember the First Lichtvallen. We settled here from another tract, and the bones were always here, and the trees. Long before the blessing visited this tract. The tract has always been here, and it will remain long after we’ve passed.”

“What are these blessings you speak of, Kera?”

“You been living in the hollow your entire life? Those blessed by the licht, fool girl. Why, a man was through here just a few moons ago, asking after any blessed. Madman, he was. Scampered off faster than he came, too.”

Esterra slowed to walk by Kera’s side, nodding. They call the curse a blessing here. Curious. But so do others, apparently . “A hunter?”

“No weapons that I saw. He wasn’t blessed. He was sick, through ‘n through. Walked with a limp, like me but not so elegant.”

Kera cackled at her little joke. “He was a tractwalker, though, despite his gait. Mind was well gone, could barely speak a word of sense.”

“Which way did he…”

“Enough of your blabbering. We’re here.”

They entered a clearing in the trees, a wide circle of thirty or forty paces across.

A single gigantic tree twisted up into the sky, dead branches clawing at the setting red sun.

Its trunk was knotted like old fingers twisted in some final prayer before death.

Bulging and grotesque, the folds of the trunk crawled their way up each other, with dead branches tearing through the scaly bark at unnatural angles.

Unlike all the other trees in the forest of bones, there were no glowing leaves on this one.

Only pointed twigs at the ends of branches scratching harshly against the evening sky.

Wind whispered from the forest, and Esterra scanned her surroundings in the twilight.

Her arm quivered softly.

There was magic in this clearing, a little more than in the forest.

Erratic as always, the magic followed no rules of geography or logic, only its own madness.

She had met mad travellers who swore they had figured it out, nevertheless.

They’d pull out scrolls and books and scribblings and lecture her on their formulae and algorithms.

The diagrams and ravings only proved one thing, in Esterra’s opinion: their naive idiocy.

There was only one certainty about magic, and that was that one could never trust or understand it.

Much like the madmen who studied it.

Usually when they saw the disbelief or condescension in her eyes, they grew violent, or tried other foul things with her. She had laid many to rest with a blade in the gut for such behaviour.

Kera led them around the tree, past the massive prints of wolves in the dust.

Some looked recent.

The roots spread far, and the old woman hopped nimbly up them, following a path only she could see.

Esterra followed, carefully planting her feet on the exact roots the old woman chose.

They circled the tree in this manner.

On the other side, now a few metres above the clearing floor, the trunk was split open.

The opening was wide enough for a person to step into if they twisted sideways.

The broken skull of a wolf hung above.

Kera entered, and Esterra followed.

The cramped interior reeked of herbs and smoke, but was spacious enough for the two of them.

Mouldy wolf-skins made a carpet, and a rough shelf of intertwined twigs circled the inner trunk.

Bones, rusty knives, and various bundles of herbs and jars of grain lined it.

Kera hauled a heavy curtain of skins across the entrance.

“Sit, child”, she said, taking down a dusty bottle, and swigging some liquid. She didn’t offer any to her guest. Esterra sat down with her back to the wall opposite the entrance.

“Tea?”

the old woman asked.

Esterra nodded with enthusiasm. She hadn’t tasted that delicacy in many years. “I had thought the last memories of tea gone from Verpace.”

“Who knows, perhaps these are the very last leaves in all the world? An old relic, much like myself. They’ll taste all the better for that, even if this is their third use.”

“I heard that there were once tracts dedicated to growing tea, away upwards of the Traders’ Circle.”

“Aye, I’ve heard tell of such places in my time. I daren’t place hope in that nonsense these days.”

“I have been there,”

Esterra said, voice low. “Nothing but barren wastelands lie there now, ravaged by storms, raiders, and the lichtvallen.”

The pair fell silent, watching as the colour slowly leached from the leaves into the hot water.

Tea-drinking had become almost ceremonial in these late days where it was a true luxury.

The custom was not to speak from the moment it was served till the very last drop had been consumed.

Kera handed Esterra a cracked ceramic mug, heavily marked by decades of use.

She drank first, then passed the mug to the old woman.

So it went till all the tea was gone, leaving only a faint aroma in the air.

They sat in thoughtful silence for a few moments, enjoying the warmth and closeness within the tree’s belly.

“Thank you for the tea,”

Esterra said.

“Welcome.”

“What do you eat here?”

“Boiled saplings. Roots. Whatever the rare trader will trade for firewood.”

“Do you get many of those?”

“We did, long ago. Not so many these days.”

They mulled over that in silence for a bit.

“You are blessed, aren’t you?”

Kera asked.

“Aye, as are you.”

The old woman grunted. “Not a high-blessing like yours.”

Esterra blinked, not understanding the strange terminology.

“A low-blessing took a hold of this tract.

Low blessings for the unworthy of Verpace.

The blind wolves used to be people. My people. Families. We stopped in this forest too long. The licht got a hold of them.”

“Do you have any remaining kin?”

“Husband died early on, neighbour Jeda ripped his head off after changing. I ended the bastard, though. My two sons changed, too. I think you killed one of ‘em. Recognised his howl.”

Esterra stared at her with a carefully measured blank look.

"Don't worry, you saved me the trouble. His brother’s skull sits on my door-frame, as you saw. I’m the last human here.”

Esterra stayed quiet, observing the long fingers, the tufts of hair poking between the bandages, the expanded irises of the yellowing eyes, a little doubt as to the old woman's veracity seeping into her mind.

The licht was deep in the old lady, had gripped its white talons around her very bones and being.

She had eaten contaminated plants.

The magic consumed any creature it touched, bending and twisting it into an uglier form.

Like her arm.

The woman had wrapped the bandages about her in a desperate attempt to hide the deformity, but they could only cover so much.

The way she sat with her one enlarged leg bent awkwardly before her, it was clear she hadn’t lost the other.

Rather, the licht had forced them together, fused them into one. Esterra’s gut twisted.

“Why did you stay?”

she asked, hand drifting down to the wooden handle of her blade.

“Because by the time I worked up the guts to set out on my own, I was blessed. The Valley would accept no blessed ones.”

Esterra’s eyes flared and she ground her teeth. “The Valley? You’d seek the Valley? They’d kill you before you even came near.”

The woman’s eye sparkled with interest, the iris pushing the white away as it expanded in a sudden burst. Esterra frowned.

“You’ve been there?”

Kera whispered.

“Born there.”

The words wrought a fierce change in the woman’s demeanour. Her old eyes glistened with sudden life, opening wide.

“Oh high-blessed! Show us the way. I have so yearned to see it.”

“They would never let you in, old lady,”

Esterra said.

The woman leaned forward, her knuckles cracking as she leaned on them.

The bandages grew taut under a sudden pressure.

With a quiet rip they tore apart as long claws cut through them. The rags fell away, and the old lady’s face seemed to lengthen below the scarf.

“Oh high-blessed, take old Kera there, I prithee. Take us… to the Valley!”

she panted, kneeling before Esterra, her twisted arms holding her aged body up.

Esterra rose, and unsheathed her knife, adrenaline flooding her muscles.

Howls and shrieks broke the night as the woman before her twisted and writhed.

The single leg kicked out, large talons gouging the earthen floor, a deep smell of dirt and blood filling the heavy air.

The scarf fell to the floor, and a toothed maw gaped where the face had been.

Her eyes closed and were drowned in fur, just as the rest of her body succumbed to the magic.

Drool slathered the yellow teeth, streaking across the dirt like the pagan scribbles of a dead cult.

The old woman’s beseeching had turned into the mewling of a wolf cub, but grew deeper and more aggressive by the second.

“Damn you, woman,”

Esterra said, “I didn’t want to do this.”

She leaped forward, hearted pounding in her chest.

Her knife stabbed down, blade sunk deep into the wolf’s neck.

The howl reverberated through the tree’s interior, and Esterra was almost thrown off as the beast tore through the door’s covering, squeezed through the opening, and burst out of the trunk.

She clung on to the knife, her legs wrapped around Kera’s torso as they bounded into the clearing.

Wolves dark as dusk emerged from the trees, cautious but hungry, blind heads turning toward the chaos.

Esterra barely had a moment to register them, her attention on the bucking creature beneath her.

She screamed as the beast turned and leapt up onto the gigantic tree that was once its home.

Its long claws dug deep into the scaled bark, ravaging the wood beneath, single back claw scrabbling for purchase below as it tried to escape the pain of Esterra’s knife.

The wolves in the clearing hooted and howled up at them, pure rage filling the air as the pair climbed the dead tree.

Esterra’s right arm hung useless at her side, fallen from its sling.

It called to her.

You cannot make me use it .

The wolf flung its jaws blindly at its left shoulder, where black blood spurted around the knife, wedged deep between bone and muscle.

You cannot force me .

The beast leapt upward another few paces, using its teeth and claws to climb ever higher.

You cannot make me fall .

They were halfway up the tree now, and Esterra’s grip on the blade was slippery with blood.

Her legs ached and threatened to cramp.

I am Esterra Stake .

She twisted as the beast leapt onto a thick branch, the knife jerking, the beast losing its balance.

And I am my own woman . She jumped at the last instant, ripping out her curved knife. She watched the creature spin off the branch and fall, breaking a foreleg against the trunk before slamming into the roots and earth below.

She breathed deeply, leaning back against the trunk of the deformed tree.

Rough bark dug into her skin.

Each breath was a struggle.

Her heart wanted to break a few ribs, it seemed, beating madly within her chest.

She spat to the side.

Still her arm called to her, a song demanding release.

The light yearned to come out.

She gritted her teeth, and gripped the pale, dry flesh by her right elbow, where the curse ended and her real self began.

She closed her eyes, willing the tears back.

She could not lose focus, would not let the licht win. Yet , her mind argued, your arm will matter little if you die here today .

The wolves below howled in vicious agreement.

She began to climb, a necessary skill she had taught herself ever since the warping of the licht had set into her arm.

Her experience didn’t make the task any more enjoyable, though.

Her legs did most of the work, her curse a dead anchor that only slowed her down.

She had to rest at every branch to catch her breath, and her heart beat harder and harder with each ascent.

The trunk shook as the first wolves began the hunt.

They climbed with the same three-limbed awkwardness.

Some fell, unaccustomed to climbing, while others fought together over priority in the hunt and crashed to the earth, covering the white dust in black blood and writhing bodies.

Dismay filled her soul as she saw five or six of the beasts, perhaps hungrier than the rest, climbing quickly, teeth glistening in the light of the forest leaves, grey snouts with flared nostrils pointed up at her, eerie in their blindness.

She forced her eyes upwards again, and climbed harder.

The branches were thinning out, and twigs were breaking off below her feet as she jumped and shimmied her way up.

She heard the harsh breathing of the closest wolf, and swore as she looked down.

It would be ripping her leg off in just a few more metres.

The scaly bark broke under her boots and fingers, threatening to throw her grip at any moment.

Adrenaline flooding her veins, she leapt across to another branch, and clambered up the trunk’s twisted knots and growths.

Tensing, she noticed that she was almost at the top of the tree.

All that rose above were thin twigs and the black sky.

The hooting and howls pitched upwards in a mad cacophony, and the entire tree was shaking as the wolves climbed and jumped their way toward her.

Dozens of metres below, the bone-white earth was filled with wolves, some more deformed than others.

Teeth snapped on the other side of the trunk, and Esterra realised that the moment had come.

She could try to fight as a human, or she could fight as one of the cursed.

Her right arm throbbed, begging to be released.

The slavering jaw of a wolf peeked around the trunk, nostrils flaring as it blindly tried to circle around.

Twigs snapped beneath its weight.

Two more wolves lurched up from below.

She could smell the rancid rot of their breath, could taste it as if the very air they expelled was corrupt.

Esterra gave in.

She let her pale limb raise itself horizontally.

White light streamed from her extended arm, flinging out tendrils which whipped together to form a blade as tall as herself.

Her arm from the elbow down to her hand was sheathed within the light, twisted bones and pale skin enveloped in the magical weapon.

The light painted her dark face into harsh contrast, tracing blue highlights along the muscles of her clenched jaw.

Esterra spun as the first beast attacked, slicing the bottom jaw from its head and nicking its hind leg.

It shrieked, and lunged, teeth flashing in the light of her licht-forged blade.

She jumped back, balancing precariously on the shaking branch.

Her arm pulsed and her mind was filled with the tumultuous roar of magic.

Soaring adrenaline only added to the internal clamour, encouraging her soul to greater heights of power, thriving in the rush.

She had to finish this quickly, or stars knew how far the magic would spread.

The wolf turned toward her, black blood pouring in a flood down it’s dark grey chest and mixing with the bone dust on the wood.

It steamed and hissed, the magic-tainted liquid reacting harshly with the physical.

The beast gripped the branch with its forelegs, leaping toward her with its hind leg extended, claws forward.

Her blade twisted and thinned into a whip, which she flicked right through the wolf.

The waving cord ripped through the creature without the slightest resistance, and as she leaped above the hurtling body, she sliced through the branch.

It cracked under the weight of the howling beast, and the whole mess went crashing to the ground below.

The wolf landed, almost cut in half, already dying.

Esterra landed on the thick remainder of the branch, gripping the bark of the trunk with her left hand.

Horrid sounds filled the night.

The beasts were hungry for anything and found an easy meal in their fallen comrade. The feeding frenzy that ensued made her throat tighten. Black blood splattering across the tree and dust, hissing. A hooting shriek died in the thing’s shattered throat as it was torn to shreds.

Two more wolves were closing in on her, though, uninterested in their slaughtered friend.

Her arm burned, the whip involuntarily flicking through twigs and smaller branches, sending them down in hissing pieces.

Esterra focused on the closest wolf, whose frantic leaps were shaking the dead tree to its very roots.

She realised she had to reach the ground before the entire thing collapsed.

Dropping toward the beast, she swiped her arm out, some deep part of her relishing the feel of splitting wood and bone and flesh as she sliced down.

The wolf’s skull split in two.

The licht shot out and dismembered the beast’s forelegs.

The shrieks vanished in the wild song of the magic.

She caught a branch, and swiped the white whip through the second beast as it lunged at her, blood arcing in the harsh glare of her weapon.

The corpses fell in pieces to the wolves below, who hooted and shrieked in blood-spattered delight at the fresh meat.

The remaining beasts on the tree followed the stench of blood and leapt down to join the mad banquet.

Esterra managed to make her way down to a wider branch, exhaustion clawing at her every limb.

Now came the hard part.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled the light back into her arm.

She grimaced as it fought back.

Her muscles spasmed.

The whip light flicked through the tree, slicing right through the trunk.

As the tree began to fall under its own weight, Esterra roared and pulled the light back with all her will, forcing it into her skin, more a battle of the spirit than anything physical.

The glow disappeared, and all was still.

Her desiccated white arm hung by her side again, veins protruding, skin burned red at the edges where nature met magic.

She clambered and scraped down the rough bark of the trunk as the top of the tree fell into the bloody mess of wolves.

A branch impaled one of them, and the shrieking beast was immediately set upon by those nearest to it.

The creatures continued fighting and killing, their blood-lust long past sanity, foam and black ichor flashing in the moonlight from ravenous jaws.

The stink of animal blood and torn intestines filled Esterra’s nose, summoned vomit from the pit of her stomach.

She choked it down.

Teeth clenched against the horror of the night, Esterra leapt from the tree and sprinted in the opposite direction from where she had come into the clearing, toward the trees with their yellow light.

The wolves paid her no heed, preoccupied with their cannibalistic fury.

She entered the stillness of the forest, the growls and snarls and snapping bones disappearing with distance.

She ran till acid ran through her muscles, till her saliva tasted of metal and her heart was ready to burst.

Only then did she stumble to a walk, then collapsed to her knees in exhaustion.

Esterra forced her eyes open.

She had to know.

Scanning her arm, she measured the red burns.

They hadn’t spread beyond her elbow.

Not noticeably, at least.

She leaned back, sighing with relief, crying freely now, letting the terror of the last hour out.

Her inner voice, usually so strict and vicious, could not berate her for this respite.

Sometimes losing control was the only way to survive, be that through licht or through broken tears.

After a few moments, she wiped her eyes and gathered herself.

A cold calm replaced the torrent of emotions, pragmatism born of hard training and experience filling her with purpose once again.

She walked deeper into the forest.

As she went, she replaced her right arm into the leather sling, flicking the brass eyelet onto its narrow hook by her shoulder.

The atrophied muscles in her arm never felt pain, the nerves dead to the world, but her heart and mind bore enough in its stead.

She washed out her mouth with some water from the gourd, spat the mixture of blood and dust and saliva to the side.

It landed with a splat on a shattered skull.

This was not the worst tract she had come through, and it wouldn’t be the last.

But somewhere out there, she knew there must be a place where one could at least carry out some semblance of life, without the licht’s influence, without the need to succumb to it.

Some place like the Valley, but without the cold-blooded pragmatism that had cast her on this path.

Ahead, the cliffs of the tract wall came into view.

She looked up at their towering heights as the rising sun touched the very top.

The weird, gargantuan testaments to the First Lichtvallen, the tawil were a harsh contrast to the abundance of life that dwelt in so many of the tracts they encircled.

Each morning they cut a jagged edge across the rising sun.

Each evening they seemed to climb higher and higher, blotting out the warmth of the day out of sheer malice.

They were a constant reminder of the catastrophe which had brought the death of the world and the birth of magic, an ever-present sign of the curse of Verpace, a story so old that no one remembered it.

Even Kera , Esterra mused.

Time was lost to humanity, and only the silent approach of death held any meaning now.

The entrance to a hollow lay before her, a dark opening slashed into the side of the tract wall, like the mouth of some mountainous creature just waiting for its prey to step in.

This hollow would lead to another tract.

The hollows always did, so long as she survived them.

I’ll keep going.

I must keep going.

I won’t succumb like Kera did.

Stars take your soul, old woman.

As she entered the shadows of the cave, she did not look back.

But if she had, she may have noticed that, among all the stars in the heavens above, one had gone dark.