I nod. “Years ago. Too many to count, though the trees remember the season.”
Clara doesn’t interrupt. She sets her hands gently in her lap and listens. Always listening.
“They gathered root and soil from sacred ground. Chanted in the old tongue. They used the last sap from a dying world tree and shaped me from bark and breath.”
I press a hand to the scar just beneath my ribs. “And they tied me to this place.”
“To protect it?” she asks softly.
“Yes. My bond is to the Grove’s heart. A ward tree, ancient and deep. Its roots are laced through my own. Its pulse keeps mine steady. If it falters—I fade.”
Her breath catches. “So you… youcan’tleave?”
I meet her gaze. “No farther than the outer stone ring. Beyond that, the bond weakens. Beyond the river bend, it breaks.”
She looks like she wants to say something and doesn’t know if she should.
“Say it.”
Clara hesitates. “That sounds… lonely.”
“It is.”
My voice is steady. Unapologetic. I was made to serve. That’s what I tell myself.
But she doesn’t look away from me.
And in her silence, I feel the full weight of what I’ve admitted.
“I don’t dream,” I say quietly. “I don’t sleep. I exist only when the Grove stirs. For decades, it slumbered. I did too.”
She shifts forward, fingers brushing the moss. “And now?”
“Now it wakes.”
Her lips part. She doesn’t speak.
I turn toward the heart tree, the oldest one—gnarled and weathered with veins of glowing green across its bark.
“I am part of it,” I say. “Bound and buried beneath its roots. This is all I have ever known.”
She rises slowly, crossing the glade. Her hand hovers just over my forearm but doesn’t touch.
“You don’t sound angry,” she whispers.
“I’m not.”
I pause.
“But sometimes… I wonder what it would be like to belong to somethingby choice.”
Her eyes go glassy. She nods once.
Then she says nothing else.
And we sit, bound by silence.
But not alone.
