Celeste stands beside me. Her eyes are on the tree.
The stone beneath her feet shifts. A tremor. The floor under her boots darkens a shade, the gold lines pulling back from where she stands, creating a circle of bare stone a foot in diameter. Then the floor pushes back. The bare stone flushes dark, then darker, and the edges of the circle bow upward.
Celeste’s hands come up. Reflex.
The floor cracks. A single clean line from the circle’s edge to the nearest root. The gold at the crack’s edges blazes white. The temperature spikes and the air tastes like ozone and hot stone.
I reach for her, but Seraphina’s hand catches my arm.
“This is between them,” she says.
Celeste’s body is rigid. The tendons in her neck pull taut. Her boots are planted and her hands are up. Her shoulders tighten. Her fingers shake.
Seraphina’s grip tightens on my arm.
Then Celeste exhales. Long and controlled. She drops her hands and breathes.
The heat recedes. The crack in the floor seals, stone flowing back together as if it were momentarily liquid, and the gold rearranges around her feet in a new pattern, denser in some places, absent in others.
Celeste’s chin lifts. She catches my eye.
“I’m okay,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake, but her hands do. She folds them behind her back.
Seraphina turns to us. “Wait here.” She rests her palm on Mira’s shoulder. “Come with me.”
She crosses to the far side of the Heart Chamber. Mira follows.
The canopy turns its slow rotation overhead. Light falls through the branches in shifting columns.
I press my hand to the nearest root. The gold is hot under my palm. The heartbeat presses against my skin.
The shadows in my blood answer it. The same low recognition.
I pull back.
Celeste is beside me. Her palm goes to the root where mine was, flat against the same gold, and her eyes close. The gold leans toward her, too. Different pattern. When she opens her eyes she is looking at my hand.
She takes it and wraps her fingers through mine.
We stand like that until a passage forms in the eastern wall. Smaller than the entrance. The stone pulls apart without sound, revealing a corridor that curves downward, lit softer and deeper than the Heart Chamber. The air from inside carries the mineral smell of deep stone and something sweeter underneath.
Seraphina glances at it. “Your chambers. The Lithenmere prepared them.”
“My thanks,” I say.
Celeste looks at the passage, then at me. She walks through first. I follow.
The corridor empties into a single room. Carved from luminous stone that throbs faintly with the same rhythm as the tree’s roots. No windows. No doors. The opening we walked through seals behind us, the stone closing over itself.
The walls carry a heat that has nothing to do with fire. The bed is enormous, built from what appears to be the same living rock as the walls, its surface covered in fabrics that catch the light and trap it. When Celeste touches the nearest sheet, it ripples under her fingers.
“The mountain gave us a room,” she says.
“The mountain has opinions.”
She laughs. The glow in the walls deepens. Faintly. The temperature rises slightly.
Celeste sits on the edge of the bed. Tests the surface with her palms. The fabric ripples again, conforming to her weight. She pulls back. Puts her palm down again. Watches it ripple.
