AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My fingers began to tingle, my consciousness tugged as if I were falling asleep, and then, I remembered.
The Spirit in Her Bones
They cut her from the heart of her mountainside Wold. They found her unclaimed, unprotected, those ravenous humans, and fashioned her body into the figurehead of their ship. Her mother wept as they bore her away. Her sisters cursed, and her brothers raged. And she herself wept as they changed her, carving and hacking, smoothing and reshaping, until she was no longer Tane, but a human figure of wood and paint. A forgotten saint, a spear in one hand, and a distaff in the other.
She bore them across seas and through storms. But where other ghistings grew complacent to their captivity, she who was once Tane did not. She was other, and she would not rest.
She was a Mother Tree, heiress to the Wold in which she was grown, destined to stretch from the shade of her own Mother into the light of the sun. Her roots would sustain the Wold, when the first Mother fell and returned to the Dark Water. Her energy would bind it. Her rule soothe it.
When she heard her kin lament from beyond the wall of storms, she led her ill-fated crew astray. She whispered of riches beyond the tempest and her captain, blinded by greed, believed. They braved the Stormwall, emerging into an arctic world where so, so many ships had perished.
There, she who had been Tane drove her ship onto the rocks and refused to move again. Her crew cursed and raged, but then they starved and died, and Tane’s world quietened. Over the decades she reached roots into frozen earth and stretched branches to the dusky sky. And where her roots reached her kin, trapped in their own prisons, they, too, began to sprout.
A new Ghistwold grew, with Tane as their Mother. Her roots sustained them. Her energy bound them. Her rule soothed them. The cold and the wind did not botherthem—theirlife and sustenance came from another world altogether, their roots reaching into the Other. They brought summer with them. Ash and elm unfurled leaves that the arctic winds could not tear. Snow melted beneath birches in their paper shrouds, and fiddleheads emerged from blankets of moss.
New ships arrived and wrecked, some which Tane’s forest and their network of roots could not reach. But they would one day, Tane soothed them. Time, after all, meant little to immortal ghistings.
Sleep, she sang to those distant ships.Sleep until the time is right.
Then he came. Tane sensed Hoten’s ship as it passed through the Stormwall. Her roots stretched and her fine leaves rustled, watching, waiting.
The ship wrecked, as they all eventually did. Far from her reach the vessel became a torch in the night, and she sensed the new ghisting’s pain as his prison burned. Then that pain was gone, and there was silence instead.
Soon after, a man wandered into the Wold. She sensed a ghisting with him. Within him.
Horror. Disgust. The feelings overwhelmed her and spread through the forest, but the ghisting in the man exalted.
“See my freedom,” Hoten said with the man’s mouth. “See all I can do. Come, my siblings, good Mother. I will take you to see the world, and it will be ours.”
Tane rejected the offer, as did all the other trees of the Wold. But many of the ghistings beyond her reach, the ones her roots had not yet saved, took Hoten’s proposal. Others rejected it but had no power to stop the ghisten man. He burned their wooden flesh and drove their final shards into his screaming crewmates.
Some of these creations lived. Their souls complemented one another and they grew strong. Others went mad. Some slept and did not wake. Some simply did not change. The remainder died, both human and ghisting vanishing into nothingness.
Death. Ghistings did not know death, not until that day. But by Hoten’s hands, they learned.
When they entered human flesh, they became mortal.
Tane tried to stop Hoten, to stop the death and the suffering of her children, and even thehumans—forshe learned compassion for them. But this new creature Hoten, this hybrid, could not be harmed by her spectral hands or reaching roots. He was more than man, more than ghisting, and death would not come to him easily.
Finally, when every human in his possession was spent, Hoten returned to Tane. He brought with him two dozen of his surviving creations, and one last human woman.
The woman smelled of the Other. A Stormsinger. She was bloodied and beaten, barely conscious as he shoved her to her knees in the shade of the Mother Tree.
“I have saved the best for you.” This time when the man spoke, it was no longer Hoten. He and this host had mingled now, and together they were someone new. “A powerful mage, Mother. Please. Come with me.”
The prisoner turned glazed eyes up to Tane, palms braced on the earth, battling not to collapse. But she did not look away. She stared at the tree and as she did, challenge edged into her eyes.
That challenge, that strength, was something Tane knew well. It was the same strength that had driven her through the Stormwall, stretched her roots across the frozen world and founded a new Wold. Tane and thiswoman—theywere alike.
“We will return south,” the Hoten-man said, turning to address all the trees in the Wold. “And I will bring another crew back. I will bring them and slaughter them, until every one of you has a host. Until every one of you is free from your wooden prisons and the Dark Water.”
Horror gripped Tane, and she realized what she must do. She could not stop Hoten as she was. She had no legs to give chase, no hands to kill with. But with the woman’s hands and a weapon, she could find a way to end this. She could protect her Wold.
Again, she looked into the woman’s eyes, and saw her own stubbornness there. Their souls, she thought to herself, were not so different. The melding would succeed.
It had to.
Tane willed herself from the shell of her tree into a single shard. It was a struggle, a feat of will even for her, but she succeeded. And as she went, the Wold quietened. Leaves began to change from green to brown, red, yellow and burgundy. They fell, drifting on the wind. Ghistings still lived within the trees, but they slept. The snow and the cold swept in as the summer died, and winter swallowed the Wold.
