Sylvanor wandered—not with purpose, but with sorrow.
The battle behind him was won, yet he carried no victory. Only the wound of memory. Only blood that dried too quickly on skin too young.
The forest thickened around him, gnarled and unknowable. Trees twisted overhead like ancient sentinels, their branches whispering secrets in tongues older than flame. The terrain bent upon itself—paths coiling like serpents, stones reshaping when unlooked upon. The air shimmered with quiet magic, not hostile, but watching.
And still he walked.
Every step stirred the ache in his side. Blood had crusted, robes torn, staff broken and discarded. Yet it was not the pain of the body that slowed him—it was the hollow behind his ribs. The space once filled by a father's voice.
His heart beat not to survive, but to remember.
Valerian…
The name echoed in his bones. The Emperor. The Flame. The father who laughed without weight when no court eyes watched. Who whispered, after each spar, "You'll be greater than me—because you'll carry both strength and sorrow."
Sylvanor's steps faltered.
A flash—Valerian's hand on his head, warm and callused. Another—shared laughter under a burning dusk, as a younger Sylvanor stumbled with a practice blade.
And again—his father's words in the dark after nightmares:
"You are my light born last—but burning truest."
Each memory struck harder than claws. And yet, he walked.
Because no grief could be greater than the silence of turning back.
Time lost meaning.
The sun above no longer pierced the canopy. Light and dark cycled with no pattern. Even the wind, once a constant whisper, had vanished.
All that remained was stillness—and the pull.
It was not hunger. Not thirst. It was something older, something embedded in the marrow of his name. A gentle pressure, as if the forest itself cradled his soul and urged it forward.
The deeper he went, the more the world faded.
Birds no longer called. Insects no longer buzzed. Even his breath seemed swallowed by the hush.
Then, without knowing how long he had wandered, he arrived.
At the center.
It was not a place. It was a presence.
The forest parted in reverence, trees leaning back, vines lowering like curtains. And there, beneath a sky cloaked in eternal cloud, stood the Worldroot.
It was not a tree—it was the Tree.
Its trunk rose like a pillar holding up the heavens, wide enough to swallow cities. Its roots sprawled across the land like rivers frozen in wood, coiling around stone and swallowing it. Its bark shimmered with faint patterns—symbols not carved but grown—like the veins of memory itself.
And its canopy?
Hidden.
Shrouded by mist and clouds and the weight of age. No eye, mortal or divine, had seen the top in an age beyond counting.
Sylvanor dropped to his knees.
The pull was gone. No—fulfilled. He was where he was meant to be.
He felt the tree not with sight, but with soul.
It thrummed beneath him—not like a voice, but like a drumbeat of the world's heart. Each throb echoed through the earth, through his skin, through the roots of his name.
Tears fell without shame. Without words.
"I don't know who I am anymore," he whispered to the bark. "A prince? A curse? A ghost?"
The Worldroot did not answer with words.
But the moss beneath his hands warmed. A vine curled softly around his wrist—not in binding, but in comfort.
And for a moment, in the silence, he felt seen.
Not as exile.
Not as harbinger.
But as one who belonged.
He rose to his feet—barely. Bloodied, breath thin, heart loud.
Before him, the Worldroot loomed like the axis of the world. Not a god, not a monster—but something both older and greater than either.
His hand trembled as he reached forward, fingers splayed against the bark. Its surface was warm—alive—not like wood, but like flesh that remembered everything.
And then he whispered:
"Canopy Communion."
Words taught in shadowed moments by a secret tutor loyal to his father—words he had once thought ceremonial.
They were not.
The tree answered.
A rush of light—not golden like his father's flame, but green and wild—erupted from the bark and pierced into his palm. It surged through his veins like liquid lightning, not burning but growing, vines curling beneath his skin.
His eyes snapped wide, then rolled back.
And Sylvanor fell into the memory of the forest.
There was no up. No down. No self.
He was no longer Sylvanor.
He was the witness, the breath between roots, the mind of moss, the eye behind leaves.
He saw time as the forest knew it: not a line, but a spiral. An ever-turning wheel of birth, decay, rebirth again.
Empires rose like saplings—bold, bright, foolish.
Empires fell like trees struck by lightning—fast, burning, forgotten.
He watched as war marched across glades now peaceful. He saw kings—armored, desperate, arrogant—kneeling at the base of the Worldroot, begging for power. And the tree gave, always with one truth:
Nothing is given without growth. Nothing grows without death.
He saw the forest's champions—figures cloaked in bark and bone, crowned in leaves and wrath. Some noble, some lost to madness. All consumed, one way or another.
And then—
The vision bent.
The wheel turned forward.
And Sylvanor saw—
Himself.
Older. Taller. Changed.
Crowned not in gold, but in thorns. Bark traced his arms like armor. His eyes glowed with a forest fire not natural nor kind.
And behind him…
The world burned.
Skies cracked open. Cities sank. Forests blazed and screamed. Mountains crumbled like sand. It was beauty and terror, life and rot.
And he stood at its center.
King of Nothing. Or Everything.
Sylvanor's body jolted.
He staggered back, gasping, eyes wide, hand smoking where it had touched the bark. The Worldroot pulsed once—and then fell still.
The memory was over.
But the voice remained—not a voice, not quite—a breath through leaves, a hum in his bones.
"Chosen… yet cursed.
King of growth… or death."
The forest no longer sang.
The trees around him had shifted. Bent. Changed.
No longer sheltering. Now watching.
Something—no, somewhere—had awakened with him.
And in the hush that followed, in the ancient silence of roots and prophecy, Sylvanor understood:
The forest knew his name.
And so did something else.