Cassian froze.
Remember.
Three years ago, when his magic was gone, he'd spent that year teaching the spells he'd created himself to students and the visions had started. A white tree. A woman in the first one, gone before he could look properly. And then the tree, every time after, saying the same thing.
Remember. Remember.
He'd thought he understood it eventually. That the magic had never actually left, that intent and belief were the whole point, that he'd been performing spells his entire life without really knowing what he was doing.
He'd been fairly confident about that conclusion he'd arrived at the time. He wasn't now, standing here with the same word coming from a voice he couldn't quite place, a voice that felt like something he should know but couldn't catch hold of.
"What?" he said. "What am I supposed to remember?"
The woman didn't answer.
"Remember what?"
Then the world peeled back and something else took its place.
A forest so green it hurt to look at directly, saturated to the point of unreality. Light came through the canopy. He was standing at the edge of it, just inside the treeline, and the first thing he noticed was the smell. Rain on old bark. Something sweet underneath it.
The forest was breathing. Somewhere high above him something called out, and something else answered further away. Branches creaked like they were talking to each other, like the whole canopy was mid-conversation and he'd just walked into it.
Things lived here. He could feel that more than see it. Something shifted in the undergrowth to his left. A shape passed between two trees ahead of him, pale and enormous. He caught the shape of antlers, gone before his eyes could settle.
A pair of phoenixes crossed overhead. Bigger than any other he had ever seen. Their wings threw a shadow across the forest floor. The trees thinned as the ground rose slightly, and then he came through the last of the canopy and stopped.
The clearing was enormous. And at the centre of it was the tree.
He'd seen it before. A version of it, anyway. In the visions, in the magic that had come back to him piece by piece during that year. It was vast. Ancient and pale, bark the colour of birch but smoother, almost luminous, like the wood itself was lit from somewhere inside. The roots ran out across the clearing in every direction and disappeared into the earth, and where they emerged again further out, flowers grew along them in long unbroken lines, white and gold.
The branches spread so high and so wide that the canopy of the tree was its own sky. Things lived up there. Phoenixes nested in the upper reaches. Other things he couldn't name. The whole tree hummed continuously.
The woman was at the base of it. She was barefoot. She moved around the tree the way someone might move around something they loved, with attention and familiarity, touching the bark briefly as she passed, reaching up without stretching to brush her fingers along a low branch, the way you'd greet a person. Her feet were silent on the root-crossed ground. None of it was performative. She wasn't doing it for him. She was simply there, and he was watching.
Above her, a phoenix drifted down and landed on a branch directly overhead, folding its wings. A second one followed. Then two more, higher up, and they began an overlapping call that moved through the clearing, and the forest behind him answered it, and for a moment everything was connected to everything else and it was the most alive he'd ever felt standing still.
Then one of the branches went black.
He didn't notice it immediately. It was a single branch, high up, on the left side of the canopy, and the darkness spread along it slowly. The bark simply stopped being what it was and became something wrong-looking, dull, a patch of absence in the middle of all that light.
The phoenix on the branch above it took off without a sound.
The woman's hands stilled on the trunk.
The second branch went the same way. Then a third. It moved down through the canopy, spreading from the affected branches to the ones below and beside them, and where it spread the light changed. The luminous pale bark dulled. The flowers along the roots on that side of the tree closed, petals drawing inward. The moss beneath them went grey at the edges.
One of the phoenixes, a smaller one, lower in the canopy, didn't fly away in time. As the darkness reached it, it changed. The white of its light flickered. Went out. Came back darker, the gold underneath it turned to something closer to nothing recognisable. Its call shifted. What came out sounded wrong, like a note played flat, and when it lifted off the branch and circled the clearing. The shadow moving beneath it didn't match the light.
The other creatures at the edge of the clearing began to react. Not all of them managed to flee. Some of them turned toward the shadow the blackened branches cast, and they changed too, gradually.
The woman's hands, still pressed against the bark, were trembling. She pulled her hands from the bark and turned to face the blackened side of the tree, and Cassian saw her expression for the first time. She wore the face of someone who had known this was coming and had been dreading it anyway.
Her hands came up. Carving sigils into the air. They came out of her fingers in trails of pale gold light, spiralling outward from a central point, layering over each other in patterns that overlapped without cancelling, each one feeding into the next.
The tree responded. The bark on the healthy side of the trunk brightened, the luminescence inside it flooding upward through the branches, and where the light reached the edge of the black it pushed. The darkness didn't retreat, but it slowed, the spreading stuttering, held back by the pressure of whatever the tree was pouring into the boundary between them.
The woman kept drawing. The sigils multiplied, a constellation of them hanging in the air around her, orbiting the trunk at different heights, and each one she added strengthened the whole structure. The golden light they cast fell across the roots and the flowers and the moss and made everything it touched look more itself, more present, more real.
For a moment it seemed like it might hold. The black stalled at the boundary. One of the higher branches cleared, pale bark reasserting itself, light pushing through as though the tree were remembering what it was. The darkness had been spreading outward along the branches. Now it contracted. Pulled back slightly and then drove downward instead, pushing along the trunk toward the root system below.
The woman saw it. She shifted her position, drawing new sigils lower, redirecting the structure she'd built, and the tree answered her, light flooding downward now, running along the roots in bright lines, flowers opening along them as the warmth reached them.
Cassian stood at the edge of the clearing with his hands at his sides, watching what was essentially a war happening in slow motion, and felt the helplessness of someone witnessing something that had already happened, that was over long before he arrived, that he was being shown rather than invited into.
Above, in the canopy, the two phoenixes that had changed were circling. Their calls came down in irregular intervals, that flat wrong note repeating, and where the sound landed the light flinched.
One of the spiralling sigils she'd drawn detached from the formation and expanded. Reshaping itself into something broader, a flat plane of light that swept upward and caught both birds on its edge. The contact slowed them but failed to destroy them, pushed them back up into the higher branches, and they went, reluctantly, their circling becoming more agitated.
That green had dimmed on the left side of the clearing, the undergrowth there gone grey and still. The line between the two halves was visible from where Cassian stood. A photograph torn down the middle.
The woman's sigils shone brighter. The black retreated from two of the upper branches.
The woman sighed.
Then the darkness took a shape.
It happened on the corrupted side, where the trees had gone grey and the ground was black It coalesced, shadow pulling together from the undergrowth, from the dimmed canopy above, drawing in from the surrounding dark. The shape that emerged was tall. Vast, actually. The body was wrong in its proportions, limbs too long. A crown, thorns and shadow, sitting at the top of the figure's shape, and where it caught what little light remained on that side of the clearing it threw it back distorted.
The woman went still. The formation she'd built rotated slowly around the trunk, maintaining the boundary she'd carved between the healthy side of the tree and the dark, but her hands had dropped to her sides and she was looking at the creature across the clearing with an expression Cassian had no word for. Recognition, maybe. The specific grief of someone looking at something that used to be different.
The creature stood at the treeline and the darkness pooled outward from it, spreading across the ground in waves, and where each wave reached, the clearing shrank. The boundary the woman's sigils were holding bent inward under the pressure, and Cassian could see the effort it was costing the tree to maintain it, the light in the bark was dimmer now.
Half the forest was gone. He understood that now. The left side of the clearing, the corrupted trees beyond it, the whole quadrant of the forest that had been full of noise and life and movement... quiet. Still. Swallowed.
The woman turned back to the tree. She pressed her hands to the trunk again. The bark under her hands blazed white. The light ran upward, flooding the remaining branches, and for a moment the clearing was brilliant, painfully bright, the creature at the treeline flinching back into the darkness it had made.
Then the roots began to move. They pulled themselves up from the earth, the largest ones first, rising in arcs above the ground and then bending, shaping, the ends of them finding each other and locking together. What emerged was an arch, enormous, formed from the living roots of the tree, rising above the woman's head and curving over into a frame.
Cassian stared at it. He knew that shape. He'd just had his hand on it, standing in a circular chamber in the Department of Mysteries with Nicolas and Perenelle watching from above. He took a step forward before he could stop himself. It did nothing. The distance didn't change.
The woman stepped back from the trunk and faced the arch. She raised both hands to her mouth, and breathed. What came out of her hit the arch and spread across it the way smoke spread across glass, filling the frame, and where it settled the air inside the arch shimmered and thinned and became something that was and wasn't there at the same time.
The Veil.
The creature stirred at the treeline. It moved forward, and the ground under it went black with each step, and the darkness rolled ahead of it across the clearing floor. The woman's sigils flared against it, the formation she'd built throwing light in every direction, but the pressure was immense now, the boundary bending visibly.
The creature was enormous up close. The crown above it caught the light from the Veil and twisted it, and the shadows it cast fell in all directions, multiple and contradictory, as though it existed in several places at once.
The woman stepped aside. She moved to the left of the Veil, and the space between the creature and the arch opened up, and the darkness surged forward, rushing toward it and the Veil blazed as it hit, brilliant, white, the same light that lived in the tree's bark turned outward, violent, and the creature hit it and screamed.
The sound shook the clearing. Shook the vision. Shook whatever thin place Cassian was standing in. Cassian flinched, the edge of the vision warping around him like something about to tear. The darkness poured into the Veil and kept pouring, pulled in and through, and the creature went with it, the crown and the shadow... The Veil blazed and then went still.
The forest was half ruin.
The woman stood beside the arch with her hands at her sides and her head bowed, and the tree above her was scarred and dimmed.
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