Arc One: The Road of Revenge
Chapter Three — The Tree That Beat
The morning was colder than usual.
Esteban woke an hour before sunrise, pulled on his coat, took his axe from its hook, and left the house the way he did every day. The sky was heavy and gray. The air smelled of rain, though the ground was still dry.
Few people were about at that hour. He passed the shuttered houses at the edge of Marina without looking at them, and followed the path into the woods.
He couldn't have said why he went deeper than usual. Maybe the nearer stands were picked over. Maybe he just wanted to put more distance between himself and the village for a while. He didn't think much about it. He kept walking.
The trees grew thicker. The sounds of Marina thinned out behind him until there was only wind in the branches and the crunch of dead leaves under his boots. After an hour he came into a part of the forest he hadn't visited in years.
He stopped and looked around.
There'd been an oak here. When he was a boy, people had talked about it: older than anyone's grandfather, a trunk so wide that three grown men couldn't link arms around it. Then a hard storm had come through last year, and nobody had mentioned the tree since.
He went on, scanning the ground. A few minutes later he found it.
It was not the tree he remembered.
The great oak lay on its side, half its roots ripped out of the earth like a hand torn from a sleeve. The trunk had split down the middle. Its branches, once as wide as a church, lay buried under soil and rotting leaves.
He walked up to it and laid his palm against the bark. Cold. Damp.
"Shame," he said.
He crouched to look closer. Beneath the roots there was a hollow, deep and oddly neat, not the kind of hole rot makes. He brushed away the dirt with his hand.
Then he stopped.
A faint blue light was coming from inside.
His first thought was water, a pool reflecting the sky. But the sky was gray, and the light was blue, a clean steady blue like the heart of a flame. He pushed aside the broken roots and reached in.
His fingers closed around something small and smooth.
He drew it out slowly.
It was about the size of a child's fist, and it wasn't like any stone he knew. The surface was unnaturally smooth, as though someone had spent years polishing it. When he held it up, light passed straight through. Deep in its center, a single point of brighter blue glowed.
The point pulsed.
Esteban frowned.
It pulsed again.
"What are you?"
He brought it closer. Slow and steady, like a tiny heart beating inside a piece of frozen sky.
He didn't know why he wanted to touch it. The sensible thing was to put it back and walk home. But his hand moved before the thought did, and his fingertip pressed the surface.
The forest went away.
Not literally. The trees were still there. But he couldn't feel them anymore. Heat flared in his palm and shot up his arm. His fingers locked around the stone. The heat climbed to his shoulder, to his chest, to the base of his skull, and he dropped to his knees and opened his mouth to scream.
Nothing came out.
His free hand clawed at his chest. His breath tore in and out. Something was moving inside him, not pain exactly, but not anything his body had a word for. The air around him shook. Dead leaves swept across the ground, though no wind had risen.
Then the lines came.
Blue lines, hanging in the air in front of his eyes, not drawn on anything. Symbols. Shapes. He tried to focus and they slid away from him. For one second something almost became words.
[ Asc▒▒▒▒▒ ]
Then it was gone, and he reached for it and closed his fingers on nothing.
He toppled forward. His hand hit the dirt. He lay there, gasping, counting seconds, and when he finally lifted his head the stone was still in his other hand.
But it was disappearing.
Not fading. It was sinking into his skin.
"What—"
He tried to pull it off. It wouldn't come. He tried harder, and the stone only slid deeper, a blue shape moving under the skin of his palm and starting up toward his wrist. He stopped fighting. There was no point. It slid up his forearm like something swimming, climbed past the elbow, and finally settled in his chest, over his heart, and stopped.
He gasped.
He looked down. A faint blue glow showed beneath his shirt. When he laid his hand flat over it, he felt a calm, steady pulse, as if he'd grown a second heart.
He stayed on the ground a long time. He didn't understand what had happened. He only knew that something was inside him now, and that there was no way to get it out.
When he finally started for home, the path seemed longer than it should have. His body wasn't weak. Something inside it had changed, and every step made him more aware of that strange beat in his chest.
At home, he locked the door and lit the lamp. He took off his coat and stood in front of the mirror.
Nothing.
No wound. No scar. No sign that any stone had ever gone in. Only a faint blue shimmer under his skin that showed when he looked at it closely, and went away when he looked at it directly. When he put his hand over his chest, there was nothing to feel.
"Maybe I was just tired."
He said it out loud. He didn't believe it.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his hand in his lap, thinking about the forest and the tree and the stone and the blue symbols that wouldn't hold still. Maybe it had been a trick of the light. Maybe a reflection. Maybe there had never been a stone at all.
Then he pressed his palm to his chest, and felt it.
One beat.
Another.
His eyes went wide. He lay awake long after the lamp burned out.
The next morning he woke before dawn and, for one blessed moment, forgot everything.
Then he felt it.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his hand over his chest. Still there.
He dressed. He took his axe. He left without a word to Mateo or anyone else in the village, and walked back to the same place in the forest without knowing what he hoped to find.
The fallen oak was where he'd left it. The hollow was still there. He dug through the dirt with both hands, then with the axe handle, then with his bare fingers, and found nothing. No stone. No trace of one.
He stood. He took a long breath and looked at the axe in his hands.
He took a firm grip and lifted it toward a young sapling.
And stopped.
Something was different, and it wasn't in his chest this time. It was in his hands. The wood of the handle, smooth and worn from twenty years of his sweat, did not feel like wood. It felt as though there was something inside it. Something waiting for him to ask.
Esteban lowered the axe and stared at it.
"What's happening to me?"
The forest said nothing.
But under his shirt, in the dark, the blue light pulsed once, patiently, like something that already knew the answer.