The fire had gone out. I woke with the sort of old-man arthritic feeling I could explain only one way: winter was imminent.
The Ether in the air had grown denser, slower. The flows that had run between the branches in summer had thickened, clinging to trunks and rocks, moving only reluctantly now. Even the horned hares, which had bounded everywhere a few weeks earlier, had grown scarce. Their tracks in the thin snow formed broken, hesitant lines. They sensed the storm before I did.
I pulled on my wolfskin coat, tightened the necklace against my throat, and stepped outside.
The trunks were black, streaked with frost, and the entire undergrowth seemed turned inward. I pressed my palm against the bark of a century-old oak. Beneath my fingers, the wood was cold, but Ether still moved through it, faintly, sluggishly.
You’ll hold another month or two at this rate, I thought.
I took a step back, and my perception shifted without conscious effort, the way one blinks. The trees became columns of golden light, streaked with dark filaments where rot had begun its work. Some trunks still glowed, intact. Others were hollowed out, eaten from within as if by worms, with places where the Ether’s weave had collapsed and left voids not even the snow could fill.
Let’s take the walking dead.
I walked in an ever-widening semicircle around the cabin, and every tree I touched told me its story. Near the stream, a blackened ash held Ether frozen in irregular patches, disease or lightning, it hardly mattered: its trunk was straight, twice as thick as my thigh, perfect for a main beam. Higher up, a fir tree half-uprooted by the autumn winds still stood, roots hanging loose, wood still sound, Ether spinning in tightening spirals where sap should normally circulate. Farther on lay the remains of an oak split from top to bottom, probably by lightning; in some sections, the Ether had reconcentrated after the impact, and the wood there was harder than stone.
I felled only the condemned ones. The others still had a chance of seeing spring, and I had no desire to take that from them just to save half a day’s walking.
The day before, I had spent most of the afternoon shaping my new axe.
I had knelt beside an outcrop of sandstone. The choice would have made any prehistoric toolmaker wince: sandstone is too soft and too porous to hold an edge for long. But that was exactly what interested me. Its pores, I could fill. Its grains, I could tighten. My fingers brushed the rough surface, and I felt the sandstone’s weaknesses, the microcracks where water had frozen for centuries, pockets of poorly compacted sand, veins of quartz running below the surface, and above all the places where the rock was ready to break.
In five minutes, I had freed an angular block without shattering it, simply by encouraging the stone to separate where it was already weak. Shaping it took longer. Instead of striking it, I guided the Ether in small pulses to round off the sharpest angles and refine the edge into a clean bevel, densifying the stone as I thinned it. Every adjustment felt like a negotiation: there, you’re too thick… here, you can thin out without risking a fracture…
When I was done, the blade felt smooth beneath my fingers and its edge was dangerously sharp. Ether flowed through it in stable loops that seemed to reinforce the structure with every pass.
The handle came next: a straight ash branch, stripped of its knots, which I patiently scored with grooves using my flint knife so the stone could seat into it. With the quartz stylus, I then traced lines of Ether along the handle, where the wood fibers spread in disorder, guiding them rather than changing them. The wood gained density without losing its flexibility. When I tested it on a solid-looking trunk, the axe bit into the wood like butter.
“Lord,” I had said, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
It was still a stone axe, and I had no illusions about its chances against a real steel blade. But it was the best stone axe I had ever held, and incidentally the only one.
I had selected six trees in total, enough for the frame of my future roof, extra wall supports, perhaps even a lean-to for storing dry wood.
I started with the ash. The first blow bit into the sapwood, the second sank into the heartwood, and the third went through the trunk without rebounding or requiring excessive effort. The tree toppled with a shrill groan.
I stood there stunned for a moment.
“Too easy.”
The wood fibers, which frost normally made nearly as stubborn as steel, had parted along lines of weakness the Ether in the handle seemed to have separated on its own.
“This thing’s basically an atomic chisel.”
The cut was clean, almost polished, and its edges glimmered faintly in the low light, as if the bonds held the echo of the impact for a moment. I ran my thumb over the edge: not a single chip. I lifted the axe and carefully turned it in my hand to feel its balance.
“I’d better be careful.”
The next one was a gnarled oak, broad, dead standing, its bark cracked by frost. I aimed slightly above the base, where the wood’s natural stresses converged before splitting toward the branches. On the first strike, the blade sank five centimeters without bouncing. Ether quivered around the impact point, then stabilized.
“Holy shit.”
I smiled. I was holding a destructive tool no human technology had ever managed to produce.
I tied the ash trunk with willow vines. When I pulled, I felt the fibers creak under the strain, but they held. Dragging it was hell. The frozen ground helped it slide, but the weight cut into my shoulders, and I had to stop every twenty paces to adjust my grip and catch my breath. At every stop, I looked behind me.
Wherever I had passed, the Ether moved, more subtly than when I altered stone with my own hands. Frozen grass straightened slightly after me. Stones I had stumbled over lost their frost faster than the others. Once, a horned hare burst from a bush three meters away, stared at me with yellow eyes, sniffed the air, and, against all expectation, bolted in my direction.
“Am I changing the environment, or am I imagining things?”
The thought made me smile despite the fatigue. I had no way to test it except by coming back later.
The leaning fir was easier. Its own weight was already doing half the work, and it came down on the fourth strike. As I cleared the stump by cutting through its roots, I felt something release into the soil. I pressed both hands flat against the snow where the roots had been only a moment before.
“I can feel water. If I dig here…”
I went back to work. The last three trees took even less time, but it was enough to leave my forearms burning by the time the final trunk joined the others. That evening, I lit a fire, and the flames climbed high, fed by the Ether the cutting had released into the wood chips. While eating my soup of vegetables and dried hare meat, I looked at the six trunks lined up beside the cabin.
Around the clearing, the other trees held their ground against the cold, and I fully intended for them to keep doing so.