about him. Some of the souls working on preparations seemed offended. Three of them seemed to embolden one another to the point of action, and approached Cairn, and threw rocks at him. The folly of throwing rocks at a pile of rocks seemed never to have entered their minds. Thunk, Whirr, Walksfar, and Adam laughed at them. This—the fact that they had all seen humor in the same thing at the same time—seemed to establish a friendship among them, such that without needing to speak of it they then parted on amicable terms.
Adam and Walksfar hiked back to Camp and found Cairn standing in the middle of it, sporting a few new rocks. Around him played the twelve children of Adam and Eve. These were now almost as tall as many of the souls who dwelled in Eltown.
Adam went and sought out Eve in their cabin. She could see in his aura that some change had come over him and so they went out and walked in the woods together. “Changes are in the offing,” Adam said, “and I believe that we must prepare for a journey.”
“Camp has been a good place for us,” said Eve, “but staying here has not brought us any nearer to our goal of finding our mother, Spring, and so it is time for us to leave.”
“There will be hardships,” Adam warned her, thinking of what it would be like to travel with the twelve children.
“I know that better than you,” Eve returned. Adam looked away, ashamed. Eve shrugged. “Perhaps some of our new friends will come with us, and ease our burdens.”
Later that evening, when the air had gone calm, they heard the distant sound of axes striking into wood, and a cheer went up from the river.
Adam and Eve walked the next day to a vantage point from which they could see the work in progress. A hundred souls were up in the branches of the tree, hacking off its boughs so that the trunk could be brought down more easily; these crashed to earth every so often, each as great as a large tree in its own right. Workers tied ropes to these so that they could be dragged down the slope. Many more ropes had been made fast to the trunk itself; these all pulled in the same direction, being attached at their lower ends to old stumps or to thick stakes driven deep. Hacking away at the base of the trunk was not just a single woodcutter but several teams of them, each gnawing away at a different spot.
As that day, and the day after, went by, their excavations merged into a single notch, large enough that twenty souls could stand upright inside of it and swing axes. By that point the tree was entirely limbless, just a bare pole projecting from the top of the hill, beginning to list in the direction that the ropes were pulling. It seemed for a while that it might not come down in a single moment but rather just lean farther and farther until it came gently to rest. But in the middle of the third day there was a crack, immensely loud, which was heard everywhere and then echoed from all of the surrounding slopes. The trunk toppled slowly. Or so it seemed from a distance. But the frantic scurrying of souls all around it hinted at the true speed and violence of its fall. A spume of aura shot up into the air from its stump, as when the lid is removed from a boiling pot, and dissipated into the sky. From the souls on the hillside a cheer went up.
Then it turned into a scream as the hill shrugged.
That was the extent of its movement, as it seemed from afar: a slow heaving, as when a sleeping beast inhales deeply and then heaves out a great shivering sigh.
A disturbance flowed from the hill’s apex downward, like wind blowing over grass, gathering strength rather than dissipating as it propagated down toward the riverfront. On a closer look this consisted of souls, and all the stuff that they had brought with them. Like crumbs being shaken from a cloth they tumbled into the rivers on either side of the hill, cluttering the water for some moments with all sorts of stuff and detritus.
A moment later they were all buried under a second, darker and heavier tide that had been shrugged off of the hill by a stronger convulsion. This was the hillside