valley floor the land heaved and bulged among the roots. Small stone walls wound across the valley, enclosing empty fields and ruined shade gardens.
Near the valley’s perimeter, stone houses were clustered into homesteads. But the closer the buildings stood to the valley’s center, the greater they became in number and size. Around the Heaven Tree’s trunk stood a small abandoned city bristling with diminutive towers.
But it was the Heaven Tree itself that most impressed the eye.
From top leaf to taproot, it was easily as tall as most Starhaven towers. From the great trunk grew six limbs at varying heights, all of which hosted leafy canopies the size of rainclouds. Save for the two at its zenith, each massive bough reached out to rest its end on a plateau of the valley’s steep walls. Around these landings stood the ruins of small villages.
Narrow bridges connected the plateau villages to the boughs. And along each massive limb ran a cobblestone road that tunneled into the trunk.
High above them, the cold autumn wind was blowing. It set the upper-most canopies to swaying and so filled the valley with a dappled wash of shifting shade and sunlight.
“So, Nicodemus Weal,” Boann asked, “do you think this will make a sufficient home?”
“Home?” He laughed. “It’s paradise.”
They hiked onto the nearest bough, where exploration revealed that the tunnels carved into the trunk led down to the valley floor. There they found the overgrown gardens teeming with rabbits and the lake filled with trout. In the small city, they claimed a sturdy building as their new home.
The next day brought a thunderstorm that swelled the stream and filledthe lake with muddy mountain runoff. For days afterward, the Heaven Tree’s leaves continued dripping fat raindrops across the valley.
Most mornings Nicodemus spent with Boann. She lectured on history, theology, and politics. Afternoons were for spelling drills in the wizardly languages with Shannon. After dark, he studied the Chthonic languages alone.
Two fortnights passed slowly, and then autumn descended upon them with a bout of freezing rain. The cold painted scarlet onto the Heaven Tree’s topmost leaves.
Shannon had not once needed to vomit logorrhea bywords. It seemed that Nicodemus had subdued the old man’s cankers with the emerald.
As the days grew colder, the leaves farther and farther down the Heaven Tree blushed red. But few ever fell.
It was a time of talking and reflection. After the evening meal, Nicodemus and Shannon often sat before the fire, recounting Simple John’s bravery or grieving for Devin.
With only three occupants, the valley could be a lonely place. Lectures and conversations had a way of exhausting themselves into silence.
So on some autumn afternoons, Nicodemus wandered. He scaled every inch of the Heaven Tree and the valley walls, discovering private grottoes and coves. He learned to hunt rabbits and goats, learned to fish the lake’s dark waters. But he never learned to cook. Those meals he prepared drew Shannon’s increasingly graphic but good-natured ridicule.
Sometimes after evening study, Nicodemus wandered the green valley floor. He would think of Devin or Kyran and grow glum, or of Deirdre and grow impatient. Time passed as before, slowly.
Then, one chill night, Nicodemus woke to hear Boann calling his name. Outside their house, he found the goddess standing in the middle of the cobbled street.
The three moons were full. Their glow filtered through the great boughs to fill the valley in a diffuse light.
“Walk with me down to the lake,” the goddess said in her calm, sing-song voice. Nicodemus followed her out of the small Chthonic city and into a field of waist-high grass. “Tonight,” she said, as they walked, “you begin an education that neither Shannon nor I could give you.”
Nicodemus said nothing. They reached a raised, grassy bank that overlooked the lake. In the moonlight, the usually limpid pool was purest black. Boann turned to him and said, “When we leave this place, you will be in the greatest danger that—”
“Goddess,” Nicodemus hissed and sank into a crouch. “Hold very still. Up ahead, on that rock, there’s a subtextualized kobold spellwright. Hisprose style is shoddy.” He crouched lower in the tall grass. The figure he could make out shone with dim violet sentences. The kobold was crouched atop a boulder that overlooked the water and, judging by his silhouette, was looking the other direction. “I don’t think he’s seen us,” Nicodemus whispered.
Boann did not move. “They call it warplay,” she said calmly. “It teaches young kobolds how to survive their constant tribal wars. I’m telling you this because they believe