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The world burned red.
Shapes flickered in the towering bonfire blaze, illuminating in snatches the wild grins of inhuman faces, the leaves woven into crowns and flashing in sprays of tangled hair, the gleaming eyes of onlookers hidden amongst the twisting branches and ink-black hollows of the trees.
Smoke and leaf-rot flooded Tirian's lungs, mingling into an ache of intoxicating decay as his fingers brushed those of a dryad girl and lost them just as quickly, tugged away by a figure with curved satyr horns and then again by the cool hands of a nymph, no distinction left between the chase and the pull of the dance.
The civilized world from which he had escaped over the city bridge before gate-close seemed one of ancient memory, a relic of some other life now swallowed up by all-consuming flame and the pounding of dwarf drums in distant caverns underfoot.
He'd lost his boots, he didn't know where, the moss-soft earth bare beneath his toes as he spun round and round the flames that burned the vision from his eyes.
The forest tilted.
The night shifted under his skin as the high flutes warbled, as if he had stepped suddenly up to the brink of some chasm, gaping, beckoning, every nerve in his body singing; he gasped, the air in his lungs thickening until it burned, until he might burst.
The light flared.
He had been here before.
He had been here before when the earth was young.
He was a stag bolting under a starlit sky.
He was a birch tree shivering in the raking winds with the peace of ages in her core, roots stretching down and down into the rich, soft earth.
He was the daughter of a babbling stream, rushing and leaping for joy in a chase with her sisters.
He was a human child running to his mother over the grassy glen with acorns in his muddy fists.
He was a nymph prince clutching his maiden tight in a wild romp around the fire.
He was a mouse burrowing into the warmth of its den.
He was a warrior in the heat of battle.
He was a bird soaring high over the waving treetops as if over a glimmering green sea.
He was spinning and spinning and spinning in someone's arms as the world flashed around him, new trees, new flames, new faces, old earth.
A branch cracked under his foot.
He lurched out from the circle and slammed back against the sturdy trunk of a gigantic oak.
The bonfire burned white in the center of the clearing. Unchanged.
The flutes and drums throbbed uninterrupted.
He gasped, coughed, caught his breath and steadied himself against the rough bark, regaining his feet only to sway with the overwhelming exhaustion of muscles turned to jelly by the untold exertion of vanished hours.
What time was it?
He glanced up, but couldn't see the sky for the blaze of the fire.
Surely it was nearing dawn if the swooping of the earth below him was anything to go by.
“Alright, Tir?”
Hands clapped down on his shoulders before he'd even noticed Hosha catching up to him, his friend's olive face flushed red in the firelight, wild curls flying free, brown eyes shining golden and level with Tirian's own as his gaze swept the Prince.
Tirian blinked.
“Tir?”
“What? Oh.” He shook his head sharply and blinked again. “Sorry, I lost my balance for a second.”
“Well, come back!”
The boy took his hand as if to tug him back into the swirling chaos, but Tirian resisted. “No, no, I’ve burned myself out this time, Hosh, and I think you have, too.”
“Me? What's wrong with me?” He moved to pull away, but stumbled when Tirian tugged him back, catching himself against the oak tree.
A sharp giggle caught in Tirian's throat, and Hosha's attempted protests turned reluctantly to a defeated grin until both boys were giggling.
“Alright, alright!” Hosha tried to wrench himself free again and almost tripped a second time, Tirian's giggles redoubling as he gripped his friend by both arms.
“Let me sit down for a minute,” gasped Tirian, dragging the bigger boy a few steps into the wood before collapsing into a little leaf-strewn hollow between two large roots.
His bones could have melted into the earth for sheer exhaustion.
Hosha dropped heavily down beside him just as a badger waddled out from some unseen hollow, carrying in his front paws a tray of little wooden cups.
“Iced wine, sirs?”
“Thank you,” said Tirian breathlessly, taking one and downing it almost without tasting its blackberry sweetness, the chill of it singing through him as the breeze nipped at his flimsy tunic and he handed the badger-sized cup back.
He hadn't even realized how thirsty he was.
“They'll be at it another hour or two, I shouldn't doubt,” said the badger sympathetically as he accepted Hosha's empty cup, too, impressed perhaps that they had kept up even this long.
Tirian smiled as the beast waddled off again, perhaps in search of further casualties.
He flopped onto his back. “Now I’m cold.”
“I’m not.” Hosha crawled on top of him and crushed him into the earth, eliciting a laugh that was mostly a wheeze as the air rushed from his lungs.
“Well don't suffocate me.”
Hosha put up only a halfhearted fight as Tirian wrestled the brunt of his weight off his chest, surrendering to rest his head on the Prince's shoulder as they ended in a comfortable tangle of limbs, this more than anything betraying his own exhaustion.
Tirian breathed deeply in the clear, cool October air as Hosha's curls tickled his cheek, watching firelight flicker on the branches overhead, the tremor of hoofbeats and distant drums playing softly against his back.
Echoes of ages long past.
“I saw them again.”
Hosha looked up sleepily with the soft rustle of leaves that had caught in his hair. “Really?”
“Mm.”
They were both silent again for a minute.
“I wonder why I never do.”
“Maybe you're not old enough.”
Hosha scoffed. “Three weeks. I am three weeks younger than you.”
“Important three weeks, I guess,” said Tirian with all the pride of one who boasted the briefly exclusive honor of being fourteen whole years old.
Hosha, who would be a meager thirteen until November, remained mutinously silent.
Tirian laughed. “No, I don't know why. It's so odd. But it doesn't feel odd, when it's happening, you know?”
“No,” said Hosha, again conceding a petty squabble to which he would have clung much more tightly had he been properly awake. “Tell me about it.”
“I don't know how to, exactly. It's like… coming to the end of the world, I suppose, right out of nowhere, one moment you're here and then you're an inch from the edge and you could step right off if you wanted, with all those ages and ages below. And then you’re somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Well, here, I think, but… before. Before the forest grew, and then when it was just brand new and all the trees were young. There used to be a stream that came right through this clearing. I wonder where it went.”
“How do you know? I mean, how do you know it was real?”
“Because I lived here.”
“What?”
“Not me, not Tirian, you know, but… oh, it's so difficult to describe.”
“Do you mean you had other lives, before now?”
“No, I asked Father last time and he said every life is individual. We don't get any more, I mean, so I couldn't have been someone else really. But he said sometimes we get their memories, and that's why people think like that. Because we've all lived, all of us here in the same place, and all that time and all those memories are still sleeping right here beneath our feet.”
“How does he know that?” asked Hosha, but this time his tone was one of awe rather than incredulity.
“He sees them too, sometimes. He said my mother saw them more than anyone he ever knew.”
For a moment the silence fell which always seemed to follow any mention of Tirian's mother; a strange and almost reverent pause at the reminder that such a person had existed, once, though neither had known her.
“I suppose she was odd, like you,” said Hosha at last, and Tirian laughed.
“I suppose so.” He was thinking of acorns in muddy little fists. “I wonder if she ever came here. I'd like to be her, if I could, even for a second.” He fell briefly into the picturesque thought—that perhaps his parents had danced here together, though he always found it so difficult to hold them both in his head at the same time—before latching again onto what he had been saying. “Father calls it a fraying edge. All our lives woven neatly and invisibly together, until you find a point where they’ve come loose. Well worn, I guess you could call it. Like here.”
“My father never talks like that,” said Hosha. “Though he did say you never know what you can expect when the wood people are about their rituals.”
Tirian smiled. “I saw a battle tonight. I wonder which one it was.”
“Father might know.”
“I think it was a very long time ago. My armor was strange, and our standard was green.”
“I wish it would happen to me. Nothing ever happens to me.”
“Maybe you're the thing that happens to other people. Maybe someday someone else will touch the frayed edge here and for a moment they'll be you.”
He felt Hosha draw a deep breath against his side—practically felt the thought filling his mind before he breathed out again with reluctant pleasure. “Tell me again how it feels.”
Tirian gazed blindly up into the flickering branches, sinking into himself, into the core of the world. He took Hosha's hand and pressed it into the pit between his ribs where his pulse still pounded so wildly it almost made him feel hollow.
“That's your heartbeat.”
“The earth has one too. I feel it here.”
Hosha said nothing, but he didn't move his hand even when Tirian let it go.
He almost thought he'd drifted off before at last he murmured “I don't want to go home tonight.”
“Then we won't,” said Tirian. “It's really morning, anyway.”
“Father will kill me if I'm not back in my room by sunrise.”
“You really think he doesn't know we're out here?”
“He lets me pretend he doesn't. He thinks it's funny when I fall asleep at the table.”
Tirian breathed a silent laugh. “My father doesn't even bother stopping me anymore. He says it's my place, out here. It would be a waste not to come out on nights like this, when all the wood is awake.”
“I wish we could trade fathers.”
Tirian scoffed lovingly. “You perfect idiot.”
Somewhere behind them, the light of a woodstove in a little earthen hollow glowed softly over the forest floor, accompanied by the clink of dishes beyond the thumping bonfire music as small forest creatures began to talk of breakfast.
Just as their ancestors had done in other warm, cozy dens a thousand years ago.
Hosha's breaths evened and slowed.
Smoke and leaf-rot mingled soothingly in the periphery of Tirian's fading senses as the high flutes warbled a song older than any living thing.
His eyes drifted shut against the canopy of shivering leaves edged in fire.
The world burned red.