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Once upon a time, a time that was neither my time nor yours, nor anybody’s time but theirs, there was a king. He had ten children, smart and strong and each more beautiful than any fair maid in the land. He loved them all, and they knew nothing of pain nor loneliness. The old king had a wife, and he loved her as surely as the sun rose. When they had their first child, he rejoiced, ordering feasts and parties that lasted weeks. He did the same for the second, and the third, and for each after that. He did not for the eleventh, for even the fair queen, doted on by fortune as she was, could not gamble life as many times as she did without losing. Indeed death, learned of her tricks of ginger and melissa, stole the queen and her child away under his cloak. The king grew fearful and, seeing death’s shadow loom over his children, swept them close, keeping them ever safe in thick stone walls and under the watchful eye of their father.
The children grew, and having nothing to do but read, studied art and science and magic. The eldest taught herself to speak with birds, so that they might carry messages to the friends left beyond the castle walls. The second played music, for he missed the traveling minstrel’s son dearly. The third picked up paint and ochre, bringing tales, real and fictional, to paper. The fourth tinkered with fox witchery, learning tricks and mischief so that she might provoke more harmless chaos to brighten their days. The fifth studied literature, the sixth fire, and so it went on. The tenth sought darkness. They learnt to dissolve into shadow, to become the black in the corner of the vaulted ceilings, to walk the paths of night.
There came a time when the tenth child grew rebellious, as all good children eventually become. The child, named Arihaestyl, found the paths and places from the paintings of their brother. They danced through the streets of the citadel in the dead of night, stealing small trinkets for their siblings. And for a time, they were content.
Beyond the citadel was a forest. The sort of forest where magic of darker times seized hold of life and twisted it into a mockery. In the center of the wood was a clearing, and in the center of the clearing was a tree. A good tree, sturdy and tall, but no different to the trees surrounding it. Among the branches of the tree hung string. Spun from light into darkness, draped and knotted just so. From the clearing to the forest’s edge ran a footpath. Well-trod, and straight as a good sharp knife.
In the city proper was a child swinging a night-wolf in mad circles. In the lower town was a child leaping black to black down the road. At the forest’s edge was a child staring at a footpath that had not been there the night before. Nor, indeed, the night before that, nor before that, nor before that. On a footpath in the woods was a child swept away from sense by curiosity. In a clearing in the woods was a child dancing wild around a tree. Amidst the roots of a black laden elm lay a child in slumber.
Once upon a time, a time that was neither mine nor yours nor anybody’s time at all, there was a citadel. Within, the bells rung, flinging down the wrath of morning into the ears of those victim to the small mercies of working. The nine siblings of the child gathered in the corridor to await their return. When they did not, the nine siblings, as their father once did, grew fearful. Their sibling did not stray beyond the citadel, and did not stay out past mid-morning. By the eve, bells tolled once more, shrieking for the return of the child. The king sent riders out in all directions from the castle. They found nothing, woods dense and featureless as ever. For a week, a month, a year, they found no trace of the child. Three years later, the child's death date was written into the genealogies. Ten years later, the king died in grief. Twenty, and the siblings fell into war. Twenty-five, and the kingdom was kingdom no more.
Once upon a time, a time that belongs to nothing and nobody, there is a city. In the middle of a city there is a park. In the park there is a forest. In the forest there is a clearing. In the clearing there is an elm tree, scraping the ceiling of the world. Cradled in the earth cracking roots sleeps an eternity’s worth of skeletons. Draped in the canopy of the elm, light spins into a web of darkness, and the elm grows an inch. And there stands a child on the edge of the clearing. And the elm grows through the fragile membrane of reality.