Aldred’s Journal

For three weeks I have stared upward, and the forest will not let me look away.

"This page was discovered pressed between the roots of an ancient Eldertree, the parchment yellowed with age but the ink still legible. The distinctive hand and signature mark it as belonging to Aldred of the High Boughs, the famed scholar whose observations of the forest canopy changed our understanding of the Eldertree realm. The date places it during his first expedition, before he made his remarkable discovery."

Aldred’s Journal

The Fourteenth Day of Leaffall, Year 287 of the River Accord

My neck is killing me.

Three weeks I’ve been camped beneath these impossible trees, and I’ve spent most of that time staring upward like some slack-jawed fool. My colleagues at the Scriptorium would have a field day if they could see me now: Aldred the meticulous, Aldred the precise, reduced to lying flat on his back in the moss with a crick in his spine and ink stains on his best traveling cloak.

But I cannot stop looking up.

There is something there. I am certain of it now.

At first, I thought it tricks of light—the way the sun catches the canopy and scatters in patterns that almost, almost look like structures. Windows, perhaps. Walkways. But light does not make sound, and I have heard voices. Distant, yes, barely more than whispers carried on the wind, but voices, nonetheless. Singing, sometimes. Laughter. The cadence is wrong for birdsong, too measured for the forest’s natural rhythms.

Yesterday, at dusk, I saw movement between the boughs. Not birds. Not branches swaying. Something deliberate. Figures, perhaps, though so high up and so quick I cannot be certain. They moved with purpose, crossing from one trunk to another in ways that defied sense. I shouted up, waved my arms like a madman. Nothing. Either they did not hear me, or they chose not to answer.

My supplies are running low. The bread has gone stale, the cheese harder than my boot leather. I should turn back, report to the Scriptorium that the Eldertree Forest is remarkable but unremarkable, full of trees and moss and the usual tedious flora one expects from ancient woodland.

But I won’t.

Because this morning, just after dawn, I saw it clearly: a bridge. Silver-white and impossibly delicate, strung between two trees at a height that would make an eagle dizzy. It caught the early light and blazed like captured moonlight, and for a moment; just a moment; I saw figures crossing it. Tall and graceful, moving with the ease of those who have never known the ground.

I must find a way up there.

The lowest branches are still thirty feet above my head, the trunks too smooth to climb. I am a scholar, not a squirrel. My hands are made for quills, not clawing at bark. But I will find a way. I must.

There is a civilization in these trees. I am certain of it. Not nestled on the forest floor like sensible folk, but suspended in the heights, living among the clouds and canopy. Who are they? How do they build? How do they live?

The questions consume me.

Tomorrow I will attempt the eastern trunk. It has a split low enough that I might wedge myself into it and begin the climb. My rope is fraying, my hands already blistered from previous failed attempts, but what is scholarship without sacrifice?

If I fall and break my neck, let this journal serve as record: Aldred of the High Boughs died doing what he loved; staring upward at something extraordinary and being too stubborn to look away.

The forest is vast. The canopy, vaster still. And somewhere above me, beyond the reach of ordinary sight, there is a world I cannot yet fathom.

I will reach it. Or die trying.

Probably both.

Aldred

P.S. - I have decided to call them the Skyward Kin, for lack of better term. It seems fitting for a people who have forsaken the earth entirely.