Chapter 39: Crystalsong Forest
(I sketched and painted this in Procreate whilst listening to the latest Audible book in the Eleanor Swift series by Verity Bright, so whenever I look at this painting now, all I can think of is a 1920s lady detective. - Chaiga T. Cheska)
For a moment, no one spoke. The room held its breath, and every person in it felt the faint outline of Nix lingering in the shadow between the wardrobe and the bookcase, his eyes the only part of him still visible, two points of hazel-green catching the hearth light. What he had shared seemed to settle over them like a heavy mantle, a weight that pressed across their shoulders and tightened the air. Tavik stood where he had left him, close enough to reach out and touch the dark if he wanted to, but it was towards Olis, seated by the fire only a few steps away, that he turned the sharp edge of his rising frustration.
“You got him to explain, then. Are you going to help him or what?” Tavik snapped, his voice high and cutting, protective of Nix yet unsettled by this calm authority who had drawn a confession from his cousin and now offered nothing in return.
Oren was on his feet at once, crossing to him. He set a hand on Tavik’s arm. “Tav,” he murmured, giving his brother an admonishing thump on the shoulder. Tavik shoved him back, and Bran sprang upright, shouting, “Stop it. How is this helping?”
Tavik glowered at his brothers, then flung a sharp gesture towards Olis.
“You wanted to know, and now you know, so what? That’s it? You just let him sit there in the dark afterwards, and that’s the end of it?” His voice rose, something coiling through him that he didn’t recognise, something that felt as though it had been sleeping in the marrow of his bones and was only now waking. It gathered itself like a storm tightening behind his ribs.
Oren reached for him again, firmer this time, and Tavik jerked away as if the touch had struck a nerve. The fury broke open inside him, raw and bright, as though a spark had fallen into dry tinder and the whole of him had caught at once.
“We have travelled miles to find this man, to find the Burrowbacks, and is this it? He pressures Nix into sharing what happened to him, and then what?” Tavik’s voice cracked and gave out. He stood there with his mouth still open, breathing hard, fists curling and uncurling at his sides, gesturing wildly at Olis, at Timatticus, then back into the shadow at Nix, who watched him with wide, worried eyes.
Oren reached out again, his hand closing firmly around Tavik’s shoulder. He refused to let go, anchoring himself beside his brother, a steady presence and nothing more. Tavik folded his arms tight across his chest and glared at Olis, Timatticus and Harthos, his jaw clenched so hard it looked as though he might grind the fury down to dust between his teeth. He tried to gather himself, drawing in sharp breaths as though pulling loose threads back into place. The storm inside him was ebbing, leaving behind a raw heat and the creeping sense that he had made a spectacle of himself, yet also the stubborn certainty that every word had needed saying, even if some part of him couldn’t have told you why it mattered quite this much.
Bran stared at him with wide, startled eyes. Tavik never lost his temper like this, and the sight of him shaking with the remnants of it seemed to tilt the room slightly, as if the ground beneath them had shifted in ways none of them were prepared for.
Nix shifted in the shadows and stepped out to stand on Tavik’s other side. He tilted his head slightly, studying his cousin with a quiet, curious focus, as though trying to read the shape of Tavik’s emotions in the air around him. Then Nix lifted his hands and moved them through the space just in front of Tavik’s chest. The room watched as tiny gossamer threads of blackness rose from Tavik’s body, drawn out by Nix’s deft fingers. They shimmered faintly, delicate as strands of soot caught in a beam of light.
As the threads left him, Tavik felt the fury draining from his chest, pulled free as though the anger had been woven into those dark filaments all along. He stared at them, mesmerised, watching his cousin gather the threads and weave them into a shifting pattern in the air. When Nix released it, the fragile lattice drifted upwards, floating like a spider’s web carried on a soft breeze, until it dissolved completely before reaching the ceiling.
Nix laid a hand on Tavik’s shoulder, light as settling ash. “That was mine,” he said. “The anger. It’s been sitting in you a while, I think, through the tether.” His ears dipped, low and apologetic. “I didn’t realise. I’m sorry.”
Tavik’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. Nothing came. He looked down at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else, then sank down to sit where he stood, back against the wardrobe, knees drawn up, and wouldn’t look at any of them.
“Sorry,” he mumbled to the floor. A pause. “That wasn’t...” He didn’t finish that one either and scrubbed both hands hard over his face.
Olis smiled, a soft, amused curl of expression. “If only all the world’s emotions could be resolved by pulling foreign threads from a person, what a world this would be.”
Timatticus and Harthos exchanged a glance, quick and layered, something passing between them that Oren could not decipher. It struck him that the two Burrowbacks seemed to have been focused on very different things, their attention drifting in currents he could not follow. The thought unsettled him, a small ripple of unease beneath his ribs.
Timatticus cleared his throat, his spines rustling faintly, and laid a paw on Olis’s shoulder before turning back to the boys.
“This is partially what I was talking about,” Tavik began, his voice steadier now as he stood back up. “Everyone else seems to know something before we do. What are you not telling us, Olis?”
Oren squeezed Tavik’s shoulder, a quiet pressure meant to steady him. “Tav…”
Olis inclined his head, the smallest of movements, as though whatever needed deciding between the three of them had already been decided before a word was spoken. “You are right, Tavik, to ask, and yes, you deserve an explanation, though it is not out of malicious intent that others hold things from you.”
Olis’s gaze drifted towards Harthos at the doorway. Harthos still stood with his arms folded, his back set against the door they had entered through, as if guarding the threshold from whatever might try to follow them in. The dim light caught along the edges of his spines, giving him a faint, bristling silhouette.
Timatticus had been watching Olis closely, his eyes narrowing with a quiet alertness. Before the scribe could continue, Timatticus stepped in, his voice poised on the edge of interruption, as though he sensed the moment shifting and needed to catch it before it slipped past.
“Tavik, we are Burrowbacks, and you are in a Burrowback chieftain’s house, which is essentially a vessel, as are all our shelters, because we are portal creatures and are not originally from MirMarnia. Our home world was dying, so we called out to Olis here and travelled with our people across the star systems to MirMarnia and created a home for ourselves here many centuries ago. Yes, we are very old beings.”
Timatticus smiled at Bran, who had been drawing breath to ask exactly how old the Burrowbacks were. The smile softened the sharp lines of his spines, and for a moment the faint blue dust along their tips caught the light, shimmering like frost on stone. It was the kind of smile that suggested he had heard that question before from countless young travellers across countless years, and that the answer was far older and stranger than any of them could yet imagine.
Timatticus looked at each of them and continued.
“Because we wanted to show our gratitude for this new home, we use our abilities to help other souls across all stars so that they may be given a chance at life. This is the way of our people. You have experienced this as the small tree house within the Eldertree Forest, a sanctuary when you needed it, with books on those shelves for you to help prepare yourselves for what was to come. We cannot directly influence your life paths, but we can offer hope along the way, and those who are friends with us can also offer guidance and hope, such as a Root Guardian, Talanooks, and those who live in the Canopy City high above the Eldertree. This room you are in now has been travelling to bring you to safety, which is why Olis needed Nix to reveal what happened to him, so we could learn where to take you.”
As he spoke, his voice carried the weight of centuries, soft yet resonant, like something shaped by long winds and older skies. His gaze moved over the boys with a quiet steadiness, as though he were trying to place each of them within a constellation only he could see. The mention of the tree house seemed to stir the air itself, calling up the memory of its warm woodland scent, the soft glow of its acorn lanterns, the sense of being held by something ancient and kind. The idea that the room around them now was a vessel, shifting through unseen pathways to bring them to safety, brought a greater sense of wellbeing to each of them as their awareness grew.
Oren, Tavik, Bran and even Nix were frozen in place, their mouths hanging open in the same stunned silence, as though the air itself had turned solid around them. It was Oren who finally realised, clearing his throat in a small, awkward sound that seemed to ripple through the room and wake his brothers and cousin from their trance.
Olis lifted a hand as they all began to speak at once, their voices rising in overlapping bursts of confusion and wonder. “I know you have questions, and I expect I will be the one to try to answer them all, but we do have time pressing us to make haste while we can, so I must urge you to save your questions until later.”
Olis looked towards Harthos again and received a slow nod. The Burrowback reached out and touched the nearest totem with two fingers. Bran watched, fascinated, as the totem lit up from top to bottom in a brief cascade of intricate green patterns, each line glowing like living vines before fading back into the plain grain of the wood. It was as if the totem had momentarily remembered its true nature and then tucked it away again.
Harthos stepped away from the door and pulled it open. What lay beyond was not the Burrowback settlement they had seen before, but a deep forest unlike anything the brothers or Nix had ever imagined. Trees rose in towering columns of indigo blues and shadowed greens, their trunks catching the faintest glimmers of light like polished stone. Around their bases grew clusters of strange crystalline formations, jutting from the earth in jagged blooms. Some of the crystal structures were as tall as the trees themselves, catching and scattering the light in shards that ricocheted through the forest in a riot of colour.
The brilliance of it confused the senses. Light fractured and reformed in shifting hues, making it impossible to tell whether it was dawn or dusk or some hour that did not belong to any familiar day. The whole forest seemed suspended in its own time, a place where colour and shadow breathed together, and the air shimmered with a quiet, otherworldly pulse.
Olis placed a hand on Timatticus’s shoulder and smiled at his friend. “Thank you, old friend, for helping us find this place. We will be in touch, I promise.”
Bran scrambled over to his brothers and cousin, then looked up at Timatticus and Harthos. “We are leaving you?” he asked, an edge of fear creeping into his voice. He had not realised until that moment how safe he felt with the Burrowbacks, how their presence wrapped around him like a warm cloak he did not want to shrug off.
“We will see each other again, Bran,” murmured Timatticus, smiling down at him. “I can guarantee you there will be many more meetings with our kind for you.”
His voice held a gentle certainty, the kind that seemed to settle into the air like soft earth after rain. The faint shimmer of blue dust along his spines caught the shifting forest light, giving him an almost celestial glow. Bran felt a reassurance settle in his chest, though the ache of parting still tugged at him, small and insistent.
Bran smiled faintly and exchanged a wondering look with his brothers and cousin, each of them caught, for a moment, in the same quiet thought. What futures might they have with the Burrowbacks? In Tavik, Oren and Nix’s eyes, he saw the same urgency he felt himself, a hunger to learn more, to understand more, yet also the shared awareness that this was not the moment to ask.
Olis gestured to the open doorway and the forest beyond. “This is the Crystalsong Forest, as it was over four hundred years ago, long before any of you were born, which is why it is the safest place you can be while I teach you how to anchor your magic. We have just a few days together, but I feel that it will be just enough to help you on your way. Your packs are waiting for you just outside the door, brought along courtesy of Harthos here, who has been our guard during this journey back in time.”
The forest’s fractured light spilled through the doorway, catching on the edges of their faces, indigo shadows, crystalline glimmers, colours that did not belong to any present-day hour. The air itself seemed to hum with age, with memory, and with the strange stillness of a world suspended in its own ancient breath.
Tavik looked sharply at Harthos, who met the boy’s stare without flinching. “You’ve been guarding us? I thought you were irritated by us and our behaviour, or by our lack of knowledge!” Tavik said, still faintly affronted by the gruff noises Harthos had made earlier.
Harthos smiled, and his eyes twinkled with a warmth Tavik had not expected. “While matters here have unfolded as they have, I have been deflecting the searches of the Caelvarae, who have thrice tried to break our boundaries whilst the rest of you were occupied with other things. I do not judge you, boy. It is your youth that perceives this so.”
The words settled over Tavik like a quiet, unexpected weight. The faint shimmer of green light from the totems caught in Harthos’s spines and gave him an almost ancient, sentinel-like presence. Tavik felt the last remnants of his indignation loosen, replaced by the uneasy realisation that while he had been flaring with emotion, Harthos had been standing guard against gods and he hadn’t noticed any of it.
Tavik felt himself flushing, heat rising from his pointed ears down the length of his neck. He sighed and cleared his throat, as if trying to shake loose the uncomfortable truth that he had far more to learn about what it meant to be a warrior, especially one who could not afford to be ruled by his own inhibitions. Oren noticed the shift and ruffled Tavik’s hair, earning an aggravated swipe from Tavik and a long-suffering eye roll from Bran, who was rapidly reaching the end of his patience with his older brothers’ antics.
Overcome by curiosity, Nix slipped between his preoccupied cousins and moved to the doorway. He stood at its threshold and looked out into the strange forest, letting the scents and sounds wash over him. The rich mineral tang of the earth rose up like a breath from the ground itself. The canopy above glowed with a deep, green intensity, and a slight, sharp breeze, cool and northern, edged with the promise of mountains, brushed against his skin.
Nix’s ears shifted and twisted, catching the faint rustle of small creatures moving through the undergrowth. Beneath that, deeper and slower, came the distant snapping of twigs, larger beings, pausing as they sensed him, sniffing the air with the same cautious curiosity he felt toward them. The forest seemed to be listening back.
Olis stepped beside him, the movement quiet but sure, and pushed the door open wider. He beckoned to the others, the crystalline light spilling across his robes as though welcoming them into a world that had been waiting for centuries.
~~~
Author’s Note:
I hope you enjoyed this chapter and that, if you’ve been following the story since the beginning, you’re finding some answers in these recent chapters.
Though it’s already been quite exciting, I feel we’re only just really getting started!
-Chaiga T. Cheska
