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For the seventh dusk in a row, the human girl comes to our tree with an offering. She approaches on all fours, moving almost as clumsily as I do when I crawl from the knothole and amble out along my favorite branch. Her face is hidden by a ceremonial mask. It’s a simple wooden thing, not half so ornate as the ones I know humans fashioned in the time of our ancestors.
We called it the monster because we could, though none of us found the label to be particularly satisfying. After a certain point, Yerim started calling it the Logos Pilgrim. Which was understandable, seeing as how she was the most mystically inclined among us, as well as the most compassionate towards things we didn’t understand. And there were many things we didn’t understand. For one, where did it come from? And why was it here?
Once upon a time, there was a king who married a witch. Together, they had four sons and one daughter, and they were very happy as long as the king lived. When my father the king died and my oldest brother was crowned king, life went sideways for me, my sister, and our mother. The new king, our oldest brother, decided to use our sister as coin to buy our country’s safety. He planned to marry her to the king across a perilous border to our south.
Night to day. In Diyu, the Earth Prison, Chun Wei opened her eyes. “Day” in the realm of the dead registered only as a less pervasive chill to the stagnant air. Not that Chun Wei needed to breathe any longer. She unfolded from the lotus position she’d rested in, stretching and rubbing her balled fists against her lower back until her spine creaked. The dilapidated Guanyin temple had an intact roof and a semi-intact stone statue, hacked out of rock by denizens still hoping for salvation.
They were not so much rumors as warnings. Beyond the mountain that overlooked the plateau was an ancient forest, enormous and wild. It was dark and treacherous and full of dangerous animals. The warnings were not about the danger of the beasts, but rather the ancient legend of a knight who entered the forest to pray at a desecrated shrine. Why he decided to pray to a devil or demon was long forgotten, but the response from the evil that lived there was still known to everyone.
A scream rises from the bush. One last call to the living: a warning of pain. Katarina’s heard that same sound more times than she’s had hot dinners but still a ribbon of unease unfurls in her gut. She sets her cleaver down for a moment, shifting from one foot to the other.
Baba’s skin splits open with the sound of thunder. A parent’s intuition, he says, switching on the news. A ticker tape warning runs across the screen telling us to leave, leave, leave. The sky over our home is cracking but Baba will not go. He runs up to the roof instead and grows larger than I ever knew him to be.
The Map Sphere consists of thirteen stellar sails, circular in shape, arranged asymmetrically around the host star. They are easy to miss but look closely and you will see them: specks against the dark, clustered in no more than thirty degrees of arc. They are not really a sphere, this is true. Their total power production is so low you would be forgiven for doubting their function.
“This is it,” says Sister Auralee. She stamps on the ground beneath them. “This is where we’ll plant the church.” The turf yields to her bare feet, warm and spongy like bruised flesh. Grass peeks between her toes. She smells moisture, the tang of fibrous peat deep below, a thousand years of bones and dead leaves packed into the dirt.
It was a different kind of migration when our parents moved to Lagos; Dad, a young accountant, had got a job at the federal secretariat, and Mum, a teacher, lugging three boys aged one, three, and five, transferred later from her state civil service job to the Federal School of Arts and Sciences on the island.
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