Mirrortide

I.

It seems only right that, if I am to tell you of the golden three, I start with the eldest.

Somnia, as I’ve known her, is the wisest of all the gods I have so far met. If you were to meet her, you might call her quiet, or perhaps even standoffish. She rarely meets eye-to-eye, hiding instead behind veils of smoke and steam, and says no more than is strictly needed. Conversation with her rests in the awkward spaces between speech, where silence shuffles on its loud feet. But you would find that in her few words, she carefully carves out meaning into its purest form. You would find yourself suddenly aware of your own tongue, that takes your thought and wraps it in layers so messily as to make all its meaning ambiguous. While her words are plucked from your entire past and future. They distil your lived experience into a phrase so finely-tuned it can be digested perfectly by you alone.

Don’t you see? For me, I need dozens of words to explain the goddess. For her, as I’ve often marvelled at, she would need only few. Omniscient, perhaps, might be enough to say. But I don’t have the goddess’ gifts, so that word alone does not seem enough.

She has always been wise, as I’ve been told, but not always so quiet. Wisdom is nurtured from curiosity and, as a child, she was ever-curious of the world around her. And curiosity, for her, came in the form of an endless imagination, that tumbled from her in meandering tales. It’s something that runs in their family, it seems, since you’re well aware how loud her youngest sister ended up with all her songs and dances. But this was before Melodia, and before Cordelia, and before even me. This was before she found the World Tree and, in its roots and branches, peered into all tomorrows and all yesterdays.

It’s not a story I ever saw, but it is one I trust to be true, since I heard it from Somnia herself some time ago. So, if you will allow me, I will tell you of how all of time became imprinted on her skin.

---

II.

Somnia was the first born to the Sun and Spring, making her the first daughter of the Mother goddess. She was born into the worlds before you and me, before any human graced this green world or any Elysian sat upon the blue sky. So, down here, the world was awake, but quiet and still – adorned only with verdant jungle and forest. No chittering bugs or barking beasts, only emerald leaves as far as the eye could see.

Though your world would have looked very different, Elysium would hardly have changed. Her home, as is mine, found its perfection long ago and has remained in its warm equilibrium ever since. The rolling fields bear swollen harvests and orchards creak heavy with saccharine fruits, all tended by Spring’s gentle hand.

Spring, mother of all things, brought Somnia often through the fields when she was young. She taught her how to prune and sow and shear, and Somnia listened eagerly. But Elysium had found perfection long ago, so little work is needed to tend its fields. Grains grow too large and splutter their kernels into piles on tilled soil; apples pluck themselves when ripe and sleep in the grass until stumbled upon. They do not rot or spoil, they wait patiently until hands find them. There is little to do in Elysium, since the world offers itself up readily.

So Somnia, as a child, found entertainment within her own mind. She had eyes like kaleidoscopes, I’m told, because she saw patterns in the world that others did not. Her mother told me that Somnia would tell many tales as they wandered the fields of Elysium, fanciful histories that told how the world around them came to be.

“These two are husband and wife,” Somnia had said once, pointing at two apple trees. “You can tell because they’ve been dancing.”

Spring and Somnia had been walking side-by-side through a long line of apple trees, collecting the fallen fruit in baskets. Her mother looked but, to her, there were only green trees and swollen red fruit.

“What makes you say that?” she replied.

“They’re still holding hands,” Somnia said, pointing to where branches of the two trees had entwined.

Spring told me it was a miraculous thing, the world that Somnia saw. It was always shifting and becoming anew. She painted colourful imagination and fluid motion into a static world.

On this occasion, when they had finished gathering fruits and were returning home to arrive before the Sun, Somnia had changed her story. Pointing at the same two apple trees, she said,

“They’re not married, actually. They’re mortal enemies.”

“How can you tell?”

“They’re wrestling with each other because they want more space,” she said, pointing again at where the tree branches had intertwined.

---

III.

Her father, the Sun, was often away, visiting brothers, sisters, and half-siblings amongst the stars, so Somnia saw him only in evenings. They would sit, the three of them, in the Sun’s great palace of glass as they dined on the many fruits of Elysia.

Somnia would often talk for extended bouts, weaving fanciful stories about what she and her mother had seen that day. She had not, at this time, developed her ability to condense speech into its smallest form. So, instead, her tales would twist endlessly, bending and splintering like rivers through forested hills.

Her father, the Sun, would listen eagerly though, chin on wrists, savouring each word since he would soon have to leave again. He was mute through her tales, only oohing and ahhing, like any great audience member, to spur on her emphatic stories.

“The clouds roll along the hills because they’re tired from flying for so long. Or, actually, maybe they just like to walk,” she would say. And the Sun and Spring would only smile at each other, mouths full of nectar, proud of the endless imagination of their young daughter.

But, as Somnia grew older, her tales became shorter. It wasn’t for a lack of imagination, or wit, but a lack of stimulus. She had soon told every story she could and was left uninspired with the perfect, yet static, world.

One evening, when the three of them were dining and Somnia was now nearer adult than child, her story left silence where it ended. Their meal was not finished, and the Sun needed not leave yet, but she had no more to say. The glass palace became reverberatingly quiet. The Sun and Spring looked at each other, unsure what to do.

The Sun, ever bound by her endless stories, was left to find his own words in the gaps. He spoke splutteringly of what he had done that day, where he had travelled, and who he had met. That particular day, he had come down from Mount Astra, here, to our green world. He had visited the World Tree, whose branches drape over the forest-tops and whose roots dig into each of the many worlds.

Though it was the closest world to Elysium, he did not visit it often back then. There were far too many siblings and half-siblings more in need of attention at that time, even before there were two-dozen worlds. This story may have been different had he been elsewhere that day. I wonder what might have become of Somnia had she visited the Sun’s brother, the Sea, instead or his sister, the Moon. But there are no such stories, and never could have been, since the threads of time declared it this way. So, she heard first about this world and thus begged to visit this world first.

---

IV.

The Sun was protective of his daughter, as he is of all dear things. But Spring has always been in favour of growth, which needs one to be curious and independent, and the worlds were yet to be inhabited by the wickedness of our modern world. So, the Sun relented. He allowed Somnia to visit the green world, but only on two conditions – that she stay atop Mount Astra, and that she be already back home before he returned in the evening.

She agreed to the terms, of course, and set out the next morning, eager to explore a brand-new world, even if just from a mountaintop.

She found where the snowy peak of Mount Astra passed by, just below the edge of Elysium. And, what she found first when she stepped onto it, was just how cold the world was.

Elysium is ever-warm, stable and static in all ways. There is no Sun in the sky, of course, since the Sun walks the world himself. But even while he roams the cosmos, veins of diamond in the soil retain his radiance and keep the world forever temperate.

The green world, your world, in contrast is cold by nature – a desolate rock in an empty starscape. It is the Sun that brings warmth as he turns his eye onto it. Without him, your world might be cold as Winter, who is rarely ever visited, even by her sister, Spring.

So, as she stepped onto that mountaintop, her breath became a veil of vapour before her. She was a daughter of the Sun, so the Sun burned, in some way, within herself. Not quite as bright, not quite as burning, but her skin was faintly lit and warm-to-touch. So, where her skin met the cold air, it bore steam in strands as if she were boiling away to visit the stars above.

Without the Sun overhead, since he was visiting another of his many siblings, this new world was blindingly dark. Somnia had to wait a while, standing faintly bright as a star atop Mount Astra, as her eyes adjusted from a lifetime in the ever-bright Elysium. When finally the world crept into view from the utter black, she saw a world unlike what had been described to her. It was no green world, but indigo and silver. Treetops were like a crumpled cloud-top beneath her, blue from the dark but lined in the silver of her smiling aunt, the Moon; in the distance, the land became shifting black sea, reflective pools that somewhere seamlessly became the horizon; and the black sky above was filled with thousands of white specks that had never been present in the ever-bright Elysian sky.

There, even just on the mountaintop, her imagination began to whir. Her many stories began to flood again as her mind wove new wonder out of the world around her. Those bright specks? Perhaps they were many smiling faces, like her aunt, the Moon, or her father, the Sun. They formed families and communities and groups and cliques.

One bright speck, she considered to be the queen of all those thousand peoples, since they seemed to all revolve around her. Or perhaps, those thousand specks were spiralling in hunt, and that bright spark was their prey, she thought. Or that bright speck was just tired and taking a rest while all the others ran around it in play, she thought.

Sat atop Mount Astra, she was too enraptured by the swirling stars above to notice that she was slowly sinking into the snow. Where her fingertips rested by her side, snowmelt pooled and began to trickle as tiny streams off the mountainside. The warmth of her sun-skin coaxed life into the frozen peak and soon she was sat in a shallow pool at the mountaintop, precariously cupped in snow and ice.

She noticed all-too-late. Since, as soon as she looked down, the snow beneath her buckled. A fresh torrent of snowmelt thrust her over the mountainside and she slipped and slid down to the base of Mount Astra. She was carried far beyond the treeline, deep into the forest by the frothing flood, until she was finally thrown to a splutteringly rest where the torrent lost interest and sank into the soil.

The sudden flood had carved a channel within the mountainside, winding and narrow as a river, but now forever empty and dry. You can still see where it carved, there, on the eastern side. But, for all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen it fill, not in rain nor flood. So, I would think, perhaps, that Somnia learned her lesson and now refrains from sitting on mountaintops.

---

V.

Gods and goddesses are far more resilient than you and me, so Somnia made that torrential journey unscathed, or so she said. But she had been tossed somewhere entirely new in an unknown world. She tried to peer between the dense canopy of leaves, but even where they opened to starry skies, there was no Mount Astra in sight. Surprising, I’m sure, since I too am yet to find anywhere on the continent so far as to make Mount Astra seem small.

Somnia is, as I’ve said, very wise and, by this time, she was closer adult than child, so she did not allow herself to be swallowed by fear. She made a clear plan, a next step for how she should return home quickly and ensure she only break the first of her father’s two rules. The first rule was, of course, broken on accident, so the Sun would have forgiven it, I’m sure.

This might, at first, sound in contrast to the child she once was – since logical planning and free-running imagination do not always seem hand-in-hand. But, once she explained to me that, in order to decide which action to take, one must be able to see clearly all possibilities and outcomes. So a free-running mind can do great things, if only reined into one singular path.

Her first step, she decided, was to get a higher view of her surroundings. The tallest peak on the continent was her only route home, so a single glance would be her saviour.

Under only the light of her own gilded skin, she found a tall tree nearby. There were plenty to choose from, with tangled branches forming an arched ceiling above – a perfect lookout spot if only it could be reached. But the many tree trunks were bare. Their branches began far overhead, too far even for a goddess’ reach.

The second-best option, she considered, was to simply walk a direction and hope it be the right path. But all directions around her were identical so picking a random route would more likely lead her further from home than toward it. She relented to endeavour with her first plan.

She placed a hand on the closest tree, feeling the gnarled bark beneath her indigo fingertips. The golden light of her veins illuminated the ridges in the bark that lined the trunk. They were shallow grooves, just wide enough for fingertips. If she’d had the strength or technique, it might have been enough to struggle a climb. But Elysium has few trees taller than a goddess, and climbing was not something the daughter of the Sun had so-far tried.

She pulled and gripped against the bark but made it no higher than a foot of the ground before her fingertips slipped free and she was left stumbling in the soil. She tried again and again, whether stubborn or resolute, but each attempt left her no closer to the canopy above.

She stopped with a huff and caught her breath. Steam continued to pour from her mouth and skin, collecting in wisps like rising strands of white hair. She glared at the dim bark and her free-running mind tried to find new possibilities.

But she noticed, as she frowned at the steady trunk, that its bark seemed different than before. It was as if it had swollen and swirled in places, like a hand tracing ink through water. And where her fingers had pressed into the bark, the surface had risen and formed gnarled lumps.

She placed her hand against the bark again and kept it still. It was imperceptible, she had said, so slow that you only notice the change afterward and not during. When she thought enough time had passed, she removed her hand and there, where her palm had rested, the bark had swollen as if a branch were trying to push through toward the miniature sun.

Fuelled by inspiration, her imagination began to whir again. Half came as fanciful personifications – that the tree was alive and stretching out to greet her – while the other half came as amendments to her prior plan.

With plenty time and copious patience, she coaxed the tree to grow under her touch, forming handholds in the trunk one-by-one. They made an impossible climb manageable, even for an inexperienced climber, and soon she clambered through the knotted canopy.

From above the forest, she saw thousands of trees following the rise and fall of the earth, up and over hillocks or clustered around lakes and rivers. There were no mountaintops in sight, only the rolling of low hills and the vast night-stained forest. And, dangling its branches like streaks of rain, a great willow tree loomed above the other side of continent. It blotted out almost a quarter of sky, hiding countless stars behind it, even such a distance away.

The great tree seemed to be, although static in its silhouette, constantly shifting as she watched it. Its dangling branches were growing at their hanging tips, sprouting new leaves and extending branches further toward the forests below it. But at a perfectly-matched rate, they seemed to be pulled up and away, back into the tree’s top. So, though they looked to be endlessly growing, their length stayed the exact same, much like how a river continuously flows but is fixed from start to end.

With Mount Astra beyond sight and, though she never told me this, I’m sure a little curiosity in her heart, she decided her next step to be to visit this great tree. It seemed only obvious, of course, that this was the World Tree her father had mentioned, since what else would it be if not a tree the size of a world. The World Tree knew her father – they had met just the day before – so she was sure it would find her a way home.

---

VI.

It took far longer than she expected to reach the World Tree. When something looms that large, perspective plays odd tricks, particularly when that thing should never reach the size it seems to be. And tracking time is an odd thing when the Sun is on another world and it is your first time seeing stars, so how long it took, neither she nor I can say. But the time it took is not relevant, and neither is her journey through the forest, for at that time the world was as static as Elysium. Trees grew in their thousands, but at fractions per lifetime. The loudest sound, at the time, would have been her footsteps though mud and bramble, echoing across a thousand narrow tree trunks. Somnia had little to say of the journey, so I will skip to when she arrived at the World Tree.

She passed its great roots as she approached, which crested through the soil as hillsides. The roots seemed to be churning too, just like the branches above, slithering into the soil as the bark across their surface slid like a second skin.

When she reached the tree, she stood at the base of its trunk between two great roots. The sky above was blotted entirely by its branches and leaves, though it was so far and so dark that it almost seemed like a crumpled sky, replacing the bright stars with dangling leaves.

She tried to introduce herself to the tree, Somnia, daughter of the Sun and Spring, she said. It made sense to do so, of course, since her father had said he had met with the World Tree the day before. But that word might have been too ambiguous because, unlike the other many gods, the World Tree does not speak.

While waiting for the mouthless tree to respond, Somnia’s attention wandered onto its gnarled surface. On the bark of the tree, crumpled ridges were lit by her faint golden glow and joined and separated in dark lines. Where the lines twirled, she imagined them to be the shape of a scene – a woman with hair of swirling steam standing before a great tree, its branches falling from the sky, its roots digging into a dozen worlds. Or perhaps – her imagination began again – perhaps…

But no second story came to her. The image was what it was, irrefutable and unambiguous.

How can I make you understand what she felt? It’s peculiar, perhaps, but she explained it to me like this. Suppose two men look upon the same shadow and, unaware of what cast it, say, from different angles, it is a rabbit or it is a duck. They would both be, in a way, as correct as each other, since neither is correct, but neither can prove the other false. But a third man who reveals it to be only the shadow of his hand, cast in a certain way, would dispel those images by proving them wrong. And from that moment, knowing the truth, the two men would only ever be able to see it as a shadow cast from a hand.

This image depicted in the bark, to Somnia, was precisely a woman standing before a great tree. That description was as correct as calling it the bark of a tree because both descriptions were utterly true, and any fanciful story she might summon would be, to her, simply untrue.

As she inspected the image, the tree was continuing to grow. Where its long branches grew in place and pulled back into the trunk, they wrapped like the threads of a rope, compacting their bark into the crumpled scenes. As that bark passed down the trunk, until it disentangled into roots and sank below the soil, the image remained unchanged. In its place, before her, the scene was replaced by new lines of fresh bark that swirled themselves into an identical image, just as the one below. Above and above she could see new lines also depicting the same scene – a woman wreathed in cloud standing before a great tree. Only much further up, where neither starlight nor her gilded veins could find the dark lines, did the image seem to become new. But from her spot by the roots, she could not see its new scene.

It puzzled her, what the scenes meant. Her first guess was that the scenes were perhaps the World Tree’s way of speaking. So, she tried to reply, but no matter what she said the images remained the same.

She decided to follow the scene, tracing it to the soil where it disappeared into the ground. She guessed where it might re-emerge, where the roots broke from the mud, rolling in and out of the earth some distance away. But when she inspected the side of the root, it was a different scene. Formed of gnarls and creases, yet strangely unambiguous, it depicted a woman with hair like steam sitting atop a tall mountain.

It was her, irrefutably her, when she had stepped from Elysium to Mount Astra and watched the stars. And, sure enough, as she watched the scene twist with new lines as the root slithered into the mud, she watched the image change. She watched the woman, hair of steam, slide suddenly from the mountainside and be tossed into a forest by a great wave.

She thought, since she was unsure what the World Tree would possibly be trying to communicate by these images, that the tree had surely seen her arrive on its world and, for some reason, had depicted her commotion in its bark. She had made quite a scene, particularly for a world filled only with hardly-moving trees.

So, she returned to the trunk, where it again depicted the same woman standing before a great tree, and looked beside the familiar images. To the left were new lines in the bark, forming their own images, separate and distinct from her own, but just as irrefutable and unambiguous. This one depicted a halo-wreathed man, her father, talking with her clay-forged half-uncle. The dark lines in the bark twisted and tangled, making the two men move in the scene, as if she were watching them from a windowsill. Her half-uncle was forming figures out of soft clay, laughing as her father accidentally baked them with his touch.

She chased the scene down to the roots, passing ahead of it to where it depicted her father leaving Elysium that morning. To where it depicted him at dinner, with her mother and her, the night before. To where it depicted him in the sky above the World Tree the day before.

She tried to follow the strand further, but the roots were deep in the soil. She dug at the mud, revealing patches where the roots went deeper, earlier moments and scenes, wordlessly played out on bark.

Beside those threads were the other gods – her mother, her aunt, her uncle, half-aunts, half-uncles, cousins. Over a dozen strands on the bark depicted each living god across the cosmos and what, she assumed, they were doing right now; and in the roots, the strands showed all moments of each immortal life so far.

Yet on the other side of her strand, to the right, there were no other images in the ridges and lines. It was peculiar, since there was plenty of space on the great trunk, but there were only those dozen-or-so threads.

That was when, spurred on by her curiosity, she looked to the tree above and where its high branches tangled at its peak. Her next decision was, perhaps, unwise had she known what would come of it. She had a suspicion that, if the roots were the past, then the branches might show predictions of futures. But had she considered other possibilities, she might not have so patiently and readily climbed the great tree.

By her sunlight touch, she spurred the World Tree to grow. The surface knotted and gnarled as new branches pushed out toward her gilded skin, forming handholds between the tangled scenes. Had she known better, she might have placed her hands in the gaps between them, but, unaware, her blue fingertips punched holes in the threads.

First, a handhold sprouted within the scenes of her aunt, the Moon, splitting the thread in two. Further up, a fingertip pressed against the thread of her uncle, Summer, and the resulting growth pushed the strand aside. As the thread curled around the new gnarl, it tangled and intersected with its neighbours, throwing the scenes into disarray. Then finally, as she neared the top, where the branches coiled together to become the trunk, she gave herself one last handhold, placing it accidentally in the thread of her father. The handhold sprouted where her fingertip rested, emerging from her father’s right eye.

At the tree’s summit, she found herself in a nest of swirling branches. Beyond the wide trunk, they dangled far-off over the wide world, sprouting new leaves as they grew further and pulled back into the tree. And, from this height, she could even see a white peak on a distant horizon, Mount Astra, just visible in the far west. Though she had once had a plan to get a higher view, and thus find a way home, it was now less alluring than the puzzle of the World Tree. She would still have time, she thought, to get home before her father. She knew the way back now, so a little investigation couldn’t hurt.

She turned her attention back to the nest of branches and leaves as they twisted around her. She plucked a leaf as it passed, before it was swallowed in the coil of branches and stamped into its bark. The long willow leaf painted, with its white veins and creases, an image just like the bark below, though far more delicate and ephemeral.

The leaf she had plucked depicted, so irrefutably and unambiguously, a man not unlike herself. He had eyes like the sun and gilded veins like herself, but he was far fainter. And unlike her, the man seemed impermanent, like a tree that grows tall but would be felled by a touch of lightning.

He seemed a broken man, head in hands, and fallen on knees. But he was not alone, she realised. Around him lay many other impermanent people. The leaf continued to grow in her hand, despite being plucked free, and the image continued to shift in its veins. The man was weeping, shaking and tearing at his hair, but the others by his feet were slumped and still.

The leaf broke in her fingertips, snapping clean down the middle as if bitten by frost. She flinched and dropped the pieces. They clattered like glass shards into the swirling nest and were swallowed in the writhing branches.

Her foot began to sink. She felt it drag down as the branches twisted around her ankle and gripped her. She had stepped back in her surprise, her foot had slipped into the creases of the whirl of bark, and now she was being pulled into the great tree.

She pulled and pulled but her leg was caught in its vice. She pushed against the bark, trying to make space to free herself. But at her sunlight touch the branches only grew more limbs around her. The inevitable churn dragged her down and down, from legs to hips to shoulders. She called out for help, but her father was on another world, and there was nothing alive to hear her.

---

VII.

The coiling branches of the World Tree would have crushed any mortal man, I’m sure. But the goddess was formed of gold and steam, so she survived within its boughs. Yet she survived as no more than a statue. The many threads entangled her limbs as they span around her. And her sun-skin forced the bark to grow in the spaces, sealing her utterly within.

She never mentioned what she first thought or felt, it’s something she’s not willing to recollect. But for an immortal being such as her, the concept of eternity trapped within the twisting boughs of a tree would have been the closest a god could come to the fear of death. And, in my opinion, perhaps even a worse fate than death.

Her only solace was that her father might find her. She had broken his first rule and most assuredly would be breaking the second. That evening, when she didn’t return home, the Sun would come looking for her. He would scour the whole world for her. He would find her sealed within the World Tree, or find her fate written in its roots. He would find her and free her, she hoped.

And she held onto that small hope, like the north star for a weary traveller, as she continued to twist within the World Tree. The many branches threaded around her, coiling her within its rope. The thousand leaves of its branches were dragged with them, pressed and crushed between the boughs, imprinting their scenes into the rings of the tree. And where the threads slid around her, the leaves pressed against her too. They sank into her skin. Their veins and creases scribed their futures onto her in dark lines and with each transcription she saw their scenes. They crystallized in her thought like memory, irrefutable and unambiguous.

She saw the creation of man – the Sun, in distress and apology, baking men of clay and offering them to a broken world. She saw Paradisia and the dawn of the first age – me and you, as we now cultivate this green world.

She saw moments not yet seen. She saw tyrant kings who blaspheme the name of the Sun and claw gilded fingertips across blood-soaked worlds. She saw green worlds turned grey by smoke and steel. She saw death and understood it in a way most gods do not. For she saw a thousand deaths and a thousand more. A thousand by hate, and a thousand by grief, and a thousand by nothing more than poor and cruel fate.

She saw all future, not as possibilities or eventualities, but written as a singular future onto her mind and skin. She saw a world and worlds ruined and disregarded; a bleak future that should not be allowed to pass.

---

VIII.

Her father did find her. The following morning, once all time had been imprinted upon her. He had unfurled the threads of the World Tree just enough to free her and she saw his two eyes, blinding, in the blue sky above her prison.

He plucked her from the boughs of the tree and carried her back to Elysium. He did not flare too angrily at her – it was an accident after all, she told him – since the Sun is ever-forgiving of all things, so long as they are done with honesty.

Her trick, once they returned to Elysium, was one she may have learned from her aunt, Winter. A lie. She told her father she had learned her lesson and would stay upon Elysium with mother from then on. He believed her, for one because he is always trusting of those he holds dear and two because the Sun is a man of honesty, so is not too accustomed to seeing lies.

So, on a following day, when her father had once again left to visit a sibling amongst the stars, Somnia slipped out of Elysium.

First, she stole fire from her uncle, Summer. I’m sure he would have given it to her had she asked, but he is always one for imbalanced deals, so perhaps she preferred his ire over his interest.

Second, she stepped again from Elysium to Mount Astra. The world had grown cold again, but her eyes and skin had acclimatised from her day in the dark so its bite was not quite as sharp.

Then, she retraced her way back to the World Tree. Her first excursion had been far too impromptu for her to remember the winding path she had been tossed through the continent. But now her clairvoyancy left her without any need to plan or puzzle. She remembered, as if it were that morning, the path she was about to take that afternoon. So, she followed her own footsteps that were yet to come, since they were already printed on her thought and skin.

When she reached the World Tree and stood again between its roots, she saw the image it scribed in bark – a woman with hair of steam and fire in hand stood before a great tree. And further up she saw similar images. And further again, in the orange light of Summer’s fire, she saw the image of a woman with hair of steam, stood before a burning tree.

She pressed the stolen fire to the roots and bark. She spread the flames as a ring at the base and watched as it began to crawl. Soon the flames found their footing and, breathing in the cold air, lashed out in a manic frenzy. They pounced across the great tree. They tore at its bark like bloodied fingertips, ripping the boughs into blackened streaks. They revealed layers upon layers of history and future, stamped into the rings of the tree, as they devoured its bark and branches. And they retched with its ashen history, spewing smoke into the crackling air.

The World Tree snapped and groaned as the stolen flames tore it thread from thread. Until one too many, it came crashing down.

Its fall shook the world. It left continents sliding against each other, shattered mountaintops, displaced oceans. And the land buckled beneath Mount Astra, thrusting its peak higher beyond the clouds until it pierced past Elysium itself.

The crack of the World Tree was heard throughout the many worlds. It could be heard even as far as the skittish Nyx who, perched on the other side of the cosmos, was knocked from his pedestal and sent frantically across the sky. Even the stars around him flickered, as they flinched at the echoing crash.

And, of course, her father had heard it too. The eastern sky burst, not with the gentle spilling of dawn, but with a burning, sulphurous blue. Two yellow eyes, brighter than any star in the sky, glared down at the burning world with a blinding intensity. His face, vast across the heavens, was caught in conflict. She saw in it not just anger, disbelief, and sorrow, but the betrayed disappointment of a once-proud father.

She called out before he could speak, though her words were faint beside the crackling remains of the World Tree.

“Father,” she said. “You didn’t see it, you wouldn’t have understood. I saw what it would bring, the future it foretold. Blood and death and darkness. Worlds choked by their own children. Tyrants evoking your name to disguise their sacrilege. I had to stop it.”

“How foolish I have been,” he said, but not with the fury she had expected. His two bright eyes were downcast, sorrowful and self-pitying, now casting a softer light across the burning world. “Your wonder seemed such a wondrous thing. But I see now, Somnia, that you live not in our worlds but your own. And while that world you see is bright and good, you paint our worlds in technicolour. But, here, you saw monsters in shadows and lashed out in fear. Sacrilege and cinder, all from the fictions in your own mind. I should have tempered your mind, Somnia, and brought your wisdom into reality.”

There’s a tendency of sons and daughters to believe their parent, despite how vehemently they might pretend that they don’t. So, despite what she had seen, there was a hesitation from Somnia at her father’s words – a hesitation that had been ultimately lacking from her actions so far.

But she was wise. Wise enough to see the line between the ephemeral and the real. In fact, wiser than anyone else in seeing between them. Since only one who has explored their own fictions so thoroughly, can distinguish between the real and the fake.

The future she had seen in the bark and the leaves, she knew, was irrefutable and unambiguous. They were not shapes in a cloud, or leaves in a cup, but a prophecy – a reality – stamped into the boughs of a tree.

“It was real,” she said. “Look.”

She held out her arms, displaying the pinprick lines across her skin. They tangled across her body like crawling wisteria, forming faces and figures in the folds. An entire future was pressed precisely across every inch of her body. An entire future she had worked to prevent.

Those two great eyes in the sky squinted for what seemed an eternity, peering at the marks across her skin. But what followed was a frown, a shake of a heavenly head, and the Sun’s sombre decree.

“You have lied to me,” he said. “You have lied, and I forgive you.”

Somnia tried to protest, but his booming voice drowned any attempt she could make.

“But I see now,” he continued. “That I should have taken more care. I will build you a home above the clouds, a home for yourself, where you will be safe from the shadows you might see in the worlds and where you can stay safely in my sight.”

With sorrow and a sigh heavier than any wrath, he lifted Somnia from the burning world and placed her upon the clouds.

From her lonely perch, she could see the burning world below her, flickering and small. The smoke of the World Tree still billowed skyward, staining the clouds from where she sat. But its acrid scent was a pleasant one, a confirmation that she had unwritten its prophecies and saved the worlds from its bleak future.

She watched as her father returned to the world and, summoning his brother, the Sea, wrestled the wildfire that ravaged the forest. Together, they bottled the stolen fire and returned it to its rightful owner, saving the remainder of the world from a blackened fate. The Sea smothered the smouldering ash of the World Tree, burying its embers. You would know it now as the Amakosha sea, that still, to this day, covers most of the heart of the continent.

She watched as the Sea, sifting through the ash and silt, found a seed. It slept quietly, sheltered in a blackened husk, so tiny and fragile. The Sun found a new home for it, away from the burnt and buried heart of the continent and planted it in fresh soil where the world was still green.

She watched as the Sun, with the help of his half-brother, the Smith, crafted clay figures and set them in the forest. With words of apology and guilt, the Sun breathed life into these figures and offered them to the green world as stewards. Mankind, born from the ashes of her own desperate acts.

The realisation, she said, came gradually. A creeping chill that deepened with each scene re-enacted and each memory replayed upon the green world. She came to realise, as she explained to me, that the World Tree had not prescribed a future. It had merely recorded a future already woven into time itself. Just as any tree takes water from the soil and condenses it permanently into roots and stem; the World Tree was soaked in time and thus stained with its ghosts.

I have asked her many times about my own future too, when I’ve visited her there above the clouds. The scenes are still there, etched into her very being, but she says little about what they contain. I think she does it in kindness though, no matter how frustrating it might seem. She says that a future cannot be changed, so knowing it all means mourning it twice. And, perhaps, knowing your future means you never live it at all.

She doesn’t speak so much anymore. The tale of a child who told fanciful stories seems far from the quiet goddess I’ve ever met. If it weren’t Somnia herself who told me this, I would not have believed it to be true.

She only watches now, from her place above the clouds, seeing for a second time the scenes already written on her skin. She is wisest of all the gods, I’m sure, since she has seen all and knows all. But there, above the clouds, her imagination no longer whirs. Since, by seeing all of time, any story she might tell would be, to her, simply untrue.

---