Avnlasce was a cold, dark place.

As soon as I stepped through the boundary, the door I entered through disappeared. It left me in the darkness. Alone. Traveler was nowhere in sight, and I felt the cold of the abyss prickle my skin—icy needles, the tiny little things, as if particles of pure cold were trying to seep into my pores. They settled under my skin. Quiet. Deadly. Trying to brittle my bones under a thin sheen of ice.

But there was no cold. Temperature did not exist here. So I stood, blinked, and felt the cold wash away. Not even a minute inside, and my mind was already playing tricks on me. Trying to convince me that this place was dangerous.

It didn’t need to.

I was fully aware what kind of place this was. Vivian had told me. And even if she hadn’t, just standing in the middle of such vast emptiness made the danger obvious to whatever primal instincts were inside me.

There is death here, my brain seemed to say. And it was coming.

I felt the eyes on me, far in the distance, prowling around me like a pack of wolves. But they stayed away, cautious for now. In the pitch darkness, I couldn’t see them, but I could feel where they were. It was like experiencing their existence with all my mortal senses at once. My immortal perception saw the sounds of things in the distance and felt the taste of their presence on my skin. Small, terrible presences. Like needles in tar, or a flower made of human teeth. Then something else. Something farther; something bigger; something that moved with a deep, resounding quiet. Sensing it felt like falling into a pit at the bottom of the sea, drifting down and down, wondering where I was until the realization dawned that the stalactites on the walls were not stones but teeth, and that the pit was not a hole but a mouth, and that waiting at the bottom was a thing watching; a thing of many eyes and angles, of distorted lines and impossible shapes and inverted dimensions that changed and twisted and—

A hand closed over my shoulder and pulled my mind from the nightmare. The visions faded. The void returned. Warmth dribbled out of my nose and I touched it, and my fingers come away black with my blood. Traveler stood beside me, grinning. Watching my face pale and my jaw tremble with fear.

“Sorry, chief,” he said, patting me on the back. “Took a bit longer than I thought to find you. This place is big, y’know? Finding you was hard. Like looking for a tiny, tiny speck of salt in the sea.”

My ears were ringing. His voice barely came through. I stared into the darkness, my heart beating painfully slow as if threatening to stop.

“What was that?” I whispered, and his grip on my shoulder tightened.

Traveler’s grin was of perpetual amusement.

“Just some ugly thing, chief. Nothing to worry about. Just don’t look at it again, eh? These things don’t like being found, y’see, so let’s move on before it comes on over and eats you.”

He pushed at me, and I found the world around me turning. It felt as if I was the center of the abyss. Avnlasce rotated around me, swiveling as a compass would around its point. And then we were moving. Pushing forward through the dark, floating through endless void.

Traveler brought me away from the titanic creature I’d glimpsed. The smaller voidlings followed us, keeping their distance even as the huge presence in the distance faded from my perception.

While we traveled, I forced myself to enter a state of calm. I closed my eyes. Released a breath. I let the fear and anxiety flow through me, going down my chest, spiraling down my stomach, and flowing out through my feet. I separated myself from my mind’s worries and zoomed out. Viewed the situation from afar. Just like Elanah taught me when I was young.

I was safe, here. I affirmed that fact. Reinforced it with reason. The giant creature wasn’t chasing us, and Traveler was steadily outrunning the smaller things in the dark.

The danger would not reach us. Calm returned to me and I opened my eyes.

In front of me stood a tree of many parts. Burning, wilting, flowering, and bearing fruit all at once. A fractured thing, peering into different versions of the same image. I stared up at the Singing Tree and my perception found traces of sensation in the bark. In the lines and crags, in the hollows and the gaps between the branches, I felt the impression of memories that were not mine. The sound of a lute, played by a master. The sight of a twinblade that sang when swung. Ale and song and wandering taverns striding across the landscape. But they were fleeting. They ran from me, my mind actively forgetting what it saw the moment I looked away.

But they were there, making up every inch of the tree’s existence. An eternity’s worth of memories. I felt myself step forward, drawn in, until Traveler blocked my path. He blocked me from the sight of the tree.

“I wouldn’t look to deeply if I were you, chief,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Not unless you want your brain to drip out of your nose. There are things in there that you just ain’t ready to see.”

I frowned at him as the sensations flowed away, “Why is it that everything here seems like it’s out to kill or maim me in some way?”

Traveler shrugged, “Ain’t my fault you like to stare. I ain’t rude like you are.”

“I can’t help it. Everywhere I look, there’s something waiting to look back.”

“That’s only ‘cause you’re still looking. You’re an immortal and you’re standing in a place full of things that eat ‘em. Every time you look at something, you’re practically announcing your location and issuing a dinner date at the same time. I wouldn’t recommend that, chief. Not when you’re on the menu.”

“So what, then? I close my eyes and walk around blind?”

He grinned, “Why don’t you try it?”

I stared at him and Traveler stared back. A frown crossed my face. He was serious. Wary, I let my eyes fall closed, leaving me in darkness—true darkness. Here, there was no Singing Tree in the void. No Traveler with his stupid, knowing grin. And as soon as I closed my eyes, the rest of my senses shut down as well. My sense of touch disappeared. The permeating cold of the void vanished. I couldn’t hear or taste or smell.

It was like losing my Name all over again. Except now there was something else. Something different.

I felt it to my left. An idea. Or perhaps the hint of one. It was a memory I didn’t have, solidified into a form that held no shape, inverted of all its colors and shapes, then reflected over a shard of jagged glass. It was a splash of orange and yellow and red and I reached out to it. Grabbed it.

My hand closed around warmth. It struggled in my grip, trying to leap out from my fingers. I held it tight, tight as I could hold the intangible between my fingers, and pulled.

Fire roared to life.

I couldn’t see it or enjoy its warmth, but I could feel the idea of it around me, like tiny little notes of song, compressed into my grip. What I felt was more than just knowing that there was fire in my hand. It was understanding that I held it. How I held it. The idea of flames coiled and shrieked against my fingers, trying to bend to its nature—to burn my flesh and turn my bones to ash. But I kept it still. I kept it in control. Instead of letting it rage and sear, I altered it. I commanded the fundamental values of its very concept and altered what it was, down to the most intimate level.

The fire I held was a small sliver of a whole. I could feel the echoes of something far larger inside of it, something I couldn’t hope to understand.

But that was alright. Because right now, all I wanted to change was the surface.

If the core of ‘fire’ was an orchestral performance, made of a billion different instruments playing in harmony, then I chose only one piece to alter. One tiny blot in the middle of the whole. Of the song that composed ‘fire,’ I’d changed the lyric for ‘scorching’ into ‘warm.’

Then from ‘wild,’ I made it ‘mild.’ I changed ‘hungry’ to ‘sated.’ The fire in my hand calmed, burning with a soft light. It didn’t seek to swallow the air or devour my fingers. Instead, it sought fuel from things that were far more primal.

Magic. The very essence of it.

Looking—no, understanding the fire in my hand led to greater understanding of immortality in turn. As an immortal, the very state of my being was reduced to something older. A state far more ancient than the oldest of trees and the deepest of depths. And with it, I could see the world as it was at the basest of levels. But it was difficult. Layered. Every time I peered into the nature of ‘fire,’ I felt the sheer vastness of it. How the deeper it went, the more layers I removed, made ‘fire’ change completely, changing into a word that did not exist in the tongue of man.

;̵̯̂̒̃.̵͚̞̾͊;̶̡̙̓̔͝ͅ'̷̹̂,̷̜͒;̵̨͛'̸̡̩̰͛̈͝.̵̩̅̄̆;̵̣͑̂'̶̧́̀ͅ.̶͙̳̙̋,̷̜͒;̵̨͛'̸̡̩̰͛̈͝.̷͙̈̃̆,̵͓̀̑;̷͕̭̤̈́̂̅

It was a sliver of a whole. Barely a drop compared to the ocean of information that the whole length of the word represented. And yet, the tiny little speck of language that formed in my mind meant more than all the mortal words I knew combined. Dumbing it down was stupid. It diminished the idea of it. Trying to reduce it to words that I could describe would make it weaker—have it lose the very thing that granted me control.

Immortal magic was more than just a language. It was pure, wholehearted understanding. Trying to make it anything but would leave its power lost in translation.

I explored the ‘fire’ in my hand, down as far as I could go. Then I altered it.

Flames turned solid in my grip. Crystalline. Then watery, flowing from my fingers and down, until I changed the weight of fire to nothing. Then, the firewater was simply floating, drifting along the length of my hand like a moon’s rings.

Then from ‘warm,’ I lowered it further. Down to almost nothing.

I pushed.

The fire resisted.

My control stayed at the very edge of change, but crossing it felt impossible. Something was blocking me—a lack of knowledge and skill. To change something so intrinsic required knowledge in other concepts. Other words of power.

I sighed, leaving it be. Cold fire was an interesting concept, but one I couldn’t approach just yet. So I turned to other Names. Other ideas.

A flash of yellow floated in the distance. Solid and steady. I walked there, crossing the void, and I felt slivers of all things brush past me. Small concepts. Things I could barely sense at my current skill. I reached the yellow idea and grabbed it and then there was ‘lightning’ on my fingers, lashing and whipping. I peered into the surface and saw where the lyrics of its song overlapped with that of fire. Energy. Heat.

More sensations became clear to me. Wonderful, beautiful sensations, offering understanding of the world and the sounds of songs that no person could sing.

I gathered shadow and moonlight and grass. I left the ideas of laughter and sunset around me, floating with the rest, and I grabbed more. I barely understood what any of them meant. But having them near me surrounded me in a sense of belonging—a oneness that almost made it seem like it was possible to turn them all into songs on my bansuri and lute.

Distracted, I forgot the passage of time and distance. It seemed like neither existed here. I collected the little flashes of understanding around me, bundling them up. Surrounding myself in them like I would old friends.

And then there was something different. Right in front of me, unnoticed until I’d literally stumbled into it.

It shifted with the sound of fingers brushing against cloth. Soft.

But I stood there, frozen, trying to make as little sound as possible. Because it was more than just a sound. Touching it reminded me of being alone in the woods as a child, stumbling into the deep sections of the woods, lost under the branches and giant roots, feeling pinpricks of ice dance over the back of my neck, running as the shadows swelled at sun’s fall.

I took a slow, wary step back. The thing in front of me shifted again. It sounded like a sigh, the kind a hunter took before releasing an arrow. The sight of the sound of it tasted like the sickly smell of rotting fruit. I watched in silence as it released a yawn reminiscent of howling, tundra wind.

Then it relaxed. And then the movements stopped, the creature settled, and it fell back asleep. A moment passed.

I turned tail and fled as fast as I possibly could.

By the time I returned to the Singing Tree, the Traveler was enjoying himself atop a branch. He held one of the tree’s fruits in his hand, full of twisting, shifting colors and images, and took a bite.

“Finally done? Sure took you a while,” he said, chewing. Traveler swallowed. “If you’d gone any farther, you would’ve woken up Big Kal. That would’ve been pretty funny. For me. A lot less so for you.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I asked, glaring. “I was in a daze for…”

I trailed off. I didn’t know how long.

Traveler just shrugged, “I would be surprised if you didn’t get distracted, chief. Pretty neat, eh? Lots of immortals spend years studying the same thing to experience even a fraction of what you just saw. But that’s in the mortal plane. Here? Here you’re at the center of everything. Here the knowledge come to you.”

“And apparently danger, too. What would’ve happened if I wandered too far and ran into something that was actually awake?”

“Eh. Lots of terrible little things. And then you’d probably get eaten.”

“And you didn’t bother to tell me?”

He raised an eyebrow, “What, you want your hand held, chief? Want me to take you into my big, strong arms and protect you from the big, bad things in the dark?” Traveler shook his head and hopped down from the tree. He approached me, his eyes narrowed and his grin fierce. “I ain’t doing none of that. You asked me to teach you. That’s what I’m doing, and I’m doing it right. Or would you rather I set you down in a classroom and explain things to you by the itty bitty?”

I glowered at him, “You’re a smug, annoying asshole, you know that?”

Traveler laughed and turned. Darkness swirled at the base of the tree and a door opened, back to safety. Back to my room in the ship.

“Get some sleep, chief. You got a few more days on the ship before you reach that city of yours, and we’re gonna make the most of it,” he said. Traveler waved his hand and the distance between me and the door instantly shortened until I stood right in front of it. He pushed me through and grinned, “After all, I’m gonna need you to be as strong as possible if you’re gonna save the lives I need saved. You got a big role to play in the world, chief.”

“And what exactly do you think that is?”

I turned to him, frowning, standing in my room while he watched me from the other side. Traveler stood in darkness as he smiled. Not a grin, but the thin, knowing curve of a lip. One that held many, many secrets.

“The most important of them all, chief,” he said, raising a hand to point at me. “You’re the one who’s gonna pull me outta the dark.”

Then he snapped his fingers, and the door closed. I stood in my room alone. I sat.

Maybe that trade wasn’t so worth it after all.