Part 2

The Creatures of the Trees

Hearts of blackest form thee sought

in sadness and disrepair,

to teach thee what learn thee could not,

but found what was despair.

O’ why is this the path thee choose

when life is by thy side;

when light awaits to set thee loose

and turn the darkest tide?

~ from ‘Ode to the Zara’

(collections of surviving arts of Alti)

“Alurian came to the agency in an unusual manner. While most look for stable work hours and an outlet for their unique abilities, she knew first-hand what I learned long ago. Magic is a destructive force in our world. Nothing more. It is bewitching, and it is deadly. That is why the agency exists.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

Moonlight lit upon a frothing surf of wheaten grass and snow, illuminating it with a ghostly silver light. Far above, the dark sky was alight with thousands of stars, tens of thousands, their light a twinkling haze. Only the trees eclipsed them, great, thick trees that towered above the earth and consumed the porcelain world below. Beyond them were the western mountains, now only the stark, fanged jaws of the horizon. Out here they looked so different. Colder…crueler…they looked like the end of everything.

It was a breathtaking world Silver found herself in, and nothing at all like what she had expected when Bek showed up in her hospital room and offered her an opportunity to take back some semblance of control over her life. Now she moved slowly through it, admiring the abundance of small, white-winged moths that swooped and fluttered about the clearing. As they moved, their tiny bodies seemed to wink in and out of existence, almost playfully. There was a haze about them, too, just like the stars. For an instant, they existed, and then, like a dream, were gone in a wisp of effervescent moonlight.

“The moths are attracted to the intense energy of this place,” Bek said from behind her. Silver turned slightly to regard him. They matched now. There had been little doubt in Bek’s mind, apparently, that she would accept his offer, and he had produced a uniform seemingly from nowhere. The MASO uniform.

For the hundredth time since the long drive up the mountain, she pinched at the black fabric. Some sort of polyester mix, with rayon, maybe…the buttons too shiny, the neck too high. Bek had insisted she could not show up in her destroyed clothing, even if she forced him to let her keep it. Now she held on to the paper bag in her left hand like her life depended on it. Those clothes were all she had left.

“So…how much farther?” Silver asked, peering through the moths to the grass stretched into the trees and the darkness beyond. There was not any sign of anything man-made except the parking lot they had left behind ten minutes ago, and the narrow trail leading back to it.

“Just follow me.”

She followed a few steps behind Bek when he passed her, too exhausted to argue. Moths brushed against her skin as they passed, but none dared come within reach of her motionless fingers. Halfway across the meadow, Silver realized she understood what Bek had meant by the energy of the place; the air was charged, like they were wading through the outskirts of an electrical storm. The hair along her arms and neck stood on end.

“Now,” Bek stopped abruptly, and she did, too, to keep from running into him, “everything you see from this point forward never leaves this place. Do you understand?”

“That’s a bit—”

“Yes,” he interrupted her sharply, “or no.” The look she gave him could have melted ice. The look he gave her in return won anyway.

“Yes,” Silver muttered. There were no smiles tonight. He nodded slowly.

“A word of advice,” he said, looking off into the meadow, away from her, “don’t question anything. Just accept it. If you can do that, everything will go smoothly.”

Before she could ask what he meant, he raised a hand and rapped sharply against nothing. His knuckles against the emptiness made a hollow thunk. Then the air creased, light spilling out through the thin slit between invisible door and invisible surface. Before their eyes, the clearing seemed to transform, shadows growing distorted and breaking up, then being replaced by the solid lines of a building that wrapped around them - around the meadow - in colossal rows of brick and stone. Silver could not conceal her stare. She gaped openly as windows lit up the night. Ivy climbed in great coils across the walls, dusted with snow and ice. Doors appeared in the darkness, opening onto walkways lit by some sort of underground light.

Still gaping, she turned back to Bek. There was an arched doorway now, its thick, brass-handled doors etched with detailed reliefs. Dragons, unicorns, wolf-like beasts and dagger-tailed lions, great birds, and finally men. He was already vanishing through it.

Silver stumbled after, heedless of the transition between stone and carpeted wood. The warmth and noise of the indoors hit her like a solid wall, and she realized her shock would not end with invisible buildings. The entryway she had stepped into was huge. Arching some hundred feet above them was a gilded ceiling, supported by arching glass beams filled with light. Balconies wrapped around the breadth of the room, directly above the counters that framed one side. She had seen office buildings like this in New York…and to some degree, she could even say she had seen pictures of opera houses like this in Europe.

Strangely, it was not the room that dominated her attention. It was not the enormous clock directly across from the entrance, or the theatrical, gaping jaws of the dragon’s skull that leered from above it, bony vertebrae twisted and polished white with age. The most prominent thing in that cavernous room was, instead, a black iron arch. Golden figures had been carved into it, but their meaning was not clear to her. What was clear was that there was no way out of or into the building without stepping beneath it.

“Hendricks.”

Silver eyed the guard next to the arch apprehensively, but he merely nodded to the both of them. This seemed to have meaning to Bek, who headed under the arch towards the reception desk. Silver went to follow him, and was stopped by the sudden, cold chill that gripped her heart as the arch’s looming shadow touched her skin. Looking up, she saw that there was a haze around the heavy black metal that distorted the air around it, causing the gold figures lining its rim to waver and blink in and out of existence. Staring at the swirling figures made her inexplicably dizzy.

One more step. She hunched her shoulders as the arch passed over her, feeling its heat on her scalp. She had the mad urge to close her eyes, to take a breath and hold it as if she were plunging into the sea, and then she was joining Bek at the counter. Silver resisted the urge to look back.

“Sign here, please,” the receptionist said as they handed her a piece of paper with several paragraphs of insanely tiny print. Silver stared at it speculatively for a while, finally decided they just wanted her fingerprints, and signed. It took only a few moments for them to take her prints, run a few other biometric scans on her hands that she had never seen before, and finally hand her a manila envelope roughly the size and weight of a textbook.

“This way,” Bek said immediately, turning on his heel as she weighed the envelope in both hands and tried not to drop her clothes, “we’ll go over that in the library. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal to read, and your hand will most likely be cramping from signing your name by the time we’re done.”

Judging by the size of her load, she did not doubt what he said. He motioned her toward the elevators and, as soon as they had begun what seemed to be a sharp descent to the lower levels of the building, began to speak.

“Silver Alurian, you are now an employee of the MASO, also known as the Military Assimilated Specialty Organization. The acronym comes from the word ‘mesoh,’ meaning roughly ‘protectors of the mythic lands,’ and has existed since before the founding of America. The name might seem a bit grand, and our official documents will tell a different story of both of our founding and our title, but you’ll find our older name more accurate the longer you work here.”

He stopped to glance at her, and she was too distracted by the floor to answer. It seemed to be a layer of glass, suspending them over a tapestry of dragons and other mythical beings. Some had wings large enough to obscure the sky at their backs, others crimson eyes and claws as long as her arms. Fire spurted from between their gaping jaws. It was woven in stunning detail, right down to the dogs and men fighting the beasts from the bottom of the scene. One of these men in particular caught her eye – in his armor, he reminded her of something she had seen long before – but it was the dog at his side that really captured her attention. Something about its topaz eyes and stoic demeanor translated through the cloth, reminding her forcibly of the injured wolf at the wildlife reserve. But white. And wearing some sort of golden armor. And fighting a dragon.

“Are you listening, Silver?” She glanced up at him, and finally Bek seemed to relax a bit. With a sigh, he said, “That tapestry has been here since the MASO was founded, as far as I know. You’ll find there’s a lot of history here, though less in the modern parts. Most of this building dates back about seven hundred years, and the artwork, much more than that.”

“That long?” she asked, eyes widening slightly. He shook his head ever so slightly, at a loss, it seemed, for answers to her questions.

“That long. Can you repeat what I said to you a second ago?”

She did, more or less, and he nodded. “Great. That’s page one. You can sign it when we arrive. Now,” the elevator buzzed as if on cue, and the doors slid open, “you’ll have to learn your way around. There are eight floors in the main MASO building. The ground floor is floor four. The top floor is eight. We’re currently on floor one.”

“Wait,” she said, starting to step out of the elevator behind him, and freezing when she realized the dog in the tapestry was suddenly looking directly at her. Leaning forward, she squinted down at it in disbelief. Without a doubt, it had been looking in the other direction before. When the elevator started to close on her, she hastily exited, only to find Bek staring at her thoughtfully. “What am I waiting for?”

“For…,” she had momentarily forgotten her question, and now blurted, “you said this is the first floor?”

“The numbering scheme starts at the bottom.” She responded with a lame-sounding “okay” and they headed down a boring hallway, devoid of the ancient artwork he had promised. There were paintings on the walls, certainly, and interesting mirrors, and an old china set on a spindly table in the corner, but nothing that drew her eye the way the tapestry had.

It was not long before they came to a wide doorway, left open to the hall, and Silver followed Bek into a cavernous room. Its walls were lined by heavy oak shelves, and each of these was stacked high with books. Where the walls curled away to the domed ceiling, a brass, rolling ladder had been leaned at a precarious angle, bolted tightly to the heavy wood. Raising her eyes higher and higher, she finally caught a glimpse of the grand ceiling. In itself, it was a marvel, supported by wood trusses as wide as trees and lined with painted panels. More scenes like the one in the elevator appeared here as well; over their heads, a massive castle was laid siege by a haphazard muddle of species, strange to the eye and to logic as well.

Bek watched her awe, and directed her towards a seating area to one edge of the room. There were other people nearby, but none seemed to notice her arrival. “This is the master library,” he stated with slightly more warmth than he had shown her yet that night, “There’s another library on the fifth floor, but it’s mostly used by the legal department.”

They settled into two seats across from each other, and he had her pull out the tremendous sheaf of paperwork the receptionist had given her. As promised, she signed the first page, and then spent the next two hours going through the rest. There were contracts and liability forms and benefits forms, including numerous things she had never thought about in her life before. There was even an in-depth discussion of ranking, which for the MASO was considerably different, it seemed, than for the military, and more similar to what she expected for a corporate institution. Bek seemed unconcerned with her ignorance. He gave her plenty of time to read, discussed a few of the forms, and located a map and a thin handbook amidst the heap of documents.

By the time they were done she was exhausted, and it must have shown. He rose ahead of her, waited patiently for her to gather her things, and led her back to the elevator. There was one thing that stood out to her in particular, after everything they had read through.

“Do most people live here, in these buildings?” she asked.

“Not long term,” he observed. She watched him punch the button for the eighth floor. “Eventually, you’ll also be able to afford something else if you want. A few month’s salary should be enough.”

“But you live here, not with your mom?” she asked more softly. He glanced at her, seeming surprised. It seemed like a normal enough question.

“Most of the time, yeah. It’s convenient.”

“No work life balance?”

Bek made an ironic face. “I would give up on that thought right now, if I were you.”

As Bek had promised, the eighth floor was much more modern than the first, and felt much more like an apartment building. Potted plants and a few well-placed watercolor paintings gave the place the feel of an upscale building in the suburbs, and the doors were all the same edgy shade of deep red.

“Four twenty-eight. This is the one.”

Bek handed her a silver disk roughly the size of a quarter, but three times as thick, and pointed at a panel on the front of the door. “Hold it there for a second, and the door will open.”

Silver did as instructed, after balancing her belongings on the carpet, and the door swung wide of its own power.

“Cool,” she said, peering inside. A square, open space with two doors that might be an adjoining bathroom and a closet, and a single twin bed - it was more than she would have hoped for.

“Well,” she said as she glanced at Bek, “good morning? Good night? It’s probably around eight in the morning now.” He leaned into her room a bit to point at a clock on the wall. She had been just about spot on.

“I’m in room two hundred. Find me if you need anything, or ask the receptionist downstairs. Otherwise, I’ll knock on your door at four tonight and show you to the cafeteria. Don’t forget that token.”

She stared at the small silver disk, wondering how long it would last before she lost it. At least she had little stuff to lose it in, at the moment. By the time she looked up, Bek had gone.