THE BOOK OF NUMA
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Chapter 1. Children of Light and Wonder

Imagine, as best you can, what it would be like to grow up in a world without fear — a world in which you are loved simply for existing, free to be happy, and giving, and kind, and funny, and silly, and full of singing and dancing, and all the good, strange, wonderful things possible within a joyful life. This is a story about such a world: the planet Numa, one of millions of living worlds scattered across a universe wrapped in the slow, patient currents of time. Three tenets held true for every living thing on Numa. First, all creatures felt called to love and care for one another, so completely that fear had never taken root among them — there had simply been no need for it, no soil in which it could grow. Even the oldest instinct of all, self-preservation, had softened over the ages into something gentler: a devotion to the survival of the whole rather than the self. Second, every being carried within it a purpose, a true calling, woven into the larger harmony of the world the way a single note belongs inside a song. And third — perhaps most importantly — Numa was simply, unapologetically fun. It was playful and funny and alive with a kind of giddy, generous joy, the sort that made even the wind seem to laugh as it moved through the trees. Whatever hardships still existed on Numa — and there were some, for even paradise is not without its griefs — they were met with love rather than dread. All in all, Numa was about as good and joyful a place to grow up as anyone could imagine, and this is where our story, and our heroine, begin.

Her name was Mariom, and though the grown history of the universe would one day speak of her in the hushed tones reserved for legends, she was — on the particular golden morning our story opens — nothing more than a wild-spirited five-year-old girl with dirt under her fingernails and a head full of questions. She did not yet know what she would become, only that the world was enormous and endlessly interesting, and that she meant to see all of it. How her family had come to make their home on a world so far from the one her grandparents remembered is a story for another day. For now, it is enough to know this: Mariom was as curious as any child who ever lived, as loved as any child could hope to be, and as real, in every way that matters, as you or I.

She lived in a tree. Not just any tree — a tree so vast that the notion of an ordinary tree could not begin to contain it. Its oldest leaves, veined in red and gold, grew large enough that the people of her village fashioned them into boats, ferrying goods and small kindnesses to neighboring homings up and down the coast. To wake inside such a tree was to wake inside a cathedral of living light. Numa's twin suns poured each morning through vast windows of grown isinglass — a gnarled, glimmering lattice that climbed root to branch, hundreds of meters into the canopy above — and where the light struck the glass it scattered into a thousand small rainbows that drifted lazily across the walls of Mariom's sleeping nook like slow-moving fish. The air itself seemed to hum with the scent of a million flowers, heaviest and sweetest where a curtain of lavender blossom draped low over her bed, as if the tree itself were tucking her in each night and easing her awake again each dawn.

She stretched, blinked the last of her dreams away, and looked up through her mossy nook to see hundreds of flutterbys — some no bigger than her palm, others broader than her plumpest uncle — wheeling lazily through the canopy in long, unhurried spirals. On the right kind of morning, if she asked politely, one of the larger ones might carry her aloft into the high branches of her homing, which is what the Numans called their houses, grown rather than built, shaped over centuries by the will and wisdom of the Ancient — the vast, sentient tree in whose branches Mariom's entire family lived. The Ancient had grown her rooms the way a mother might braid a child's hair: patiently, lovingly, with an eye for both beauty and use. Its isinglass windows kept out the rain while she slept and dissolved back into the branches the moment she rose, so that the moss and hanging blossoms of her room might drink in the morning dew she no longer needed shelter from. Even the walls of her home, in other words, understood the difference between what she needed and what the garden needed, and gave freely to both.

Mariom breathed deep, savoring the fragrant air, and wondered — as she wondered every morning, with the particular seriousness only a five-year-old can summon — what adventures the day might hold. Even this young, she was already known throughout Bornholm as a wanderer, a girl who could not walk past an unfamiliar creature or unopened path without needing, urgently, to know where it led. Her homing stood only two kilometers or so from the sea, and this morning the wind carried a whole story to her nose before her eyes had even found the horizon: salt water, the petrichor of last night's rain, the perfume of a thousand blossoms just opening — and beneath it all, faint but unmistakable, the warm, cinnamon-edged scent of dragon.

She was out of her nook and past the great central chamber before she'd fully decided to move, bare feet slapping the mossy floor, and outside she craned her neck skyward until she found them: Rubyred, a dragon the exact scarlet of a polished garnet, circling high above the homing tree with her rider, Arie, silhouetted against the brightening sky. Mariom cast her thoughts upward, the way a child on Earth might call out across a yard — Good morrow, Rube's n' Rie! Are you terribly busy with some important errand, or might I beg a ride to the top of Numari? — and felt, rather than heard, Arie's laughter and Rubyred's answering bellow ripple back down to her. A heartbeat later the dragon folded her wings and dropped, arrow-straight, a thousand feet in what felt to Mariom like the space of a single held breath. The scent of cinnamon-warmed scale hit her an instant before Rubyred did, wings cupping hard against the air to slow her fall, talons finding the ground with a delicacy that seemed almost impossible for a creature so enormous. The great garnet head lowered, nudged Mariom's cheek, and then — with the particular mischief of a creature who had known this child since her first breath — snorted directly into Mariom's face, sending her dark hair streaming back like a flag in a gale. Mariom shrieked with laughter and threw her arms as far around the dragon's neck as they would go, just as Arie slid down from the saddling to join the reunion.

Arie stood nearly seven feet tall, and still she seemed almost delicate beside her dragon. Her chestnut hair, waved and thick, was braided into two long plaits and tucked into a quiver-shaped pocket sewn into the back of her flying jacket — the practical fashion of dragon riders the world over, who had long ago learned what became of loose hair at altitude. Her voice, when she spoke, carried the low, weathered rasp of several hundred years spent shouting over windswept skies. "Well now, Ruby, my dear," she said, looking Mariom up and down with open delight, "will ya look at the size of this wee lass. That couldn't be Mariom, could it?" Mariom, who stood perhaps a meter tall and took her height very seriously indeed, drew herself up as straight as she could manage. "It is me — Mariom! I have grown a full winkling or two since you last saw me. I am a big girl now." (A winkling, for the uninitiated, is a tiny elf-folk who stands some four to six centimeters at full height — a small unit of measure for a child determined to prove she was no longer small.) Arie laughed, a warm, rolling sound, and nodded with theatrical solemnity. "Oh aye, I can see that plainly. You'll be my height soon enough. Might even give Sÿlvÿr a run for it one day," she said, and Mariom beamed as though she'd been crowned.

"I've come on an errand, mind," Arie continued, tucking a stray braid back into place, "from the Christina, up in t'Nort'lands. They're in need of a fresh batch of your mother's fulsomberry salve. Is Marita about, little one?" Mariom closed her eyes for the barest moment and cast her thoughts to her mother, feeling the familiar warmth of the connection settle over her before the reply came, gentle and clear as a bell: Please let Arie know I am at a healing and will return within the hour. Ask the Winkles to bring her wayberry tea and something to eat. And tell Rubyred there's a honey melon in the garden, enormous and perfectly ripe, waiting just for her. Mariom relayed the message and watched, delighted, as Rubyred's ears pricked forward and the great dragon trotted off toward the garden with an eagerness that made the ground tremble underfoot.

Mariom led Arie inside, where the isinglass windows were already rolling back to let the morning air and sunlight pour through the lattice of branches. A dozen winklings arrived within moments, staggering under the weight of a wooden mug of warm wayberry tea balanced atop a dried cerulean leaf they had carved handles into — no small feat for creatures who stood barely as tall as the mug itself. They set the tea at Arie's feet with a flurry of small, earnest bows, and Arie thanked them so warmly that they blushed a deeper shade of green before scattering off to fetch more treats. She sipped, tentative at first, then sighed with real pleasure. "Ah. This is the good stuff." More food and drink arrived in a steady, cheerful procession, and Mariom and Arie fell into easy conversation about the news of neighboring realms, the weather over the Nort'lands, and — Mariom's favorite subject — every creature Arie had encountered on her long journey south.

It was in the middle of this conversation that Marita arrived, drifting in through one of the high windows the way morning light drifts through fog. Mariom's mother was a telekinetic goddess, and she looked it: a nimbus of soft light caught in her snow-white hair, her pearlescent gown shifting and rippling as though it, too, breathed with the breeze. She landed without a sound and folded both girls into a hug that smelled of garden herbs and healing salves. There was a tiredness in her — Mariom could feel it, the particular weariness that came after a long healing — but beneath it, as always, ran a current of warmth that never seemed to run dry.

They shared tea and wayberry cakes a while longer before Marita led them out to her garden apothecary, where broad yellowing leaves hung draped over low branches, shading bulbous flowers and gourds heavy with powders, creams, and elixirs of every description. Illness was a rare visitor on Numa, but broken bones and skinned knees were not, and the apothecary's shelves — grown, not built, like everything else in Bornholm — held remedies for both pain and patience. Marita pointed up to a bulbous pink bag, roughly the size of an Earth gallon, hanging from the eaves: the salve, grown inside a single cone-shaped flower and tied off once full. Even Arie, tall as she was, could not quite reach it. Marita only smiled, lifted one hand, and the bag drifted gently down into Arie's open palm without either of them needing to move another step.

Arie thanked the goddess, tousled Mariom's hair with obvious affection, and secured the salve to her saddling, which shifted and reshaped itself around the new weight as though it had been expecting it all along. Then, with a single easy motion, she scooped Mariom up, bounded onto Rubyred's back, and settled into the saddling. A wink, a wave, and they were airborne, Rubyred's great wings beating the air into motion, Mariom's hair whipping wild around her face as the ground fell away beneath them.

Arie and Rubyred carried her not home but higher still, up to the very topmost boughs of Numari, so she might spend an afternoon watching the blue waters of Bornholm Bay stretch out toward a horizon she had not yet earned the right to cross. She loved this view above all others — the sense of the whole living, breathing world laid out beneath her, small enough to hold in her two hands. Numari herself stood at least a thousand feet tall, one of the oldest of the Ancients, the eldest and wisest of all the trees on Numa. It was said the Maker had grown the Ancients before any other living thing, which would make Numari older than memory itself — older, perhaps, than the concept of age.

Rubyred hovered while Arie lowered Mariom onto the wide, trumpet-shaped bloom of a pale yellow flower some ten meters across, its petals curved just so to overlook the sea. Mariom thanked them both and cast a small, warm pulse of love their way as they wheeled off toward their own errands, and then she was alone with the wind and the water and the enormous, patient quiet of the flower, which seemed to gather every sound of the world — the distant roar of waves breaking against the reef, the cry of some far-off seabird — and funnel it gently to her ear, as though she sat inside the horn of some ancient, living instrument. She waved to passing birds. She cast good mornings to anyone within reach of her thoughts. Eventually a great yellow-and-cerulean beezus arrived with a low, contented thrum, nudging her politely aside as it burrowed deeper into the bloom toward the nectar-heavy organ at its base, and Mariom considered — briefly, seriously — whether she might one day be small enough to ride one. Not today, she decided. Perhaps not for a while yet.

For any reader keeping careful track: Numa operates under gravity and physics much like Earth's own, only rendered in far richer color — taller mountains, deeper forests, wider seas, and a night sky so thick with stars that they seemed, some nights, to be whispering to one another in a language made entirely of light.

The morning breeze tugged at Mariom's dark hair, and the drowsy, honeyed perfume of the blossoms around her began, as it always did, to work its quiet magic. She was only five, after all, and five-year-olds nap. As sleep found her, her mind wandered outward and upward, past the reef, past the horizon, out toward the impossible scatter of stars, and she found herself — not for the first time — wondering which single point of light might be Sol, the distant sun her grandparents so rarely spoke of, and the strange, far world called Earth that her family had left behind long before she was born. She could not have explained it to anyone, not even to herself, but there were mornings when she felt something out there, something vast and quiet, reaching faintly back toward her across all that distance — a feeling she would not understand for many years yet, and would spend the rest of her life trying to answer.

She woke refreshed, chin propped on her hands, and watched the harbor traffic below with the unhurried attention only a child at leisure can afford: sailing vessels gliding in from distant shores, each one flying the bright, particular flag of its home port, each one rigged with isinglass sails unique to its makers — some patterned like the stained glass of old Earth cathedrals, all of them faintly luminescent, so that after dark the harbor glowed with the soft, shifting colors of a hundred different homelands. The ships would leave again laden with the goods of Bornholm and its neighboring villages, carried freely, given rather than sold, in the manner of a world that had never needed money to know its own generosity.

A yellow-and-blue flutterby nearly her own size landed briefly on her knee, uncurled a long, curious proboscis, tasted the air near her nose and cheek, and — apparently deciding she was not, in fact, a flower — fluttered off in search of better prospects. Mariom giggled at the insult. The day was glorious, the sea a field of scattered gems, and for a while she simply let herself exist inside the beauty of it, already dreaming of the day she would be old enough to see every corner of Numa for herself — the frozen hush of the Nortlands, the warm, storm-wet air of the Souwest lands, and everything strange and wonderful in between.

Eventually, reluctantly, she made her way back down — sometimes with the patient help of trelves, the tree-elves who tended Numari's lower branches, sometimes astride a slow, gentle sylvie, and once in a great while lifted gently by her mother's or her Aunt Bridget's telekinetic hand, as though gravity on Numa was, for Mariom at least, always negotiable. She had tested that negotiation once already, at three years old, tumbling from the very top of the tree in a heart-stopping instant — and in that instant had somehow known, without being told, to reach for Bridget with her mind. Her aunt had caught her out of thin air before either of them had time to be afraid, which was, in its own way, the truest lesson Numa ever taught: that love, cast quickly enough and truly enough, arrives before fear even has the chance to speak.

Back on solid ground, Mariom sang and skipped her way toward the village, and when her small legs tired, she needed only think of her mother and trust that someone — anyone — from the village would soon appear to carry her the rest of the way. Marita was goddess of the whole realm of Bornholm, bound by love and thought to every soul within it, and that same bond, threaded loosely through Mariom as her daughter, meant she was never truly far from anyone who might help her. Every living thing on Numa carried some measure of that sentience, that quiet, constant thread of connection to purpose and to one another. We carry the same thread on Earth, the story reminds us gently here, though fear so often muffles it that we forget it's there at all — at least, not yet.

Chapter 2. On How the Children of Numa Learn as They Live

The next morning arrived bright and cloudless, the kind of day the Faerenfolk out on the outer isles had promised would hold fair clean through to evening. Mariom woke to the sound of her mother and Aunt Bridget singing together in the garden below, their voices twining in a harmony so old and familiar it had become, over the years, less a song than a kind of weather — something Mariom felt in her chest before she consciously heard it. She shed her sleeping gown and padded to her bathing pool, humming along without quite knowing the words.

The moment her feet touched the cool water, she cooed a soft greeting, and the surface of the pool began to stir. Aquaelves — tiny, mer-shaped folk no larger than her hand — rose up from the water and the surrounding flora in a flurry of bright, chattering color, each one already arguing cheerfully over who would have the honor of scrubbing which patch of Mariom first. She knew them all, every one, by name and hue: quick, silver-finned Tavi; round, bossy little Purl; and above them all, perched now on Mariom's shoulder with the easy authority of long practice, their unofficial leader, Evi Plinkwater, who liked nothing better than pointing out to some hapless cousin that he'd missed a spot behind Mariom's ear.

The aquaelves had, over time, developed an entire small industry around Mariom's morning bath. They had built tiny sleds from the dried husks of featherwood blossoms, each husk naturally ribbed like the runners of an old Earth sled, and they used these to careen down from the crown of her head, along her shoulders, and into the pool below, the ribbed runners combing snarls from her hair as they went. When a sled caught on a stubborn tangle — which happened often, and always to great delight — its rider went tumbling into the air with a whoop, splashing down in the pool to peals of high-pitched laughter from the whole gathered crowd. Mariom bore it all with the calm patience of someone who had done this every morning of her life, fishing sleds and elves alike back out of the water and setting them, dripping, atop her head to try again. When the last tangle was finally combed smooth, she thanked each of them in turn and cast a small warm pulse of gratitude over the whole chattering crowd, which sent them scattering back into the flowers in a happy shower of droplets.

No sooner was she dry than Flitwing and a handful of other flightsprites arrived, bearing a tunic of white gossamer that the nigh-elves had woven while she slept. All Numan clothing grew from isinglass threads spun by the world's flora, and it came in every color imaginable — though flightsprites themselves were always some brilliant shade of blue, their dragonfly wings a blur as they hovered around Mariom, fussing over the fit of her sleeves with the seriousness of master tailors. Their speech came out in high, piccolo-bright trills, more song than sentence, and when the tunic finally sat just right, Flitwing planted a quick kiss on Mariom's cheek before darting off, already late for some other small errand of kindness.

Behind the flightsprites came the winklings, hauling her leggings and skeds down the path in a small determined procession — all except one, a winkling child no taller than three inches, whose adult companions stood nearly twice her height and who clung to the load with the fierce, wobbling concentration of someone determined not to be left out of the work. Winklings, unlike their nocturnal nigh-elf cousins, loved daylight and growing things, and dressed themselves accordingly in shades of earthy brown and green, while the nigh-elves favored the hush of moonlight and quiet, careful needlework performed while the rest of the world slept. Between the two peoples, Mariom's wardrobe was remade fresh each day, never quite the same twice, and she never tired of the small surprise of it. She thanked the winklings, pulled on her leggings — not unlike capris, if you'd ever seen such a thing — and laced up her moccasin-soft skeds.

She found her mother and aunt in the garden and folded herself into a hug with each of them before setting off toward the village. Marita pressed a fuzzkin, peach-soft and warm from the morning sun, into her hands. "Breakfast, when you're hungry," she said, and kissed the top of Mariom's head.

"Mariom, are you off to Bornholm?" Bridget asked. There was something in her aunt's voice this morning, a softness edged with something Mariom was too young yet to name — a kind of tenderness that lingered a beat too long, as though Bridget were memorizing the moment even as she lived it. "Yes, Bridget. Should I bring you back anything?" "Some wayberry tea leaves, if you happen by the Estlands stall. That would be lovely." Marita, still tending the bandaged wing of a small dragonette in her lap, looked up. "And could you carry this salve to Moonie? She caught too much sun in the garden yesterday — this will help her heal faster." She pressed a kiss to the dragonette's head, and it chirruped its thanks and launched skyward in a flash of emerald, and then Marita lifted a small pouch from her own shoulder and settled it over Mariom's. "There you are." "Thank you, Mumsarita! I'll see you both this afternoon — or tomorrow, if I'm having too much fun to remember the way home." Both women laughed, and Bridget, still with that same lingering softness, said, "Have fun, little goddess. We'll see you when we see you. But we'll always feel your spirit, wherever you wander." In that instant both women cast their love toward her at once, and Mariom felt it land in her chest like warm sunlight through a window — a feeling she would carry with her, unknowingly, for the rest of her life.

For readers wondering what exactly "casting love" means: most Numans can send loving thought — sometimes simple, sometimes whole complicated feelings — from mind to mind, soul to soul, in a way that needs no words at all. The gods and goddesses of Numa are especially skilled at it, though humans, on Earth and off, carry the same capacity buried somewhere within them. We give and receive love more often than we ever realize; we simply lack Numa's clarity in recognizing it when it happens.

Mariom hitched her leggings up importantly, the way a big girl does, and set off down the village path, singing to herself. The trail had been worn smooth over thousands of years by thousands of feet and paws and hooves, winding at times through cool green tunnels of flora where dappled light fell like coins across the ground, opening at other times into wide faeren-fields, so named for the fae-folk who liked to gather there. Every few steps some new creature seemed to find her — a turquoise flutterby, nearly a foot across, settled briefly on her head like a living tiara, its wings translucent and faintly trembling — and Mariom greeted every one of them as though they were old friends, because on Numa, in some sense, they were.

Not far past the second bend, the path opened into a clearing shaded by an old flowering quickthorn, and here Mariom found what passed, on Numa, for a schoolhouse: no walls, no slates, no rows of desks — only a loose, cheerful circle of children seated in the grass around Nana Persimmon, a stout, round-faced winkling elder whose hands, though older than the tree above her, moved with the quick sureness of someone half her age. She was showing a cluster of winklings, two young flightsprites, and a solemn little sylvie how to graft a struggling blossom-bud onto healthier stock, narrating each small motion as she worked rather than explaining it beforehand — the Numan way of teaching being, always, to do first and understand after. "There now," she was saying, pressing a bud gently into place, "you don't force a calling onto a plant no more than you'd force one onto a child. You find where it already wants to grow, and you help it get there a little faster, that's all."

Mariom slowed, then stopped altogether, drawn in the way she was always drawn toward anything with more than one voice speaking at once. Nana Persimmon caught her eye without pausing her work and patted the grass beside her, and Mariom folded herself down among the others without a second thought — this, too, was simply how learning happened on Numa: whoever wandered close enough to a lesson became, for as long as they liked, part of it. She watched a young winkling named Pell struggle to tie off a graft-thread, his small fingers fumbling the knot three times before Mariom, without being asked, reached over and steadied the stem so he could try a fourth. He looked up at her, startled and grateful in equal measure, and Nana Persimmon only smiled, as though this — a five-year-old goddess-child quietly helping a stranger's fumbling fingers — were the whole of the lesson she'd meant to teach that morning.

"Every one of you already carries your calling inside you," Nana Persimmon told the circle, tying off her own graft with a final, practiced tug, "same as this little bud carries the flower it hasn't grown into yet. Nobody has to tell a seed what to become. You only have to give it good soil, good company, and enough patience not to dig it up early just to check." The children laughed, not quite understanding and not needing to, and Mariom laughed with them, tucking the words away in the particular unhurried way children keep things they aren't ready to use yet. She thanked Nana Persimmon, promised Pell she'd check on his graft another day, and continued on, humming, toward the faerenfield.

By midmorning the twin suns had climbed high enough that she was growing hungry and thirsty in earnest, and it was then that she came upon the treeling standing alone in the middle of a faerenfield, arms outstretched like young branches toward the light. Her topmost leaves shimmered in a blend of azure and sunset gold, and around her, fat yellow humblebees the size of a grown hand drifted from bloom to bloom alongside a scattering of flutterbys. Mariom had never met this particular treeling before, and crossed the field to introduce herself properly. The treeling's voice came out in an oboe-like fluting, warm and a little melancholy. "I am called Clarion." She stood nearly four meters tall already, though her age — Mariom would learn — meant she was nearing the end of her wandering years, the last stretch of a treeling's life before she rooted herself permanently in one chosen place. Even so, she could still bend, and her lowest branch curved down to brush Mariom's cheek with unmistakable tenderness. "Here, child. Drink of me." A blossom lowered itself into Mariom's cupped hands, and she sipped nectar sweeter and more complex than any she had tasted before. "Thank you, Clarion. I've never tasted anything quite like it. Have you traveled far?" "Yesss," Clarion sighed, the word drawn long and soft. "From the realm of the goddess Sage Angelíon. I am seeking a mate — someone to root beside, to raise treelings with. I can feel him calling to me on the wind, in its chemistry, closer now than he was yesterday. I think I am nearly there."

Mariom cast an image of the treeling to her mother without quite meaning to — the habit of a child who shared everything interesting with the person she trusted most — and felt Marita's reply arrive almost instantly, warm with recognition. Oh, I feel her now. Thank you, Mariom. There's a male of her kind, recently rooted, along the Alpen path. His name is Aster. He's the one calling to her — I'll come guide her there myself. Mariom relayed the news, watching relief and joy move across Clarion's leaves like wind across water. "My mother, Marita, goddess of Bornholm, can sense you now," she said. "She'll come soon to bring you to Aster. He's been calling to you a long while, and he trembles now, waiting for you to arrive." Clarion gave a long, shuddering sigh of relief and lifted Mariom carefully into her boughs to wait together, and while they waited, she spoke of her own childhood — how the elven folk had tended her as a seedling before she could speak or walk, how she had said goodbye to her rooted parents when her branches grew strong enough to carry her into the world, and how she had wandered ever since, searching for the place and the partner where her fruit might finally nourish a community of her own. "Much like you," she told Mariom, "we begin as something small and tended. Then we walk the world until we find our calling. Soon enough, you will too."

It was not long before Marita arrived, drifting down through the field with the same unhurried grace she brought to everything, and laid a hand against Clarion's bark. "You are more than ready for rooting, dear one. Let's bring you to someone who has been longing for the touch of your roots." Several small dragonites, startled from where they'd been dozing in Clarion's higher branches, took to the air in a flurry of wings as the treeling gathered herself, lifted Mariom gently back to the ground, and thanked the goddess with a low bow of her crown. Then, creaking, she took her first slow step toward the Alpen path, and then another, Marita walking silently beside her in a conversation Mariom could not hear but somehow understood anyway. Her mother turned back just long enough to wink at her before the two of them disappeared down the trail, and Mariom, smiling, turned back toward the village path alone.

A little further along, where the path dipped through a shaded hollow, Mariom came upon a small trailside stand built into the hollow of an old stump — shelves of woven vine holding dried fruit, twists of spiced bark, a handful of carved wooden toys, and a single, faded sign in looping Numan script that needed no explaining to anyone raised on Numa: Take what calls to you. Leave what you can. No one tended the stand; no one needed to. As Mariom watched, a passing wingfolk trader paused, selected a twist of spiced bark, and in its place set down a small woven basket she had clearly repaired herself, its handle bound in fresh, careful stitching. Neither the giving nor the taking seemed to require a single word between them — only the quiet, practiced certainty of people who had never once had to wonder whether the world would provide.

Mariom was not hungry — Marita's fuzzkin still sat warm and untouched in her pouch — but she stopped anyway, because stopping at the stand felt, in some small way, like part of the walk itself. She left behind a single bright feather she'd found tangled in her hair that morning, tucking it carefully among the dried fruit for whichever child might want it next, and continued on with the particular lightness of someone who has given something away and been made richer for it rather than poorer.

Chapter 3. In Which Thunder Can Be a Friend

She heard him coming long before she saw him. Mariom had stopped to rest by a spring-fed pond just off the village path, trailing her fingers through the cool water, when the ground itself began to tremble beneath her — ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thumpity-thump — as though some great slow storm were rolling in along the earth rather than through the sky. The sound grew louder, closer, until Mariom judged it wise to step toward the water's edge, just in case whatever was coming had no plans to stop. It very nearly didn't. A massive centaur thundered around the bend and skidded to a halt scarcely an arm's length from her, close enough that she felt the rush of displaced air against her face. "My apologies, little goddess!" the centaur boomed, his great voice equal parts alarm and embarrassment. "I did not see you there!" This was Adrax, and he towered over her the way Numari's trunk towered over her homing. "Hello, Adrax! I'm headed to the village — are you as well?" "Aye, that I am. Your mum asked me to keep an eye out, in case you'd fancy a ride into town." Mariom, who had never in her life declined a ride from anyone, fancied it very much indeed.

Adrax lowered himself and scooped her up into one enormous palm, and Mariom pressed her cheek against the warm, furry expanse of his chest, listening to his heartbeat thud away beneath her like a great slow drum. He kissed the top of her head, almost absentmindedly, the way one might greet a favorite niece, and set off toward the village at an easy trot that still, to Mariom, felt like flying.

The village was livelier than usual when they arrived. Several trading vessels had come into port overnight, and the harborside hummed with activity. The dock itself, sentient in its slow, patient way, stretched octopus-like arms out to cradle each new arrival, cleaning hulls and feeding them Numa's own rich, restorative milk, so that even a ship that had spent a month or more at open sea could rest and be renewed before setting out again. Adrax set Mariom gently down, and she thanked him for the ride as he trotted off toward the far side of the village, pausing along the way to trade a few easy words with a sailor unloading a sack of faeren fruit from the south. He offered, in return, a length of finely woven isinglass rope slung across his broad shoulders, but the sailor waved him off good-naturedly — "chuck full-o-ropes already, but enjoy t'fruits, laddie" — and the two parted with the easy warmth of people who had traded favors for years and expected to trade many more.

Bornholm's square, just beyond the harbor, was in full and happy chaos by the time Mariom wandered into it. Stalls built from woven branch and sail-cloth lined three sides of the open plaza, though "stalls" understated the truth of them — nothing on Numa was bought, and so nothing here was quite for sale, either. Vessa the potter had set out a table of her newest bowls beside a hand-lettered sign that read simply take one, and had already accumulated, in exchange, a small mountain of things she hadn't asked for: a sack of Nort'land grain, a mended fishing net, a child's drawing of her own kiln done in charcoal. Old Bram, who had lost most of his voice to age but none of his cheer, stood at the well pumping fresh water into anyone's jug who brought one, communicating entirely through an elaborate system of winks and gestures that every child in Bornholm had long since learned to read fluently.

Near the square's center, a lanky young Numan named Corwyn was casting bells — actual bells, shaped from a resonant blue clay found only in the Bornholm hills, each one humming faintly with its own particular note even before it was fired. Corwyn had been, by his own cheerful admission, hopeless at nearly everything else the village had tried teaching him: he could not fish, could not weave, went pale and useless at the sight of a healing wound. It was Marita herself who had noticed, years back, the way he unconsciously hummed a different pitch for every person he met, and who had gently suggested he try his hand at bell-casting instead — and in the years since, no ship left Bornholm's harbor without one of Corwyn's bells hung at its prow, each tuned, he insisted, to the particular sound of its captain's laugh. Nobody on Numa thought it strange that a boy's calling should take three false starts to find. They only thought it stranger, when Mariom asked about it, that anyone might have given up looking before it was found.

A ripple of small shrieks went up from a knot of playing children as Adrax came trotting back through the square on some other errand, the ground announcing him half a block before he arrived — and for the briefest instant, in the way even a fearless world still startles at a sudden noise, every small body went still and wide-eyed. Then, exactly as quickly, the shrieks turned to delighted laughter as the children recognized him and swarmed his legs demanding to be lifted, and Mariom, watching, understood something she wouldn't have words for until much later: that even here, even on Numa, thunder could still make you flinch — but only for the length of a single startled breath, because it was always, always, only ever a friend underneath.

Mariom made her way to the Wayberry Inn in search of Moonie, a dearen — a small, teardrop-shaped creature about a meter tall, with wispy yellow hair the same lemon shade as her skin and thin, twig-like legs that ended in bright red, curl-toed skeds. Her apron was nothing more than a single soft orange petal, cut with a hole for her head and dusted liberally with red tea leaves. "Hi, Mariom! I see you brought the ointment from your mum — thanks the world for it. I burnt me backside in t'garden yesterday something fierce, and me bum's been numb the whole blessed day. Got meself a proper numb-bum, I have!" The two of them collapsed into giggles at the sheer indignity of it, and since Moonie's own twig-thin arms could not quite reach the afflicted area, Mariom applied the salve herself, both girls laughing so hard the job took twice as long as it should have. Afterward, over a shared cup of tea, they traded the small gossip of their days, and Mariom tied the promised bag of wayberry leaves to her hip before setting off, at last, for home.

On her way out of the village, Mariom remembered Bridget's small request and detoured past the Estlands stall, where a broad-shouldered goddess named Yelena kept baskets of tea leaves sorted by scent rather than name, each basket labeled only with a small painted symbol — a raindrop, a sunbeam, a curl of smoke — for those who couldn't yet read. Yelena measured out a generous handful of wayberry leaves into a twist of leaf-paper without being asked twice, waving off Mariom's offer of the coin-shaped fuzzkin seed she'd been given for just such trades. "You'll bring me something better one day, little goddess," Yelena said, tucking the twist into Mariom's pouch alongside Moonie's bag. "Everyone does, eventually. That's rather the whole point."

By the time she reached the path up to Numari, both suns had long since set, and the flora along the trail had begun its slow evening luminescence — enough to see her feet, if not much beyond them. She judged, with mounting unease, that she still had a good distance to go and was beginning to consider the very real possibility of a night spent sleeping beside the trail, when a soft whinny sounded somewhere in the dark ahead. A moment later a gentle light broke through the brush, growing brighter as a unicorn picked her way toward Mariom with unhurried, deliberate grace. She recognized Windfoot at once and cast her love ahead of her like a greeting; the unicorn could not answer in words, but she knelt low all the same, and Mariom climbed gratefully onto her back. They rose together and set off toward home at an easy walk, and Mariom, wrapped in the soft glow and quieter-still love that only a unicorn seems able to offer, felt her eyes grow heavy almost at once. By the time they reached Numari, she was nearly asleep in the saddle, and it was Bridget — waiting, as she so often seemed to be, exactly when and where she was needed — who lifted the drowsy child down and carried her the rest of the way to her mossy bed, already fluffed and turned down by the nigh-elves for the night. Bridget laid her gently upon the moss, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and whispered, so softly it barely disturbed the quiet, "Sweet dreams, child" — and if there was, in that whisper, some small private sorrow that Mariom was still too young to hear, it passed, that night, unnoticed, leaving behind only warmth, and love, and the deep, dreamless sleep of a child who had never once been told to be afraid.

Long after the lamps of Numari had dimmed and the whole homing had settled into its slow, breathing quiet, Bridget sat a while longer beside the child's bed than she strictly needed to, watching the moonslight move across Mariom's sleeping face. She was young enough yet to trust that the world would always be this soft, this certain, this entirely without teeth — and Bridget, who had lived long enough to know that even the kindest worlds sometimes change shape when you aren't looking, allowed herself, just this once, the small luxury of hoping she was wrong to worry. Then she rose, smoothed the moss blanket one last time, and went to find her own bed, leaving behind a room lit only by starlight and the faint, contented glow of a thousand small night-blooms, and the sound, if you listened closely enough, of an entire loving world breathing quietly in its sleep.