Bones of the Earth
by Jules
part 1
For a timeless amount of time, Eshe sits at the bedside of Kide, his closest, most brilliant friend. He looks helplessly at the wooden loom he made at Kide’s direction, to make silk woven finer and stronger than anyone else’s. He looks at a half-finished garment shining softly in the patchwork of sun shining into the tent. There is a hard pincushion with precious needles stuck into it. Kide is one of the few in the Crowns skilled enough to possess metal tools to sew and to cut.
If Kide had broken a bone, Eshe would have carved a brace. If Kide had lost a limb, Eshe would have carved a new one decorated with the round bees Kide loved. If Kide needed rescuing, Eshe would have rescued him.
Now Eshe can only clench his big, callused hands as Kide takes another rattling breath. How long have they been like this? Almost long enough for the First Sun to move across the sky, but not long enough for the suncatcher flowers to bloom more than once. As First Sun lowers, Second Sun comes along behind it. One, the other, or both are usually in the sky.
Kide is grey under his brown skin. His lips are turning blue, his fingernails turning red. Wind rustles leaves and sways slender boughs that support the tent. Eshe watches the fleeting silhouettes of birds flit by outside. Everything in the Crowns is in motion, except Kide’s chest never rises again after his exhale.
Eshe’s world breaks in half. Time is divided. There was the time with Kide, and now there is time without him. Eshe stares down at Kide’s wasted face, so thin it seems to pull his mouth into a grin. Eshe sits there until Kide’s family comes back inside the tent. They take a silk veil from a wooden box Eshe made and place it over Kide’s face. Later they will bind his body to the highest branches, arms raised, face tilted up so that the white-winged birds can feed and carry his spirit back to the sky.
Kide’s spirit is somewhere, but it isn’t here.
Eshe knows he should stay. He knows he should remove the colorful feathers and wooden beads from his hair in the ritual of mourning, but his first act in this new, divided time is to leave the tent. He walks quickly on loamy paths, past other tents and pools surrounded by pinwheel gardens of colored flowers and groves of tall, Crown-dwelling ferns. He feels heavy enough to bow wide walking-branches under his feet as he wanders from one great Crown to another. The route is long and circuitous. He and Kide had planned to create a system of light, wooden baskets that would shuttle people directly from Crown to Crown on silk cords. Now that will never be.
Second Sun is bright through the Canopy. It makes the loam smell heavy and rich in a way that First Sun does not. Eshe thinks the sky should be dark to reflect Kide’s death, but in the Crowns, darkness happens infrequently and at varied intervals. He casts his eyes downward to the green dimness below.
In the next Crown, loam walks spiral out from a central garden where a storyteller is entertaining a seated crowd. A paper screen stands behind her. The storyteller alternates between characters, using her stick as a Bole-climber’s pick, as an old woman’s walking stick, as a magic wand. She darts behind the screen and contorts her hands and body to make shadow puppets. The crowd is spellbound. Eshe sits among them for a while, but cannot keep his attention on the story. He gets up and moves away.
He finds himself in a cathedral space fluttering with colored silk panels tied high into slender branches. There is an old man teaching the rituals of running water. Some listen, while others congregate around a deep, still pool. Some gossip. Others meditate. Eshe cannot do either. He watches seed pods twirl down from above to find their final resting places in the water. People come and go around him.
When the Bole-flowers close, in the time when their delicate shade of purple is gone, but their powdery scent is fresh in memory, the Crown Dwellers say the Necrology for those whose souls were drowned below. The bold and foolhardy had been climbing down to the world below for time out of mind. The lost would never again rise to the Canopy or return to the sky.
Eshe only knew one of them by face and by name. Yena had brought Eshe a bird-shaped spokeshave from the underworld, opening up new rounded surfaces for him and, through his skill, for the other Crown dwellers. She’d brought fistfuls of nails, too and a priceless glass cup for the altar. She had been great among adventurers. Then one day she failed to return.
When everyone who knew Yena has died, she will just be another name in the Necrology. Horror grows within Eshe. After he dies, there will come a time when no one remembers him at all. No one will even remember when he was forgotten. That’s time out of mind. He understands it now.
Eshe cannot bring himself to complete the Necrology for the drowned spirits. Names fall to meaningless syllables, like shattered silk or splintered wood. Nothing is complete. Nothing can be completed. There is only ending. There is only Kide’s ending and Eshe’s own eventual ending as well.
He cannot look at the bright eyes and brown faces of the other Crown Dwellers. He leaves the cathedral for the solitude of his own workshop. It is close to the great Bole itself. Like most spaces in the Crowns, it is large and airy. The entrance is framed by two small, sturdy trees growing up from the thick loam. Bronzy silk screens divide his space from that of others, but otherwise, it is open. The roof-leaves high overhead are so thick and layered that they keep off the rain. Half his shelves are made of great knotted ridges of bark. There is one big knot that serves him as a seat, another as a workbench. He even has a small pool to wash in. It is rimmed with moss. He would know his workshop with his eyes closed; the place smells like wood shavings.
As soon as he enters, he sees his and Kide’s most ambitious project hung on a curving branch. It is a sleek frame with white silk stretched across it, that will — theoretically — allow a person to glide like a bird. Kide will never get to see whether it works, and Eshe is seized with the wild impulse to break it so that he won’t see, either. No one ever will. His workshop is wide enough that before he crosses it, he remembers that he’d be destroying Kide’s work as well as his own. He has no right to, so he simply stands in the middle of the workshop. It is blurry and wobbly with the tears in his eyes. He cries for both Kide and himself.
Eshe’s own projects are all around him. There are supports for great tents, latticed screens, trellises, small puzzle boxes, strong chests, toys for children he knows. They have a surface finished as smooth as running water. Every wooden piece slots into the other such that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. They have to be. Metal nails and hinges are too dear to use for everyday objects.
Ah, but his collection of metal carving tools are hung on a peg-board to one side. They were brought up from the ruined underworld at great risk, passed down from master woodworkers before him and will endure forever.
Forever?
Eshe scrubs tears from his eyes with his wrist. Yena always used to say that immortality itself is down there, in the flooded underworld city. He used to scoff at her, but now it makes sense. Metal lasts in a way that wood and silk and leather do not. Metal lasts longer than memory, longer than time out of mind. If immortality is anywhere, it is in the underworld.
Eshe decides that he will live forever. He will have a spirit of metal, keen and everlasting.
Yena is gone. Eshe cannot ask her to take him down the Boles. Even if he were able to ask her, she’d refuse. The journey to the underworld takes days. It takes a special kind of endurance. It takes intimate knowledge of equipment. Most importantly, it takes a whole crew with dedicated roles. If he asked adventurers, they’d laugh at him. A wood crafter, even a master, would be a burden to them. Besides, Yena used to tell him that only a certain kind of person could even breathe down there.
Immortality slides out of his grasp and his workshop blurs again.
No; he refuses to give up.
Eshe turns back to the glider. He can use it to circle down the Bole to the underworld city, find immortality and seize it with both hands. He can’t use it to get back up but, if a party of adventurers finds him back at the foot of the Boles, they will have to bring him up with them, burden or not.
For Eshe, action follows thought as naturally as Second Sun follows First. He takes the glider down from its place and carries it beyond the tents, beyond the Crown, out to where the branches are thin and whippy. Dwellers give him strange looks, but they are used to seeing Eshe carrying configurations of wood and silk they can only guess at.
His timing is good: the wind always rises when Second Sun is high in the sky. When he arrives at a likely clearing, he slides his arms through sturdy loops of cord and ties it into the knots Kide devised. Eshe becomes a product of geometry rather than the crude cycle of life, birth and decay. Axioms last forever, he reminds himself. He grasps the handles firmly. Only then does he dare to look down. The drop is unfathomable.
Will the glider work? Will it really? Eshe knows planes and angles, but Kide was the one who understood weight distribution and how silk would bear up a human body. Kide was the one who was going to test it, not Eshe. So, does Eshe trust his friend with his life? While he considers, he nearly overbalances with the unwieldy thing strapped to his back. He grabs a nearby branch to keep himself from tumbling out of the Crowns and into anathema. Shock tingles all the way out to his fingers and toes.
When his heart slows, he tells himself that his choice is either fast anathema or the slow erosion of memory into time out of mind. Besides, he does trust Kide’s expertise. When a gust of wind shivers the leaves, he tilts the glider and lets the wind catch it. The light frame of silk and wood bears him away. There is no drop. He is sweeping through the space between the Crowns.
Kide would be thrilled. He would spin in one of his tight circles and clap his hands, the way he did when he was swept with strong emotion. Eshe is so overcome that he nearly doesn’t realize that another Crown is approaching rapidly. He leans into a curve away from it. The glider sweeps out and down, past the broad walking branches, down to the levels of the silk farms and beyond. Now he has a clear view of the Bole for the first time in his life.
The Boles support all the Crowns. Every child knows that. Eshe knew they had to be big to hold the market squares and workshops and learning circles and the entirety of his world, but that was an abstract knowledge. He had never before appreciated how massive they are. From here, he can see only one. Crags bearded with cascading lichen take up his entire vision to his right side. Shelves of flowers and groves of ferns nod from bark ledges. A colony of nesting birds twitters at him in confusion, ruffling a mass of wings. A cavernous knot-hole yawns.
Eshe cannot attend to all of it or he might crash into one of the spoke-like branches jutting from the Bole. He leans and leans, sailing around the long curve of the Bole, lower and lower. Now there are fewer branches and more space, but it is harder to see. It is dim here, except for slanting bars of sunlight that do little except contrast with the green darkness.
After a while, the muscles of his arms strain with effort. Who knew this trip would be so long? What happens when he is so fatigued he cannot steer the glider? He tilts his weight, trying to accelerate his downward motion. The glider lurches and momentum seizes his body. Eshe feels as though he has left his insides in the Canopy and the glider dives faster. It begins to wobble wildly as though it is hitting resistance first on one side, then on the other. Silk ripples and snaps next to his ears. Eshe summons strength he didn’t know he had, trying to wrestle the glider back under control.
Instead it begins to spiral. He misses another bough so close that he tears through its curtain of moss. Light and shadow change places. His surroundings become darker and colder. The ground rushes toward him: shreds of mist across brown and black. He hits with a massive slap that knocks the world right out of him: no gravity, no sight, no smell, no sound. His limbs are slowed against thick resistance. Cold presses against his skin. This is the underworld. It is not meant for the living.
Then he realizes that he is underwater. The glider straps tangle his limbs, trapping him below the surface. Eshe scrabbles to undo the knots. Kide was the clever one with cords. He could make knots that would hold against body weight, then come undone with a single precise tug. Eshe’s chest aches. His eyes are uselessly wide in the dark water. His fingers seem to slide off the knots. He gives up on them, twisting his body and snapping the hollow struts of the glider. Then he is free, kicking upward and breaking the surface with a wild gasp. His flailing hands connect with something knotty and slimy and solid. He digs his fingers in and pulls himself up onto a massive knuckle of root.
Eshe’s heart beats like a mallet against his ribs. He is out of the water, but the air here is so heavy and still that he struggles to breathe. Every inhale feels like he is sucking sips off something viscous. The rush of survival is wearing off, and he wants nothing more than a handful of berries or a piece of fruit to restore himself, but finds — to his unease — that there are no berries, no fruits, no nectar. His surroundings are dim shades of brown and grey. Black water stretches around him, with paths made by twisted roots. Stands of silver trees grow from roots and water, pale as ghosts.
How long until an urge for sugar becomes real hunger? Eshe has known that before, after long stretches in his workshop, but that means following his nose to wherever a feast is going on and joining the eating and dancing for a while.
In the underworld, his nose tells him nothing. He can only smell sodden wood and stagnant water. How long before real hunger becomes starvation and mortality? He can only remain in the underworld for so long before he joins the spirits trapped here. But thanks to Yena, he has a vague idea of where the flooded city is.
When Eshe takes his first step, he stumbles. All his life he has been surrounded by the motion of leaves, branches, Crowns and even the slight give of the Boles to the wind. The ground here is so still that it jolts his feet. He looks up for the comfort of sunflash through leaves, but the Canopy is unimaginably far away. There is only gloom.
Eshe knows the general direction of the flooded city, but he quickly discovers that he is in a labyrinth. The root pathways keep turning on themselves, offering false hope before then twisting him away from where he wants to go. The roots are still and cold under his feet. Twisted white flowers bloom at the foot of a tree, but they are meaningless. They tell him nothing about time or place. Their wafting scent is alien, wispy and faint. How do adventurers navigate this?
Cold from the ground begins to seep into his heart and sap his resolve. If there are signals in the roots, he is as oblivious to them as Yena would have been to the meaning of wood-grain in his workshop. He knows where the Bole is and could even return to it, but he’d be even less able to climb it alone and unaided than he would be to travel across flat ground.
Before he can give in to despair, he sees a tangle of felled trunks in the water nearby him. Eshe knows that wood floats on water from little crafts he’s built for children to sail in rivulets and pools. In a moment, he unknots the glider cords around his body, stretches them out and lashes together the most buoyant logs.
The result of his work is crooked and unwieldy, but it takes his weight. He kisses his fingertips and raises them toward the Crowns above, thanking Kide’s spirit for woven silk strong enough to save him. He takes a long, straight branch and uses it to pole himself across the black water, taking a straight course toward the flooded city.
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
