Ch 1 The Sirkel Room

Gilly’s fingers tightened around the controls of the Silverback, the sleek assault craft vibrating with barely contained fury as it tore through the pink sky. The Dart was just ahead, its jagged silhouette dashing between the stone spires of the Upper, like a wounded predator.

She matched its every move, weaving through the towering sarsens and the impossibly tall trees that clawed at the clouds. The air shimmered with heat and velocity. Her targeting reticle blinked red. One more second and she’d have the kill shot.

Next, the blaster fire came, searing past her cockpit from another Dart that now closed in from behind, striking a sarsen spire just ahead. The massive ancient rock groaned, cracked, and began to fall. Gilly swore, jerking the Silverback into a desperate roll.

“Mother Fracking Tree!,” she gripped the controls, every muscle tightened, her eyes narrowing to tiny slits.

Boulders rained down like the fists of deities. One struck her wing. The craft lurched, shrieked, and began to spiral. She was falling, plummeting into a fissure that split the ground like a wound. Darkness swallowed her. The cockpit cracked. Air hissed out in thin, cruel streams. Her breath caught. Her lungs screamed. She couldn’t breathe.

And then—something.

Not a voice, not quite. A presence.

Like fingers, long and searching, rifling through the pages of her mind. She felt it more than heard it, like a whisper behind a wall of water. Muddled. Distant. But it was looking for her. She was sure of it.

Suddenly a sound, so loud she felt it in her bones. Like a heavy door being slammed by an angry hand.

BOOM!

She instantly snapped awake, heart hammering, breath ragged, clothes drenched in sweat. The dream, turned nightmare, clung to her like fog. She trembled. That voice, if it was a voice, still echoed in her skull, distorted, and wet, like a sound underwater.

It had been searching. Not just watching. Not just calling. Probing. The thought made her skin crawl. She shivered, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders, but the cold wasn’t coming from outside.

She bolted upright, the rough linen sheets a stark contrast to the icy dread that clenched her stomach. A frantic scramble: leather shoes thudding against the warn floorboards, a desperate tug at a tank top, then a threadbare tunic, the rough wool scratching against her skin.

Finally, a headlong dash out her door and down the twisting underground root-hallways, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and something faintly metallic, like old blood. She could almost taste her panic, a bitter drop spreading across her tongue.

Twenty-two years she'd choked on the dust and grit of the Middle, a lifetime steeped in the cloying sweetness of fear and the coopery taste of ichor. The air itself hung thick, heavy with the unspoken threat of Mother's wrath, a suffocating presence that pressed against her chest, a physical weight she longed to escape.

Though deep below ground, the Middle breathed like a living organism. Caverns opened in to amphitheaters, corridors curve in concentric wooden ribs and polished stone. The Middle was an engineered world, carved into bedrock and woven into the colossal roots of the Mother Tree that stood hundreds of feet above on the surface of Triune.

There were terraces, gardens, workshops, and sparing rooms. The Middle, both laboratory and home to those who live there, a long apprenticeship in training and survival. One that must be endured in order to step through the Moondoor and onto the Phebus lit shores of the Upper.

The muted rasp of Gilly’s own breathing felt like a betrayal as she raced ahead, a reckless defiance against her odds of survival. For being a moment late wasn't merely an infraction; it was an act of war.

A tremor of dread, cold and sharp as shattered glass, pierced her, the chilling thought of Mother's eyes landing upon her and that almost human demeanor which did not take infractions lightly. Gilly was a moth drawn to a flame, knowing the burn first hand, courting the annihilation.

The halls reeked of recycled air as she sprinted, lungs burning towards the Sirkel room. Her last lecture in the underground world of the Middle. Her last chance to learn how to survive her final Binding.

She skidded, a near-fall, before the inconspicuous door, a deceptive sliver of polished wood, then, with a hiss of compressed air, the door parted, revealing her destiny. She held her breath and entered.