I remember wandering through the village for the first time. My mother carried me on her shoulders, bouncing with each step. The giggling bubbled up through my tiny body as I dug my hands into her hair. I don’t remember the faces of the people we walked past, only the sound of my mother’s singing. Her voice light and airy, feathering notes into the air, singing her nonsense songs for me.

  Even in a crowd she remained constant. A brightness. A creature of song and dance. My mother.

  As a child, I believed she existed solely for me. Solely to make me happy. To bring me smiles. To hold me when I coughed through the night. To swing me through the trees. To throw me into the air and catch me before I hit the ground.

  More than my HoPa or LoPa, she was the one who nurtured me. She was like a third sun to me. I revolved round her and she shone so bright on every moment of my life.

  We were the home set farthest from the MotherTree. Right on the forest’s edge, barely making it beneath MotherTree’s shadow at twilight. The homes closest to us weren’t very close. Dozens of Bauruken feet away. It gave us a lot of space out there to live expansively, albeit separately. Only our homes were set alone, unshared by multiple families.

  You’ve never been there so I’ll explain what our homes were.

  To enter our village from the forest that is the world, you would be confronted by a long clearing of small, rolling hills. Atop many of these hills were gardens or even livestock. Chickens scratching endlessly at the black dirt of our homes. Goats finding themselves in trees, eating crops, and being chased away. And the flowers. The most beautiful flowers you’d ever have the privilege of seeing. A thousand thousand hues dancing over the rings of homes that defined the inner circle of the clan.

  I remember the families that grew only flowers. Flowers to trade with the other clans, to use in celebration days. It was an honor to live in a home like that. These flowered homes were generational. It would take an act of great shame for a family or group of families to be moved from the flowered homes. They were bright and expansive. A dozen families could’ve shared each flowered home, but much fewer did.

  She carried me from our home, small and relatively newly raised, through the clan and all the way to the MotherTree. Those closest to us had small homes but more space. We were a tattered bunch. All our homes dug recently into the rolling hills or raised to mimic those hills that defined the clan’s clearing. Our pots cracked and barely usable, constantly being respun by my HoPa. That’s what we traded, mostly. At least with those who would trade with us. Outcasts that we were. As we made our way towards the MotherTree, the homes became longer and more congested, sometimes with several distinct homes sharing the same hill. Don’t know why they did it like this when they could’ve just connected them all internally and lived more comfortably, but families were sometimes possessive of the patches of land they were given. The Meadow for the children of the clan stretched through much of the clearing. A flat stretch of land running alongside these many congested hills. Closer still were the flowered homes, and then came the yurts. Animal skins housed those on the inner circles of the clan, until we reached the MotherTree itself, where First Mother lived in a simple yurt of wolf skins said to be a gift from the ancient wolf gods themselves.

  The inner circle lived in yurts to symbolize that favor with the gods and even with the world is ephemeral. By the time I was born, those families had lived there for nearly ten generations.

  The walk was long. At least a few Bauruken miles from forest to the MotherTree’s trunk. It’s hard to give useful measurements, so take these all like you would the story of a drunk Auntie. We didn’t have such things in the clan. Time and distance weren’t reckoned this way. We didn’t have engineering or maths. The forest provided and surrounded. The forest was all we needed, and we saw no need to quantify our lives, except by her seasons.

  We walked past communal fires where many families shared meals. Fires burning the cast-off branches of trees, though most often our fires were made from a type of moss that grows everywhere in the forest. Or goat dun. It gives off a musky pleasant scent, the moss. We didn’t chop down trees there. We only took what was given by the forest, so we often went without wood.

  We walked past men and women tending their gardens, some communal, some personal, while others fed their chickens or goats. She avoided the Meadow where the children all lived together. Either that or the game of her song distracted me.

  It was the first time I remember being at the MotherTree. It had always been there, way off in the distance, and I had never given a thought to it in my very brief life. It simply was.

  The MotherTree stretched a mile into the air, sometimes piercing clouds. She grew over the course of a thousand thousand years. MotherTree is among the oldest creatures in the world. Her roots grow deep into the world, wrapping around the very heart of Saol. They stretch through the clearing, thicker than a man is tall. They run like untouchable rivers. Her trunk is half a mile thick. To stand beside it is to be overwhelmed by the history of life, the history of Saol. Every member of the Wolf Clan’s ashes has been spread over Her roots, returning our bodies to the Mother of life. The god that nurtures and feeds but never needs.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  If anything may be considered a god, it is the MotherTree.

  Many of the sacred elements of the world have rotted in my eyes, but the MotherTree is forever. It existed long before us and will live long after us.

  That may sound silly to one such as you but the MotherTree is not a simple matter of belief.

  It’s difficult to explain to someone who’s never seen it or one of its Sisters who live deep in the forest that is the world. To look upon It is to have waves of the endless wash over you, swell inside you. Every bit of you becomes swept up by its radiating power. Spacetime expands and contracts, as if existence and life sigh with pleasure. It’s difficult to think your own thoughts.

  How to even say this—housed in the MotherTree are the echoes of thousands of generations of human and godly lives. It’s as if those echoes reverberate and trickle through, faintly. They call to us. They sing for us.

  It’s like being born while giving birth.

  My mother said, “This is the MotherTree, oldest of all beings of the world. The first person to ever live was the seed of one of her fruits. She lived inside a fruit as big as HoPa and through its skin she heard the chirping of birds, the howling of wolves. But she was trapped. Trapped inside the belly of that great fruit. When the wind blew, she felt how it moved the fruit that housed her. She shook within. She beat against the walls and even tried to eat her way out, but nothing worked. Then a storm came and blew her fruit so strong that she was able to shake her fruit free from the branch.

  “She fell. She fell and she fell and she fell and when the fruit hit the ground—” My mother clapped and my heart jumped. “The fruit broke open and she stood in the light of the suns for the first time. The first person to ever see the suns and feel the wind on her skin. The rain on her face. She clutched at the MotherTree and waited for the storm to end.

  “Do you know what she did next?”

  My voice was barely a breath, “What?”

  “She climbed. She climbed and climbed and climbed way up into those branches. When she reached the other fruit, she kicked them free. She watched them fall all the way down to the ground.” She clapped again, startling me once more. “When the fruit broke open, she found her brothers and sister inside.

  “Back on the ground, they sang and danced and learnt to live. To be human, like you and me. Those are our ancestors, given to the world as a gift by the MotherTree. We stay near Her because we long to be a part of Her again. She is our Mother and we belong to Her. Because She gives us our life, we give Her ourselves when we die, after the Walkers take us.”

  “Vilka,” a harsh voice spoke. My mother turned to face a small woman draped in white wolfskins. A white wolfhead worn on her own dark head.

  What I noticed first about her were her disgusting feet, callused and gnarled. Her legs thick and patched with veins, the skin seemed too thick. Like the hide of a beast. Her toes curled grotesquely beneath the cracked pads of her feet.

  My mother set me down and squatted beside me, whispering loud enough for the woman to hear. “Luna, this is First Mother. You don’t remember, but she helped bring you into this world when you tried to kill me. She was the first to hold your tiny body and breathe air into your lungs.”

  First Mother stared at me with no expression. As if I weren’t there. Or like I was nothing but an out of place leaf. It paralyzed me, seeing a face stare at me without warmth. Her eyes old and hard under eyelids heavy with age. Wrinkles ravined through her face. Her thick lips were pale like she was biting them inside her mouth. It was the first time I feared another person. The way she watched me without compassion, without kindness. I had never felt—never thought someone could be cruel or mean. I didn’t even have words for those concepts then. It was dizzying and my body felt full of spiders ripping through their eggsacks and clawing over my organs. Then First Mother turned to my mother.

  “What are you doing here?”

  My mother stood and I leaned into her, then wrapped my arm round her leg. Her muscles were so hard but her skin so smooth. She stared up into the branches. “Do you ever think about all those who live inside the MotherTree?”

  First Mother snorted, “Go home, Vilka.”

  My mother laughed without smiling, with barely any expression at all, making it appear derisive. “How long did you wait for her to die so you could punish my family?”

  First Mother only sighed as if she had heard this a thousand times. She walked to MotherTree’s trunk and put a hand flat against the bark. Chills ran down my spine.

  She said, “Your life disgraces her. Your choices punish your family every day. That you do it continuously—” First Mother’s voice was rising to a shout. Her voice creaking with age but slapping against my ears like stone being struck by hammers. She snapped her mouth shut, her lips pale. She closed her eyes for a moment, then exhaled the breath she must’ve held for a long time. Turning back to us, her eyes were sad, “Go home, Vilka. Think of your daughter and what she could one day grow to be.” First Mother turned and left us standing beneath the MotherTree.

  “I’m with child once more, Mother.” My mother put a hand gently to her stomach, which was still taut and flat.

  First Mother stopped and looked back, “I pray that this one lives. More, I pray that you will do better.”

  We watched her go and then my mother lifted me back up.

  She didn’t sing on the way back. Her tension flowed into me. Every face looked caustic on the way home.

  It wasn’t until I saw my brothers running and laughing between LoPa and HoPa that my mother sang again.

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