Pulse One — Blood on the Gate
Talis Vireo felt the orchard before he saw it. The air on Lyseria’s eternal night side had always tasted faintly of cold iron, but tonight it crackled with something sweeter—like sparks leaping off sugar. Beyond a dune of jet-black sand waited the concentric trees of legends: trunks of glassy crystal, branches blooming aurora-colored thorns.
He pushed through waist-high tufts of star-grass until the first thorn brushed his wrist. It pricked. A single bead of scarlet welled, then shattered into motes of light that sank into the bark. With a hiss, the Gate-Tree parted. Petals the size of stained-glass shields folded outward, revealing a corridor alive with pulsating roots. They beat in time with Talis’s racing heart, as though announcing a challenger’s arrival.
Behind him, the dune had already begun to crumble—no return. Ahead, an eight-point spiral path invited him into the orchard’s dark glow.
Pulse Two — March of the Chromatic Roots
The path carried him rather than the other way around. Roots braided together, forming a living conveyor that rolled beneath his boots. Each step he would have taken sprouted neon moss, then dissolved back into earth once he’d passed—as though the orchard rewrote itself to his rhythm alone.
Sometimes the trees leaned inward. Their pliant limbs formed archways that whispered in dozens of voices—snippets of extinct languages, negotiations between long-dead lovers, the recitation of prime numbers backwards. Talis tried to focus on the steady thrum of his pulse to stay anchored. He had inhaled only a breath of spore-dust so far, yet colors already felt louder than thunder.
At a curve in the spiral, the conveyor slowed. Ahead stretched open ground littered with swirling pollen. Every particle flashed a full rainbow cycle before vanishing. Where did it go? He stepped forward—and the orchard answered with a storm.
Pulse Three — Sporestorm
It began as a murmur overhead. Then the canopy burst like a broken dam, unleashing cascades of iridescent spores. They swarmed in cylindrical vortices, scribbling impossible geometry in midair. Gravity canted thirty degrees; the horizon folded like origami.
Talis spun, weightless, neither falling nor standing. Each breath painted flavors across his tongue: ultraviolet mint, melancholic tangerine. He clutched the satchel across his chest, the braided rope that tethered his resolve. Find the Heart-Spore, descend the Well, bargain back the vanished. The mantra steadied him.
In the moment he spoke the words aloud, the storm froze. Spores hung motionless, a billion prismatic beads suspended in black honey. Then they drifted aside, parting to reveal a glade of mirrored trunks.
Pulse Four — The Mirror Grove
Here, crystal trees had liquefied into flawless mercury. Their surfaces showed no orchard—only reflections of Talis, multiplied to infinity. Each duplicate marched several paces familiar, then diverged: one turned right, another knelt to examine phantom soil, several simply stepped out of the mirror and strode toward him.
They circled, silent. Their eyes glinted with private conviction, each certain of the correct path through the orchard. In every pair of irises he saw different futures: one version carried a glowing spore but bled from the chest; another bore ash-gray hair and eyes like worn stone, wandering alone down a fluorescent coastline.
Talis unsheathed a shard of obsidian he had hidden against his forearm. A cut unites what reflection divides, the oracle in his home village taught. He scored a line across his palm. Blood welled again—but this time it turned white, shining like moon lamplight.
The doubles blinked and dissolved into splashy puddles of mirrored liquid. The grove rumbled. From beneath the silvery soil, a staircase of invisible steps revealed itself, spiraling down into darkness.
Pulse Five — Hexadecimal Choir
He descended, counting each step, though the numbers soon looped in un-Euclidean ways: thirteen followed by F, F followed by twenty, and so on. When he reached what felt like the thirty-third tier, disembodied digits formed halos around him—floating symbols: 0 1 A D E 7 C.
The digits sang. Their chorus was a vibrating code that cracked open seams in reality. Letters spun into runes; numbers blossomed into fractal snowflakes. Each resolved into a piece of a grand stairway that extended below what mortal eyes could see.
“Speak the answer,” the choir intoned, voice overlapping across octaves that did not exist.
Talis replied with the only phrase that felt honest: “There is no answer—only pulse.”
Acquiescence thrummed through the void. The choir split apart, reintegrating into a single downward bridge wrapped in indigo nebula fog. He stepped onto it, and gravity—if it still had any say—reversed.
Pulse Six — Descent Through Velvet Infraspace
Up was down. Down was a soft ocean of night velvet, thick enough to swim through. Bioluminescent glyphs drifted past like plankton: spirals, tessellations, stylized faces mouthing silent laughter. Time smeared; minutes might have fled an hour ago or not yet arrived.
Somewhere ahead, a citadel of fungal pillars flickered in and out of focus. Lightning coursed across its cap-stone and trickled down gill-like architecture. He drifted toward it, arms paddling through nothing. Each stroke erased a memory of childhood and replaced it with a blooming vision of link-chains of galaxies. He couldn’t be sure whether he had ever been a child.
But one thing remained solid—the satchel pulsing against his ribs. Its heartbeat synchronized with his own, guiding him closer to a violet glow at the citadel’s center.
Pulse Seven — The Mycelial Throne
The throne resembled a colossal mushroom fused with a circuit board. Filaments of silver data scrolls crawled across its surface, feeding knowledge into the looming figure seated upon it: the Spore Regent—half-humanoid, half-mycelium, crowned with tendrils that resembled both wires and roots.
“Talis Vireo,” it articulated through harmonic tremors. “Why do you trespass?”
“To trade,” Talis managed, though his voice warbled under pressure. “A Heart-Spore for the return of those swallowed by the orchard’s memory.”
The Regent’s laugh sounded like pages turning inside a storm. “To buy a life, you must pay with lives. Yet you arrive alone. Who, then, will bear your debt?”
Talis unlatched his satchel. Inside glowed not coins, nor weapons, but time—small glass vials containing moments he had stolen from himself during sleepless years. Each vial shimmered with images of birthdays uncelebrated, friendships never pursued, loves left only in dreams.
“Take these,” he vowed, “and let the orchard free them.”
The throne’s fungal root curled, accepting the satchel. In exchange it exposed its core: a glistening heart-shaped spore, beating lavender light. It pulsed twice—slow, cavernous booms that rippled through the citadel. Outside, the orchard groaned, limbs cracking in sympathetic rhythm.
Pulse Eight — Eclipse & Freefall
Talis grasped the Heart-Spore. It molded to his hand, tendrils piercing skin like needles of frost and fire simultaneously. High above, Lyseria’s lone moon veered across the sky at impossible speed, sliding between the planet and its sun-shard.
The orchard blacked out—every crystal leaf dimmed, every root stilled. Night, which had always ruled this hemisphere, became darker still, as though the concept of light had been whispered out of existence.
A single chasm opened beneath the throne. Wind howled upward from the Orcus Well, smelling of ozone and ancient tears. Without hesitation—because hesitation could no longer breathe in this vacuum of light—Talis leapt into it, Heart-Spore clutched like a newborn star.
He fell upward into the abyss. The eclipse’s violet corona painted rings around him, each ring a doorway to some uncharted reality. As the orchard vanished from sight, the Heart-Spore thudded one last seismic beat—and the first doorway cracked open with a roar of color.
Epilogue — First Membrane Breached
In the instant before crossing the threshold, Talis realized the Regent’s riddle had been a mercy, not a warning: to save another’s story, he had exiled his own. Where he would land—what version of him would greet the new dawn—remained unwritten.
Yet in the emptiness between pulses, a hush promised that every sacrifice was only the seed of a stranger harvest. And somewhere far above, the Night Orchard waited, branches poised to bloom again—should any wanderer dare answer its next heartbeat.
(End of Book One. Turn the page when you’re ready to breathe again.)
