They left through a seam.
The village simply… loosened. Structure softened into trellis, trellis into ribbed growth half-sunk in soil. Daniel felt the guidance pressure thin and scatter, like a hand withdrawing after making sure you could stand on your own.
Behind him, someone exhaled too fast.
"Okay," a girl said. "I liked the part where we weren't walking into teeth."
Daniel didn't turn, but he clocked her voice. Dry humor. Breath a little tight. She was managing fear, not pretending it wasn't there.
"Give it a minute," said a dwarven boy ahead of them. "The land's still deciding if it likes us."
The girl snorted. "Great. Love being evaluated by dirt."
Daniel smiled despite himself.
The first band of managed wild parted politely. Grass flattened. Shrubs leaned away. Insects adjusted trajectories at the last possible moment, daring reflexes to keep up.
The girl glanced down at her feet. "See? That's manners. I can work with manners."
"Name?" the dwarf asked, slowing just enough to walk beside her.
"Rhea."
"Bram," he replied. "And don't trust the manners. They stop about fifty meters ahead."
Daniel filed both names away. "Daniel," he said.
The elf girl drifted closer on his other side, eyes unfocused in a way Daniel recognized. She wasn't distracted. She was elsewhere.
"You're going to want to angle left," she said quietly.
Bram frowned. "Ground load's stable here."
"Not the ground," she replied. "The canopy."
Daniel felt his overlay hesitate, probabilities blooming without committing. He didn't look up. He looked at her instead.
"You see something molting," he said.
She blinked, surprised. Then smiled, sharp and pleased. "Yes. Thank you."
"Name?" Rhea asked.
"Sil," the elf replied. "And it's shedding patience, not skin."
Rhea made a face. "That's worse."
They reached the second tier.
The ground darkened. Roots pulsed visibly now, thick cables braided through soil that moved when stepped on. Fungal columns rose like architectural mistakes, caps flared wide and translucent, light crawling beneath their surfaces.
Bram stopped.
Not abruptly. Finished a step and declined the next.
Daniel stopped with him.
Rhea took one more step before her overlay caught up. She swore softly and rocked back on her heels.
"Okay," she said. "No manners anymore."
The elf inhaled, slow and deliberate. The forest lit for her, gradients rippling outward in her vision as if the world were exhaling back.
"Something's inside the caps," Sil said. "Big."
Daniel felt the numbers refuse to settle. Not danger. Not safety. Just… missing data.
Then the ground bulged.
The fungal column split.
The thing that emerged was a categorical violation, the kind of shape that the world should have kept buried under kilometers of mineral logic. It was segmented, yes, but segments suggested order, and there was no order to the way its length bent and coiled and reversed through itself.
Its body was paler than any of the fungal stalks, as if it had been extruded directly from the column's core, and indeed that seemed to be the method: fresh segments pressed out from the splintered rim, each new portion glistening as it articulated free, joints swollen and glossy like unhealed scars. The whole creature was at least three meters long, but it didn't move with the sinuous ease of a worm or snake. Instead it advanced by driving rootlike appendages into the soil, each anchor splitting into filaments that burrowed downward with a sickening, earnest purpose.
Once lodged, the limb flexed, and the body yanked itself forward by increments so slow and inexorable that it was difficult to say when progress had occurred. There was no visible head, not at first, only a blunt, fleshy terminus that flexed open and shut as if tasting the air.
Bram made a small, unhappy sound. Sil stilled, arms slightly raised, poised between flight and fascination.
The thing reached the edge of the fungal cluster and paused, compressing its length into a tight spiral. The air in its vicinity grew sharp, underwritten with a scent Daniel's overlay struggled to classify—somewhere between loam and rot, ancient and urgent. Without warning, the creature's anterior segment split open along a seam, revealing a ring of delicate, trembling sensory filaments, each tipped with a bead of phosphorescent fluid. The filaments quested, mapping the air, and then the entire mass rotated toward the group.
Daniel's overlays caught the transient heat signature, the wild spike in ionization, the collapse of every local insect pathway.
"Is it… looking at us?" Bram whispered.
Sil nodded, never breaking her gaze. "It knows exactly where we are."
The segmented body uncoiled, the root-legs digging in, and Daniel understood then: the creature wasn't moving toward the group. It was preparing to defend the forest against them.
Rhea whispered, "That is absolutely not a deer."
"No," Bram agreed. "That's a maintenance class."
"That's a lie," Rhea said.
"A small one," Bram replied.
The creature's sensory clusters flared.
Pressure washed through the bowl. Daniel's overlay stuttered. Numbers scrambled.
Someone bolted.
A boy Daniel hadn't learned the name of yet. Fast, panicked, efficient. He hit the root-web wrong. The ground stiffened instead of yielding.
He went down hard and slid.
Daniel moved.
Not first.
Sil was already in motion, cutting sideways along a path only she could see, vines parting just ahead of her hand. Bram shouted something Daniel didn't hear, but the ground beneath the creature's anchors hardened abruptly, forcing its roots to disengage.
Daniel went last.
He reached the fallen boy as the soil softened again, too late to be helpful. The boy scrabbled, breath tearing out of him in short bursts.
Daniel didn't grab.
He planted one knee, lowered his center of gravity, and offered his forearm instead of his hand.
The boy locked onto it instantly.
Contact triggered something.
The creature paused.
Daniel's overlay went blank.
No numbers.
No suggestions.
Just the weight of the boy on his arm and the awareness that if he lost balance now, they both went under.
Bram's intervention finished first. The creature recoiled, anchors withdrawing with a sound like tearing cloth. Sil slammed her palm into a glowing vine, light surging outward in a disorienting wash.
The creature retreated, offended rather than harmed, folding back into the fungal column as the cap sealed shut.
Silence.
The boy sobbed once, then clamped his mouth shut like he was ashamed of it.
Daniel kept his forearm steady until the shaking stopped.
Then he eased the boy upright.
"Breathe," Daniel said, calm, boring, impossible to argue with. "You're up. That means you won."
The boy stared at him, confused.
Rhea crouched nearby. "He's right. You're upright. That's the metric."
Bram snorted. "Low bar, but effective."
Daniel released the boy slowly and stood.
His knees trembled.
Sil studied him openly now. "You waited."
Daniel shrugged. "It was already being handled."
"That's not why," she said.
He met her gaze. She wasn't accusing. She was cataloging.
"Sometimes," Daniel said after a moment, "being early makes things worse."
Bram nodded once.
Rhea watched Daniel with new eyes. "You're not eight, are you?"
Daniel smiled faintly. "Not anymore."
They moved on.
Later, when the wild opened into something almost beautiful—spiraled trees chiming softly, translucent animals bounding through light—Rhea walked beside Daniel again.
"You don't rush," she said. "But you don't freeze either."
"I've frozen," Daniel replied. "I just learned where it costs the least."
She laughed, then sobered. "Stick with us."
Daniel didn't answer right away.
Then: "As long as our paths overlap."
Bram grunted. "That's the only honest promise anyway."
They camped that night beneath glass-feathered leaves that scattered light like rain. Sil slept with the forest glowing faintly in rhythm with her luminescent markings. Bram stayed awake longer than he needed to, listening to the ground.
Daniel lay back, staring up through layered canopy.
The seed in his pocket was hot now.
He didn't take it out.
They moved on.
The second tier released them reluctantly, as if the forest were offended at being denied a proper conclusion. Roots eased their grip. The soil's pulse slowed. Whatever had been inside the fungal column settled back into latency, its existence filed away as a solved problem that would be revisited later, by something older and less impatient than children.
No one spoke for a while.
That, Daniel noticed, was the real change. Earlier, silence would have meant fear. Now it meant processing.
When the wild finally opened into something almost beautiful, the shift felt intentional, like a palate cleanser after a hard truth. Trees grew in slow spirals, their trunks braiding together before separating again higher up. Leaves shaped like thin panes of glass chimed softly as air moved through them, each sound slightly out of phase with the next. Small animals darted along the branches, fur patterned in recursive fractals that made Daniel's eyes slide off them if he stared too long.
A herd of something deer-adjacent crossed the path ahead.
Their bodies were translucent enough that Daniel could see organs shifting inside them, energy moving like liquid light along internal channels. One paused, lifted its head, and looked straight at him.
For a moment, Daniel had the unsettling impression that it was not seeing his body at all, but the accumulated weight of choices behind it.
Then the animal flicked its ears and bounded away, hooves barely touching the ground.
Rhea let out a breath she'd clearly been holding. "Okay," she said. "That was worth the fungal nightmare."
Bram grunted. "Low bar."
Sil smiled faintly, eyes still half elsewhere. "You notice how nothing here is wasted?"
Rhea blinked. "I notice it's trying very hard not to waste us."
"That too," Sil agreed.
They didn't camp because anyone told them to. They camped because every overlay, in every incompatible way, converged on the same quiet conclusion: enough.
The ground warmed where they settled, roots retracting to form a shallow basin that held heat without flame. Food emerged from packs and systems, dense and unceremonious, eaten quickly. Someone laughed at something that hadn't been meant as a joke. Someone else cried briefly and then stopped, embarrassed but unchallenged.
Sil fell asleep first, the faint bioluminescent tracery along her skin syncing unconsciously with the surrounding flora. Bram stayed awake longer than he needed to, one hand resting against the ground, listening to stresses Daniel couldn't feel yet.
Rhea sat beside Daniel, knees drawn up, watching the canopy.
"You ever think," she said, casual but not careless, "that this whole place is just one long test?"
Daniel considered it.
"No," he said. "Tests end. This is life."
She nodded, satisfied, as if that had been the better answer.
Daniel lay back and stared up through the layered leaves, light scattering like rain across his vision. The numbers at the edge of his awareness ticked forward, not marking distance or progress, but survival, adaptation, continued relevance.
The seed in his pocket was hot now. Not metaphorically. Physically warm, as if responding to the density of life around it.
He curled his fingers around it once, through the fabric.
Not yet, he told it—or himself.
Around them, the habitat breathed. Systems adjusted. Wildlife resumed trajectories interrupted only briefly by the passage of children who were already learning how not to be crushed by wonder. They may have experienced subjective decades in gestation, but this was still their first life. And the hormones of children were restless at the best of times.
Tomorrow, the path would narrow again.
Daniel closed his eyes and let the world keep going without him for a few hours.
He trusted it would still be there when he woke.
———
They encountered the transit spine the next morning.
They felt it before they saw it.
A pressure change, subtle but unmistakable, like standing too close to a held breath. The ground beneath their feet carried a steady vibration, not a tremor but a sustained tension, as if the land itself were under load.
The managed wild thinned ahead of them, trees stepping back in an orderly retreat. The path widened, sloped gently, and then opened onto something that made several of them stop short at once.
Cables.
They rose from the ground at a steep angle, nearly vertical, vanishing upward into haze. Not one or two, but dozens, spaced with deliberate regularity, each one thicker than any tree trunk Daniel had ever seen. They didn't sway. They didn't hum. They simply held, immense bundles of layered material drawn so taut that looking at them made his jaw tighten.
They didn't look like transit.
They looked like restraint.
A pod launched.
It emerged from a recessed cradle at the base of one of the cables, accelerating so smoothly that Daniel almost missed the moment it left contact with the ground. No roar. No visible thrust. Just a sudden, impossible certainty of motion as it shot upward along the cable, climbing fast enough that his eyes struggled to track it.
Straight up.
Rhea swore, very quietly. "That's… wrong."
The pod shrank rapidly, becoming a bright bead sliding toward the sky. Then it disappeared into distance.
Daniel's overlay spiked, then stalled, its assumptions collapsing in on themselves. Gravity vectors reoriented. Distance estimates refused to converge.
"That's not up," Bram said slowly. "That's across."
Sil's eyes followed the cable far longer than was comfortable. "They're crossing the diameter," she said. "Straight through."
Rhea laughed once, sharp and disbelieving. "So… we're standing on the inside of a wheel, and they're just—" she made a vague upward gesture, "—shooting people through it?"
"Cities," Bram corrected. "They're connecting cities."
Another pod launched.
This one larger, segmented, its surface alive with faint geometric shifts as it climbed. For a heartbeat, Daniel had the unsettling sense that it wasn't being pulled or pushed, but handed off from system to system in a choreography too precise to feel mechanical.
Below the cables, the ground wasn't solid.
Sections of earth gave way to transparent structural layers, revealing vast underground spaces beneath the wilderness. Living quarters stacked in terraces. Transit halls glowing softly. People moving through them, unconcerned, as pods arrived and departed through apertures that closed seamlessly behind them.
"They live under this," Rhea murmured.
"And through it," Sil added.
Daniel crouched, placing his palm against the ground. He could feel the vibration now, the constant exchange of mass and momentum passing beneath them. A city breathing. Another city answering.
The realization settled slowly, heavily.
"This isn't wilderness," Rhea said. "It's… a roof."
"And a classroom," Daniel added before he could stop himself.
They looked at him.
He shrugged. "They could've moved us fast. Put us on one of those." He nodded at the capsules streaking overhead. "Dropped us anywhere on the arc in minutes."
"But they didn't," Sil said.
"No," Daniel agreed. "They want us to feel distance. Weather. Weight. Time passing when nothing's prompting it."
Bram nodded once. "Simulations compress cost. This doesn't."
Rhea hugged her knees, thoughtful now instead of afraid. "So this is… practice?"
"For living somewhere that doesn't care if you understand it yet," Daniel said.
No one argued.
They walked on with the cable overhead for a long stretch, the hum becoming a companion rather than a distraction. Every so often, another glassed-over section revealed more of the world beneath their feet. Entire neighborhoods. Transit corridors intersecting at angles that made no sense locally but felt inevitable when considered as part of something larger.
Eventually, the path began to rise.
The managed wild changed character again. Trees grew taller, straighter, their trunks thickening as if drawn upward by something more than light. The canopy opened in deliberate gaps, guiding sightlines forward.
And there it was.
The sentinel tree.
It rose from the landscape like an answer that had been growing for centuries before anyone thought to ask it. Its trunk was vast enough that Daniel couldn't see all of it at once, even from this distance. Branches radiated outward in layered tiers, each supporting platforms, dwellings, walkways woven directly into living wood. Light gathered around it differently, bending just enough to make the structure feel slightly unreal.
Sil stopped without meaning to.
Bram exhaled slowly. "That's… a lot of memory."
Rhea swallowed. "That's a place that notices you."
Daniel felt the seed in his pocket respond, heat blooming sharply, insistently. He ignored it, eyes fixed on the tree.
The path forked here.
Clear, unambiguous branches leading toward the settlement beneath the sentinel's canopy, and others continuing onward, skirting the village entirely.
They slowed.
This time, when children peeled off, it was different.
Some quickened their steps toward the tree, drawn by something they didn't try to explain. Others hesitated, then followed, shoulders straightening as if making a decision they'd been circling for a while. A few stopped, turned back, and continued on without looking again.
One by one, they found adults waiting near the tree's roots—dwarves with hands like stone, elves whose attention felt deep and patient, humans who watched with a mix of hope and restraint. Conversations began quietly. No announcements. No ceremony.
Rhea stood very still.
"You going?" Daniel asked.
She looked at the tree, then at him. "I think so. At least… I want to see who I am when I stand under it."
He nodded. "That seems fair."
She hesitated, then stepped forward and pulled him into a quick, fierce hug. "Don't disappear," she said into his shoulder.
Daniel smiled. "I'm bad at that."
Bram watched her go, expression unreadable. "Trees aren't for me," he said eventually. "Too much commitment to verticality."
Sil smiled faintly. "I might stop. Not stay. Just… listen."
They stood there as more of the group thinned, each departure a small, decisive cut in the shape of their shared motion.
When it was over, fewer of them remained.
The sentinel tree loomed behind them now, immense and watchful, as they turned back toward the narrowing path.
Daniel felt the world shift around that absence and did not rush to fill it.