The road to the city wasn't really a road. It was more of a suggestion-an ancient trail swallowed by vines, echoing with bird calls that sounded suspiciously like whispered secrets.
Lavender, barefoot and glowing with curiosity, stepped over tangled roots with the grace of a woman used to trespassing in places clearly marked do not enter. Vashir, as always, followed silently-half guardian, half disapproving older cousin with fangs.
They'd left the cozy town and were aiming for the city of Kael'Tun, where knowledge was rumored to grow like moss and the rarest goods were traded beneath moonlit arches. Lavender had drawn a star on her map there. Potential husbands and historical oddities, she'd written.
But the forest had its own agenda.
A low, eerie humming began to stir.
Lavender halted. "Do you hear that?"
Vashir paused. Listened. His pupils narrowed. "That's... not wind."
The sound was strange - not music exactly, but not not-music either. It pulsed through the trees like a heartbeat wrapped in bells. The air grew colder. Crisper. More aware.
Lavender's eyes lit up. "Oh, we are absolutely going toward that noise."
Vashir reached for her arm. "It could be a trap."
She gently patted his hand. "Everything beautiful is a little dangerous. Let's go."
---
The source of the sound was a clearing swallowed by time. At its center stood an enormous tree made entirely of white bone - gnarled ribs and vertebrae tangled upward like twisted ivory branches. Around it, ancient relics and skeletonized animals lay scattered like broken toys.
But none of it was dead.
The tree sang.
Every gust of wind sent a shiver through its hollow branches, producing a melody so haunting and lovely, it made Lavender's chest ache.
"It's like the forest remembers something it can't forget," she whispered.
Vashir stayed at the edge. "This is an old place. Forbidden."
"So naturally," Lavender said, already stepping closer, "I'm enchanted."
Her eyes landed on something tangled near the base of the bone-tree: a pendant. At first glance it looked like glass, but as she knelt, she saw it was a tear-shaped shard of crystallized light - shifting in hue, soft as moonbeam silk, warm to the touch. And carved into its surface was a symbol in a script neither she nor Vashir recognized.
It pulsed in her hand.
"Don't," Vashir warned.
"I'm not stealing it," she replied. "I'm preserving it."
The tree seemed to shiver as she lifted the pendant.
For a moment, the wind stilled.
And then everything moved.
---
The skeletons around the clearing stirred. One by one, they rose - not by strings or magic, but as though remembered back into being. Their eyes glowed violet, like her totem's.
Lavender stood tall, pendant in one hand, and her ring already shifting into a gleaming twin-bladed glaive in the other.
Vashir hissed. "We run. Now."
"No!" she shouted over the rising hum. "They're guarding something!"
"Lavender-!"
But she stepped forward, her curls blowing wild in the storm of memory and bone.
"I'm not here to take," she declared to the circling skeletal beasts. "I'm here to know. To remember what everyone else forgot."
The creatures paused.
One stepped forward - a massive lion skull draped in bone-woven armor - and placed a claw gently to her forehead.
There was a flash. A vision.
A great war. A buried truth. A serpent king with violet eyes, falling into shadow.
And then... silence.
The creatures bowed.
The pendant pulsed once, then settled into her palm.
"They gave it to me," she whispered.
"You've been marked now," Vashir said, eyes distant. "By something old. That place... it was one of the Bone Choir Shrines. I didn't think any still sang."
Lavender turned to him, eyes gleaming.
"Then I'm very lucky."
---
They continued their journey, the forest still singing faintly behind them.
In her bag, the pendant pulsed - not just an object now, but a memory made physical. A true treasure. The first of many.