The stairs are spiraling, carved into the very grain of the tree. The light shifts as you climb, the inner glow giving way to something cooler, thinner. Real daylight, filtering through fissures in the bark like light through old scars.

She is standing in the upper chamber with her back to you, staring through a wide crack in the wood. Her dress is the color of pale earth and old roses, printed with small flowers that have softened with wear. Pink blossoms are tucked into her loose hair, and they look, in this dark woody space, like something that has wandered in from the wrong world entirely. She doesn't turn when you reach the top of the stairs. Doesn't startle, doesn't acknowledge. Simply stands.

You wait. The chamber settles around you both.

Then she turns, and you understand immediately that you are not quite what she is looking at. Her gaze moves over you slowly, taking you in the way someone might study weather on the horizon—curious, but at a remove. Her eyes settle just past your shoulder, as if the more interesting thing is the air you arrived through.

"You came up," she says. Her voice is thin, unhurried.

You open your mouth and find, to your own surprise, that you are not certain what to say. That you came up is true. That you are here, standing, breathing—all of that is true. But the tunnel is still with you, the darkness of it, the sense of waking inside something that was never meant to be woken inside.

"I didn't know where else to go," you say.

She seems to consider this, or something adjacent to it. "Are you hungry?" she asks, the question less directed at you than released into the room. "I forget, sometimes. If I've eaten." She looks at her own hands as if checking.

"Who are you?" you ask.

She blinks slowly, as if the question has arrived from very far away. "Elyndra," she says. Then, after a pause: "I think that's right." She looks faintly uncertain, the way someone does when they've said a word so many times it has stopped sounding like one.

"And me?" you ask. "Do you know who I am?"

She tilts her head and studies you—or the air around you—with genuine attention. "You came up the stairs," she says. "Before that you were below." She nods, satisfied, as if this is a complete answer.

You open your mouth and find nothing waiting behind it. No hometown, no face, no sense of what your hands have done or where your feet have been. Even the name you surfaced in the tunnel below feels thinner up here, in the light. Less certain.

"I can't find anything," you say. "Before the tunnel. There's nothing there to find."

She looks at you with something that might be recognition. "The wood takes it," she says softly. "Or keeps it. I can never remember which." She touches one of the pink blooms in her hair, absently, the way you might touch a scar. "What does your name feel like?"

You tell her the word that surfaced. The one that might be yours.

She repeats it softly, tasting it, and smiles at nothing in particular. "Yes," she says. "That sounds about right."

A silence opens between you. Through the fissure behind her: a village. Low, hovel-like structures, worn paths, smoke rising thin and gray from a central hearth. Settled. Ancient.

"Who are they?" you ask.

She turns as if surprised to find the village there. "Oh." A smile—warm, but untethered to anything in the room. "The others. They went out. You go out, and then you—" She stops. Tilts her head. "There's a sound sometimes, in the deep part. Like water, but it isn't water." She looks at you, waiting for understanding.

"Did they wake the way I did? In the tunnels?"

"The roots know," she says.

You wait. She nods—slow, rhythmic—though at what is unclear.

"Is there anyone in the village who might have answers?" you try. "About this place. Why we wake here."

She considers this, her gaze drifting back to the fissure, to the smoke, to something past it. "There's a woman," she says, almost to herself. "The others talk about her. She's been outside the longest." A pause, a wrinkle of the brow. "She has a red door, I think. Or she did." The thought clears and she is gone again, somewhere miles behind her own eyes. "Do you think the tree remembers being a seed?"

You look at her. You look at the village.

"I'm going to go out," you say.

"Yes," she whispers, still looking through the fissure, or past it. "That's the direction, isn't it."