The taste came first.
Sera was walking the perimeter at sunset when chamomile hit her tongue. Not gradually but rather all at once, filling her mouth like she'd swallowed something, hot and slightly bitter. Her hand went to the sword by reflex before she found herself standing on the wall with her lips apart and the taste already fading, and she understood — because she'd spent her whole life understanding things that arrived through her senses without permission — that it wasn't hers.
She'd never tasted chamomile in her life. But the memory had come with the taste's name other things attached. A ceramic cup. Warmth against palms. Hands holding it like they were absorbing heat they didn't think they deserved.
She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth but the taste was entirely gone now.
The tree was visible above the rooftops, canopy catching the last sunset in shades of copper. Nothing looked different. But the root nearest her position was warmer than it should have been, and when she pressed her boot against it the warmth held a beat too long before fading.
She'd been sleeping closer to the tree lately. Not for comfort — at least that's what she told herself. The root network put out something her ability snagged on the way cloth catches on a splinter. Most of the time it was background noise, a low hum she'd learned to filter the same way she filtered a room full of strangers. But sometimes it sharpened. Usually at night. The small warm pulses she'd been catching for weeks — the ones she hadn't told anyone about, the ones that were hers — they came through that same channel. Whatever part of Chris was still in there, it was reaching, and her ability was the thing reaching back.
She went back to her rounds without saying anything.
Three days later she was in the courtyard, sharpening a practice sword for one of the refugee teenagers. The boy was fifteen and terrible with a blade — all elbows, showed up every morning anyway. She was halfway through a stroke on the whetstone when Old Garrett's voice came up through the cobblestones.
"That hinge has been squeaking for three weeks, and if nobody's going to fix it, I'm going to nail the damn door shut."
Clear as if he were standing next to her. Except Garrett was in the common hall, still fighting with the chair-back. She knew because she'd seen him there twenty minutes ago, hammering at the same split he'd been hammering at for days.
She set the whetstone down. Pressed her palm flat against the cobblestones. The pulse beat against her skin.
"I hear you." Quiet. Under her breath. The ground held its warmth a beat longer than it should have.
Her ability had always worked on people. Intentions, emotions, the shape of what someone was about to do before they did it — the specialist program had sharpened it into something lethal, and she'd spent years learning to filter the noise so it didn't drown her. Plants were different. They bled feeling in a way people didn't, broader and slower, like weather instead of conversation. She'd adapted. Mostly.
This wasn't that. This was something pushing through the root network and arriving in her senses like a shout in a quiet room. Not plant-feeling. Not human-emotion. Something that had started as one and become the other and was now neither.
She told Korr that evening. And the shaman, who showed up at Korr's elbow the way she sometimes did, unannounced, like she'd materialized from the soil itself.
"He pushed something through," the shaman said. She wasn't looking at either of them — her eyes were on the ground, reading something in the soil that neither Korr nor Sera could see. "Two times now. The framework destabilized both times. The lattice wavered." She stamped a hoof. "He's learning to aim, and it's costing him every time he does it. The pattern has to rebuild afterward."
"Costing him what?" Korr said.
"Coherence." The shaman's voice was flat. "Focus. The thing that keeps him from spreading so thin he stops being Chris and starts being soil."
Korr was quiet. A centaur foal wandered past them, chasing a moth, not paying any attention to the conversation. The shaman watched it go.
"It won't kill him. Not yet. But each push costs the same whether it works or doesn't. He's spending something to talk to us, and he doesn't have infinite supply."
"Can he stop?" Sera said.
"He could. He won't." The shaman finally looked at her. "You know that."
Sera said nothing.
The third one came at midnight, a week later.
She'd been sleeping near the root again. The same root, the one that curved like a backrest, the one she'd been coming to every evening since the battle. Close enough that the pulse was a rhythm against her back, familiar now the way a heartbeat becomes familiar when you sleep next to someone. She hadn't let herself think about why.
It hit her ability like a dam breaking.
Not an emotion. Something bigger than emotion, or at least something her ability had no framework for. It came through the root beneath her and opened up in her chest like a door she didn't know was there, and suddenly she wasn't on the ground outside the tree anymore.
Dirt floor. Rough stone walls. A crude hut with a narrow window letting in thin white sky — no clouds, no moisture, nothing. A young man kneeling in dust, hands buried in dark soil that looked wrong against the pale ground. Mixing it. Spreading it. She could feel what he felt — not the specific thought, but the shape of it. Desperation so deep it had gone past fear into something quieter. Stubbornness. The particular kind that comes from having nothing left and knowing it and doing the thing anyway. A small sprout pushing through the soil, green and impossibly bright.
Chris. Younger. In a place that was dead.
Then the memory fractured. Not cleanly — it tore, and what came through the tear wasn't more memory. Or if it was, it was memory from somewhere she couldn't place, things her mind had no category for.
A blade. Not a normal one. A sword with light running the full length of the edge, burning, alive — and the figure holding it moved in a way that shouldn't have been possible, cutting through something massive and dark. Then another image: armor that shifted and layered on its own, plates rearranging mid-swing, the wearer fighting inside something that moved with them like a second skin. Then a structure — a tree, but not the one outside. Bigger. Vast. Roots running through the ground like veins, light coming from it rather than the sky, and people gathered at its base. Not around it. Before it. The way people stood before altars.
The images tumbled over each other. A weapon with a chain and a curved blade that glowed, spinning fast enough to tear the air. A girl standing in front of something enormous, wearing armor that looked like it was made of light itself. A figure in robes holding a staff that cracked with energy at its tip, and behind them a city — towers of glass and stone reaching so high they looked carved from the sky, nothing like any city she'd ever seen or heard described.
Each image was different. Each one was impossible. They came faster than she could process, slamming against her ability like waves against a breakwater, and her training had nothing for this. She'd been built to read a room, to feel a killing intent before the blade moved, to track the emotional temperature of a diplomatic function. Not this. This was like trying to drink from a flood.
Then the shrine-tree again. It kept coming back. The massive tree with the gathered people, the roots and the light. Each time it surfaced the other images seemed to cluster around it, like the tree was the center and everything else was orbit. And mixed in with it — flickering at the edges, gone before she could hold it — something else. A figure. Old. Vast in a way that had nothing to do with size. A walking stick. A smile that carried weight she couldn't measure. Gone.
It snapped.
She was on her back against the root in the dark, fingernails aching where they'd dug into the soil. Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth. The residue of the images was still there, fading but not gone — she could still see the burning blade behind her eyes if she let her focus slip.
The pulse beneath her stuttered. Flex and settle, flex and settle. Erratic. She pressed her hand flat against the root.
"It's okay. Rest."
The stutter smoothed. Slowed. The rhythm came back, uneven at first, then steadier. She lay there with her cheek against the bark and didn't move until her heartbeat stopped sounding louder than his.
Her ability was still catching fragments. Traces. The afterimage of something that had poured through the root network and into her like water into a cracked vessel. She'd spent her whole life being the most sensitive person in any room — feeling what others felt whether she wanted to or not — and this was the first time something had poured back.
She didn't sleep again that night. She lay against the root and let her ability do what it did, sorting through the residue of what she'd received, trying to build something coherent from pieces that didn't fit.
She told Korr the next morning. All three — the taste, the voice, the images.
He listened without interrupting, but his fingers were working against the wall's edge, tracing the grain of the wood. She'd noticed him doing that since the battle. Never mentioned it.
"The first two I could frame as what I already do," she said. "A taste and a voice. Emotions and impressions coming through the network — unusual but not outside what I've learned to handle. This was different. It started as a memory — him in some dead place, kneeling in dirt, growing something — and then it broke apart and I saw things I can't explain."
"Describe them."
She did. The burning blade. The shifting armor. The chain-scythe. The girl in light. The staff crackling with energy. The glass city. The shrine-tree with the gathered people. The old figure at the edges — the walking stick, the smile, gone before she could hold it.
Korr's expression didn't change, but his fingers stopped moving on the wood.
"And the tree," she said. "A massive tree built into something like a shrine. People before it, not around it — the way you stand before something sacred. It kept coming back, over and over — the other images moved around it."
"You think he's showing you something on purpose."
"I think so." She paused, choosing her next words. "There was a figure. Mixed into the images — at the edges, gone before I could hold it. Old. A walking stick. A smile that felt—" She stopped. Tried again. "I've been in courts. I've stood in rooms with people who owned nations. That figure carried weight like nothing I've ever felt. Not power exactly. Something behind power. Like the power was just the surface of it."
Korr's fingers stopped.
"He told me once," he said slowly, "back when he still had a mouth, that he wasn't summoned the way the empire summons heroes. A god pulled him here. Some old god who didn't have enough influence left to claim a proper champion. Chris said the other gods had already taken the heroes, the saints, the grand mages. His god got nothing and decided to see what would happen. For entertainment."
Sera was quiet. The word sat between them.
"Entertainment," she said.
"That's what he said. I thought he was cracked."
"And now?"
"Now I think he was telling the truth and I wasn't listening." Korr pulled at the splinter. "So. That figure in your visions. You think it's the same one."
"I think it might be." She was still sorting through it. The shrine-tree kept surfacing in her mind, the people standing before it, the old figure at the edges. "Chris spent pieces of himself to send me this. The shrine-tree. The figure. The weapons and armor I can't explain. He's pushing these through for a reason, and the figure keeps coming back with the shrine. Whatever that god is to him — whether Chris wants us to honor it, or use it, or something else I'm not seeing yet — he's telling us it matters."
Korr was quiet for a long moment. Below them the green zone was spreading, rough circle of living ground, new grass, a pair of centaur foals chasing each other near the boundary. One of them stumbled and got up and kept running.
"A god who sent him here for entertainment," Korr said. "And you want to build it a shrine."
"I want to understand what he's showing me before the images fade. The figure. The shrine-tree. The weapons. If that god gave Chris the seeds and this is what grew from them, then the god is part of the story whether I like it or not."
Korr didn't answer right away. A child was crying somewhere and then stopped. The hammering from the eastern wall had started up again.
"The shaman said each push costs him. Coherence. Focus." He looked at her. "If he keeps doing this, he'll—"
"I know what the shaman said."
"Then you know we can't just let him keep pushing things through because you think you understand what he means."
"I'm not just going to let him. I'm going to talk to the heroes. Elara and the others came from other worlds too. If those images are from wherever Chris came from, they might recognize something." She stood. The practice sword was still in the courtyard where she'd left it. The refugee boy would be looking for it. "And then I'm going to write everything down. Every detail. While it's still fresh."
Korr watched her walk toward the courtyard. His hand was still on the splinter. He pulled it free and rolled it between his fingers.
"Sera."
She stopped. Didn't turn.
"The first two were small. A taste. A voice. This one was big enough to put you on your back." His voice was flat. Careful. "If the next one's bigger, and you're the one sleeping next to the root every night—"
"I know."
"Good." He dropped the splinter. "Write it down first. Then talk to the heroes. Then we figure out if any of it means what you think it means."
She nodded once and kept walking. Her hand was already reaching for the charcoal stub in her belt.
Korr stood on the wall and watched her go. Below, the tree pulsed. Steady. Patient. The black-and-white bark caught the morning light in patterns that almost looked like writing if you didn't look too closely. Somewhere inside that vast tangled network, Chris was recovering from the cost of reaching out, and Korr couldn't decide whether what Sera had received was a message or a cry for help.
He was starting to think it might be both.