The sky brimmed with the promise of tears. The clouds had lingered all day, waiting for an opportunity to spoil the mood. They could have come sooner, for my tastes. I’d reached the point I get to in any celebration when I just can’t sustain the required, expected feelings any longer. Maybe my tolerance is low, or I’m just a grumpy sod who should be allowed to go home early, but I’d had enough half the day ago. Pleading a headache, and the cure of fresh air, I’d taken off on my own for a few minutes of peace and quiet. I slipped out of the chalet’s back door, hands and expression placating my friends – just in case one of them felt they ought to accompany me.
I found myself under those clouds, and on the edge of the lake. I released the breath I’d been holding all day and let my shoulders shudder it all out of me. It was much quieter out here; behind me, the chalet vibrated with music, chatter, and laughter. It wasn’t like I was abandoning them. I’d be back, once I’d done a bit of sulking and kicked some stones into the water. The afternoon was rapidly fading away, and the sky was turning that rich teal that I love at this time of year. The sun, low over the lake, and the first hint of a moon sketching itself into existence. A beautiful place, and apt for celebration, though if I was honest with myself, I rather resented being back. As gloomy as the clouds I scuffed my way through the thin grass to the shore, careful to step around the young, hungry saplings; those would be a task for another day, not that I’d remember them.
Such a pretty, still lake. I kicked a few pebbles out of the sand, messing up my smart boots. They had a good weight to them, and I couldn’t resist breaking that perfect surface. The first stone, as always, began with a promising string of skips, but vanished sooner than I’d like. The calm now ruined, I watched the ripples spread and fade away. Pebbles two and three did a bit better. The fourth I hurled as far as I could, and lost myself for a minute of stamping at the sand, hoofing the stones every which way. At least I’d uncovered a few more bright prospects. I brushed the sand off them, for streamlining purposes, and tossed them, frustrated, back to the ground.
A walk. I’d promised myself a walk. The lake, and this little wooden house were the first things I could remember. A place to grow up, to make friends, and lives together. And now we were back, to take it all away. My feet led me inexorably around the lake, its gravity had always drawn me on. When I was younger in my time, I’d taken to climbing out of the window at all hours of night. I’d been restless, prone to insomnia through over-excitable thoughts, or some restlessness in my spirit that made sleep an elusive property of consciousness. Hard won, and surprising when it crashed down on me. The night-time walks didn’t help me sleep, but they did fill the time.
I would fold back the covers just so – not in a heap – that would create pockets to be filled with cold. Better to leave it neat and open, ready for me to slip back in later. Then I’d pad across the wooden floor, flip the catch atop the sash window and slowly slide it up. The damned thing always seemed to stick, and ground its way upward with what seemed an appalling sound. Still, it never woke my sibs. I’d always forget its racket by the next day, and would chide myself for failing to oil it, or whatever it is that would soothe a wooden window frame, saddened by its age into deformation, vexed near-nightly by a youth who wouldn’t let it sleep. Presumably it still got stuck; perhaps I’d test it later.
The path round the lake is half sand and half ragged patchwork of pressed down rubble, kicked loose and into the waters by people like me. It wound in a way that spoke to my feet, and together we skirted the water on my left and the ever-darkening woods to my right. ‘Woods’ was probably an exaggeration. Here there were mere copses competing for light and earth, none grown so large as to dominate the area, all just toughing it out, waiting to see which would suddenly sprout up and bully the others into shade and diminution. Still, I kept my distance, respectful. There’s no need to intrude – there was space, for now, for all of us. The lake had returned to a glacial stillness, in anticipation of full moonrise, which would be upon us soon enough. Time yet for a walk.
From the window I could half-slide and scrabble my way down the wooden-shingled roof, its heart-shapes under my hands and feet. As I grew older it became a smoother ride, my confidence grew and I would take longer strides. Until that night it was raining and the tiles were slick. I slipped almost immediately, just one foot out of the window, spinning me head and shoulders into the roof, one leg snarled over the sill. After that I put both feet out together. I certainly didn’t stop going for those moonlit walks. The short drop beyond was always easy, and then I could be off. A half-dozen backwards glances to confirm that I wasn’t missed, and I was away.
The half-drawn moon fleshed out its colours as the sun faded, grew bright and yellow and cast its buttery glow over the lake. Calia out in all his glory. The trees began to unfurl their secondary leaves, and I paused for a moment to watch them spread their thick spines, the leaves filling out like sails being caught by the wind, straining between the spines. All to catch that creamy light. The lake developed its first ripple; not from any stone I’d cast, but from Calia’s twin, lending her weight to his pull. The two came as a pair, and sure enough, the ripples grew into waves as the lake was being dragged to the east, and Talens emerged from behind Calia. The trees shuddered, their leaves rippling like the water, soaking up the light from the twin moons. I could feel something of their magic myself, all lined in yellow, caught between their victim, the lake, and the trees who hungered for the moons’ touch. This was why I used to come out at night. To feel part of the world, to see the parts that we usually missed by being asleep, or inside, or in the city where the trees were less common. It’s too easy to miss out on the simple things.
I was glad to be out walking, even if I still wasn’t happy about being here. The sounds of the chalet had long since faded, replaced by the meaty shuffle of the leaves and the involuntary tide of the lake. It had been years since I’d tasted this air, felt the moons here, all with the promise of returning home to a bed, which would be chilled from my absence, but would soon warm up as I lay there, watching the moons disappear over the other side of the world. And I’d go back soon too, but it would be for the last time. I was torn between dragging this walk out as long as I could, and returning to the others and cherishing our little family. It was, of course, somewhat selfish of me to leave them at all, but that too was a thing I wasn’t entirely ready to give up.
A wave sloshed over the path, splashing up my trouser leg and through the lace holes of my shoe. It really had been too long, I’d known every step of this road and felt its tides to the second. But now I had a wet foot. It seemed certain that was a metaphor for growing up, or forgetting one’s youth, or something. The world is full of symbols if you care to look for them, though that doesn’t accord them actual meaning: one man’s inspiration is another’s tedium. As I pointlessly shook my foot (well, it was hardly going to get the water out of my sock, was it?) I was startled further by a voice behind me, calling my name. I turned; there’s no avoiding the ones you love.
“No one’s ever come out after me before,” I said, attempting to repress the flux of emotions that suddenly welled up with my words.
“I always assumed you wanted to be alone, Jenn.”
I grinned. “Of course I did, and of course you did.”
The moonlight sloshed its bright yellow over Maina. She was a bit taller than me, and in the moonlight she glowed like a spectre. In a heartbeat she was beside me, in another, her arm was tucked firmly through mine.
“Did you come out every night?” she asked, her shoulder bumping against mine.
“Most nights,” I said, companionably bumping back, “it’s the moons. And the trees. And the lake.”
She laughed, a soft sound that I mostly felt rather than heard. “I stopped wondering where you going after a while. Once I knew you were coming back. That window must have woken me every time until I got used to it. Squealed like murder.”
She shook loose a laugh that I didn’t know I was waiting to let go of. Another deep breath.
“But it’s lovely out here,” Maina looked up at the moons and sighed, basking a little in their light, “maybe I should have joined you.”
“I think I might have liked that,” I admitted, “I didn’t know you could hear the window.”
“Are you kidding? There was nothing in that house louder – not even bloody Aer’s snoring.”
“I thought it was one of those noises that was louder in your head, like when you pop your jaw, but no one else can hear.”
“I can confirm that the window is not inside your head.”
“Funny.”
“Is that your foot?” she asked.
“Nope, that squishing sock sound is entirely in your mind.”
We smiled. She rested her head on my shoulder and we went on.
“I was coming back,” I started, “it’s just–“
“It’s all a bit much, isn’t it?” Maina interrupted, “you always were terrible at these things. Do you remember Aer’s party? When he got that job, out at the hospital?”
“Maybe,” I hedged.
“He was bragging about how well the interview went, and how good he was going to be at looking after people – and you – you couldn’t stand it.”
“We’d been telling him how great he was for hours. Well, it felt like hours.”
“And then Rumala slipped, and fell down the stairs.”
“I’d forgotten that,” I clapped my free hand over my mouth, “that was a really bad fall. Didn’t she break her arm?”
“Kind of. Turned out she’d broken it days ago, falling out of a tree. Since it had popped back into place, she thought it must be all alright. Falling down the stairs proved her wrong. That scream!”
“Even thinking about it makes me feel queasy,” I said.
“Ha! You don’t remember properly do you? As soon as the attention switched from Aer to Rumala, your face absolutely lit up. You looked delighted,” Maina leaned heavily on me for emphasis and my foot squelched especially loudly, “I bet I was the only one who saw. You weren’t pleased about Rumala, but you were thrilled not to be talking about Aer any more.”
“That’s not–“ I started, but unable to honestly continue that line, “–fine. I was, plus it gave Aer something to do instead of talk about himself. He did do a good job of looking after Rumala, I’ll him that.”
“Ooh, that must have hurt to admit,” Maina was beaming at me, “and is this the same? Everyone’s together again properly.”
I booted a stone into an approaching wave, breaking its concentration. The moons picked up the slack though, and they kept coming, thick and fast. I angled us further up the path, away from the water’s edge.
“I don’t know. It all seems so silly now. It just goes on so long that it feels forced, I feel like I’m having to try to be all happy and pleased.”
“And you’re not,” Maina said, turning me to face her, “I know you’re not.”
“Are you? Are you really alright with all this – tomorrow we’re going to end it all, and none of us will be together any more, and it’ll be like we never happened,” Maina stared at me, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. It’s just…”
“Jenn. You don’t have to go too. You know that, right? You do know that.”
The damn tears weren’t in the clouds any more, they’d snuck into my eyes while I was gazing at the moons.
“I– I can’t. How could I go on alone? And you – is this what you want? Or are you just going along with it because Aer and Rumala have decided it’s time, that they’ve had enough of each other, and the rest of us are just going down with them.”
“Talens’ sake Jenn. You’d have them go on, unhappy, fallen out of love. And what, just persist?”
I took back my arm, and folded them both about me.
“That’s not how it’s done,” Maina continued, growing angry now, angry at me, “you’re being selfish.”
“Because I want to live? Because I don’t want to sweep all of this away, sweep you, and Aer, and Rumala, and Eleran, and Tesh, and Miqual and Teresa’s into nothing? Because I don’t want to forget everything we’ve had together? Selfish? I think Aer and Rumala are being selfish, and taking the rest of us down with them.”
“But – we all agreed, Jenn. We all agreed. And we all came out here – the shettling is tomorrow – and now you’re doing this? I thought the story about Aer’s party was funny, but it’s not. It wasn’t Jenn just being Jenn – this is, I don’t know what this is. I can’t believe you.”
I reached out for her – a conciliatory hand, an apology I had no words for, but she spun away.
“Maina.”
The moons now only lit her walking away from me. Sharp, angry paces. Maybe it was best that I’d always walked alone here before. But that was stupid thinking too – to blame Maina instead of myself. I knew what I was agreeing to. A group shouldn’t take shettling lightly, but nor should its weight press them down, or hold them back. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, tried to listen just to the trees leaves fighting for the moons’ touch, the waves slapping down on the shore, tried to hear my own heartbeat and drown out the wail in my heart. Ever unwilling to submit, I carried on my walk.
Aer and Rumala were a beautiful force of love. I’m not sure when they fell, fully, for each other. Presumably that was being revisited back at the chalet, probed and enriched by sharing our memories and thoughts. Sometime after the broken arm I guessed. Aer had put her arm into a sling, and taken her out into the woods. There weren’t many of the right kind of tree near the chalet. These are all too young now, and they were younger then, too involved in jostling for space to be concerned with us. But Aer knew where there was a much older relative of theirs. He’d found it one summer, off hiking with our mothers and fathers. I hadn’t gone on that trip. It must have been him, probably with Tereis and Tesh, since they were inseparable. I don’t know what I was doing that summer. It must have been when I’d taken up music with a vigour, soon to be abandoned when I discovered I wasn’t really going to be very good at it. But they found this big old tree, its roots thick and massive. There was no doubt that it was part of the alltree. Its primary leaves were turned crimson, because it had grown large enough to dominate its neighbours and could now subsist solely on its nocturnal photosynthesis.
It would have been perfect, if Aer could have actually found it again. But he couldn’t, and after leading Rumala around for hours, in pain from her broken arm, he had to admit that he couldn’t remember where it was, and bring her back to the chalet and father had to call for an ambulance. He Aer spent the whole ride into town apologising profusely to Rumala. I guess that did the trick, somehow. Ah, but they fell so hard in love. We’d all lived together, just waiting for such a romance to break out. Once it had, it gave the rest of us licence to fall too. It seems to be the way. Tereis and Tesh, always together, now gained an extra glint in their already gleaming and mischievous eyes. Theirs was a love that had not faded. I’d rarely seen them when they weren’t holding hands, or at least pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. And I loved them dearly too. Even Aer, ridiculously pompous Aer. Maina, Eleran, Miqual and I fell in and out of playful and passionate spells. None of us had the fire to match those first two, enduring pairings. Instead we slipped with equanimity and friendship through a happy cycle of relationships with each other. I regretted not having more. I’d always had an eye for something special for Maina, and though we spent time together, it never hit that peak I had hoped for. What I felt was never quite reciprocated, and I drifted away a little. Never far – how far can you slide from your circle? We grew up together and knew each other inside out.
Why then was Maina so surprised that I now felt this way, that deep down I didn’t want to go through the shettling? Surely it should have been obvious that I wasn’t ready, that it was too soon, that I hadn’t done something, that Maina and I had not truly found each other. If we ended it all now, we never would. But perhaps we never would anyway, no matter how long we went on. The walk had turned out less soothing than I had hoped for. Maina now knew how I felt. Would she be back at the chalet now, telling the others? I was torn between hoping she would, and hoping my secrets would remain mine. Like my midnight walks. Except those had never been secret, no matter what I thought. Would things have been different if someone had followed me one night, come to ask me if I was alright? Or would I have resented their interference? Either way, I had to accept that this dilemma was in me, not in them. They did what they thought best – to allow me my privacy, my night time thing, and to not interfere. Being freely given that freedom has a cost. It was a trust placed in me, and I didn’t know how that trust should lie in my heart.
Waves steadily surged across the lake, dragged about by the massive lunar forces. I could be selfish. I could ruin the shettling for all of them, for all of us. Or I could return to my circle, to my family and friends, and do what was right for the group. If we could no longer all bear to live with the weight of our memories and each other – clearly Rumala and Aer couldn’t, watching them together since they had split up was a pain I felt to my very core – then we would support that.
I turned on the twins, and felt their light warming my spine as I headed back to the chalet.

I followed my doubled shadow back to the chalet; Talens and Calia, bright in the sky behind me, lit my path. I wasn’t so much reluctant to return to my friends as I was embarrassed to walk in and have missed out. A foolish set of feelings to have, contradictory and unhelpful. I consoled myself a little by punting a few stones into the water on my way. Trivial exercises of power are ever the way to a happier heart… I could see I wasn’t going to be able to just sneak in. A silhouette waited outside, lounging against one of the wooden posts that separated the veranda from the inclined roof above. Aware that I was being watched, I gave up on my reluctance and doubled my stride.
As my feet crunched and squelched through the gravel leading up to our family home, the figure turned, to be caught by the moonlight, and revealed itself to be Miqual. Beautiful Miqual. Eyes like fire, and now outlined in gold. He smoothly pushed himself to standing with a simple flex of his shoulder, bouncing off the post. The light treated him well. It always had. It’s not always a compliment to say you like how someone looks by night, but for Miqual it really worked. I drew nearer and he stepped down off the porch, bare foot as usual, and simply grabbed me into a hug. It had been a long time since we’d been more than just friends, but the casual strength and warmth of the man still made me catch my breath, before relaxing into him.
“Still out walking, then,” he offered, barely a murmur in my ear.
I hadn’t yet gotten over Maina pointing out that they all knew I’d gone a wandering nightly, and his remark bounced off me at the wrong angle. I stiffened, stretching out of his embrace. A childish reaction, but it seemed I wasn’t yet done with petulance for the evening. I had nothing to offer in return, other than a half-grunted confirmation, whose words even I couldn’t have spelled out. Miqual let me go, allowed me to retract myself to arms’ length, though his hands remained on my shoulders; a comforting weight I didn’t want to accept.
“Maina’s not happy with you,” he began, “want to talk about it?”
When we’d been together, I’d adored Miqual’s directness. His frank statements of feeling, of desire, demands, and forthright expressions of affection had an honesty I’d both admired and responded to in kind. I’d found it hard to replicate with anyone else, but he consistently brought out the best in me. I grumbled some further nonsense, and turned away to gaze at Talens sliding out past Calia, vaster and brighter than his sister moon, sharpening the yellow into a white glow that burned when it reflected off the water. Miqual caught me by the shoulder and drew me back in, his left arm across my chest, my back pressed to him.
I was doing a spectacularly poor job of preparing for shettling. I knew that, but I was struggling to give myself back over to the circle. What else would Miqual want than for me to speak my mind.
“Well no, not really. But I should. I’m – I’m not ready for this Miq. And I know that’s not fair on everyone else.”
“It’s Maina, isn’t it? You always had a thing for her.”
“It just, it never worked out.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“I know that, I just thought, it would, you know. Like Tesh and Tereis. I thought we’d have our time.”
“You did. Several times, as I recall,” I could feel Miqual smiling as he spoke, “as did we, several times.”
I jabbed him with my elbow, got rewarded with a mock ‘oof’.
“So what’s wrong with me then Miq? What’s your diagnosis?”
“Hmm. It’s complicated, but right now you’re stuck with some idea of what’s supposed to happen. Calia’s tears – we all think it’s going to turn out some special way, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to. Maybe I thought it would be you and me, that we’d end up like those two, joined at the hip. Didn’t work out that way. Doesn’t mean I’m happy about it, but I’m not sad about it. It was always fun when we were together, but I love Eleran too, and Maina. And the others come to that. I can’t regret what never happened, I can’t do that to myself. And nor should you. Come inside, remember what did happen, don’t spend tonight inventing a past that should have happened, or a future that won’t happen. Seriously, Tesh brought some amazing wine.”
While I could grumble, it was always hard to resist Miqual, and Tesh had indeed long developed a taste for the finest wines.
“All right. Fine. Lead the way.”
Miqual enclosed me in a huge hug, until I pushed him away and shoved him back up the step and through the front door.
Inside the chalet, the wooden floors spread out before me, each one leading to some memory of growing up here. Slipping and sliding in our socks in daft races down the hall, the stairs that Rumala fell down so dramatically, saying goodbye to our mother and father when they judged us secure enough to be left alone; that first night without them, all of us huddled in our own beds, no longer quite sure of the rules any more. Only to realise later, that there weren’t really any rules. All that mattered was the little circle of us – one that would shrink and grow depending on what we chose to do, the paths we followed, but was ultimately unbreakable, and would always draw us back in. As it had now. Miqual led me by the hand into the main living room.
“Look who I found outside,” he declared.
The others cheered. Even Maina, who briefly vanquished the scowl she had bestowed on me. Miqual pushed me into a chair next to Eleran, and sat on its arm, leaning over me to seize the bottle of wine Eleran was holding.
“How’s Calia tonight,” asked Eleran, reaching out to tuck a hair back behind my ear, “bright?”
“Never so radiant as you,” I replied, drawing the light mocking laughter from her that I so enjoyed. We smiled at each other, and I began to relax into the mood.
The room was entirely panelled in wood, the chairs and settees a mismatched sprawl of worn old furnishings of different heights, widths and depths. They contained us perfectly. Calia and Talens were bright through the windows, but muted by their panes, not so bright as to dazzle. Instead, the low tables which filled the space between the seats were set out with dozens of candles, many of which I’d set out earlier in jars and holders dug out from the numerous cupboards and chests of drawers scattered throughout the house. For all my reluctance, I’d played my part in preparing our old home for us. All the beds had been made, though there was a reasonable chance we’d barely use half of them – Eleran had arrived early that morning with Rumala and done much to make the place ready for us. I liked to think I added the glow.
Tesh and Tereis were, inevitably, piled on top of each other in a single broad armchair, though their frequent wriggling made it hard to tell who sat on whose lap. Their grins were infectious, laughing at each other’s jokes and teasing jibes. By contrast, Aer and Rumala were separated by Eleran, myself and Miqual. That still didn’t seem right, and of course was very much the reason we were all back here. It was fine for Miqual, Maina, Eleran and I to drift in our romantic rhombus, but their break up was deeply troubling. I suppose I hadn’t wanted to admit it before, but my brief absence and return made it all the plainer: the circle was broken.
Miqual handed me an overflowing glass of wine. I downed most of it in one, to mild applause.
“Catching up,” I managed, as the wine took effect, sending pulses of warmth through me like waves on the lake.
“We were just talking about you,” said Aer.
I grimaced, “something good I hope.”
“Actually yes,” he took a deeper swallow of his own wine, “do you remember when mother and father left – that first night, when I was still in that little room at the end of the hall, on my own at night – and you heard me crying?”
“I do. And I came and climbed into bed with you till you went back to sleep.”
“Except you fell asleep too, and when we woke up your arms and my legs had gone to sleep–“
“–no, it was your arms that had gone to sleep–“
“–someone’s arms had gone to sleep, and we tried to get up and just fell on the floor and couldn’t get up until we’d got feeling back.”
“I do. I’m pretty sure I’ve still got a scar on my knee from smacking into the shelves next to your bed.”
“Well, I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for that night, if not the morning afterwards.”
We all raised our glasses, to the memory, to being friends, brothers and sisters – to our circle.
The night was full of such memories. The trivial things that any family shares: how Tereis constantly lost his glasses, just could not either wear the damn things or put them down somewhere sensible;  all of us waiting outside the stage door for Maina to come out after her operatic performance so we could shower her with flowers and congratulations; Aleran’s recovery from her car accident, eagerly pulling her out of the soft soil, healed but too long asleep to walk, so Miqual and I carried her while she drowsily muttered of her dreams with the trees; the first nights we’d spent with each other. It’s amazing what you can remember as a group, that you thought had been forgotten or never remembered happening until it’s laid out for you again. Inevitably, there were tears as well as laughter. Sorrow is ever mixed with joy, makes the two sweeter and sharper for their contrast. Each rich, each part of the lives we shared, both reasons for living.
We came at last to Aer and Rumala’s break up, Talens knows how many bottles of wine we’d drunk, how many tears we’d shed. By that point, Eleran was sprawled sideways across my lap and Miqual’s arm held the back of my chair, else he’d have slid to the floor. Maina propped up Rumala and somehow Tesh and Tereis had made enough space to support Aer as he sat on the floor at their feet. As a family we managed our wine well. Can you explain what causes people to fall out of love? We didn’t know, we only knew that it had torn a hole in our circle, never to be mended. Listening to them talk, as they exchanged their fond recollections, they were unable to quantify the change in their feelings, only the emotions themselves. All they could say was couched in metaphor and simile, the yawning void, the spreading gulf between them.
It was contagious, that hole. We’d been apart for just slightly too long, split off on our own pursuits, chasing work and art, that we’d grown unable to see the separation coming. But now we were all together again, it was clear to me. The shettling was the right thing for us. How could we function as a circle any longer, when two of our number had suffered, had lost the thing that held us all together. I caught, and held Maina’s eye, as Rumala wordlessly expressed her sense of loss. We too had lost something, and perhaps we all felt something similar, that we were all diminished. Our time had come, and though we could celebrate what we’d had together, it was time for something new and different. In the morning we would join in the shettling and be reborn.
I stumbled off to bed alone. The candles had burned down, and guttered in their molten remains. We had definitively, and loudly finished Tesh’s wine. He himself had had the last glass, and promptly fallen asleep in the armchair, trapping Tereis in place beneath him. He accepted his lot and waved us off to bed, shuffling his lover into a more comfortable position. Miqual had disappeared with Rumala, Aer with Maina. I’d thought, perhaps, that she and I would have spent this last night together, but as Miqual had said, there was no use in striving for a story that didn’t exist. Even though I had grasped this, my stomach still lurched with the possibility. Or maybe that was the wine. My head was spinning as I lay down in the bed that I’d had since I was young. It still fit me perfectly, the blankets smelled the same, had the same reassuring weight, gently pinning me to the mattress. I’d drunk too much to feel the cold, but not so much that I couldn’t feel it when Eleran climbed under the blanket, and opened my eyes to see her long hair shattered into a luminous rainbow by Talens’ light. She was warm, and naked.
Morning came too soon. The yellow moons had been replaced by the cool blue sky of day, and the sun’s pale light flooded my bedroom. Eleran had disappeared some time around dawn, leaving us both with too little time for sleep. Not that it really mattered. Shettling came twice a year, on the two nights of the year when Talens’ orbit coincided perfectly with Calia’s. They would rise as one, with Talens’ light filtered and enhanced through Calia. We had most of the day to travel north, past Brisingam and out into the allforest, where Aer had been working these past ten years. It was a long trip, but the train ran there directly. How many circles would be seeking to shettle I had no idea, but there would also be mothers and fathers travelling to collect the shettled and take them to their new homes. I finally felt ready to take the plunge, and to deliver myself into the earth, with my family and embrace what would come next.

The promised rain never came. Overnight, the clouds had fled, leaving our pale sun to carry the sky’s weight. It did the best it could, and was still too bright for my post-wine eyes. The blue itself was searing, setting fire to the inside of my head. The covers were still shaped for two, and I couldn’t take the smile from my face, even though I was now alone. Eleran had a bed of her own, of course, and we all had goodbyes to make; not just to each other, but to the things, places and objects that made up our lives. I’d always bounced between the various philosophies of identity – whether it’s the people we’re surrounded by and our relationships that make us who we are, or if it’s the stuff we bury our lives under – that make us who we are. I’d a fair appreciation for the things of life, those items that were always there, even when the people left, that had no feelings of their own. They’re a structure, a shape, some of kind of mould or armour we build. Whether we’re the presence left when they’re taken away, or the shape formed by the void between them, well, that’s the sort of question that leads me into a bottle of wine, and out the other side. The places that we’ve been are part of the pathway to who we are, so re-treading our time here together made sense to me.
This chalet was a keystone for all of us. It’s almost the first thing I can remember, after clawing through the soft soil. I reached up for the world of air and light, felt the sharp snapping of roots being left behind, and felt hands reaching for mine, pulling me up the rest of the way, blinking into the face of that pale sun. All around me my brothers and sisters were pushing their way to the surface as well, all of us bound together by the shettling, and now released into a new life. The blur of kindly faces, distorted voices welcoming us, bundling us in blankets – that fierce sensation of softness, where before only compacted dirt had held us so tightly that our lungs had not drawn breath – shocking lightness of sensation, almost overwhelming. I have flashes of the journey out of the allforest, curled up with seven similarly blanketed forms, huddled for that intense sense of pressing weight we’d so recently been freed from. I can remember the flurry of shapes, which must have been the branches and leaves of trees along the road, a blurred span of green and blue. Hours and moments of sleep and wakefulness, golden hair, a broad hand pressing me down in the back of the automotive as I reached for the window, deep voices, soothing, like the murmurs of the earth.
And then coming to in this bed, the heavy blanket like swaddling, comforting beyond reason. As it was now. These were all morning thoughts, a babble of the mind reawakening, and adjusting to the real world again. I folded the blanket back, as I would if I were to sneak out for my not-so-secret night jaunts. All this time, they’d known me better than I’d thought; of course they had. I’d been foolish to think otherwise. In stretching and gazing out of the window, I weighed the span of our time together – some forty-two years of amity and love. A good length. A happy time, of growth and learning, of trivial and crucial events that bound us ever tighter together. And now apart, at last.
I’d risen late it seemed – already the chalet was filled with activity. I took advantage of the temporarily free bathroom, content with the smell of breakfast and the hungover groans and laughter that drifted through the wooden halls. Clean, and fresher in the head I laid out my favourite suit. I’d carefully folded it before making my way here, and it had survived the trip surprisingly well. Given that it had been buried inside my rucksack as I’d hitchhiked half the distance from Brisingham, before abandoning the roads and taking to the rougher woodland paths, it was only severely creased. Five days of walking through the dells and around the meres that dotted the landscape between the city I lived and worked in, and this beautiful lake of ours. I should probably have caught a lift with one of the others sooner, instead of brooding alone for that time. I’d scared Calia’s tears out of Miqual when I’d appeared at the side of the road, flagging down his automotive. He’d picked up Tesh and Tereis from the observatory, where they spent their time star gazing, or some such pursuit. I wasn’t as interested in looking up as I was in looking into our glorious green world. Hence the hiking. I shook the suit out as best I could. I should have taken it into the bathroom, and allowed the steam to work its magic. Oh well, I’d never been the best dressed of us – that was a title reserved for Aer and his clotheshorse frame, though rivalled by Miqual’s capacity for allowing any garment to hang perfectly. But enough of them. I looked quite dapper, I thought. We’d be shedding all of our clothes at nightfall anyway, plus we had the journey north to content with, but at least I’d look good and sharp for breakfast.
The kitchen was in shocking disarray. Someone had let Aer do the cooking, and every surface was covered in a fine layer of flour and spattered with hard-to-identify droplets of something that must be related to food. He was somehow sparkling clean amidst the devastation he’d wrought, and he turned at my entrance.
“Take a seat Jenn, we have toast, of three varieties, porridge, coffee, I’m no longer sure what this is, but it began as an omelette, also tea… And there’s juice, plus bacons and fruit tarts.”
“Talens blessing be on you, Aer,” I took a seat at the table, shuffling up next to Rumala, who clutched a mug of coffee like it held salvation, “I’ll take a little of everything, except the coffee – I’d like a lot of that.”
Aer turned back to his grand chaos, pouring me a huge drink. Tesh snatched it from his hand as he stumbled into the kitchen, draining it in one, despite the heat.
“You look…” I teased, “like you drank the very last of the wine last night.”
“I have little to no recollection of that, but some idiot let me sleep in an armchair, and now I can’t feel my collarbones,” he grumbled, thrusting his mug back under the caffeiniere until it did his bidding.
“That was supposed to be mine,” I pointed out, and received a scowl and a full mug. “Thank you Tesh. Where’s Tereis?”
“Oh, he went for a run with Maina. Which is inconceivable, and actually makes me feel sick. But they’re back now. He’s packing up the stuff from our room.”
I’d sorted most of my possessions back in Brisingham. My apartment was pretty well packed and ready to go. I’d left nothing here when I moved to the city, though I knew some of the others had kept their hoards of toys, books and clothes near the lake where they belonged. By nightfall, all we owned should be at the archives. Anything we left behind would be available to whoever took our place. It wasn’t that we expected to reclaim them, but the archiving was a deep-rooted part of shettling: the reconciliation and encapsulation of a life together, to be stored together – a closeness that reflected how we’d lived. I’d given much to charity and neighbours, keeping only a few boxes of personal treasures and photographs. For all that I’d enjoyed gathering a house of stuff, at the end I’d found that little of it represented who I’d become; I suppose I was not the shape formed by the things after all.
“We’ll be stopping off in Brisingham for a few hours later, Jenn. Will that be time enough for you to take care of everything?” asked Rumala, through a mouthful of what I guessed was once an omelette.
“Should be fine. It’s all stacked in the hall, ready to go.”
“I wish you’d moved in with me and Aer,” she said, surprising me.
“Really?”
“Of course,” chimed in Aer, “we were all in the city together, and yet apart. I regret not inviting you in. It’s what we should have done.”
“Ah, but you’d have hated me climbing out your bedroom window every night,” I said, spurring a round of laughter. Rumala gave me a hug, and Aer gave me a plate piled high with the produce of his war with the kitchen. “But thank you both.”
“Everything else is in the automotives,” said Miqual, appearing in the doorway. “Everyone else has either archived or brought their stuff with them. Should be an easy drop off. Maina registered us last month and they opened a new case for us. I’ve taken up about half of it with pictures of you lot.”
“That painting of me and Eleran you did is sitting in my hall, nicely wrapped in three of my shirts,” I said, “it’s one of my favourites.”
“At least the collection will be together again,” he replied, accepting a mountainous sandwich from Aer.
“We’re just about ready then,” said Rumala, with a sigh, “though I suppose we’ll have to clear up this mess first.”
Aer took her pointed stare with an innocent glee, denying all responsibility.
It didn’t take that long to clear up. By the time we had, Tereis and Maina had finished their packing, and a small pile of cartons sat on the veranda. Eleran locked the chalet’s front door, and tucked the key under the cushion of the love seat to its left.
“Alright then,” she said, turning to face us, “I have loved you all, for all of our time. Let’s do this together.”
Miqual produced a camera, and we all crowded onto the veranda, our backs to the lake, facing our childhood home, and squeezed into one final snapshot of us all together. Our circle, united, soon to be broken.

The journey back to Brisingham took a couple of hours, a time filled with fidgeting and too little space. The back was filled to overflowing with boxes and bags, strapped down and still blocking any view to the rear. Miqual drove, while I was squeezed in with Tesh and Rumala; the rest were in Aer’s automotive, leading the way. There was an awkwardness I hadn’t anticipated, but in retrospect was obvious: we’d just spent a day and a half celebrating our lives together, virtually said goodbye, and now were mashed together for another day. It was much like saying goodbye to a friend and then realising you’re both going heading in the same direction. Do you acknowledge and walk together, having said all there was to say, or awkwardly pretend not to have noticed each other? Neither works out terribly well.
The road was lined with the scrubby half-woods that I spent much of my professional life in. Studying the allforest had kept me busy for many years; and not just me, generations of researchers, scientists, doctors and curious enthusiasts were drawn to the strange monoculture. In this region, we had but a single species of tree, which dominated almost all available space, competing with itself for sun and moonlight. While there were many varieties of grass, flowering shrub and smaller plants, nothing but the alltrees ever reached more than the average person’s height. Partly it was their extreme aggression, both towards rival plants, and to younger versions of itself. I’d spent a summer documenting alltree saplings, which had been planted specifically to observe their behaviour. At first they’d all grown evenly, their careful spacing allowing them to reach around five feet in height before their branches and leaves started to intrude on the others. At the first hint of shade being cast on one of the others’ leaves, the victim tree entered a period of aggressive growth, burning all the energy it could extract from the sky and the ground to attain new height. Obviously once that began, a whole arms race ensued. The trees sprouted vines that dangled from their branches until they found one of their rivals, wrapping round the branches and contracting until it withered and died. The same happened below ground: forays of over-active roots choked each other, and invaded their neighbours. In some cases the roots would grow up into a neighbouring tree, join with the vines and tear the tree apart from the inside. Sometimes a rival would put enough energy into height and spreading its branches that the trees below couldn’t keep up and, in their deprived and weakened state, simply faded away as the victor’s roots stretched out, cutting them off below as above.
Gazing out of the window I watched the vicious allforest battle itself, until the individual trees reached a state of critical mass and nutrition – no amount of light and space was going to help it grow further – and now fully mature, it potentially intruded on the domain of other, vast alltrees. The questing roots and vines switched from predation to symbiosis, merging their subterranean network, vines forming vast webs through the canopy, linking together all the alltrees’ resources and merging into one vast organism: the allforest. While there were as yet many parts of the world untouched by the allforest, its spread was clear and had been long documented. It had spread from a single sample across the northern continent, choking out the native specimens. When even a seed sprouted on our shores, it was soon killed off. The only place other trees flourished to any degree were in greenhouses, though even there it was important to keep them isolated. A hint of pollen would cause nearby alltrees to change their direction of growth, drawing ever nearer, the root systems actually dragging the trunk and canopy toward the greenhouse, with predictably disastrous consequences for the structure. Overseas of course, it was a different matter. Small islands were mostly safe from the alltrees as they sustain only a few mature plants, which were unable to join up with the allforest, and tended to dwindle as a consequence. The southern continent had a rather more direct approach to the alltrees’ colonisation plans: burning out any samples that arrived by sea or air. So far it had been quite successful. Here in the north, the trees had become the dominating feature of our landscape, and far more importantly, the defining influence in how we lived our lives.
 
Eventually we arrived in Brisingham. The road took us out of the scrublands and past the dead straight line where the allforest ended. The city had been built in the heart of a rocky crater, its earth too shallow to allow the alltrees to take root easily and grow to their full size. It was a constant challenge keeping it back, and the streets were of a composite sand, chemically treated to be inimical to fertilisation. It mostly worked, but we had to keep an eye out for the hardy plants. Brisingham was fairly decentralised, with offices and workplaces scattered across the city, its thousands of citizens living mostly near where they worked. Coppery structures passed us on either side, decorated with bark patterns, their roofs and upper walls coated in a patina of solar and lunar panels, contributing to the power grid. We were headed for the centre of the rock, where the archives were located. I was just a few streets away, so I was able to get out of the automotive first, leaving a little more space for the others.
“See you in two hours, in front of the archive, right?” Miqual confirmed as I hopped down, with just my bag.
I waved them off, the automotive wobbling more precariously than I’d realised under its load of personal items and the junk the others had decided to have stored. I walked down a sandy sidestreet, enjoying the quiet crunch underfoot. My home was in the middle of a block of identical houses fabricated from the basin’s stone, and had been clad with felled alltree wood. Not felled by us, of course, pulled down by the violent growth of the trees themselves. I lived in a house covered in failures. They were younger trees, their bark still smooth, with occasional blots of white and a darker green where branches had been ready to break out.
I nodded to a few neighbours, and received the usual mix of nods and waves. I’d been fairly happy here, not that I’d spent a lot of time at home – I much preferred to be out in the woods, working and walking. I’d wrapped up my last project, into how the vines sprouted, and the complex photosynthesis and its resulting sugars were able to be poured into their radical competitive growth. It wasn’t really very conclusive, or groundbreaking, but it was better than looking at the trees and shrugging. All that work had already been sent on to the institute, who would add it to the existing body of knowledge. My name would be attached of course, even though after the shettling I wouldn’t have any recollection of the work, or any claim to it. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Perhaps I hadn’t been sure about it previously either, and this was a cycle I’d always gone through, and presumably would continue. It was thoughts like that which made me wonder if I was really suitable for shettling. Perhaps I’d just begun to settle this time, having moved away from most of the circle. Who knew, maybe next time would be my last. For now, after last night, I felt it was something I wanted to do with the others – I didn’t think I could just let them dissolve the circle and be left alone. That would be too much.
My keys were, of course, buried in my bag rather than in the pocket of the nice suit I’d worn for our final photograph earlier. Crouched over my rucksack, emptying its contents out onto the porch I didn’t notice the approaching footsteps until they crunched on the sandy gravel.
“So this is it, then?”
I looked up, keys in hand at my next door neighbour, Relyan. She was tightly clutching a square of paper between her hands.
“I suppose so,” I said, not sure how to provide a satisfactory answer, “do you want to come in for a minute?”
She hesitated. I guessed I’d arrived at the wrong time. A few minutes earlier or later and she could have just slipped the card under my door without having to see me.
“Come on in, I’ll make a cup of tea.”
She gave me a slight nod, so I got up and let us in.
The hallway was dark, one half of it made up of stacked boxes, labelled clearly with my name, reference ID and our circle’s number, and cycle. The rest was the soft red carpet that had been here before I moved in fifteen years ago. I’d felt no need to replace it; it was delightful on bare feet. Since I was home, and for the last time, I kicked my shoes off. Relyan did the same, and she followed me past the boxes into the living room.
“It’s good to see you Relyan,” I said, “is that for me?”
“Oh, yes.” She handed me the card, now creased and folded around the edges.
“Thank you Relyan, I do appreciate it.”
I smoothed out the edges and laid the card on the low table that lay along one edge of the room. Previously it had contained a stack of alltree samples, local carvings and the assorted junk I’d collected over the years. Most of it was now in a different set of boxes, not marked for the archive like those in the hall, but for anyone to take what they wanted. I’d leave those on the porch when I left.
Relyan sat on the edge of the sofa. I stepped through the oval arch that separated the living room from the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. I fussed with some mugs, the few that hadn’t been packed up, in anticipation of this meeting, or something like it. Relyan and I had been neighbours for all the time I’d been here, she’d lived in this terrace for much longer. At first she had been rather cool towards me, but I’d been keen to make some friends in the neighbourhood, given how far I was from my circle (we had still spoken and messaged almost daily, but it wasn’t the same as actually being with people). My overtures of friendship had been successful, in the end, and we’d become good friends. Not that you would have guessed it from the expression on her face. She let me make the tea in silence, and I didn’t feel the need to press her. The card on the table remained unopened. It’s always struck me as a little odd to open a letter while the person who sent it to you was right before you.
I brought the mugs back through and sat on the chair opposite Relyan. She was a striking woman, her dark skin offset by the vibrant tattoos that ran down the side of her face and neck, vanishing under clothes to emerge at wrist and ankle. I was well aware they ran all the way in between, too.
“I’m going to miss you Jenn,” she said.
“I’m going to miss you too,” I replied.
“No, you’re not. You’re not going to remember me at all, you’re not going to remember any of this. Calia’s tears, don’t you even care about that?”
“You know I do – but you know–“
“–about your precious circle? Of course I do, how could I forget? I thought you’d finally thought your way out of that ridiculous cult.”
“It’s not a cult – it’s a way of life.”
“It’s not a way of life, it’s a way of not having a life, of avoiding every damn responsibility that comes your way. You and your friends, you don’t even try, you just restart it, over and over again. And for what? What is the point?”
“You just don’t understand,” I said, “the point is the circle. We want that intimacy, that closeness, to be a family.”
“Why would you think I don’t understand? You’re not unique, you’re not special just because you shettle, over and over again. We know what shettling is, I know what it’s like. The rest of us have grown out of it. I can’t believe I wasted my time with you. And now you’re just throwing it away. You’ve all lost your minds. You’re exactly like the children you want to be. You know what, I’ve had enough. I shouldn’t ever have gotten involved with a bloody shettler.”
We were both standing up by now, shouting at each other. I’d never meant to hurt Relyan. She was right in so many ways – I had drifted from my circle, ended up out here, with her. But now I’d been drawn back in. She wasn’t interested in the bind of obligations and affection that drew us all together – that was the point, after all, to be immersed in that intense bond together. It was a test, of sorts, one that I’d thought for a while I might be failing, but in the end was going to pass.
“Do you even know how many times you’ve done this, Jenn? Do you have any idea that you’ve wiped your idiot mind again and again, with these same people, re-learned those relationships. Do you know if it’s been different this time? Or is it the same every stupid time?”
I recoiled from her words.
“Don’t you ever stop to think, to wonder why everyone else has stopped? There are only a few hundred of you, stubborn, endlessly repeating the same life, instead of dealing with this one. When are you going to grow up?”
“I don’t want to do this Relyan, I’m meeting my circle in an hour.”
“Fine, of course,” her sudden calmness was somehow more distressing than her anger, “just – don’t find me afterwards. And if you do, I won’t be here for you. I know you won’t remember this, so I’m saying it for me.”
She took the card from where I’d put it and left. The door closed quietly, and I was left with two undrunk cups of tea, in my empty living room. Ultimately, Relyan was right about one thing – soon, none of this would matter. I was aware that I was lazily absolving myself of the need to think about this, about our fight, and whether she was correct about shettling, and about me in particular. I’d made a commitment, to my circle, and I was going to see it through.
I rinsed out the mugs and returned them to their place in the cupboard. Time to go. I had a small automotive tucked away in the garage court behind the terrace. I stepped out through the patio doors into the garden I’d paid little attention to. I noticed an altree sapling taking root, so ducked back inside and retrieved the thick, metal-lined gloves I kept by the doors for this precise purpose. Safely gloved I tore the sapling out of the ground in a single, swift motion. The gloves protected me from the thorns that had sprung from the bark as soon as I gripped it. It was too young for them to have the stiffness and sharpness they would later acquire. The roots writhed in the air, seeking purchase in anything soft enough for them to puncture. I wasn’t going to give it that opportunity, and took it straight round to the communal steriliser on the other side of the garages. There was a good stack of dead wood already. We were all punctilious about preventing the trees from taking root in the city. It had been a long, hard battle to carve out this much space from the constant incursions of the alltree. The wood collected all over the city was distributed to various industries, from furniture making, to cladding homes like mine, and countless artisanal crafts. I’d given Maina some jewellery made from the varnished leaves of juvenile alltrees, uprooted from the city. Its roots curling up at me, I flipped open the steriliser, and dropped the sapling inside. It was young enough that its trunk was flexible and it looked like an arm with too many fingers at either end, flailing to escape the box.
“Sorry,” I whispered, shut the steriliser, and stabbed the red ‘on’ button.
The unit hummed, and the tree stopped struggling. Flipping the lid open again, I took the curled up tree out, and placed it on the stack. With the spot of good citizenship out of the way I sought out my automotive, unpeeling the armoured gloves and tucking them in my back pocket. My little auto was still waiting for me, a foreshortened triangle, with wheels at each corner, space only for me in the front, but a generous amount of storage space in the back. I reversed it out into the sunshine, and round the block in front of my house. There was a light in Relyan’s window, and I wondered wistfully if she would wave as I left. It seemed unlikely.
All the boxes fit neatly into the boot, as I’d hoped, and I did a last quick check of the house to make sure I’d forgotten nothing. In my bedroom I spotted the framed photograph of Relyan and I, standing under an alltree, a tangled nest of vines hanging down behind us, making an arch that we fit neatly inside of. It was from a week when Relyan decided to accompany me into the heart of the allforest; she’d had to sit in the boot of my auto, cushioned by tents and equipment. It had been a good week, sharing the forest, pointing out the especially results of the trees’ behaviour, from the vast thorns that had sprouted from some in their earlier years, to the sticky sap that had glued three trees together until they couldn’t compete with each other and had to grow as one. It was a memory worth recording. But not one I wanted to take with me. The fight with Relyan had both been confusing for me, both confirming my doubts about our circle shettling because of Aer and Rumula, but also reminding me of why I was in the circle to begin with. A difficult contradiction to bear, but the photograph clarified it for me: that I wanted to try again, to return to the amnesiac state we had begun our circle in all those years ago, no disappointments, no failures. Just the hope, and promise of togetherness, and the joy of discovery.
I left the photograph by the stripped bed, watching over an empty home that I would never think of again.

A cool wind blew through the open window, keeping me focussed. I was running late for meeting the others, and it would take time to transfer my belongings and get properly checked in at the archive. It wasn’t far, so I drove a little faster than I normally would, feeling the light structure of the automotive crunching along the sandy roads. The streets were quiet, and I only passed a few other autos and a handful of pedestrians. Soon enough, the archive hove into view: as the largest building in the city, it already stood out, but since it had also been dug straight out the rock in the Brisingham basin, it arrested the eye. At three storeys tall, it was higher than anything else, and it extended far further underground – much of the rock quarried out for its vast chambers and corridors had been used in the construction of the rest of the city. It needed to be this large – at one time, virtually our whole population would shettle, depositing the possessions and artefacts of each life below ground. There had been something in our social conscience that kept us from simply destroying or discarding those relics, instead they sat sealed and silent, carefully logged and catalogues. Together they formed a vast cultural archive of our people. Of late, the volume of depositions had declined, along with the practice of shettling. I’d given it little thought until fighting with Relyan – though I’d been unsure if the timing of our shettle was right, I’d not doubted the practice itself. It troubled me that so many were choosing to persist. What had they found to give their lives meaning? I found it hard to imagine the endless time looming before me.
 
Miqual’s automotive was parked outside the archive’s main entrance, empty of people and boxes. I pulled up alongside, and hopped out. The archive’s doors swung open easily, leading me into a brightly lit atrium, sunlight coming through the roof and front of the building, shaped by the stained glass into the branches and canopy of the allforest. Miqual was inside, chatting with the sole clerk at the bank of counters that ran the entire width of the room.
“There you are,” Miqual called, as I strode across the atrium towards him, “I thought you’d gotten lost.”
“Sorry, I just had a few more things to pack up than I’d realised.”
“Ever the hoarder.”
The clerk addressed me for the first time, “do you have items to archive?”
“I do, yes, though not as much as he’d have you think.”
“Very good – take the trolley and bring it all in.”
It was just a few minutes work to stack the remnants of my life onto the trolley and wheel it back in. The clerk fussed with labels and seals for considerably longer, until my boxes were doubly identified and marked for storage with the rest of the circle’s paraphenalia. I passed the clerk my identity card. The only thing on it of any real importance was the number – my name could change when I shettled, as might my home, and the people who I joined in my next circle. I had no plans to reawaken with anyone else, but these things were allowed to happen. Tracking who shettlers actually are occupies a considerable amount of effort. Somewhere in the archives there was a record of when I first shettled, how many times, and with whom I had been in a circle, and the precise location of every item I’d ever deposited down in the labyrinth below us. It wasn’t something I liked to think about a great deal, but I suppose that was part of the point of visiting the archive each time – a reminder of overall continuity of existence, beyond the individual rebirths and cycles. A strange business. While the memories of those prior lives was hidden from me, being here gave me a sense of them. Just seeing my trolley-load of boxes disappear into the darkness as a single life made me wonder a little how many other times I’d stacked my life like this.
“Miqual, do you ever… think about the last time you did this?” I asked, hesitantly, not entirely sure what it was I wanted to know.
“Not really. I’d guess that I’ve contributed a lot to the archive over the years, in diaries, if nothing else. That seems so fixed a habit that I can hardly imagine I’ve lived without keeping them.”
I responded with some noncommittal murmur, still waiting to see if the thought that was scratching in my mind would come forth.
“Excuse me,” I said to the clerk, a densely built man, who filled his suit jacket with ease, “this might be an odd question, but – do you remember me?”
Both the clerk and Miqual stared at me like I’d gone mad.
“I’m sorry – I know you’re not supposed to say, but it’s been on my mind. Look, if you don’t mind my asking, do you shettle?”
The clerk chose to indulge me; he could easily have refused to continue our conversation. “It’s been a long time since I have. My circle split; some of us returned to the allforest, some of us chose to live on. I’ve always assumed that one day I’ll shettle again, but I haven’t reached that time yet. You seem troubled.”
“It’s just,” this was hardly the time or the place, but there was something stuck in me, some idea that I’d not given space to, that wanted to be out of me, “I saw someone today – a neighbour, a friend,” I carefully avoided eye contact with Miqual, “she is someone, I’ve… hurt, I think, in this life. I wouldn’t want to hurt her in the next. But I don’t know how I can prevent that.”
“That’s not your responsibility Jenn,” said Miqual, “she will know the rules – you’re not the same person, and it’s up to her to decide whether you’ll know each other, to protect you from your earlier self.”
“But what if I’d done something terrible – I haven’t – I wouldn’t know that, how could I avoid doing that again?”
Miqual’s face was a frozen mask.
“Miqual, I’m sorry, but this is on my mind.”
“Today? You don’t think you should be focused on what’s to come, focused on the group, your circle – your family?”
“I am. What If Aer and Rumala end up together again, and it ends up like this again? What if it has before? What if we’re always re-entering the shettle for the same reason? How would we know – how could we do things differently?”
“Look Jenn, I don’t know what’s got into you, but it’s getting late. We need to join the others.”
He took my arm, to drag me out of the archive. Before he could pull me away from the counter, the clerk leaned over his desk, touched my shoulder and spoke quietly, “I do remember you.”
Miqual exploded with rage, snatching the man’s hand from my shoulder and flinging it back at him. “Stay away from him,” Miqual snarled, “I’ll report you for this.” He made a show of reading the clerk’s name badge, ‘Hevalan’, then stalked out of the archive, pulling me along like a recalcitrant child.
When we got outside, my head was still spinning. Even though I’d asked for it, I knew the rules well enough: ‘a shettle shall not be reminded of their former lives, they are free to learn and live anew’. That the clerk of the archives, of all people had been willing to acknowledge my question. To have remembered me, he must have persisted in the same life for more than the forty-two years that my circle had been together. I found myself almost desperate to know how many times he had seen me. I had too many questions. And it was too late to ask them. Miqual flung me towards his auto. I tripped and just barely managed to get a hand up in front of me before I hit the auto headfirst. I stood up, gazing at him with shock, rubbing at the hand and wrist I’d jarred.
“Get in the auto,” he said, “the others are here.”
On cue, the rest of our circle arrived, dusted off and looking smart and relaxed in their fine suits. I ducked into the backseat of the auto, covering the newly ripped open knee of my trousers with one shaking hand. Aer’s auto pulled up alongside and the group divided themselves into the two vehicles. Miqual got in without another word. It was horribly obvious that something had happened between us, but I had no idea what to do about it, and slipped into some default setting where everything was fine.
“Did you get it all put away?” asked Tesh, squeezed up next to me.
“Oh yes, all stacked and signed in,” he must have been able to feel the tremor that still ran through me from the hand I’d slammed into the auto’s door. Rather than say anything, he just stretched an arm around my shoulders and gave me a private smile.
“Everything will be fine,” he whispered.
“Hey, you two! No secrets on the last day,” Rumala called, grinning widely.
I’d rarely felt so out of sync with my circle.
Miqual called to Aer out of the window that he’d take the lead. Aer offered him a thumbs up in return. I couldn’t see how Miqual answered, but we pulled away from the archive at quite a speed, causing Tereis to exclaim from the front seat that it must be a race. The carnival atmosphere of the others slid around me like fog. All I could focus on was the back of Miqual’s head. He’d scared me, something I never thought I’d feel in our circle. I wanted to apologise, to take back my questions and whatever it was that had made him so angry. But I had no idea how to start that conversation, squeezed into the back of his auto with two of our friends. The words caught on my tongue, got stuck behind my teeth. It would all be forgotten soon though, and we’d get another chance.
It was another hour’s drive north of the city before I relented in the face of the others’ cheery mood. I joined in,  offering up more memories of our time together, chatting and laughing. There were more stories about the gang in the other auto than ourselves – if we couldn’t actually race, we could certainly compete. But my eyes kept being drawn back to Miqual, who, while not exactly silent, was certainly the quietest of us, focused intently on the road ahead.
Above us the sun was on its way to handing over the sky to the twins, though there were a few hours before they would take over. I felt a tremendous sense of anticipation, the promise of the twin moons laid on top of each other. They hung like a weight behind the horizon, soon to be flung across the world, to change everything. My doubts still lurked in my mind – maybe I always felt this way as shettling approached. I saw how happy Rumala was that the mistakes of this life were about to be erased, how free she looked. Wasn’t that how I should feel? I caught sight of Miqual’s eyes, fixed on me in the mirror, and I hastily looked away. I couldn’t stop the rising anxiety in my stomach.
Farms slid by on either side, more space carefully denuded of the allforest so we could live alongside it. We’d settled down to a friendly silence, watching the farmers do whatever it is that farmers do. They gave out to a thin region of scrubland, scattered with juvenile alltrees, and then the allforest was upon us. There was no more time for my doubts.
 

Miqual took our automotive off the main road, within moments we were hidden under the allforest canopy. Waves of dappled green light washed over us – the last of the sun’s efforts to penetrate their leaves, before the lunar eclipse took over. The road faded away into being the space between the trees. The alltrees’ peculiar aggression led to their being widely spaced, though the joined up root networks sometimes protruded above the ground. Before long we had to park up and leave the automotives behind. They’d be claimed and collected by a department of the archive, if procedure was followed in full. More likely mothers and fathers would pick up a second vehicle out of those abandoned under the trees, and they would cart off any fresh shettles to their new life.
We had left everything we owned at the archive, barring the clothes on our backs. It was a curiously purifying sense that the only things which truly mattered to us were the people around us. Which made it all the worse that I felt uncertain about what I wanted. I was still avoiding Miqual, and had slunk to the back of our group, trailing with Eleran, who simply walked slowly if she wasn’t running. At other times her pace had annoyed me intensely, but now it was exactly what I needed. We ambled along, not speaking much, but taking in the forest around us.
This area was one in which study and research were not permitted, an ancient (for the allforest) region of densely interconnected trees, whose degree of unification into a single organism had enabled it to develop abilities beyond those we usually saw. While it had become common in outlying settlements to tap into the power supply of the alltrees – those of a sufficient age and size, not the juveniles, who would respond violently, and sometimes fatally – our culture had discovered that far greater secrets could be unlocked. For generations our people had been buried in the earth beneath the trees, where their roots would quest for further nutrients, and find them in our bodies. Their energy needs were delivered by our sun and moons, but in their advanced, conjoined form they needed something else, and they took it from us: memory, experience, emotion. We would remain in the earth, fed and cared for by the trees while they extracted our memories of people, our actions, and our feelings. This was the shettling, the process of our lives being turned over and started again, and to a degree, physically rejuvenated by the allforest. Once released from the alltree we would be  cleansed of our errors and failures, free to begin again, to love anew, to rediscover the world and relish it. How the allforest distinguished between personal and practical memories was unknown, for I would retain my scientific knowledge of the forest, how to drive and dress myself, but all trace of how I’d come to acquire them would be gone.
Culturally, we ignored the date, the actual passing of time. A huge chunk of our social norm was spent in ignoring the fact that a good proportion of our population would reset their lives every few decades. And though they remained productive members of society, at least they did after spending a few years rediscovering themselves, it was increasingly difficult to ignore the incredible privilege we’d be granted, in being allowed to escape the natural run of the world. The notion that this was a given, and a normal part of my – our lives – had been emphasised early in my own emergence from the shettle; relatively naïve, though retaining the many facts and knowledge of my earlier shettles, it was clear to me that this was how we lived: rebooting our relationships and exploring the world from a fresh start. With enough repetition, we can come to believe anything.
Ahead of us, the rest of our circle were merging into a small crowd of others, here for shettling. They had come into the allforest from all directions. Mixed into the group were couples, or trios who walked somewhat apart from the rest of us. They still soaked in the same celebratory atmosphere, yet remained distinct. They appeared fractionally older than we shettles. They would be the parents to those about to be unearthed. They are what Miqual and the others had revered during our mental adolescence: parents, willing to collect a fresh crop of amnesiac youths, and set us on course for our circle. Our renewed youth required guardians, to champion the growth of our social existence, to find the route between our practical recollections and the raw interactions with our peers. Typically, these we people who had fallen out of their cycle of rebirth, their circles broken and found themselves left behind, alone, and yet recalling their own growth, felt bound to promote another’s. I wondered if that might be the position I should find myself in. Compassionate toward those undergoing shettling, yet no longer able to participate. Was that the road I was on myself? Pulled out of the circle, doubtful, yet committed to prolonging the experience for those who still desired it.
And yet… the archive had been empty, save for our small group, and even now our numbers had merely quadrupled. So few to return to the earth. Was our choice the norm any more, or had we become stuck in an unproductive cycle of activity? Where was my choice? Had I made it , or had Aer and Rumula decided to end it all, dragging myself and the others along with them… How to distinguish between a social good and a personal good?
I was haunted by these thoughts as we hiked deeper into the allforest. Above the canopy the moons slowly rose, in tandem, Talens’ light blasting through Calia’s – she focused it like a lens, blasting ther combined light into the greedy secondary leaves of the alltrees. Their fierce golden light battered through the gaps between the leaves, striking us in turn golden, silver, and black silhouettes. The raw power being funnelled by the trees’ fleshy extremities made the earth itself hum beneath our feet. And this was merely moonrise, far from its apex. It was an enlivening sensation. Sparks crackled between my palms and Eleran’s, as we walked, hand in hand beneath the branches. All the shettles were affected. Static electricity strobed over their bodies, dispersing into the tree trunks around us, fizzling out after ringing our bodies and crackled hoops and discharging into the soil, there to stimulate the roots.
The whole forest felt alive, beyond the simple fact of existence, I felt that we were at the heart of a vibrant mystery, inducted into a sacred order, with rituals incomprehensible to those not captured in the web of energy hanging between the trees in the allforest. I had never felt so alive, and yet so close to death, or at least dispersal into the vast energies of the universe – my matter was prepared to dissolve and seek a new form in the heart of a star, or the frailest capillary of a leaf, and everything in between. The strobing of light down through the leaves was hypnotic, those fat meaty leaves splashing us with the stuff of existence.
We arrived in a clearing, densely ringed with alltrees, at a proximity between the trunks unikely according to my studies. These must be truly ancient trees, that had either tolerated each other’s grasping at the sky, or through competition dragged themselves, root by root to this formidable temple of the allforest. We gathered, staring at the intricate intermingling of the alltrees’ vines, branches and roots: a cathedral carved of a single living thing. Our future parents stopped at the periphery of this holy dell, and we, the shettles, proceeded into its heart.
The ground sloped down, into a shallow bowl formed between six alltrees. Their roots stood guard in bone-like ridges, an inverted ribcage awaiting a heart. Into that depression we shettles walked. My doubts, my fears were overridden by the intensity of the place; I was scarcely able to form a word in my mind, let alone a cogent objection. Miqual and the others gathered at the rim of the crater. They held hands, the bright light of the moons casting stark shadows behing them, from which low-lying branches recoiled, intent on their fair share of lunar power.
The moons were steadily reaching their apex, Talens blasting his light through Calia, whose crystalline structure magnified it. The forest was on fire around us, each leaf and twig outlined in a harsh metallic whiteness. Had I touched a leaf, my fingers would have burned. This was the very limit of their adaptive powers, this night, twice a year. My own studies had shown that during the two nights of aviposis (as we researchers prefer to name the occasion), the allforest would convert  up to a hundred times the light into sugars of an average day of sunlight. And along with that, they would be primed for a special and intricate ceremony.
Aer began the chanting. Within a verse it had been taken up by the thirty or so individuals standing in that basin. As the moons reached their zenith, the ground at the centre of our ring began to shake. The trees roots were unearthing themselves, pulling up clods of earth. Their roots retracted like an anchor, rattling from the deep sea into a ship’s hull. And with them came human forms. Along with Miqual and the others, I dived forward to help pluck our cousins from the earth. They were confused, mud-spattered, and profoundly childlike. Each one with tugged free from the ground, and they came out choking, blackened and grateful. We passed them back to the mothers and fathers waiting at the edge of the crater, who unveiled blankets to wrap the shettlers in. Their soft weeping, and gasping for air filled my ears.
And then it was our turn. The ground roiled once more, roots splaying out of the ground, leaving sarcophagi carved from soil behind, those roots poised over the holes, ready to entrap and enclose. Miqual turned around to catch each one of our eyes. Rumala and Aer were the first to descend. They did so with joy, discarding their clothes as the went, until their naked feet pressed into the dirt, and they nestled down inside the excavated mud coffins. Tesh and Tereis went next, holding hands and kissing deeply, with tears on their cheeks as they too settled into the earth. The roots began to close over my friends, drawing them deeper into the mud below the trees. Miqual and Maina went next, curling down face to face in the dark, dark soil. That left just Eleran and I. The other circles had already descended into the earth, eager, with smiles on their faces.
“I don’t know that I’m ready to do this,” I said to Eleran, her hand tight in mine.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, gently pulling me by the hand, back into the circle.
But then everything changed. There was a flicker in the buttery golden light, cast by our twin moons. I looked up, this place permitted the light of the moons to enter, and so I caught a glimpse of both our starless heavens, and the twin, double-sized moon. There was another flicker, some pulse of light passed from Talens to Calia, and then a vast sonic explosion struck my ears. They instantly ran red with blood, my eardrums ruptured. Eleran fell down the slight incline, similarly bleeding. I fell to my knee, staring at the sky. An especially bright point appeared in the heart of Calia, intensifying to a near-purple glow, before bursting out of the smaller moon. That intense light struck the trees around us, instantly igniting their fleshy leaves and branches. It persisted, I was surrounded by a ring of flaming alltrees. I just noted the mothers and father around the edge of the basin burst into flame, before the roots of the allforest themselves caught light. At the heart of the basin, my beloved circle were slowly sinking beneath the ground, drawn down by the alltrees. But too slow: the intense light hammering through Calia ignited the thick network of roots that bound my companions. Flame danced along them, touched my friends and they were suddenly immolated, burning along the trees on the other side of the clearing, their vines and branches flailing, even as they blackened.
A further string of sonic booms attacked my ears and I fell forwards. Something arrested my fall, coiling around my legs and hips. I looked to the sky once more, to see the impossible: Calia fractured, her heart exposed, and the a spiderweb of cracks spreading across her distant surface. Talens glowed through the shattered canyons, as Calia began to fragment. After this I remember nothing, save for that tight presence around my hips squeezing further and dragging me down, into the earth.

I have a memory of catching fire.
Sudden, unbearable heat all over my head and arms which instantly reaches a peak, and my skin ignites, flaring in the previously cool air. I am gifted a moment to scream before all is blackness; my last breath is of burning flesh and wood, on my tongue a mouthful of crisping humus and earth.
That fierce pressure about my waist, my pelvis audibly cracking, it is a root of the alltree. Unlike its careful swaddling of my circle before bearing them into the earth, this is a violent tearing through the ground. The uppermost feet of soil had been churned to a softness by the unravelling roots, but I felt I was being torn in half, dragged sideways into the dark. That crushing pressure ravels around my legs and I’ve dimly aware of a change in direction, one that almost rips me in half. Its only blessing is a distraction from the raw, burned flesh of my upper body and face, flecks of soil grinding into that ruined skin. Being enveloped in the earth has extinguished the flames, but my nerves are on fire all the same.
It is utterly black. My eyes are worthless – I have to close them to avoid their being rubbed raw by the dirt – my ears and nose are filled with mud. My only sensation is of motion; an arm trapped up above my head catching around a buried cord of wood, some other root, it snags my hand and with the inexorable drag downwards, my shoulder separates with a crunch that must only be audible inside my body. Another thread of pain besieging my mind.
Besides the scrape against my skin of stones and sudden, frightening, hard materials I can’t identify,  I’m aware that my last breath was of smoke and its precious cargo of oxygen has been ill-used in pain and trying to scream. It’s a panic that grows as I’m pulled further into the earth, past the layers of fine and slowly compacting matter into a harder, wetter region, where the force of my progress slows, so that I feel like I’m being stretched out, every broken bone separated, as if I’m being pulled through a hole too small for me. I’m being squeezed to death, unable to even move my unbroken arm for the weight and density of the soil around me. I try to open my mouth but can taste only slimy clay. There is no air for me here.
The doubts I’d suffered above ground return in full force as my brain is starved of oxygen. Mercifully, my sense of pain is dulled as my existence narrows to my brain, trapped in its battered skull. Is the shettling all a lie? We have offered ourselves to the trees as food, a ritualised sacrifice for the monsters that we cherish, protect and worship. They are gods who demand our blood, and take it masked in family and warmth. Only I now know the truth – I am special – I will understand before they take me. My circle are down here with me, already being crushed by roots, broken by the tonnes of soil above us, mashed into a paste that the trees will suck dry and discard our flavourless skins for the worms… I see the trees as inverted demons, their legs waving in the air, the sun and moons warming their feet, as below their faces are made of a million thrashing tentacles, tearing us apart and consuming us. Perhaps I will see my circle again, feel the grace of their touch before we are eaten together. A dim relief, a shared moment of comfort before the end. A finger through a lock of hair, the shape of an ear, the softness of a wrist… I would accept any fate, just to be with them again, not here, in the darkness.
Even in my hallucinating state I realise that the last I saw of my circle was them on fire, being burned even as the roots themselves crisped and twisted, trying in vain to haul them away from that awful light. They are all gone, instantly murdered before the trees could draw them to safety, or to a worse death at their endless fingers. There will be no relief from this hell, this choking dark nightmare.
I am alone. I am alone in the dark, and I am dying, abraded and asphyxiated by the earth that nourishes my beloved allforest. I have no breath, and my lungs are screaming. I would be screaming if I could.
Dimly, I am aware of tremors in the earth, of terrific concussive forces that rock my body, fracture my already bruised flesh, travelling with ease through the meat of my world, and into me. But that world is beyond me now. In another heartbeat I am beyond regret and fear. I am… nothing.
 
____I
________D
____________R
________________E
____________________A
________________________M
 
I never expected to wake up. But I did. I was moving again, gently this time, though even the most miniscule of movements was agony. Steadily I emerged from the soil, the root wound about my waist and legs carefully resting me in what felt like a hammock made of thin strings. Gingerly it released me, my pelvis and legs shrieking as they tried to return to their natural shape. I was suddenly able to draw breath again, although it felt like the first time my lungs had ever functioned. The air was dry and cold, but it was air. I greedily inhaled as much as I could, but my fractured ribs complained bitterly, reducing me to shallow puffs. It was still an improvement. Then I felt a thousand tiny filaments run over my skin, triggering sharp slashes of pain where I was burned, abraded and broken. Those thousand fingertips wrapped around me like a lace cocoon; I was held by the alltree. Then I prickled all over as their almost infinitely fine tips slipped through my pores, invading my body. In surprise, I tried to open my eyes. Nothing happened: my eye sockets were filled with compacted mud from my passage from the surface. With my unbroken arm I scraped away the worst of it, tolerating the pain of the movement. I had expected to be greeted by darkness, but being able to open my eyes was worth such a disappointment, but no – a faint luminescence filled the space I hung in. I could see a ragged ceiling of  earth above me, with a crumpled imprint of my own body where I’d been drawn down. From that ceiling, a carpet of dangling roots, their fibrous ends waving gently, in response to something other than a breeze, for there was none.
A cool sensation flooded my body, horripilating my skin and it felt like it was coating my bones in a freezing gel. The pain was washed away, and I could relax and simply breathe again. No longer so strictly confined by the earth, the few feet of air between my face and the ceiling was enough to make me forget the panic that had wracked me. I accepted the questing roots that came through the ceiling and found their way inside me. I slept.
 
________I
____________R
________________E
____________________M
________________________E
____________________________M
________________________________B
____________________________________E
________________________________________R
 
Light flowered in my mind. I felt nothing, just a luminance within, as if someone had lit a candle behind my eyes which only I could see, looking inside myself. The mind was incandescent, colours glimmering around and through it, pulses illuminating inner structures, flashes of electricity. I was watching my own mind. I could see a thought race across the hemispheres of my brain, striking at ideas and emotions, which grew or faded. Sometimes they would leap into a rainbow frenzy, or a thought would be just one bright spot that dimmed, extinguished, to be replaced by another elsewhere. I was aware of watching myself, but not of the thoughts that I could see. This was the shettle, I realised, these lights and colours were my past life, being run through, and presumably erased. I was watching my life running backwards, each thought, feeling and memory streaming through my mind, leached out by the alltree. With my leap in understanding, my focus drew closer. I passed through the fringes of my brain, enveloped in the pink jelly, surrounded by my memories sparking past and through me, until I came to rest, nestled in its centre. I was surrounded by the pulsing flesh in which all that was me resided. I was home. Yet that home was in the process of being emptied – I was moving out – but in a seeming paradox, I was to be left behind, while all the comforting fixtures and fittings I’d grown used to were being taken.
There was something wrong, though. As I rested inside my mind, those memories became real for me again, with memories I did not recall:
____I stand under the boughs of the allforest, arm in arm with Eleran
____I’m bundled up in blankets in the back of an auto, Rumala’s hand held tight in mine
____I brush my hair with silver hairbrush, worn at the corners, it feels nice on my scalp
____My suit is heavy, slowing my movements, I struggle with the helmet
____I am swimming with Aer, I am solely focused on how strong a swimmer he is
____Maina sits astride me, face alive with pleasure
____I empty a tin of buttons onto a table and sift through them, looking for the perfect replacement for a jacket I caught on a bramble
____Tereis spins in a wild jig, I am laughing and kissing Tesh as we dance together in Calia’s light
____I plant a seedling in the middle of a forest
____We all walk arm in arm down to the lake, the run and jump from the end of the pier
____Fire consumes my circle
____Opening a letter, tracing the familiar handwriting with my fingers, kissing the paper
____My favourite shirt wears out, and I am comforted by our mother
____I laugh so hard at something Eleran says that my ribs and stomach hurt
____A bright explosion in the sky, a fiery rain
____I shout at Miqual, and I feel such anger that I lash out and strike him in the face
____A juvenile alltree whips out a vine and badly tears my arm; Eleran carefully binding it with a white bandage
____I am hit by an automotive, the world spins around me
____A tiny alltree in a pot on a table
____I burn everything I own
____There is a knife in my hand and I slash wildly around me
____I stand under an alltree with Relyan, her camera balanced on her rucksack, we pose together for the perfect photograph
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
____I am born anew
____The roots wrap around me and my eyes close
All these and so much more flooded into my memory, disjointed, out of order, not of the life I have just lived. It was frightening – for every moment I recognised a dozen more slotted into place, occupying and overlapping the life I had just lived. I swam, I ate, I fought simultaneously. Every instant of my existence felt like I was legion, crammed into the same narrow space. Slowly they settled in my mind, taking on shadow hues. I could see myself splayed into a hundred actions, many arms thrown out in each direction, blurring as each of my lives was overlaid and woven together. I both feared and loved Miqual; Eleran was my first, as was Tesh, and Rumala, and Tereis; I move away from the circle, I remain in the chalet always; I cry, I laugh, I sleep. I lived them all sequentially, each of those lives, from shettle to shettle, and backwards, and in skipping between tangential events in each life – guided through them by intense emotions, tracing every moment of anger, every moment of love, of doubt, and absurd joy. An infinite combination of thoughts and ideas assailed me. I had no sense of time, only the time contained in each memory, which stretched and fragmented according to its own rules and feeling.
It was bewildering, each thought burgeoning with so many experiences and variations that they became meaningless, unrelated, timeless, each moment like a star in the sky, and I drew shapes between them. I felt myself dissociating, fracturing – each shape in the sky a set of memories that cohered slowly into discrete selves. The constellations drift apart, each shape of myself condensing into tight points of light. Slowly they began to wink out, and I felt an enormous relief as my mental map simplified. The night sky became the earth: the mountain ranges of one life melted away, and a river ran in its place. Continents shifted, lands of memory disconnecting and rearranging themselves into the world I had most recently known. If I peered very closely though, I could still perceive those ghosts of former lives, now translucent – mere memories of memories.
I had only one life then, the one that ended in fire and fear and pain. I should not have even that. The glowing mind around me faded, its colour bleeding out into blackness and faint white outlines, and then, not even that. The darkness reached out and took me once more.

The transition from the void of unconsciousness to awareness was slow, a string of sensations that gradually accumulated, physical processes steadily kicking into action; my heartbeat intruded upon the veins and arteries, awakening as the blood flowed. As breath was drawn, shakily at first, but with increasing confidence, collected by my blood, re-oxygenating the industries that maintain my frail physical flesh. As each organ, each nerve reconnected and established its little nation state, they federated, grew stronger and larger, each dependent on the other. And finally, consciousness could supervene on the layers of meat, sparkling electricity and chemistry which build the platform for our minds. While that train of activity was slow, the final step of awareness was sharply and suddenly achieved; a burst of sound, cold and the thick tang of the earth signalled my return to the existence.
Newly aware of breathing I relished the sensation, lungs that inflated and deflated with ease, each breath stretching those membranes and bronchioles to their fullest. Even the musty air was a sweet relief from the last they remembered – starving and strained to their limits. Though awareness of my physical presence returned, any sense of place, time and history remained blissfully absent. I was able to experience each sense as they checked in. The cold sent streams of goosebumps up my arms, down my body and legs. A glorious effervescence of feeling. I heard little but a faint scratching, nothing more than my own heartbeat and breathing beyond that. I was held by a hammock, each cord distinct to my horripilated flesh, wrapping all around me, and, I dimly registered, through me. Those cords threaded through my body just as my own veins and sinews did, holding me in place, rigid, if comfortable. It was the muscular pulses of those cords that had awakened feeling in the rest of me.
At last, I opened my eyes. At first I thought I must be in darkness, but faintly I made out a glow, emanating from all around me, a blue verging on black, which intensified as I noticed it. A web of fine strings depended from the ceiling just above my face, wrapping me in this cocoon that penetrated my skin. I could barely move, but I was able to turn my face and get a brief glimpse of dark shapes suspended from the roof around me, seemingly enveloped as I was. And then those fine wires began to pull.
Before me a ripple ran across the roof, and it folded inwards and upwards. I vaguely recognised that the net that held me was of roots, tipped off by the scent of the earth, and almost grasped my place. And then it was abruptly taken from me. I was pulled into the unfolding roof, a dense network of roots gently drawing me up into darkness. The earth continued to collapse before me, folded away by the roots which bore me up. I felt no fear – as yet I could perceive my body and was slowly interpreting what I saw and felt – but I could not apply context. When I saw the dark it connected to nothing inside me, no memories, no thoughts – a simple apprehending of darkness. So the surprise as I was pushed through a final, soft topsoil was relegated to noting a lack of pressure on my body. I was gently laid upon the surface.
When the roots retracted from my body, they took with them the curious lassitude in my thoughts; the dissociative separation of body and mind disappeared as they pulled free from my pores, leaving me naked and alone. I shivered in the cold night air, the earth cool and damp beneath me. I began to analyse, and to recognise myself in relation to my environment. Dark. Night. But how…? I lay in a shallow depression – a faint crater sketched up around me that I could just about see in the dark blue grey light. Details fell into place – the period after sunset, before moonrise. I lay on the ground, the dark shadows of a tree rising above me, its comforting shape distinct as an alltree, though it seemed less… complete than the form I held in my memory.
I continued to lie there, shivering. No particular will or desire entered my mind. I was content to simply be, to experience the world as it presented itself to me. I’d been delivered up into this dark new place and I would await a cue, a direction, a need before I would move from this spot. I soon received the trigger I was waiting for. Light spread slowly across the sky, as Calia – a word that seared itself against my mind even as my eyes funnelled data to it – our beautiful first moon rose. But there was something terribly wrong with her. She was not her familiar disc of golden light, but a shattered scatter of irregular shapes, drifting across the night sky. The light came not from her, but from the round shape of Talens who followed, brilliantly illuminating those lunar chunks that passed across his surface. Calia was just a smear of rubble across the sky, intermittently glowing with her brother’s light.
Its deep wrongness agitated something deep in me and I was able to move at last. I gathered myself into a huddle, unable to take my eyes off the appalling celestial sight of the orphaned twin, Talens. Then I realised what was wrong with the silhouettes ringing my view of the sky. The alltrees, those wondrous, voracious and luxuriant sprawls were just shadows of their former selves. The branches were twisted, denuded of leaves, torn and cracked. The mostly intact alltree that loomed over me was alone, its neighbours were stumps and broken trunks. As I tried to stand I stumbled, sprawling into a tangle of branches and hard, rough shapes which gleamed white and yellow in the diminished light of the moons. I jerked upright, away from the instantly recognisable form of a human skull, cracked and blackened, staring at me.
Upright, in the centre of wide crater, ringed by a ruined forest I wrapped my arms around myself, shaking with the cold, absorbing what warmth I could from our fractured moon. And it all came back to me. I’d been reborn, healed and rejuvenated by the allforest – and now returned to the world to live again. But where were my circle? Where were the mothers and fathers to collect us, bundle us in blankets and carry us off, piled higgledy-piggledy in the back of an auto, to take us into our new life together? Of a sudden, I knew they weren’t coming. A vision of the forest on fire, my brothers and sisters struck down, and the awful remembrance of flames burning away my skin. I shouldn’t have been able to remember that – it should have been taken away by the allforest. I – I was still myself. An appalling notion. Where was my rebirth? How could I begin again, grow anew if I held all of my former life in me? And my circle… all gone, all lost, all horribly murdered. I was alone, truly alone.
The forest felt dead, or something so awfully close to dead that it might as well have been the same. The roots that had borne my upwards lay motionless on the ground around me, splayed like a vast, many-fingered hand reaching out in supplication. I could offer them no absolution. My world was in chaos – one life had ended, and yet continued. The allforest had taken me just in time, and now returned me. But for what? This silent forest, deprived of the sound of its leaves straining for the moonlight, was more horrifying than anything.
I could hardly conceive of myself apart from my circle, and my last memories of them reduced me to choking tears. I flailed in the dry mud, taking fistfuls of the roots in my hands, trying to wrap them around me. I begged them to take me back, to draw me under and purge me of this nightmare, either return me fresh and empty, or take me forever. There was nothing here – no allforest, no Maina, no Eleran. I’d seen Miqual and the others burst into flame, even as their shettling cocoons tightened about them. Whose skull was it I’d almost fallen into? Was it Tesh, with his wicked smile, or Tereis, with his beautiful green eyes, now boiled from their sockets… How could I be alone? The roots were still, and dry. Whatever moisture had once been in them was gone, they cracked and snapped in my hands, their once-fine bristling tips fell to powder. The alltree had given its last in returning me to this scorched and terrible world. While it seemed a terrible to reject the life I’d been given, I wanted nothing more than to disappear forever.
I don’t know how long I lay there, in a stunned grief. The tears ceased after a while, my body exhausted from its weeping; the tremors that wracked me subsided. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke, Talens had chased much of the debris of Calia across the sky, though I could see that a thin band of detritus persisted – perhaps a thin ring of our first moon now stretched all around the world, and even in the sunlight I’d be able to see some trace of her. Dawn was fast approaching, though I had no desire to know what kind of world it would reveal. The broken moonlight had offered but a fraction of its former glory. Without the refracting lens of Calia, Talens was lessened, and between them they had barely lit the seared grove I’d emerged from. The promise of day affected me: I had no choice but to live. The allforest had saved me. I had been returned to life. There must be something I could do with it. I wasn’t yet ready to consider what else might have befallen the land before the earth swallowed me; if I had, perhaps I would have just lain down again and waited to die.
My legs were shaky, but they held me as I staggered away from the shallow depression I’d sunk into. As I passed between the blackened, wrecked stumps of alltrees, I was shocked by the sound of a voice. Still confused, and numb from cold and grief, I let myself be enveloped in softness.  A blanket had been thrown around me, and I was pulled tight against a warm body. Pathetically, I was moved once more to a flood of tears. Further voices called quietly around me, and I was hustled, now between two people, their arms around my shoulders, speeding me on and hoisting me up when I fell. I heard the sound of an automotive door opening, a noise somehow distinctive enough to penetrate the exhaustion which came over me – a relief perhaps in being saved, which somehow rid me of all sense of responsibility. I gave myself willingly over to these strangers; I had no clue what else I should have done otherwise. Any independence or desire I’d once had were gone, burned away with my circle.
I was pushed up into the boot – I fell into it, and my legs were boosted up behind me until I was in. It was a flat, warm space where I could curl up, and did so without prompting. Warm bodies pressed in around me; the automotive sank on its suspension. The door closed, another opened, and closed again. There was a murmur of conversation I failed to interpret. An arm rested over my back, a gentle hand ran over my hair. And I faded away again, into sweet, empty sleep.