“The Bone Tree was created to subdue the threat of the valkerax,” Gavik insists. “But Muro says, in the following years, there was a small sub-section of Old Vetrisians who wanted to use the technology that made the Bone Tree to push the envelope of creation. The Bone Tree commanded the valkerax to the Dark Below. But they wanted to make another tree. One that could command people to remain immortal. A tree made of glass.”

My hands start to shake. Immortality. He can’t be talking about…Heartlessness?

“The tree of bone and the tree of glass.” I repeat the line from the “Hymn of the Forest.” The glass shard in my Heartless bag—the glass jars most Heartless hearts go into. The jars witches make, the bags witches make. Varia told me they work only because of the shards of glass included in them. Those shards give us our immortality, she said.

your heart, the hunger sneers. tied forever to me.

Gavik nods feverishly. “The Old Vetrisians created the Glass Tree. But other Vetrisians thought the idea of immortality was wrong. Immoral. Against God’s teachings. They drove out those who made the Glass Tree. They labeled themselves the New God worshippers—forging a new path forward, one without immortality. And those who were driven out of Old Vetris were called the Old God’s followers.”

“The witches?” I whisper.

He frowns. “Most witches became Old God followers; by giving just a few drops of their magic to the Glass Tree, they could bind their loved ones to them forever. It was a tempting prospect.” Gavik pauses, then looks at the sky. “And it ripped Old Vetris in two. Muro told me: that is how the old hatred in Cavanos began. That is how the wars between humans and witches started.”

“How?” I swallow, my throat so dry it feels like sand. “How was Muro the only person who knew this?”

“The wars have been hard on Cavanos’s history,” Gavik admits. “Books have been burned. Historians have written about the victors, not about the truth. Even the Black Archives don’t have much on Old Vetris’s fall. Muro had to go to the old, ruined Palas—beneather cities, infested with valkerax—for what he found out.”

That would explain why Yorl knows so much about valkerax. Muro must’ve seen everything about them, observed the valkerax closely on his trips to the Dark Below, in an effort not to be killed by them. And he passed that knowledge down to Yorl.

Gavik suddenly leans in more, his voice low. “That isn’t the worst of it. The Old Vetrisians—they made the Glass Tree by taking a piece of the Bone Tree and transplanting it. All the magic inside the Bone Tree, all the sentience it developed, it replicated itself onto the Glass Tree.”