“Being buried under a rockslide would be preferable to listening to him chew me out for the next seventeen months,” I lilt.

“Months?” Malachite chokes out. “Try YEARS! Decades! I can’t believe you two are so thickheaded! Who gets married in a time like this? Who even proposes? What do you even eat at a stupid upworlder’s wedding?” He pauses his rant and looks at me with the tiniest of plaintive gazes. “Why didn’t you tell me first?”

“It was literally a half ago, Mal.” I pat his shoulder sympathetically. “Fione just noticed because she’s observant about jewelry.”

Malachite glances down at the blue rose on my finger, and his eyes widen. “Oh.”

“Hurry up,” Yorl insists. “We’re almost there.”

He points one claw into the distance, to the very middle of the ruin. We follow a decorative line in the ground, glazed reddish tile long buried in dust and fragmented by time. The smell of flowers is everywhere—so faint it’s more of a suggestion than a true scent. Half vanilla, half cinnamon—it’s a smell I’ve never smelled before. It changes moment to moment, wildly swinging between sharp rosemary, to musty lavender, back to vanilla and everything in between.

“Are those the flowers, you think?” I ask Yorl. He’s covering his nose.

“Hopefully not,” he says, muffled by his handkerchief. “They reek.”

“I don’t think they’re so bad,” I muse, watching as the ghostly golden blooms bob like a sea lapping at our waists.

“You’re a Heartless. Of course you think the smell of rotting meat isn’t so bad,” he grunts.

I blink once. Twice.

“They smell like rotting meat to you?” I ask.

Yorl’s green eyes over his handkerchief freeze on mine. Fione catches up to us then, and chimes in, “Definitely rotting meat.”

All three of us look at Malachite, who, though still wrapped in his own thorny disgruntlement, blurts words. “Yup. Bad meat.”

Yorl glances at the flowers, then warily back to me. “Let us continue, regardless.”

I sniff hard and wait for unpleasant, but while the scent cycles, it never changes from utterly delightful. Could it be…the Tree of Souls? It feels like this scent is welcoming me, and only me. I look up as we walk, the shimmering branches suspended high above and the not-quite-there trunk so massive it seems to hold up the entire world. It connects everyone; I saw it. I don’t know how, or why, or what it really is, but it isn’t just magic. And it isn’t just a Tree. It’s more than that.

A god.