Hello

Kreg is small, owl-sized beside Caul, with a very tall hood that runs rust to gold to green and a pale mask of a face. He has no mouth. His eyes are two dark thumbprints, one set a little higher, so he always seems to be tilting his head at you.

He says one word, and only one: hello. Forty-one lessons from Caul did not add a second. His language was never meant to be spoken. Kreg talks mind to mind, and Caul only found that out half asleep, when the roots of Kreg’s Tree lit up under him.

Kreg doesn’t think in words. He thinks in twenty thousand years.

Episode 2: The Stitches

Caul tries to teach Kreg a second word, and finds out what Kreg remembers instead. Music: “Megaptera Novaeangliae” by Jonathan Yandel.

The menders

There used to be thousands of Kregs, and every one of them was Kreg: the same small body, the same striped hood, the same mask, and one mind running through all of them. What one Kreg saw, every Kreg saw. Whenever the world began to split, they sowed a Tree of Ebbs into the seam, and the roots sewed it shut. The forest that runs down the spine of the world is not a forest. It is a line of stitches across a scar.

Then the Kregs began to disappear, and the mind they shared went quieter with each one. Kreg can’t show where they went; the memory goes dark there, like a page torn out. Fewer menders meant more splits than anyone could close, until the seam gave way and the Reach was sundered.

What he knows

Kreg has lived in Tree after Tree, moving every time one is hollowed out from the inside. He has seen what does the hollowing, and he remembers how the Reach cracked open. Every hollowed Tree is a stitch being pulled, and someone is pulling them. Finding out what Kreg knows is Caul’s work now.

Connections