She did not have a name either.
Not one she could speak, not one she had ever heard uttered aloud. The ones who raised her—the root-tenders, the moss-scribes, the quiet ones—called her Child of the Spiral, or simply Seedling. She grew up knowing the rustle of branches before she knew the shape of her own voice. The forest spoke to her before any person did.
She did not cry when she scraped her knees on blackroot thorns. The trees whispered lullabies. The stones hummed songs without melody. Her skin bore moss like bruises, her hair coiled with fallen leaves that never rotted. The Spiral was her cradle, her cloister, her cage.
They never told her where she came from.
But the Grove did.
It remembered in pulses. In sighs of wind through bonewood. In moonlight threading through thorns. She
