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On the Skyridge, lights ripen on silverleaf boughs and vows hum like weather. Rowan Vale, a novice keeper with an ear for promises, watches a star-fruit fall early and become a child called Astra. A decree to seize the grove and a hunter’s arrival drive them toward a mythic mountain forge.
In the grove that crowned the Skyridge, lights did not burn; they grew. Each star-fruit hung from silverleaf branches with a patient glow, as if the heavens had learned to ripen and rest. Rowan Vale walked the terraces before dawn, letting his fingertips brush bark that hummed with sleeping vows. The grove’s music lived in him; it was how he told weather from omen, season from cycle, and softness from danger. Edda Lorn called it his ear, though the melodies were not heard by flesh alone. They shimmered along bone and breath, a choir of promises kept.
On the morning the cycle faltered, the air felt like a held breath. The horizon wore a bruise of purple as night refused to peel away, and the grove’s chords were a step sharp, like an instrument tuned too tight. Rowan paused beneath a great-spanning tree whose boughs cradled a cluster of small suns. He closed his eyes. Within the lattice of branch and breeze, every fruit sang a single oath: I will fall when the world is ready. It was a vow as old as thunder, woven into the stone beneath his feet, and it had guided keepers for generations.
“Rowan,” Edda called from the upper path, her voice creased with sleep and smoke. She descended with a basket over her arm, gray braid tucked in a coil beneath a shawl stitched with constellations. Edda always moved as if speaking to the grove without words, offering her weight gently to the earth. “You feel it too.”
He nodded. “Something in the pitch. Like a hidden thorn.”
“Storms can do that,” she said, though her eyes lifted to that stubborn bruise along the rim of the world. “Or worse. We will watch and wait. The grove has survived empires, dear heart.”
They tended the morning tasks, checking leaf for rot and bark for frost-bite, coaxing wayward roots back into the soil’s warm veins. From time to time Edda pressed her palm to a trunk and listened with her skin. Rowan followed suit and felt heat pulse back, the kindness of old wood. He tried not to think of the decree whispered in mountain inns: soldiers conscripting harvests, rumors of a new crown for the Regent, one to fix the light at a single sigh of day. Rumors, he told himself, were just that. The grove was protected by law and older things besides.
A hush spread through the branches, like the last calm breath before a shout. A flake of light bobbed in the air before Rowan, loosed from its stem not by season, not by rite, but by something restless and unseen. His heartbeat stumbled. Edda’s basket slid from her arm and thumped the path. “Wait,” she said softly. “Not yet.”
The fruit dropped. It fell before its time.