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In a valley lit by trees that drink the stars, a keeper and a sky-guardian collide over a revelation of secret stores. As old rules fracture, a public rite forces hidden measures into daylight and remakes the balance between duty and attachment, with personal cost and a new, uncertain tenderness.
The orchard did not grow like any orchard the villagers spoke of when the sun still walked the sky. It grew from a different kind of seed, one that fell from the high arc of evening and lodged itself in the cool earth like a promise. Where a falling mote lodged, a shoot of silver-green pushed up between stones and turned the damp soil into a slow, patient light. The trunks were slender and pale as bone, and their leaves shivered with faint music when wind passed over them; under their roots the very ground hummed with a gentle, constant pulse. People said their forebears had taught the trees to drink the stars, and the orchard answered by feeding what lay within its radius: the harvests of the valley, the wells in drought, the ward that kept the mists from coming too near.
Alina moved through that hush as though she belonged to it. Her hands were familiar with the curved shapes of the saplings and the careful measures of their soil. She wore her hair bound at the nape so it would not brush against the glowing veins; she carried in a leather satchel the instruments the families had always used — little scoops, water drawn from the moonpool, strips of linen steeped in a calming brew. Her family had tended an arc of the orchard for three generations. To her they were not merely plants but kin, and the responsibility sat in her chest like a slow, steady flame. She checked each sapling as the night moved, circling with a practised patience: patting the earth, lighting the small powder that soothed the roots, whispering the low lines of the keening song that coaxed the light into a steadier pulse.
Tonight the orchard smelled of rain that had never come and a faint mineral tang, like cold coin. The nearest sapling — a stock no larger than a child's forearm — held itself close to the dark and blinked slowly. Alina crouched, the hem of her cloak damp with the orchard's breath, and eased the linen band around the sapling's crown. Her fingers were steady. She had learned that tenderness was a craft as much as a ritual. When she pressed the linen there was a soft answering thrum, a stanza of sound made out of light and root.