Jamie.

Aiden? What’s going on? I can’t see anything.

You’re asleep, but not deeply enough to dream, yet. Close, though. Soon.

How are we talking, if I’m asleep?

You seemed nervous, so I thought I’d come with you. Into the dream.

What? You can go into other people’s dreams?

No, but this is my dream, so. Yeah, I can come back to it. Do you not want me to stay with you? I can wake up.

Please stay. That makes me feel so much better, actually. This would be kind of scary without you.

Nothing to be afraid of, I promise. We’re safe. We’re asleep, together, in your bed.

Okay.

I’ve got my arms around you. Out there, anyways.

Wish I could feel that in here. I do feel something, though. I think I feel you near me, but not your body. Just - you.

Because I’m right here with you. It’s okay. Let yourself dream.

~~~~

It’s a bright, clear, sunny morning, the day the Fate descends to Earth.

It all starts with her. With curiosity. With an act of daring.

She will need a human form, to walk among the mortals. She has touched down on a shady, overgrown road, and she stops there, to fashion herself a likeness. When it’s complete, she slips into the form, feels it out. She becomes aware of the soil beneath her feet, the wind against her skin, the sunlight on her neck. She pauses for a moment, listening to the beat of her newly physical pulse. She looks up at the sun, the sky. It all looks so different, from below.

The Fate tests out her balance. She takes a step. Another. Another. She begins to walk.

She begins to run.

She has never done it before, never had toes and feet to beat against the ground, arms to give her momentum, a heart to start racing. She has never felt the wind through her hair. She laughs wildly as she runs, and that is new, too. Laughter belongs to humans, but the stolen moment of it is intoxicating. She marvels at the way it rises out of her without her intention. How strange, she thinks. How strange.

She is gasping in lungfuls of air, never having needed it before. There comes a stab in her side, from running so long. Her first experience of pain. She cries out, but then laughs again. It’s all so human, and this is what she’s come to learn of.

She is the first Fate to try such a thing, and she will be the last.

She has many siblings, and she knows they are watching. She tips her head back, sticks her tongue out at the sky.

She is the youngest. She is often teased. Her siblings say she does not see the bigger picture. That she is too soft. That she worries too much over each individual soul, when she could focus on those strings connected to thousands. Great rulers, conquerors, philosophers, warriors.

But she worries over every soul, regardless of whether the connected name will appear in the history books.

She does not play with the souls, as her siblings like to do. She prefers to smooth things out. She untangles the threads. She coaxes out the knots, the kinks, the connections that are dragging each other down or snarling each other up. She weaves back together the threads that are fraying, lending them greater support. She is heartbroken for each one she can’t find a way to untangle.

Her work matters to her even when it only affects one solitary soul. One life saved. One heartbreak avoided. One injustice righted. One moment of joy where there might have been tears. Each means everything to this Fate.

Don’t you see that your work will never be done? her siblings ask. Don’t you see how they get themselves all tangled up again right away? Why put so much effort into every single thread? Into every single soul?

She wants to see if it’s true, what they say. That despite her efforts, she has made no impact with her work.

She does not intend to stay long amongst the humans. A very short stretch. Fifty years, perhaps. To an immortal, the span is nothing.

The Fate walks until she comes to a village. It’s a tiny community, surrounded by a forest. Built on a hill. Little more than a cluster of houses and a church. She walks through it, wondering at every new sight and sensation. She sees the women sitting cross-ankled before their houses, men leaving for their work. Children playing in the dust, their imagination turning bundles of sticks into princes and princesses, the nearby river into a great ocean filled with dangers to overcome, the uneven streets into pathways of some great journey.

As the Fate explores, it starts to rain. The village is so small, but there are worlds of things for her to discover within it. Wet leaves. Someone whistling. Incense drifting out from the church. The smoke of cookfires. Moss and ferns, eating at the wood of the bridge over the river. The cracking sound of thunder, the haze of the storm when it moves off into the distance.

At night, there are gatherings, songs. Music. Stories. The Fate watches from afar, fascinated. She listens to the stories. The laughter.

The village eventually goes dark. The Fate walks the streets again, listening. The town is sleeping, but she still hears things. Snoring, and quiet laughter. Muffled arguing. Moans and sighs, of pleasure and melancholy both. The whispers of children who have stayed up long after they were meant to sleep. The church bells.

The Fate intended to walk to a new place tomorrow. She wants the breadth of the human experience, not just one place, one cluster of people. But now, she doesn’t want to go. There’s so much to discover, here alone. She decides that she must stay, at least for a short while.

She watches as the sun rises, turning the sky the color of molten glass. She watches the people of the village push open their windows, letting the sunshine in, permitting the day to start.

She has learned the language, from listening to the stories last night. Now, she finds she wants to talk to people. She wants to move among them, not content herself with watching and listening from afar.

And so she does. She speaks to them, moves in their midst. They find her an oddity, at first. Unkind things are said, and they make her sad, and angry - but she wanted to feel this way. She wants to understand how it feels.

She finds humans passionate, explosive. The power of their emotion is so great that they often don’t know what to do with it.

The Fate decides that the time has come to test out her theory. She wants to see if it’s true, what her siblings say. That it’s empty of meaning, to take the time to improve only one life.

She listens until she hears a deeply sad soul.

The soul lingers in the biggest and most extravagant house in the village. Set far back from all the others, on its own swath of land. It’s the only house with stone walls, and a gate. The gate is always locked.

The Fate comes to look at it, and finds a girl there. She discovers that the girl often comes to stand by the gate, in the night. She comes out regardless of rain or snow or cold. She stares at the bars of the gate with sorrowful eyes, then goes back inside.

For the first time since her initial descent, the Fate calls upon her powers.

When the girl returns to the gate that night, she finds it unlocked, sitting wide open. Even the hinges, historically loud, have turned silent, though no one has oiled them. Fate has intervened, and it’s the girl’s choice, whether or not to accept its invitation.

The girl stands staring at the gate. She looks back at the great house behind her, then turns to face the open path ahead. Her soul is singing, alive with hope and terror.

She runs, right then. She doesn’t return to the house for anything. She doesn’t look back. She only runs, and she doesn’t stop until she leaves the village far behind.

The Fate sits back to listen to the sound of the girl, hear the way it changes. She hears the heaviness start to slip away. A wildness comes over the sound, lifting it, punching it upwards, turning it to song. The Fate knows that wherever the girl is, she is laughing.

A flash of insight comes to the Fate. Her work has not been meaningless. It doesn’t matter whether the girl’s happiness has some impact that will alter the great roads of the future. It matters only that she laughed.

The Fate finds her convictions taking deeper root within her. She comes to adore human dreams, ideas, experiences.

In the face of each and every human being, she sees a story. One worth caring about.

As she always suspected, there is value in each individual soul. Value, spirit, and worth.

And the notion that there is no greater impact of taking the time to care for an individual - this isn’t true. The Fate sees firsthand how despair often breeds more despair. How joy breeds more joy. How kindness is handed off between human beings the same way they might hand off something physical. It’s contagious. It spreads, in echoes and reverberations. Perhaps it will not change the course of history. But the longer the Fate stays among the humans, the less she can see why it has to, in order to matter.

Fifty years pass, and the Fate still can’t bring herself to leave the first village she happened upon. She cares too much for its people. She pulls them back from death’s door. She frees the trapped, soothes the angry. She does things so small that her siblings would laugh. She returns a lost doll to a little girl. She saves a family dog from the river’s current. She puts out a fire that would have harmed no one, only cost a man his house.

She’s become half-human, herself, and before she knows it, she’s grown old. Her mortal form will not support her much longer. She could leave it and return to her siblings, her work on high. But human emotion, as she has learned well, is contagious. She can’t bear to leave the village, the people. She has put down roots, here.

So she stays, and eventually, she dies.

The villagers have come to see the Fate as an angel, of sorts. She was loved by them, cherished in her lifetime. They give her a burial with gratitude so powerful that even her siblings hear the force of the collective song.

But what is immortal can never truly die, and where they lay her body to rest, there grows a tree.

~~~~

The Fate will not leave her people unguarded. But in this form, she can’t intercede when danger or suffering comes to them. She will have to find another way.

She listens for the right kind of soul. A giving soul, loving and gentle.

She finds the one, and calls for it.

The man comes in the middle of the night, as if in a trance, a dream. He walks barefoot to the Fate, and stops beneath her sweeping canopy. The Fate recognizes him: the youngest son of the girl she let out through the gate, all those years ago. He’s moved back, to reclaim his grandfather’s house.

He has little of his grandfather’s spirit, but much of his mother’s.

He doesn’t know what led him here. He puts a hand to the deep grooves of the tree’s trunk, trying to understand.

Through the place of contact, the Fate speaks to him.

She seeks a covenant.

Should he accept, he will act in her place, draw on her power. Hear souls as she hears them, so he will know when one is ailing. She has been their shield. Now, if he accepts, the responsibility will fall to him.

She warns him that this power is not made for a mortal form. It will be difficult. Loud. There will be heartbreak, when a soul goes silent before it should. And when he dies, the covenant will pass onto one of his children, whichever one she chooses.

It is no small burden, the Fate warns him.

She is asking him to make a warm place in a world that all too often seems hostile. A place of safety. She is asking him to be a watchman, a protector.

A Guardian.

He goes away to think on it, but he comes back the very next night. She knew he would, because she knows his soul.

He swears the oath, and the Fate, though she can no longer see as humans do, senses the formation of their bond.

The power glows in his eyes. He falls to his knees, when he hears the souls as she does. It’s too loud for him to bear, at first.

But humans are adaptable creatures, and she chose the first Guardian well.

He makes his first save that same week. The Fate listens as the floundering soul is pulled back from the brink. Deep within herself, she smiles.

At last, she can settle comfortably into her new form. She speaks to the Guardian no more. She becomes a well of power, of strength. She lets go the consciousness that was not suited to this form.

Like all those she has saved, she becomes a spirit, untethered only when the time is right.

~~~~

The villagers keep their Tree, and their Guardian, a close-held secret. They know that what is rare and valuable is often the first to be exploited.

The years pass, and the village changes. People begin to leave town. Some set out for new places, new lands. Their loved ones, unwilling to send them alone and unprotected, take cuttings from the Guardian Tree. The cuttings cost the Guardian greatly, each time. A painful severing. But it’s all part of the covenant.

In bags, in travel cases, in bundled packages. In secret pockets sewn into skirts. In hidden compartments. Pieces of the Guardian Tree are carried all over the world.

They are planted. They grow. Each time, a new covenant must be formed, a new Guardian chosen, a new family line to take up the promise. The trees grow differently in each place, with each Guardian. They grow into varied forms, adapting to climate, to location.

There comes to be a host of Guardians. For their own protection, their secret becomes even more closely kept. Kept even from the people under the Guardian’s protection.

One day, a cutting is carried to a new town, in a place far away from the first Guardian Tree. A tiny little dot on the map, called Ketterbridge.

~~~~

In a grassy clearing surrounded by thick brush, the three women, carriers of the cutting, gather together.

The two younger women begin to dig, to make a place for the roots.

The older, white-haired and solemn, watches, the Tree in her hands.

She steps forward, and carefully places the sapling into the ground.

“Hurry,” the old woman says, and the younger two sink their fingers into the soil, patting it down around the infant Guardian Tree. They must finish before they are missed in town. Tonight, the tree will summon someone, to form the new bond. No one knows who it will be.

A little girl comes tearing through the trees, giggling and joyful, fired up with play. The closest woman catches her, before she can get too close to the Tree.

“Careful,” she whispers. “This is for you. It’s for all of us.”