The root-tree was older than the settlement.
Liam knew this because he had asked his mother once, on a morning when she was in a good enough mood to answer questions, and she had looked at it for a long moment before saying that the root-trees in this part of Thalia had been here before any dark elf had thought to build beneath them. Before even the high elves had climbed to the canopy. Before the forest had a name.
He believed her. The tree in question – the one he currently had his back pressed against – was wide enough at its base that three adults couldn't link hands around it, and its roots rose from the earth in great arching ridges that created natural alcoves, natural shelters, natural hiding spots for a seven-year-old boy who had spent most of his life perfecting the art of not being noticed.
The settlement spread out in front of him in the grey-green light that passed for afternoon in the deep forest. Thalia's canopy was so dense here that direct sunlight was a rumor – everything filtered down in diffuse, shadow-softened layers that the dark elves moved through like they were born for it. Which they were, of course. Their eyes were built for this. Their skin – deep grey-blue, the color of slate after rain – absorbed the dim light in ways that made humans and high elves visibly uncomfortable when they saw it, as though the dark elves were doing something improper simply by existing in their own bodies.
Liam looked down at his own hands, resting on his knees. Small. The hands of a seven-year-old, fine-boned and dark-complected in the way of his people. He had spent an embarrassing amount of time in his early years in this body just – looking at it. The hands. The feet. The faint luminescence that dark elf skin had in low light, a characteristic that humans apparently found unsettling but that Liam privately thought was one of the nicer things about his current form.
He had been Loki for twenty-two years. He had been Liam for seven. The math of that still felt strange when he ran it.
Across the settlement, a group of children were playing some kind of chasing game between the root-arches, their laughter sharp and uncomplicated in the still air. He watched them from his alcove with the same expression he had worn watching playground games from library windows – present, distant, not quite part of the scene he was observing. Some things, apparently, carried over.
He was not unhappy. He wanted to be clear about that, at least to himself. He had done unhappy. He knew what it felt like as a sustained condition, that low-grade grinding colorlessness that had followed Loki through most of his university years. This was not that. This was something more like – cautious. Alert. The particular mental posture of someone who knew that stillness was not the same as safety and was trying to understand the terrain before committing to any movement.
Eight years, his mind supplied. Eight years in this world and he still felt, sometimes, like he was reading a map of a country he'd never visited. The landmarks were becoming familiar. The language of this place – Elvish, as spoken by dark elves, which differed from the high elf dialect in accent and in certain vocabulary choices that his mother said were older – sat comfortably in his mouth now. The customs were legible. He understood, in broad strokes, what this world was and how it worked.
The novels had helped with that. A handful of fantasy novels read by a boy in a university library, dog-eared and borrowed from the fiction section that nobody in the engineering department was supposed to admit visiting. He had read them quietly, between coursework, the way he did everything – carefully, without drawing attention. A cultivation story. A sword-and-sorcery adventure with a magic academy. A political fantasy with a complicated royal court. One with a reincarnated protagonist that he had found both implausible and comforting in equal measure.
None of them had prepared him for the specific reality of poverty in a discriminated community at the edge of an ancient forest. But they had given him vocabulary for what he was, and that had mattered more than he could have articulated in those first disorienting years when he was simultaneously a baby and a twenty-two-year-old dead man trying to make sense of the fact that he was alive again.
Reincarnation, he had concluded, around age three. The evidence was overwhelming: his intact memories, the fundamental alienness of this body and world, the presence of things – magic, non-human races, a different sky – that could not be accounted for by any other framework. He had accepted it with the same methodical practicality he'd brought to every other problem he'd ever had to solve. Panic would not help. Understanding the situation would.
He was still in the process of understanding the situation.
The children's game shifted – someone changed the rules, or broke them, and the laughter sharpened briefly into argument before resolving back into play. Liam watched the resolution with interest. He noticed that there was one girl, older than the others by a year or two, who settled disputes not by volume but by a particular quality of stillness – she simply stopped moving, and everyone else eventually oriented toward her like plants toward light. He had been observing this phenomenon for several months. It was the same mechanism, he thought, that made Jingahr seem larger than he was in rooms full of other adults.
Useful. He filed it away.
Somewhere in the deep forest behind the settlement – behind the carved root-homes and the hanging moss-lights and the low defensive barrier of woven branch that marked the boundary of where the dark elves lived and the territory of Thalia's monsters began – something moved. Not close. Far enough that the sound was only a suggestion, a displacement of air and the crack of something heavy on old wood. Liam did not move. He had learned, in eight years, to read the forest's sounds by their distance and their pattern. That one was far. That one was not hunting. That one would not come this way.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it said about his life – both lives – that he was more comfortable sitting alone at the edge of a monster-adjacent forest than he was walking into a room full of people his own age.
Probably nothing flattering.
He pressed his back a little harder against the root-tree's bark. It was rough and warm, the way old wood is warm – not like heat, like duration. Like something that had simply been present for so long that the temperature of the world had seeped into it.
He had died in a corridor, ordinary and unremarkable. He had woken up in this. He still wasn't sure what the logic of that exchange was. The novels had never been very convincing on the mechanics of why reincarnation happened to a specific person at a specific time, and he had no better explanation than the stories did. He had simply been Loki, and then there had been a gap that he didn't have access to, and then he had been Liam.
What he did know – what eight years of careful observation had made clear – was that this world had rules. All worlds did. Thalia Forest had rules. The settlement had rules. The broader world beyond the forest, the world of human realms and dwarf kingdoms and the great country of Zurieas where the largest ceremony in the known world was apparently held, had rules. He didn't know all of them yet. But he was learning.
He was always learning.
That was the one thing that had never changed between lives: the learning. The gathering of information, the cataloguing of patterns, the slow construction of a map from whatever fragments were available. It was what he was good at. It was, perhaps, the only thing he had ever been genuinely good at, in either world.
He looked out at the settlement one more time – the children still playing, the adults moving between root-homes on the quiet business of an ordinary afternoon, the moss-lights beginning to glow slightly brighter as the already-dim light filtered further toward evening – and felt something settle in his chest. Not contentment exactly. Not happiness. Something more like: this is where I am. This is what there is. I will learn it well enough to survive it.
It was, he reflected, a very Loki kind of resolution to arrive at. And a very Liam kind of place to arrive at it in.
He stayed until the sounds of the forest behind him shifted into the particular register that meant the deep-forest's night was beginning, then pushed himself up from the root-tree's base, brushed bark-dust from his clothes, and walked back toward the warm amber light of home.