Light Beneath the Bark

The inside of the tree was not wood.

It was memory.

The walls shimmered with rings of light, layered like time-lapse photographs. Stories woven in silence: migrations, losses, sparks of joy. Nothing moved, yet everything shifted. It was not linear. It was living.

And they weren’t alone.

A figure stood ahead, calm and still — hand resting against the rings of light.

Cairo Bell.

They turned slowly as Kai and Sienna approached, their voice soft but grounded, like someone who had listened longer than anyone else.

“You made it,” they said.

Sienna blinked. “How long have you been here?”

Cairo smiled faintly. “Long enough to understand that this place doesn’t ask how quickly you arrive. Only how fully you’re willing to remain.”

They stepped back, inviting Kai and Sienna into the light.

“I’ve been helping it remember,” Cairo continued. “Sorting what the wind forgot. Composting what decayed. Some memories aren’t meant to be preserved in glass—they need to be rooted. Returned to the soil.”

From the core of the tree, a faint hum rose.

A voice emerged — not spoken aloud, but felt, like a message traced into the inside of your bones:

“To remember is to root.
To stay is to grow.
To grow is to risk change.
Will you remain?”

Sienna closed her eyes.

She thought of every step since the first descent. Every fracture. Every echo. Every silence they had chosen to hold rather than escape.

She opened her eyes. “Yes.”

The tree pulsed once — then again.

And then the bark behind them split into light.

But this time, it wasn’t a passage.

It was a beacon.

Kai turned to her, a question unspoken.

Cairo answered it before she could.

“Let’s stay long enough to tend the future.”