It was a softness that brought here there – a strange color in the wind, a particular whirl of Orangemoon leaves that caught hold of her child’s heart and carried it up, up and away— Away, skipping across the lake like a stone; away over the proud Edge trees, part-bowed with harsh wind but far from broken; away across the meadow where the late flowers pressed through the thick, tarrish mud of autumn— (The girl wouldn’t remember how she arrived there, later, in the House of the Mountain and All She Knows. It was like a dream, the first in a year that she did not regret, though she far from understood its meaning.)

And still the earth ushered her along. 

The Mountain she saw first, as one does. Tall. Taller. (And sharp, in a way, though perhaps not intentionally so.) Emerging from the treeline, Ultima could not help the stuttered stop, the intake of breath – it was like the first time she saw the sea, something magnificent and vast with no need for pretense. They simply were. Even as more and more people swirled into the clearing, chirping faintly like birds, the girl felt rooted to the congregation’s fringes like a stray, quaking aspen. But when the Mountain spoke, clear and grounded, the girl’s ears pricked forward, transfixed.

“As many of you know, the Earth God has charged us all with aiding in the growth of the Hidden Falls.”

Hidden Falls. “Oh—” Earth God. “Goodness—” Demi-goddess. “I—” Princess, it appears you’ve found yourself in the wrong castle. 

Whatever sixth-sense had brought her here, blindfolded, laughing with her hands stretched out, it fell like a curtain and then flew in her face. The smell of the earth, the slant of the trees, even the ambient noise lurking behind the Mountain’s voice – even the Mountain herself. For what felt like seven centuries but was hardly seven seconds, she stood very still, her bright gold eyes uncertain. A stallion with a kind smile sidled up to her and she glanced at him, smiling briefly, her eyes eventually sliding back to the mare standing at the podium. Be an earth thing? But she wasn’t even a Moon thing. In spite of the warmth she felt at the Edge, the Ultima-shaped spaces she had taken in the lives of the herd-members, she was still an altogether different thing from Tilney, Maude, Tembovu and Alysanne; it was like a sheet of glass between them, cold against her shoulder if she tried too hard to be close. 

But they hadn’t called for an Earth thing or a Moon thing – they had called for a healer for the meager crop of family that gathered her today, and the call had latched onto her, whatever the girl was. She did not believe in coincidence. Seasons ago she’d been called to Tilney and the ocean. A year ago she’d been called to the desert glass and the crocodile who broke her heart. And now she was here, on the breeze of an autumn-time lullaby.

Here, where she’d been sung. Here, where she’d been summoned. The earth was dry and clean-swept, smelling slightly of char. The faces all around her betrayed some tension, but also an idle, persistent, hope. In the ground, new things (was she a new thing? could she be a new thing?) were reaching for the light. And if there was anything Tilney had taught her, it was love of earth and all that grew from it, and a sense of appreciation for the small, fierce steps the living took towards the sun: tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

“Will you accept this magic? Will you take up the title of Earth Medics?”

There really is no such thing as coincidence, she thought, her heart still quaking in her narrow chest, apprehension written across her delicate features. But Ultima, Dearest, Fairest, frightened but not lost, returned the Mountain’s smile at last. 

“—Yes.”

This must be the place.

“I will.”