Syr stood, and so did the soothsayer.
“There is an entrance here. Stand on that side of the table and take one step back. I will snuff the candle. It will not be long before you will be able to do this even in on a noisy street, but for now we will remove the distractions and allow you to focus.”
Syr did as bidden and the candle flickered out.
“Search your perception for that void you described. A non-place. Go to it.”
Syr mentally felt about the silence until she experienced the mental equivalent of trying to lean against a wall in the darkness that was unexpectedly missing. She yelped and fell in immediately.
“Good.”
The soothsayer loomed over Syr, who was busy hurling her morning eggs and spinach into the dirt.
“Doesn’t… feel good,” she managed through gritted teeth.
“You will grow used to it.”
When her breakfast had been fully evacuated, Syr knelt, took some deep breaths, and took her first measure of the Halls.
They did not appear to be halls by any conventional definition of the word. She knelt on a patch of bare earth amidst a tangle of thick roots. Oak trees stood all around, their empty branches weaving a sparse canopy above. Through it, the sky was dark and immense, glittering stars flooding through it, threatening to overflow and drench the world below.
Fireflies speckled the space between the dark trunks. A legion of crickets covered the air in a heavy blanket of noise.
Syr and the soothsayer were alone.
The soothsayer said nothing.
Syr noted their conspicuous silence and understood, grudgingly, the cue to observe more closely.
The forest of winter-naked trees seemed featureless at first and sparse enough to witness that featurelessness for some distance in every direction. But in the surprisingly bright starlight, Syr made out an irregularity: a single tree, ten times as wide and ten times as tall as its neighbors. She scanned around and spotted another. And perhaps a third.
“Huh.”
“Yes.”
Syr led the way to the nearest, stepping carefully between trunks, her head on a swivel and eyes darting between the innumerable shadows. The soothsayer seemed unconcerned. Or how could she tell? She couldn’t see their face, she reminded herself; she must be projecting some sort of assumption onto them.
The base of the great tree came into view after a few minutes of careful navigation over the root-riven earth. Its enormity seemed to push on the world around it; it commanded a clearing between itself and the smaller trees like an orator in a square.
Syr stood at the treeline, a couple dozen yards away from the base of the colossus, and looked up. Besides the obvious, she struggled to find any difference between it and its smaller peers. The thought occurred to her, gazing up into its great crown of bare boughs, that even the meager light she could see them by was too strong to be explained by starlight and fireflies. But she couldn’t see what that might tell her about this tree or these… Halls.
She thought of trying to pry more out of the soothsayer, but then she had a better idea. She closed her eyes and tried to See what this “non-place”, as the soothsayer had called it, was about.
Seeing was still not natural to her, and she spent some time listening to the crickets and experiencing the inside of her eyelids. This went on for… a minute? Two? Ten? It was impossible to tell. But after some time she could hear the silence that lay underneath the crickets, and then within the darkness and the silence together she could sense the flickering and dancing of other sensations, as though from a great distance. She reached for those sensations.
The first one she found was the feeling that she was standing inches away from someone’s face.
She gasped, her eyes flew open, and she looked up at the tree. It loomed over her.
“She is kind and honorable,” explained the soothsayer, who was standing just a few feet behind. “Be kind in return.”
Syr shivered. A million questions rose to her throat, and her heart began to thump harder as she thought about speaking with something—someone—so titanic. But it seemed so obvious now: this is what she had to do, and there wasn’t any point in stalling. So she closed her eyes, found the darkness and the silence together, and searched within them.