Kaleidotrope, April 2026
The story is narrated by Brinnen Ott, a mill worker at a frontier timber company town built on the edge of a vast, ancient forest. Brinnen’s closest friend is Steph Kuva, an arcanist — a scientist who studies “arcana,” a discipline that interacts with a parallel plane of reality in ways indistinguishable from magic to most observers. The two share a standing weekly dinner, and when Steph fails to appear one Waterday evening, Brinnen’s concern quickly sharpens into alarm. A visit to her lab turns up Chief Arcanist Doolain, a cold and dismissive superior who claims Steph left early feeling ill. Brinnen doesn’t believe him.
The town’s economy is built on otherwood — a remarkable material that is stronger than iron, burns hot from its sawdust, and can extend life when its sap is consumed. Most otherwood trees, however, are partially rooted in the other plane of reality and cannot be felled or even touched in the conventional sense. When Brinnen breaks into Steph’s apartment and finds it methodically searched, he knows she has been taken. The only clue left behind is her arcane slate, wiped clean — but Steph once taught him a simple trick to restore erased writing. What surfaces is a lunar calendar marking the imminent alignment of three moons, a date with obvious arcane significance.
Piecing together what he can, Brinnen sneaks into Doolain’s office during the lunch hour and finds arcanopics documenting early otherwood research alongside a haunting charcoal drawing of a vast, impossibly complex tree — branches shaped from writhing human forms. He is caught and thrown out of the mill. Bruised and desperate, he returns to his room and remembers something: days earlier, Steph had secretly written in the back of his old classbook and told him not to read it until he knew when. The message leads him to a locker at the locomotive station containing an envelope of her research. The documents reveal everything — Steph had discovered that the mysterious disappearance of the ancient Tree People was no accident. They had tried to bind themselves arcanically to the otherwood plane, and a vast, incomprehensible being from that plane had retaliated, trapping them inside trees as punishment.
Doolain intends to repeat the experiment — not with Tree People, but with living human sacrifices — to fix more otherwood trees in the physical world and make them available for the mill to harvest. Before Brinnen can act on this knowledge, he is ambushed and knocked unconscious. He wakes in the forest, bound to a sacrificial otherwood post beside Steph under the aligned moons, as Doolain performs the ritual.
What manifests is a being of terrifying, alien grandeur — scaled, feathered, segmented, insectoid, with a spiraling beak at its center and eyes that appear and vanish across its body. It radiates pure fury toward humans as vermin who steal its trees. In a last desperate gamble, Brinnen shouts at the being that he and Steph are victims, that Doolain is the thief trying to exploit it. Steph, in turn, coolly instructs the being to remove Doolain and his men from the world rather than kill them outright, preserving the trees while dispensing justice.
The being complies. Doolain and his goons vanish. Brinnen and Steph are freed and left broken, shaken, and profoundly changed. Limping back toward town, they resolve to share Steph’s research widely enough to prevent others from repeating Doolain’s catastrophic arrogance. The story closes with Steph’s stomach growling — and an invitation to talk over dinner, the ordinary ritual of friendship reasserting itself at the edge of the abyss.
Thematically, the story interrogates the ethics of resource extraction and colonial exploitation, using the otherwood industry as an extended metaphor for industries built on the despoliation of worlds — or peoples — that humans treat as mere raw material. It also celebrates the peculiar strength of cross-class friendship: Brinnen and Steph are separated by education, salary, and social standing, yet their bond sustains them through the unsurvivable. The title echoes on multiple levels — the tree that resists the axe, the friendship that resists destruction, and the civilizational pattern of reckless plunder that no amount of catastrophe seems able to finally stop.
Timothy Mudie is a speculative fiction writer and an editor of all sorts of genres. His fiction has appeared in various magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Podcastle, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and LeVar Burton Reads. His nonfiction children’s book about the importance of dark sky preservation, If You Can See The Dark, was published by Appalachian Mountain Club Books in 2024. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two sons. Find him online at timothymudie.com.