It was a strange feeling to know that he had paid a tithe for the last time, that he would never see the Tithe Proctor again, or have to face the screechers, or hide from another gang, or ever want for food and water. In many ways it left him feeling light and pushed him to haste, for he did not want to wait for it to be reality. Yet, in other ways, fewer and smaller ways, it frightened him. It was a change, and all change was uncertain, and uncertainty was fear of a kind.

But that was all forgotten when he came upon a great gate set into a wall of dark stone that rose above the buildings. The gate was solid, made of thick wood banded with iron, and though the boy had no idea how he knew, he was sure that it was thousands of years old, that it had been there since before the first brick of the city was laid. He did not need to look at the map to know he had come to the gardens. He stepped forwards, and the gate rumbled and shifted and swung slowly inwards, and he hurried up to it and passed through as soon as the gap was wide enough that he could fit.

In an instant the gate swung shut behind him, slamming with a great, resonant thump that echoed through the blasted land before him. The fog still clung to the air, but he could see as far as the first trees, and they were dead.

As he walked slowly forwards, he clung desperately to a frail hope that the fog would lift and beyond would be life, green and blue, forests and rivers and oceans, vast and spreading concepts that he somehow grasped though he knew not how or why… and as he pressed on through bare earthen ground, he came to the edge of the treeline and placed his hand against one of the trees, and he knew in a moment that the pale, smooth dry surface was not wood or rock.

At the very least, if the Proctor came this far within, he would not want for tithes. Glancing back towards the closed gate, he took a deep breath and stepped between the trees. Minutes drifted as he walked, and then hours. As morning passed into afternoon and the tangle of bone trees stretched ever farther, understanding began to truly dawn in the boy. If these were the real gardens, then the gardens he’d been trying to find had been exactly what he had once thought they must be: a vision from a dream, a soft and fleeting vision that could never harden into reality.

As he walked, he began to wonder if anyone else had made it here. Would there be food and water among the trees? Would there be gangs, screechers, other, formless beasts hiding in the mist? He peered up at the high branches above him, tangled so that the faint light that found its way through the fog was fainter still when it speckled the barren floor below.

Turning his eyes left, he looked up at the trunk of one of the trees by his side and stopped in his tracks. For a small way up that trunk, a little above eye level with him, was a most unnatural shape. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth; a visage of a person, cast in anguish and bone, frozen forever in the side of the tree. He stepped back from it, turned his gaze away, and hurried on, but soon he was noticing that there were more, and before long he was turning on the spot, and every tree around him had a face of its own, and before what seemed like very long, he came to one that he knew.

It stared back at him with wide and wild eyes. He reached into his coat and pulled out the map, thinking at first to offer it back, but the face did not react, and for that he was thankful. He dropped the map at the foot of the tree and left it there.

Not long after that, he realised that dusk had come again, as it always did. He did not know whether the Proctor would come for him here, but he didn’t want to take the risk, so with a whisper of apology he reached up to the nearest tree and pulled at a branch. It held fast. He tried again, putting all his weight into it, begged it to snap, but it held fast. When he tried for a twig, a little fingerbone, he thought, it too held fast.

Drawing his knife, he tried to saw at it, but the blade made no mark, so he stepped back and held the knife up in front of him and turned slowly on the spot. If he could not pay the Tithe Proctor, he decided he would finally do the one thing he never thought he would. He would look upon its face, he would defy it, and when it tried to take him he would fight back. He would cut deep into its shadowy form and it would bleed smoke and run howling from him, and he would carry on through the night and come at last to paradise, to the waters and fields of a good green land.

While his thoughts wandered and his legs tired from turning so long without pause, darkness crept into the sky and stole the last remnants of daylight, and night fell over the forest of bones. And he waited for the Tithe Proctor.

He only realised that it was not coming when he felt something moving at his feet. Looking down, he watched, frozen, as fingerbones rose swiftly from the earth and curled about his feet. Still he found he did not move, as more bones began to break the ground and rise up, clawing at his ankles and then his legs, reaching ever higher. Only once they came to his knees did he finally find the power to move again, and began to struggle against them. But the bones were strong, they were so strong, and there were so many of them.

Farther they climbed, reaching up to his torso, hands on the ends of long arms, grasping from the dry dead earth, and he saw at the very base of them that they were beginning to join together and smooth over into an unbroken surface. Though he still struggled against them, they had already reached his chest, and he could barely move anything other than his arms and his head. As one bony arm reached out and seized his wrist, squeezing so tightly that his grip went lax and his knife slipped to the ground, his vision began to darken.

He could not tell if it was the bones or if the night was simply growing darker, but shadows were creeping at the edges of his eyes, and as the bones ascended ever higher, those shadows closed in. Fingers crawled and grasped at his neck and his arms, and he put his head back and screamed and screamed and screamed. But his echoing pleas fell only on the silence of fog.