The Numbers Tree

"Q! Wait up! Q!"

Quentin could hear Julia calling from behind him and her footfalls in the thick meadow grass. He slowed his pace, his khakis getting soaked by the dew, and looked back, but Julia, jogging up to his side, was looking past him. She pointed a finger and he turned back to the rise they had been charging towards.

"Look," she said. "We found it."

An ancient, silvery tree reached its bare, twisted branches up to the sky, where Quentin had sworn there had only been bare hilltop before. Its bark looked like slivers of steel and shimmered in the morning light. 

They drew nearer, close enough to touch its trunk. Quentin gazed up and, there, in the fork of two branches, the four digits of an atomic clock flew through hours far outside the usual twenty-four. 

An unseen voice above his head asked, "Looking for the WiFi password?" 

Quentin searched for the source of the voice in the branches. "Who's there?" he asked. 

"Show yourself!" Julia called, her hands already poised to cast.

"Wait--Jules--it might be friendly." 

Julia rolled her eyes. "It's Fillory."

With a chuckle, a girl in a silvery dress, who at first glance, reminded Quentin very much of a bird, appeared on a branch high above them.

"Who are you?" Julia called.

"Who are you?" the girl replied, clinging to the trunk. 

"We're from Earth," Quentin blurted. "I'm Quentin. That's Julia."

"Numbers."

Julia lowered her hands. "We've been looking for you."

"Yep. Is that your caravan?" Numbers pointed at something in the distance behind them. Quentin whipped around to look back. 

Eliot and Margo were making their way across the meadow in a garishly-painted buggy, followed by Penny on foot. 

"Yeah, those are our friends," Quentin said. 

Numbers twined her fingers in vine-like wire winding around the trunk of the tree. "They're coming from the heart of the forest. It's dead there," she said thoughtfully.

"So it's true--" Quentin said. "Your network."

"We found the servers when we came here," Julia said.

Numbers hopped down onto the grass. "It's not quite the Internet--more like a FIllory to parallel Fillory."

 "We want to trap the Beast inside it," Julia said.

Numbers nodded. "It could be done. But if it goes wrong--he will have more power than before--and access to all of Fillory at once."

Eliot and Margo had reached the foot of the hill and their buggy didn't seem to want to go further, rather tumbling them out onto the long grass. Quentin and Julia watched them climb up the hill.

"The Beast has been here," Penny called up. "And not long ago."

"Shit--" Julia breathed. "How do you know?"

Penny held out a hand. A dry, dead moth lay curled in his palm.

Eliot by now had also made it up the hill, leaning heavily on Margo. "We think he comes back every night and goes somewhere deep in the woods."

"And it seems like he's made himself king of Fillory," Penny added.

"He'd have to return often," Quentin said. "No king of Fillory can leave Fillory for long."