# Before the Rift You see it before you see anything else. Long before the river, long before the walls, long before the smoke of the cook-fires — there is a green light on the horizon, standing where no light should be. The palace is a baobab, and it is older than the kingdom carved into it. ## The Trunk The trunk rises fifteen stories before it splits, a grey-barked column. Above that, the canopy climbs another five or six stories, a slow-boiling cloud of leaves that glows a soft, living green after dusk — not a bright light, but the light of something breathing. The tree bleeds. Where the bark is cut, the sap wells up gold-green and luminous. So every window, every carved arch, every seam and lintel and chiselled letter, spills that light outward. From the plains at night the palace looks like a lantern with a thousand cracks in it, or like something enormous that swallowed a star and never quite closed its mouth. The [[Kajit]] did not build the palace. They opened it. ## Inside The halls run with the grain. Corridors follow the tree's own logic, spiralling up around the heartwood, so that no passage in the palace is truly straight and every stair remembers a curve. The walls are warm to the touch. Put a hand flat against them and you can feel the pull of water moving upward through the wood, a pulse slower than any heartbeat you know. There is no silence in it. Hundreds of Khajiit live here — not courtiers only, but weavers, sap-tappers, drummers, cooks, thieves, grandmothers, children who know the stairwells better than the guards do. The place hums. Music comes down from three floors above and up from two floors below and neither song is the same one, and neither stops. Somewhere someone is always arguing about the price of moon-sugar. Market stalls fill the wide galleries, awnings strung between carved pillars, the glow of the walls doing half the work of a lamp. Bolts of cloth, glass beads, spice, river-fish, hammered tin. The stalls change every day and the sellers claim they have always been exactly there. ## The Gardens and the Pools Water is drawn up from the river below through the tree's own channels, coaxed by old workings into terraced pools that sit in the hollows of the great limbs. Gardens grow in them and around them — hanging things, climbing things, whole orchards standing in soil that has never touched the ground. The pools are still and dark and hold the green of the leaves on their surface, so that walking a garden terrace at night is like walking between two skies. ## From the Windows Every window in the palace looks out over the plains, and every window pours light out onto them. Stand at one high in the trunk and the grass runs to the edge of the world in every direction, silver under the moons, and the herds move across it like weather. Stand at the base and look up, and the whole thing hangs above you — fifteen stories of carved and glowing wood, the canopy above that, the light leaking out of every wound in the bark. It is a palace, but that is the least of what it is. It is a city, a hearth, a market, a shrine, and a living thing that has agreed, so far, to be all of those. # After The Rift The palace is dead. on [[1354-01-13]] The [[N'garba Rifts]] tore the whole tree out of [[N'garba]] and set it down in [[Stories/The Waste|The Waste]], and it did not survive the journey — the sap cooled and stopped, the leaves went brown and came down, and what stands now is fifteen stories of grey husk under a bare crown of branches. Every window is a black hole in the bark. The carved halls are still there, the market galleries, the terraced pools cracked dry, all of it perfectly preserved and perfectly unlit, because nothing is left inside the wood to leak light out of the wounds. From a distance you can still see it from a day's walk out. You just can't see it at night anymore.