The next leaf pulled him north, out of the sand and into grass, and out of the grass into a forest so old that its trees had faces. Not carved faces: grown ones, folded into the bark, with knots for eyes and long mossy mouths that never quite closed.

And they whispered. Everything that had ever been said beneath their branches, they had kept, and they said it all back at once, softly, forever.

Most of what the trees whispered was ordinary: lovers’ promises, hunters’ curses, a child counting to a hundred and stopping at sixty-three. Mihao walked through it the way you walk through rain, until a voice came out of a great oak and stopped him dead.

It was his own voice, younger and very tired. Forgive me, Wen, it said. I couldn’t. I couldn’t let it end. He laid his paw on the bark. The oak’s rings glowed one by one, back and back, past kingdoms and floods and the first fires, to the oldest ring of all, where the voice went on repeating itself in the dark. “Who is Wen?” he asked. The oak only whispered the question back.

He noticed the light before he noticed the fox. It bobbed between the trees at about the height of a small creature’s tail, which is exactly where it was: at the very tip of the tail of a small, ash-grey fox with enormous ears and a look of tremendous interest.

“You’re old,” she said. “Very old. You’ve got a beard like a waterfall.” Her name was Pell. The forest foxes, she explained, were born from stories the trees had overheard, and most of them knew which story they came from. Pell did not. “I’m the fox at the edge of somebody’s tale,” she said cheerfully. “They forgot to write my ending. So I thought I’d come with you and find it.”

Pell knew everyone. She introduced Mihao to the glowcaps, mushrooms that lit up wherever someone had once been happy, so that the forest floor was a map of old picnics. She introduced him to the Rootwardens, acorn-hatted folk no taller than a thumb, who kept count of the forest’s rings and took it very seriously.

And she introduced him, carefully, to the bookmoths: pale, silent things that ate ink, and had been eating the next leaf for years. “They don’t mean harm,” Pell whispered. “They’re hungry, that’s all. Everything’s hungry this close to the Hollow.” Mihao kept that sentence. Later, he would need it.

That night they made camp in the roots of a fallen tree, and Mihao told Pell a story to help her sleep: a short one, about a cat who kept a lamp in a window for someone who never came home. He was not sure where he had heard it. He only knew he had told it before, many times, to someone who liked the ending.

Pell was quiet afterwards. “Does everyone get one?” she asked. “An ending?” “Everyone,” said Mihao. “Even the fox at the edge?” “Especially the fox at the edge.” She curled her tail around herself until only the light showed. “Then I hope mine’s a good one,” she said, and fell asleep.

In the forest’s heart the trees had stopped whispering. Their faces had gone smooth and their rings blank. In the middle of the clearing hung the Hollow’s edge, a tear in the air like a badly ripped page, and caught in it, flapping, was the leaf.

Pell’s light held the blankness back. Mihao pulled a beard-hair, and it unspooled into a line of gold writing that stitched the trees’ memories back into their bark, word by word. When the whispering returned, the leaf fell into his paws.