5th August 2026

Part 4 of the Lightbloom series

Part of the arc: The Houses that UG Built

The lion was the first thing he saved. UG woke one morning to find a thin pale thread running up through the tent canvas right behind where its head used to rest, and moved the lion before he moved anything else — a decision he has never explained and nobody has asked him to.

By the end of the week the thread wasn’t a thread anymore. It had a shape to it — low, spreading, faintly luminous in the dark the way the chest’s lid had been, and it had picked the exact corner of the tent where his sleeping mat used to sit as the place it liked best. He tried the other side of the tent. It found that corner too, eventually, the way water finds the low point in a room.

Francois took the whole upheaval in stride, in the specific way Francois takes everything in stride, which is to say he showed no reaction whatsoever and appeared, if anything, to consider the extra construction an improvement. He kept to the driest corner of the tent throughout, indifferent to the wiring, the sparking, and the fact that his owner now slept forty feet up a tree. Nothing about any of it seemed to strike him as remarkable.

UG still hadn’t opened the treehouse door. He’d thought about it most nights, usually right before falling asleep, which is a very efficient way to think about something without ever actually doing anything about it.

What he did instead was treat it as a lighting problem, because a lighting problem was a problem he actually knew how to solve. The tent was running low on candles, and most people would have called that a candle problem. UG built a power source instead — a proper one, humming and sparking away in what used to be his sleeping corner, with a cable running out the back and straight up into the canopy, arcing visibly along its length the whole way, to feed the treehouse above whether the treehouse wanted feeding or not. It worked. It also turned out to be large, sparking in ways that would concern most sensible people, and taking up nearly the whole tent, leaving just enough floor space for a sleeping bag squeezed in beside it — which put the sleeping bag close enough to the corner that the Lightbloom found it within the week too.

There wasn’t much to be done about any of it after the fact, so he did what he’s always done when a project outgrows the room built for it: adjusted around the project instead of shrinking it, and adjusted around the fungus the same way. A green hammock went up underneath the treehouse floor itself, slung in among the rafters, reachable only by climbing up to it each night rather than simply walking in. The lion came with him, tucked into the corner of the hammock, and has stayed there since. The candles, notably, never got restocked, and the door, less notably but just as deliberately, never got opened.

Getting to the hammock is its own nightly project. The foundation up there was never built to be climbed, let alone climbed after dark by a gnome carrying a lantern in one hand — patched beams, several of them clearly repaired rather than replaced, bearing weight they were never rated for and creaking about it the whole way up. The candle’s gone from the rigging now — he moved it after a close enough call that even he took the hint — but the fix he found instead was to tap the same live cable that feeds the treehouse and run a proper high-power lamp off it, wired in right at the point where the beams are weakest. He considers this the safer option. It has not obviously made him safer. The cable runs along the same route he does either way, close enough in places that avoiding it takes real attention rather than habit, and UG has learned the hard way exactly how much it hurts to grab the wrong support in the dark. Between the fall risk and the electrocution risk, he’s not sure which one is more likely to get him on any given night. He climbs up anyway. The hammock, once he’s actually in it, swings gently between the branches with the sea visible beyond the beams, and he’s decided, on balance, that the view is worth the odds.

From up there, most nights, he can just make out the pale shape of it in the tent below — smaller from this height, less urgent-looking, easy enough to not think about until morning. What he can’t quite talk himself out of noticing, some nights more than others, is that the thread running up the outside of the trunk toward the treehouse door has gotten a little further up than it was the week before.

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More in the Lightbloom series

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