“But Chiku was not a standard eight-year-old. Chiku was a Dev eight-year-old — which meant: he had magic. Dev magic was: earth-based, the earth-based magic that the ancient Naag bloodlines had bequeathed to the Dev race when the Sundering had split the Pari into two kin (Pari — small, winged, light-magic; Dev — tall, pointed-eared, earth-magic). Chiku's magic manifested as: he could hear the forest. Not hear in the way that humans heard forests (birds, wind, leaves) but hear in the way that Devs heard (root-speech, soil-rhythm, the particular frequency that trees used to communicate underground through mycorrhizal networks — the networks that human scientists would discover millennia later and that Devs had heard since birth).”