This is book #2 of the Warder Trilogy, comprising Throwback’s Realm, Tree Thinker and Heavy Biscuits.

Set at the end of the 21st Century, Martin Farrell is the Realm Wizard of the Hidden Realm overlaying much of Western Europe, and his human wife Sofia is dying.  She is 82, nearly blind, and mostly bed-ridden, but urges Martin – the all-powerful Elvish Ala Daq Da – to accelerate his studies of ancient Elvish records referring to 'Tmoa Zala', and pre-dating the founding of the Hidden Realm during the Bronze Age.

Martin finds that crumbling archaeological records refer cryptically to the name of a mysterious device, rather than the name of a founding Elvish Wizard, as had been previously supposed.

He learns that the first Elvish Wizards – then known as Gilgandean Shamans – created a physical means of forcing a small group of trees to share their sensory and energy reserves.  This became the basis for all subsequent Elvish ‘bio-mass’ magic.  As the ancient tribal society mutated into an early, Bronze-Age nation-state, a device known as a Tmoa Zala (Great Joiner) was constructed to join the dozens of small, separate tribal enclaves, and move them all to a uniform time offset as a parallel universe.  Over centuries, then millennia, the Hidden Realm grew and prospered, and the Tmoa Zala occupied a slightly-offset dimension as an almost-transparent carbon-copy of the Hidden Realm.  By Martin’s time, its very existence is long forgotten.
Because of its complex neural structure, Tmoa Zala has grown to link all trees on the planet, both inside and outside the Hidden Realm, and has become self-aware – a giant, bodiless mind – and is becoming more and more anxious to understand the world.

A group of anti-magic Outsider industrialists seek to destroy Tmoa Zala, so that all magic would cease on Earth and they would regain their commercial ascendency currently being eroded by Elvish Wizards.  They race Martin to find the device.

Although dying, Sofia is the first – by persistent blind meditation – to communicate with Tmoa Zala via an intermediary.  A pet parrot named Prospero.  She hopes to transfer her experiences and memories to Tmoa Zala as a way of remaining with all-but-immortal Martin after her death.

Martin follows his dead wife’s trail and inherits the task of helping Tmoa Zala to slowly widen its tree-based perception of reality.  He helps it experience life as a thinking, seeing, hearing, moving creature by proxy, learning such difficult human concepts as grief, hope, love and forgiveness, first dimly experienced through its ‘remembered dream’ of Sofia.

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