Bruce Cordell - Key of Stars

The bank of moths parted before her. A causeway of clear air formed ahead. She walked down the constricted way, careful to keep to the exact center.

Taal followed her into the lane. It wasn’t so narrow their shoulders risked brushing the edges, but if they were to swing their arms, their fingers might well graze the moth wing walls. Dead grass crumbled beneath his feet. The stars overhead wheeled in the sky, and he had to look away. The open air churned with the movement of thousands of flapping musky membranes. He resisted the urge to sneeze.

A totem growl drew his attention up.

A mote of glowing white fell from the left wall and stopped at Malyanna’s head. Taal leaped, snatched the thing out of the air with his right hand, and smashed its body into his left elbow. One of the trailing wings brushed his forearm. Blood welled instantly, and a line of pain stitched his skin. He dropped the unmoving body to the grass, careful to avoid the flaccid wing membranes. The body dissolved into dust.

The eladrin noble continued her steady progress forward.

Then they were through.

They stood before a massive gate, tumbled and broken beneath a darkling sky suddenly bereft of stars. The gate was mounted in the side of a great tor that rose up out of a “lake” of flux moths. The visible portion of the massive hill featured dead grass and tumbled stones.

Granite fragments of the ruined gate were half-buried in loose soil. The throat of the opening was completely collapsed and filled with rubble. One section of the fallen stone was chiseled with the stylized sign of a white tree. A great crack split the symbol nearly in two.

Nearly every other piece of stone was etched with lines of script. A few used letters familiar to Taal. He squinted, reading:

This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … Nothing valued is here .

What is here is dangerous and repulsive. This message is a warning about danger .

… And more of the same. Taal looked up. “The warning written on these stones; it is scribed in many tongues,” he said.

“For all the good it did,” replied Malyanna. “The Traitor fled when this pocket plane lurched back into conjunction with Sildeyuir, and Sildeyuir with Faerie. But with the Spellplague raging he obviously didn’t get far, for he never returned again to the Spire of Winter’s Peace …”

Malyanna studied the collapsed gate a moment longer, then turned and ascended the slope. She and Taal picked a path between tumbled stones that looked as if they had extruded from the earth as slender rocky splinters, only to fall and shatter on the hillside.

Tamur bounded ahead, sniffing at every surface.

The summit resolved in the gloom as they drew closer. On it grew a single tree, larger than any tree Taal had ever before seen-and he’d seen his share of woody giants. But the one on the hilltop was bare of leaf. Its many branches clenched into a tight fistlike cyst.

“A Forest Monarch!” said Malyanna, her voice surprised.

“A dead one, if you mean the tree,” said Taal. “See-it’s petrified.”

“So it is.”

They approached until they stood beneath the mineralized growth. It was even larger than Taal had first surmised. Its trunk was easily more than a hundred feet in diameter!

“Forest Monarchs,” said Malyanna, her voice soft, “were primeval trees. But they were more than mere plants; they were emblems of the Feywild itself, vigorous beyond measure, and vessels of pure life force.”

“You sound melancholy,” Taal said. Was the eladrin actually showing sentiment?

“I grew up on stories of the Forest Monarchs,” she said. “Like the Golden Tree of Dawn that clutched the sun in its boughs and whose leaves split the light into creation’s prism …”

“Sounds beautiful,” he replied.

“Yes …”

She shrugged and shook her head. “But that was before I found the strength the Far Manifold offers,” she said. Her face lost the softness of reminiscence. Had it been there at all?

The great dog brushed her flank, then bounded away back down the slope, its nose to the ground. Taal doubted it’d flush any game in the dead and decaying pocket world.

Malyanna reached for the tree. Before her fingers could touch it, a spark of cerulean fire leaped the distance, like static discharge. She cried out as a wave of ice materialized from the air and pushed her away from the tree’s rigid surface.

Taal dropped into his ready stance, his oath tugging him to protect the Lady of Winter’s Peace. But how could he defend her from a petrified tree?

Malyanna examined her hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. The ice shield she’d reflexively conjured steamed away. “Residual charge of Keeper warding fire,” she said. “This Monarch was an embodiment of it, most likely … but its energies are spent.”

“Spent on what?” Taal said.

“Unless I miss my guess, capturing that which attempted to flee Stardeep,” she replied.

They traced the periphery of the gnarled tree until they came to a place where the contorted, squeezed branches offered a gap wide enough to serve as passage inward, toward the heart of the cyst the tree clutched.

Malyanna bowed her head and muttered a few words whose meaning evaded Taal’s understanding like fish darting away from questing hands. When she finished, she stood straighter and nodded at him.

He preceded her into the opening. The fissure tapered, constricting more and more as he went. Finally he was forced to crawl. The stone-hard bark abraded his knees.

The faintest glimmer of blue light danced somewhere ahead. It was enough for Taal to see that the gap narrowed even further. Dropping to his stomach, he squirmed forward. He was relieved to finally emerge into a larger space.

The curling branches of the petrified Monarch formed a cathedral-like cavity of stone: the heart of the cyst. A figure hung above Taal, caught at the apex of the cavity. It was the source of the blue light. A male elf or perhaps an eladrin … at least from the waist up. A forest of sinuous tentacles splayed from where the man’s hips should have been. Most were dozens of feet long. Grasping tree branches and reaching tentacles were an interwoven mess. He could well imagine how the Monarch’s woody limbs had snatched the horror out of the air and wrapped it within the tree’s confining embrace.

And, then, apparently, it had sacrificed its own life by petrifying itself and its captive, ensuring the Traitor would never break the trust of the Keepers.

Malyanna squirmed into the cyst. Her eyes fastened on the hybrid horror held above them.

“Poor Carnis,” she said.

“It’s really him?” Taal asked.

“After all these years, I never thought to see him again.”

“Do … you mean to free him?”

“No!” she said, laughing. “He had his time, and failed. Besides, look at him. He allowed the influence to have its way with him, warping his body in return for easy power. Do not doubt that his mind was similarly twisted. Moreover, he is dead.”

“You could bring him back, in some form, if you wanted,” Taal said, knowing he was baiting her, but his oath allowed him that much.

“From this,” she said, waving her hands to encompass the entirety of the stone cyst, “there is no coming back.”

“Then what use was our trip to this dead-end dimension?” asked Taal.

“Carnis’s spirit may be fled or shattered, but his remains can still be persuaded to give up his secrets.”

“What shall I do?”

“Join Tamur outside and defend the Monarch’s corpse.”

Before he could ask from what, his totem growled. Something from the world had followed them.