Mark Anthony - Kindred Spirits

“Clearly a creature with a long tail,” Flint mused, never loosening his grip on his battle-axe and constantly searching the undergrowth with sharp eyes. “Built like a lizard. But in woodlands?”

He felt his eyes drift out of focus as he moved slowly in a circle. The bur oak, the boulder, another oak, and a dozen aspens went by in a blur.

“A woodland lizard makes little sense,” he reflected, gaze coming to rest on a knobby oak about twenty feet away. As he pondered, his vision eased back into focus.

Another smear of blood was daubed on a piece of wood jutting out halfway up the tree trunk. Above that, the trunk…

… was looking back at him. And the eyes were intelligent.

Flint felt the tylor’s razor-sharp jaws snap past his head as he hurtled across the clearing and into the underbrush. He dived to the wet earth and heard, rather than saw, Fleetfoot thunder by. He scrambled up again, beard clotted with clay, and looked frantically about for the monster. What in Reorx’s forge was that thing? he thought.

The creature, temporarily caught between an oak tree and a spruce, lunged again, snapped the evergreen, and pounded across the clearing.

It came right at Flint, who took off running with a speed that would have stunned his slower-moving dwarven relatives. After fifty paces or so, he caught up with Fleetfoot, who, being larger, couldn’t slip through the trees as quickly as Flint could. However, the mule was stronger than the dwarf, so the race appeared to be neck and neck. Behind them, the tylor pushed trees aside in its bloodlust, and roared. The dwarf and mule crashed through underbrush until Flint no longer had any idea where he was.

“Reorx!” he gasped as he dashed into another clearing, the mule a half-pace behind. In the center of the opening stood a huge dead oak-so large that it would have taken six or seven men to encircle it with their arms. One side showed a shadow-no, a depression in the trunk.

No, an opening. The tree was hollow.

As the tylor crashed out of the woods behind Flint, the dwarf bolted into the opening in the tree. The mule followed close on his heels.

“Fleetfoot!” the dwarf protested as the smelly mule, lathered with sweat, pressed against him in the dark interior of the oak. Flint turned toward the gap in the trunk, half-thinking to shove the mule back through it.

But the opening was gone. Outside, the tylor roared and screeched in protest, pounding against the tree again and again. Then it began to chant magic words.

Flint found himself standing in utter darkness, short arms flung around the neck of a trembling mule. At least he thought it was Fleetfoot who was trembling.

“God’s thunder,” he muttered. “Now what?”

He groped along Fleetfoot’s back to the saddlepack and drew out flint and steel. Moments later, as the trunk continued to reverberate with the sound of magical chanting and the force of the tylor’s blows, Flint, groping, found a stick on the pine needle-littered floor of the tree and lit it. Fleet-foot cuddled ever closer to the dwarf, who swatted her aside with an irritable hand.

“Move over, stupid,” he hissed. Flint held up the glowing chunk of wood and examined the bottom of the trunk. There was a thin layer of soil, which he poked a stubby finger into-and felt wood.

That would not seem surprising in a hollow tree, except that his fingers also felt something carved into that wood.

Nudging Fleetfoot aside again, Flint brushed aside the rich soil until the carving stood exposed.

“Reorx’s hammer!” he breathed. “A rune!” He leaned closer, heedless of the torch, which suddenly spat out a cinder, smack into the dry pine needles. The needles flared up in a blaze, which soon spread in a circle to the wooden floor of the trunk. The mule stood and trembled in a cylinder of flame, disregarding Flint’s attempts to haul her out of the blaze.

Flint was never sure what happened next. One moment he was tugging at the halter of a stalled mule, and the next moment he was standing in a huge oaken chamber, seemingly below where he’d been just a second before.

There was no sound in the chamber but the harried breathing of a hysterical pack mule and an only slightly calmer dwarf. He held up his makeshift light. A regiment could have fit comfortably in the spherical chamber.

“By the gods, we’re in the heart of the oak!” he told the mule, who appeared unimpressed. The dwarf stooped and poked at the floor with his short sword. “This tree is still alive.” He stood erect again and gazed around the chamber.

Firelight flickered off coppery walls of living wood, leaving knots and burls in shadow but exposing the smoother, rounded portions of the tree’s interior. Several passages appeared to open onto the chamber, much like enormous hollow roots.

Off to his left, Fleetfoot sighed and nickered, seeming finally to be emerging from the panic of the moments before. The mule looked around, an expression of torpid curiosity rising in her eyes. Then the creature spied what appeared to be an enormous water trough in the very center of the oaken room, and, mulelike, she acted immediately upon her impulse. She shuffled over to the wooden trough and snuffled the edge with quivering nostrils.

Clear liquid filled the basin, which was about five feet across. On the surface floated a lily-a golden lily, with the leaves of a normal water flower but a blossom of pure gold. Flint reached forward and touched the blossom with a reverent finger. Something so beautiful could not be evil, he thought.

As he touched it, the blossom opened and the pure voice of an elven woman chimed through the chamber:

“Well met, well met, the portal is set, the star is silver, the sun is gold, cast your coin where you’re going, then take hold and touch the gold.”

Flint drew back, casting a suspicious glare around the room, as though expecting a beautiful elf with a voice like a bell to step out from one of the rootlike caverns. “What should I do?” he whispered and turned, as if for an answer, toward Fleetfoot, who gazed back dimwittedly. “Oh, of all the creatures to get trapped in a magic tree with,” the dwarf said disgustedly. “Well, it said to cast in a coin, that the portal is set. A portal’s a door,” he explained to Fleetfoot. “And it seems to me I see no real door hereabouts, so perhaps this flower will help us. As my mother would say, ‘A bird in the hand makes light work.’ “

Flint dug into a pocket and drew out the sum total of his winter’s wages from Solace: one gold coin. “Well, if I starve here, it doesn’t matter if I’m broke or not,” he reasoned, and tossed the coin into the honeylike fluid.

The liquid lit up as though a lamp burned deep within it, within the woody flesh of the oak. “Reorx!” Flint muttered, and grabbed Fleetfoot’s mane for support. The sweaty animal nuzzled him again, as if to encourage him. “Oh, all right,” he snapped, then continued more thoughtfully. “Maybe I should’ve tossed the coin into the flower; the lily seemed to be doing the speaking.” He touched one golden petal and…

… Warmth suddenly flooded the dwarf’s body, and, turning to the mule-whom Flint now realized he had never appreciated for the dear, devoted creature that she was-he saw a similar warm glow glisten in Fleetfoot’s limpid eyes. Flint would later swear that the music of a hundred lutes filled the cavern at that moment. The room faded around them. Flint saw the mule’s heavy eyelids begin to close, and he let his own drift shut as well.

Suddenly the room grew noisy, and Flint felt stone, not wood, beneath his feet. His eyes flew open.

He stood, daubed in mud, pine needles, and mule sweat, embracing the odoriferous Fleetfoot. Around him, and slightly below, stood the open-mouthed figures of Tanis, Miral, and several elven courtiers. Flint gazed around him.