Thomas Reid - The Fractured Sky

Tauran had commanded him to flee, and flee he would.

And I won't stop until I get well away from him. For good.

The cambion reached into his tunic and fumbled free a bit of gauzy fabric wrapped around a tiny glass tube sealed with wax. Kaanyr didn't waste time with the seal. He simply snapped the tube in half, freeing the smoke that had been trapped inside. As the two arcane components merged together, he swirled the whole thing around himself.

Kaanyr transformed, becoming insubstantial. He felt odd, disembodied, but he had experienced such before and ignored the sensations. He could see in every direction at once, all around, above and below. He watched the hound archons struggle in vain to see where he had gone, and he wanted to laugh, but he had no voice.

Vhok continued to rise into the air, sliding through the foliage of the strange, twisted, angled trees. He could not travel very fast, but he did not care. He was virtually invisible, particularly with the swirling mists all around, and every moment that he slipped farther away from the fighting made him feel safer, more at ease.

When he was well above the tree tops, Kaanyr searched for some landmark, a direction by which he could navigate. He wasn't sure where he wanted to go, but he wanted to disappear silently and completely from Tauran's grasp forever.

He initially considered the World Tree. It was nearby and it offered so many possibilities. But that was where Tauran had intended to go, and Kaanyr did not want to risk a reunion with the angel.

No, he decided, I think another direction entirely is in order.

He had just begun drifting toward the nearest edge of the great, forested island-intent on reaching its underside to hide-when he saw two angels rise from the trees and fly in his direction. Like Tauran and Micus, they were astral devas, and it was clear to Kaanyr that they were homing in on him.

Damnation, he thought.

Before the cambion could react, one of the angels gestured at him, and his spell of gaseousness dissipated. In corporeal form once more, Kaanyr plummeted. He got his wits about him in time to invoke his levitating ability before he crashed into the canopy below.

Apparently, that was precisely what the two angels expected him to do, because in the next instant, he heard the second one speak a single word. It echoed in the cambion's mind like a thunderbolt.

Everything went black.

Myshik and Kashada followed close behind Zasian as they moved along the passage between planes. The shadow-mystic's footfalls, already faint, became lost amid the clomping of Myshik's boots.

The walls of the passage remained close at hand on either side of the trio, and Zasian imagined he could have forgone the light and felt his way easily enough. The tunnel twisted and turned occasionally, ascending at times and dipping sharply at others. Once, it grew so narrow that Myshik was forced to slip free from his breastplate to squeeze through.

"What catacomb do you lead us to?" he grumbled as he tugged his armor back on. "You said nothing of tight spaces before."

"We will be free of this confined space soon enough, Morueme," Zasian replied.

As soon as Myshik had donned his armor, they resumed their travels. As if to prove the priest a prophet, they rounded a bend and discovered light seeping from the next turn ahead. Zasian quickened his pace and reached the opening of the tunnel. Stepping free of it, he took in the surroundings.

Much like at the other end, the trio stood within a narrow gorge of rich, dark wood rising up to either side of them. The trail continued out of sight ahead. Also similar to before, gray mist filled the air, casting a pall over the place. Unlike the moist air that hung within the House of the Triad, though, the mist was much more silvery.

Eventually the canyon walls began to drop away from the sides, until at last the priest and his companions stood upon what appeared to be a great ridge of the same woody landscape. Much of the ground was bare, but in spots, the same large, angled trees jutted from it. Lush green tangles of some sort of thick bracken covered other large stretches.

The ridge did not rise from some larger plain, however. Instead, it just fell away to either side, its edges seeming to grow steeper as it faded from view, making the whole thing round, like some gargantuan barrel. The crown of the ridge ran off both ahead of and behind them into the distance, eventually fading from sight into the pervasive silvery light. The narrow gorge from which they had ascended appeared as a crack in the surface behind them.

Zasian halted and took it in for a moment. He scanned the horizon in every direction, as far as he could see. I'm actually standing here, he thought, pleased. I'm actually standing on the World Tree. It is grander than even I could have imagined.

"What is this place?" Myshik asked, peering around in wonder.

"The World Tree," Zasian answered. "Or rather, a single branch of it."

"Where does it lead?" the half-dragon asked. "Why are we here?"

Zasian glanced at his companion, irked. Can't you even appreciate the grandeur of this place? Do you not grasp what a monumental moment this is? He shook his head in disgust. "It leads everywhere," the priest explained with a sigh. "And we are following it to get… elsewhere." He stared at the hobgoblin with a steady gaze, as if to say, Do you really wish to keep testing my patience?

Myshik returned the stare with displeasure, but he didn't press the issue further. Instead he asked, "Which way do we go?"

Zasian studied each direction before deciding on the path leading back alongside the crack. It seemed to him that the ridge grew larger in that direction, whereas the route in front of them became the slightest bit narrower. Without a word, he set out along that path.

The trio walked for some time, passing numerous thick, angled tree trunks. Zasian recognized them as other, smaller branches jutting from the larger one upon which they strolled. In some places, great fanlike expanses of green material as large as a ship's sails clung to them.

Ah, the priest realized, leaves. Magnificent, monumental leaves. Extraordinary!

They skirted large patches of undergrowth, and eventually, he recognized the dense, tangled vines as oversized clumps of moss.

Before long, unease replaced Zasian's elation. For a while, he thought it was simply a wariness of the unfamiliar place, or an expectation of encountering some hostile denizen of the tree, but eventually he knew it was something else entirely.

No wind blew and no sound reached the trio other than their own footsteps. The odd, silvery surroundings were utterly devoid of any noise, any hint of life.

I guess I keep thinking I should hear birds singing and breezes blowing through the leaves, he decided. On the other hand, he added wryly, I don't really think I want to see the bird that nests in this tree. Stifling the chuckle at his own grim joke, Zasian refocused his attention on the trail, the offshooting branches, and the moss. Many things could hide in those places, waiting to spring out and attack them.

The trio walked on in utter silence. The landscape never changed, although it was very clear to Zasian that the thickness of the branch upon which they hiked had grown considerably since they had set out. That observation convinced him that he had chosen the right way, and that they were, indeed, headed toward the trunk.

"Look," Myshik said, and Zasian glanced back at the half-dragon to see him pointing off into the distance, ahead and to one side.

Zasian peered into the silvery murk and spotted what the hobgoblin had noticed. A second great branch was just beginning to become visible, running at an angle and from a slightly higher plane such that it would most likely join with their own branch within a few more moments of walking.