Michael Mathias - The Sword and the Dragon

Before long, he came to a junction. The tunnel he was in ended, and he could either go left or right. A few dozen yards down the right hand tunnel, a man sat, huddled with his head between his knees, and his back against the trunk of one of the trees that lined the way.

Cautiously, Hyden walk toward the man, while Talon flew further down the right hand passage to explore it. Hyden called out, but there was no response. When he moved closer, Hyden got a strange feeling in his gut. He nudged the man’s shoulder with his boot, and wasn’t too surprised when the skeleton fell over, with a rattling thrump of dusty bones.

Through Talon’s eyes, he saw that the right and left hand tunnels were identical mirror images of each other. Each went on straight for a ways, than ended in a T-junction, just like the first tunnel had. He decided that he would turn right at each intersection he came to, that way he could find his way back to the skeleton, by making left hand turns on his way back. To his great surprise though, when he turned his second right, the skeleton was there ahead of him, laid over exactly as his boot had left it.

Hyden pondered this for a while, and then sent Talon back to the first junction. When the bird flew left at the corner, there he was, coming right back at Hyden, again from the right hand corner of the other end of the passage. This was unexpected, and confusing. Hyden decided to go left then. There was no surprise when he made his second left hand turn, and saw the toppled skeleton laying there ahead of him. Talon came flapping down, landed on his shoulder, let out a frustrated squawk, and then started preening himself, while Hyden pondered their dilemma further.

While he was standing there, with his chin in his hand, he heard a chirping giggle from the trees nearby. Again, he heard the sound. He looked around and spotted a couple of tree squirrels peeking over a root at the edge of the thorny wall. A few other squirrels scampered along the limbs as they went about their business, but they didn’t seem to notice him. The two squirrels by the tree trunk though, were watching him intently, and giggling.

“You think it’s funny, then?” Hyden asked lightheartedly. He didn’t expect a response, and was shocked when he heard the squirrels plainly speaking to each other. Sure, he had communicated with animals, but it wasn’t a very verbal sort of communication. This was something altogether different. The squirrels were articulate.

“Can he hear us?” one squirrel asked the other.

“He can, I think!” the other replied.

“That’s far better than most that come here.”

“Is there a way beyond this, this…” Hyden indicated the tree-formed passage, but didn’t know what to call it. “…beyond this, this loop?”

“My, my, my, this one might just do,” a squirrel passing by on a limb overhead said to the others.

“He didn’t ask for a way out!” one of the squirrels by the root nodded reverently. “He asked for a way forward. That’s a start.”

“He asked for a way beyond, is what he did,” the squirrel beside him corrected. “A wise word ‘beyond.’ A wise question to ask, not a foolish one.”

“I’m here!” Hyden snapped. “You talk about me as if I’m not, or as if I couldn’t hear you. You’re awfully rude squirrels. You should know that I have friends that love to eat squirrels.” The last was said lightly, but the possible threat caught the little creatures’ full attention.

“Your friends may eat careless squirrels,” one of them replied, indignantly. “But we’re not careless.”

“Not careless at all,” the other added.

“Careless or not, it’s rude to talk about someone as if they weren’t there,” Hyden scolded. “Now that you’re talking to me, instead of about me, would you please answer my question?”

“No,” one of the squirrels answered simply. “You already know the answer to the question that you asked.”

“Use your head, and ask the proper question,” the other one told him. “We will only answer one.”

Hyden made a face at the squirrels, because he knew they were correct. Of course, there was a way out of the loop. The right question became obvious then, but Hyden thought it through before asking it.

“What is the way to get beyond this place?”

“Follow your heart!” a squirrel giggled from the trees.

“Follow your familiar!” another added.

The two squirrels, by the root, started bounding away, into the thorny wall. Just before they were out of earshot, one of them turned, and said, “Try going both ways, at the same time, and looking through all of your eyes at once.”

It took several attempts, and as much concentration as it did for him to climb the nesting cliff of the hawklings, for him to be able to see through Talon’s eyes with his own eyes open, but he finally managed it. It was even harder, to keep Talon moving through the left-hand tunnel in a restrained hover that matched the speed of his jog through the right-hand side. When it finally happened, when four eyes looked together down both corridors at once, it all became clearer. When he turned left, just as Talon turned right at the T-junction, they met in the middle, and the forested passages shimmered away. The trees were replaced by a long torch-lit hallway. At the end of the featureless passage, was a single door.

Beyond the door there was an empty room. As before, when Hyden closed the door behind him, the room shifted. The door vanished, and he found himself somewhere, that was as beautiful, as it was terrifying. Talon, who was holding a steady hover, over and just behind his head, cooed out a sigh of relief at seeing the open sky overhead.

They were standing on a slow, rolling plain of fertile green, an emerald sea of turf, which stretched as far as the eye, or eyes, in this case, could see. Right behind where he stood, was a single, monstrous old oak. Ten men might not have been able to put their outstretched arms together to form a ring around it. Littered among the leaves and deadfall at its base, were the bones of a score or more men. Some were scattered about, some were in neat little piles. Others were still connected at the joints, and sitting there, in half rotted clothes, with packs and pouches strapped to their bodies. A few empty water skins, a handful of books, and even a sword or two, lay among them in various degrees of weathered decay.

Suddenly, movement caught his eye. A huge, dark knothole in the tree trunk had shifted, he was sure of it. Cautiously, he took a few steps back. Talon landed on a shoulder, and sunk his claws firmly, and reassuringly, into Hyden’s muscle. A breeze cooled his skin, and the leaves rustled about him.

It was warm, probably hot, beyond the shade the tree provided. He was about to send Talon off to explore the lay of the land, when the knothole moved again. There was no mistaking it this time. The knot closed, and puckered, like a mouth, and then in a voice as deep as the ancient tree’s roots, it spoke. The rhyming riddle came out slowly and rhythmically.

“A guide will come, if your heart’s been true, and lead you to a door of mine.

Ponder this, while you wait, if you want to go inside;

A pyramid, a patterned knock, made up of only ten.

You must start from the bottom; if you do I’ll let you in.”

After the voice stopped, Hyden spoke the words to himself, over and over again. It was hard to do, considering the shock, and bewilderment he was feeling after being spoken to by a tree. He didn’t dare forget the words though. They made little sense to him now, but he would think about the meaning later. At the moment, all he wanted to do was commit the riddle to memory. By the look of the others waiting, he figured he might have plenty of time to sort it out.