Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

“Does anyone around here have anything good to say about him?” Kithri asked.

With a shrug, the eladrin answered, “Perhaps. But you will find no one here who would trust Paelias with his life.”

They traded with the elves before leaving, and the elves cheated them mercilessly, reserving their most ruthless bargains for Lucan. He had his eye on a pair of boots since his had been badly torn in the bridge fighting. “Oh, these boots are powerful,” the elf cobbler said. “You will move silent as a cat and your enemies will think you are a shadow.”

Lucan bought them, cursing the cobbler and the entire race of elves as he paid the exorbitant price. “This is more than your share of what we’ve won thus far. It puts you in debt to us,” Biri-Daar observed.

“Oh, fear not,” Lucan said, putting on the new boots. “I’ll work for my keep.”

Five horses and tack for the long trek ahead of them, plus replacements for gear that had worn out or been broken on the trek so far-oil, torches, flint and steel, fresh waterskins-took all the gold they had. They rode away from the elf encampment feeling cheated and still feeling the cloud of Iriani’s death. Paelias, seeing them approach the road, spurred his mount to meet them. “Let me guess,” he said. “They told stories about me and then swindled you at market.”

“You were watching,” Kithri said.

“No,” Paelias said. “That is what they do. The elves of these woods don’t like me because I come from the Feywild and they don’t like the Feywild. The other eladrin don’t like me because I like this world a little too much. Probably you voted among yourselves that you don’t want me along. That’s fine. I will ride with you for a while. You can’t stop me unless you want to fight, and if we fight it will end badly for all of us. So. Let us ride. Yes?”

The five survivors of the battle on Iban Ja’s bridge looked at each other. “All right. Yes,” Biri-Daar said after a long moment. “You may ride with us for a while.”

They emerged from the elves’ forest the next morning. The country around them was still wooded, but more sparsely. Sunlight reached the ground there, and the air was heavy with the scents of alpine summer. “Now we’re on the Crow Road,” Lucan said. He pointed up to the trees that lined the road, and Remy saw them: crows standing sentinel, one in the top branches of each tree.

Mindful of the story he had heard about how Iban Ja’s bridge had gotten the way it was, he asked, “Are those crows or ravens?”

Lucan laughed. “Most people can’t tell the difference. These are crows. But you’ll see ravens along the way. You’ll see just about everything if you travel the Crow Road from one end to the other.”

“And what is at the other end?”

“Well, that depends. Either you get off before the end and work your way through the Lightless Marsh to… this sounds strange, but there’s a place where the Lightless Marsh isn’t lightless anymore. That’s the best way I can explain it. You get to that place, and you realize that you have somehow re-emerged into the world from wherever you were before. Which, if you’re traveling the Crow Road, is everywhere. And anywhere.”

“And if you don’t get off? If you see the Crow Road through all the way to its end?” Remy pressed.

“Well,” said Lucan slowly, “then you reach the Inverted Keep.”

“The Inverted Keep?” Paelias looked amazed. “Really? I understood that to be a legend.”

“Most people in the Dragondown would say the same about Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “But they are both real.”

“Most of them would also say it about the Crow Road,” Keverel added.

Paelias nodded and scanned the treetops for more crows. “True enough. Yet here we are.”

“Is it called the Crow Road because crows sit in the trees?” Remy asked. “They do that everywhere.”

“It’s called the Crow Road…” Kithri started, then stopped. She looked at Lucan.

“What?” he said.

“You tell the story,” Kithri said. “If you don’t, you’ll just complain about how one of us does it wrong.”

In the years before Arkhosia and Bael Turath put their stamp on the world, a great and now forgotten empire arose in the highlands between the Blackfall and Whitefall rivers. So long ago did it rise and fall that even most of its ruins are destroyed and gone, and its languages and arts, its deeds both villainous and glorious, are lost. All that remains of this vanished empire is the Crow Road.

Ancient records of Bael Turath and Arkhosia speak of it and describe it exactly as it appears to the adventurer of today: a road whose stones no frost can heave, which even buried under mudslides centuries old looks as if it was built yesterday when dug out again. It is a road to outlast the ages.

And on it the traveler will experience things that exist on no other road.

The story is that the nameless empire contained a great builder, who wished not only to build roads across the face of the mortal world, but between the planes and other realms as well. The folklore of this people-this is one of very few things known about them-held that crows and ravens had commerce with all of the realms. Therefore, after the builder surveyed his route but before he lay the first stone, he brewed a great enchantment using all of the magical might his empire’s wizards could muster… and he taught the crows how to understand human speech.

Then he learned their secrets. “I have given you a gift, crows,” he said. “Now in return you may tell me the secret of your ability to perceive and travel to all realms, whether astral or abyssal, elemental or fey.”

But the crows were crows, and would not tell. Have you ever tried to convince a crow to do anything? To this day, when you speak in the vicinity of a crow, or a raven, be careful. Say only what you would not fear to have repeated in front of your enemies.

Great grew the builder’s fury. Eventually he reasoned that if he could not get the answers from the crows while they were alive, he would learn it from what happened when they were dead. A bounty went out through the empire, and dead crows began arriving at the castle where the builder had his plans. At first they arrived a few at a time, brought by the bored children of local farmers. Then, when word spread that the builder paid the bounty he promised, crows started to arrive by the saddlebag-full, and then in sacks large enough that mules brought them to the builder’s door. He paid, and paid, and paid. Soon the crows had learned to stay away, but they had also learned why, and from that moment forward the crows were sworn enemies of the builder and of his road.

He had one more card yet to play, however. When he brought his crews out to the edge of the elves’ dark wood and dug the first stretch of the road’s bed, he laid the body of a crow under every tenth stone.

Now the crows hated the road and the builder, but the road was also a crows’ burial ground and they flocked to it because-though they might be larcenous, fickle, and cruel-crows honor their dead. The road stretched mile after mile, and every man or dwarf, halfling or elf-every mortal being that died building the road was buried under its stones. Walking it, the builder decreed, would be a voyage that paralleled the path between worlds.

Of course he was quite mad by this time, and grew madder as the road went on. The builder ordered exotic beasts of the Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos, the Feywild and the Abyss, all of the planes. He ordered them brought to the road and there he killed them and buried them beneath its freshly laid stones. And each of those deaths permeated the stones, and brought a bit of the other realms to the road.