Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Shade huffed once more.

Wynn frowned, turning forward again. Perhaps it was a good thing, but right now it was just unsettling.

“Not only domiciles,” Chane added, and pointed upward over Wynn’s shoulder. “That is a shop of some kind.”

There was no sign of a city or any such large settlement ahead, but they must have reached its outskirts. Even Ore-Locks craned his head back in astonishment.

Wynn’s eyes adjusted to those glowing points of light spread upward into the great trees’ heights. The thickest branches were the size of normal tree trunks. A complex system of walkways stretched between various levels.

People went about their ways in early nightfall. Tall elves stood on or walked the paths, stairs, and landings, circumventing structures mounted around the trunks or perched out on the more massive branches. Of those few that Wynn could make out passing near glimmering lanterns of glass and pale metals, everyone moved without a care for the heights.

“Lunacy,” Ore-Locks said. “One’s feet should remain upon the solid earth, as intended.”

Wynn wrinkled her small nose, remembering what he’d called the patroller during the confrontation.

“Don’t you ever again call one of them yiannû-billê —‘bush baby’ again,” she told him softly.

“Heat of the moment,” he replied under his breath.

Dwarves were a curious and accepting people. Wynn had never expected to travel with one who might be a bigot. It was one more thing that separated him from his kind—and all the more offensive considering his disguise. He was still attired like a shirvêsh of Feather-Tongue, who was a wise and worldly traveler spoken of in dwarven sacred myths and legends.

Chane leaned past Wynn’s side. She watched his gaze roam the heights in fascination. While he sometimes expressed arrogant attitudes and he could be coldly judgmental, new experiences always riveted him. If Chane hadn’t been forced into death and beyond it, he would’ve become a true scholar, no doubt.

Homes and small-to-medium structures blended into the leafy upper reaches, making it difficult to distinguish where one ended and another began. All were made of plank wood, though Wynn thought some roofs might be covered in cultivated moss. The branches of these huge spruces and oaks and gargantuan maples dwarfed the trees she’d seen along the journey.

One wavering light, low to the ground, caught Wynn’s eye. Not all of the settlement was built above.

Those lower structures were all dark but for a few lanterns somehow suspended along the paths between them. Perhaps these were for the more trade-and craft-related pursuits. How had all this come to be? Why did Lhoin’na choose these strange, high settlements, as opposed to the an’Cróans’ wilder enclaves upon the earth and their homes inside of living trees?

Shade whined, nosing into Wynn’s side. Wynn reached back, stroking the dog’s cheek.

Sudden memories of the an’Cróans’ wild Elven Territories rose in Wynn’s head—but they were not her own memories. The Lhoin’na forest must seem different to Shade, and Wynn hoped it didn’t make the young majay-hì too homesick.

“Althahk ... veasg’âr-äilleach!”

The patrol leader slowed his horse at the call of his name. Wynn drew in the reins as she searched the heights for the greeting’s source. A tall elf stood at a walkway railing ornamented with swirls and ovals of trained, leafy vines. It was hard to make him out, but a nearby lantern sent white and silver shimmers through his long, unbound hair.

“And fair evening to you, Counselor,” Althahk returned in their tongue.

“What brings you in so late, Commander?” the counselor asked. “And why do the Shé’ ith escort visitors to ...”

Wynn was too busy with that one unfathomable word to wonder about the long pause. That term wasn’t in the Elvish she knew or the older dialect of the an’Cróan. The root shéth meant “quietude” or “tranquillity,” sometimes “serenity.” Perhaps what she’d heard was something older still.

“The old one is looking at us,” Chane whispered from behind.

“It is odd, indeed,” Althahk answered back, and turned a stern eye on Wynn.

No, not at her, but at Shade.

“I will speak with you tomorrow,” the elder answered back.

By the time Wynn looked up, he was gone. Althahk clicked his tongue, and his horse moved on. Flicking the reins, Wynn guided the wagon onward.

In breaks between settlements, the forest’s guardian trees overwhelmed any hint of civilization. Glimpses of dwellings soon came more often, to the point where long, extended walkways began joining one to the next. Buildings among the massive trunks multiplied upon the forest floor, until Wynn couldn’t follow the pattern of them in the darkness, even by the wispy lantern lights along paths above or below.

The wagon rounded a gradual bend where the darkness appeared to break beyond the trees.

A sea of light struck Wynn as Althahk turned a final sharp bend. Her eyes popped as the group rolled through a living arch of two trees grown together high above.

Wynn was still blinking at spots of glare when a’Ghràihlôn’na—Blessed of the Woods—filled her whole view.

Sau’ilahk materialized upon the road a stone’s throw from the massive forest’s edge. He had already backtracked to find the caravan along another route; Wynn was no longer with it. Alone in the full night, he knew that she had crossed into those ancient trees and was on her way to the Lhoin’na sages.

Sau’ilahk could not follow, but what of Chane?

The road was the only way the wagon could have passed. If Chane had been left behind, he would be waiting here. Or had he gone with her somehow?

Impossible—unless there was more to that strange little ring.

Sau’ilahk wavered, staring about the grassy plain. It was a bitter place he had heard of only in his living days. So much had begun and ended here. An age ago, a line had been drawn, marked by where autumn’s dead grass met the ever-living green of that forest. The war’s waves of victory had broken here. But that wasn’t what had ended the war.

It had been as if Beloved had simply given in.

The time of victory would come again, and next time, the Children would not lead. Sau’ilahk would regain youth and beauty, awe and glory. He alone would dominate Beloved’s forces. Their worship would feed him more than all of the life he had consumed in his altered existence.

But what of Wynn Hygeorht? What did she seek in this place? Where was an orb that would free him? Where was lost Bäalâle Seatt?

That he depended on this whelp of a sage, an immature infidel, ate at him. He was not foolish enough to pass the tree line and would have to follow her from afar once more. A servitor of Air or Earth would not serve his needs this time. He needed an emissary of consciousness connected to his own.

He needed eyes as well as ears, and perhaps more.

Again, Sau’ilahk blocked out the world, focusing inward, and then looked down. Within his thoughts, he stroked a glowing circle for Spirit upon the road’s packed dirt. Within that came the square for Earth. Smaller still came another circle for Spirit’s physical Aspect as Tree. Between the lines of these shapes, he stroked the glowing sigils with his thoughts.

Spirit to the Aspect of Tree, Tree to the essence of Spirit, and born of the Earth.

His energies bled into the pattern on the road that only he saw.

Sau’ilahk’s form thinned to transparent in weariness, and then a shaft of wood cracked the dirt at the pattern’s center.

It jutted upward as if an overly thickened branch suddenly sprouted there. That short, bark-covered limb bent over, far suppler than it appeared. Along its length, six tinier limbs sprouted to lift its body and rip itself from the road. Turning around, a small knot of ochre root tendrils twitched around its base.