Of Truth and Beasts

Her crystal cast eerie shadows in the wild underbrush, but something more stood out in the darkness overhead. She gazed upward, raising the crystal, and its light caught on tawny vines as thick as her arm. They wove their way through the high canopy, some of them paralleling the path ahead.

Wynn slowed, looking closer. The vines were smooth, perhaps glistening from moisture, and utterly unlike anything else in sight. She thought she saw grain in them, like polished wood.

—follow ... tree—

At those broken memory-words, Wynn looked down at Shade. How could she follow a tree? Which tree? But Shade pressed on, and Wynn stepped after her.

The farther they went, the more Wynn noticed those strange, tawny vines—and they grew broader, thicker. Smaller ones appeared here and there, perhaps branching off from the larger ones. All were woven into the upper reaches of the trees, and now ...

They didn’t glisten as much as they appeared to faintly glow, as if catching the radiance of the moon hidden from sight.

Wynn traced onward by their faint radiance as she followed Shade, until another light appeared ahead, beyond the forest’s tangle. Vines and branches, trunks and bearded moss were like black silhouettes between her and the nearing illumination.

Shade lunged ahead through a break at the path’s end.

Wynn couldn’t keep up without leaving Chane behind—which she would not do.

“Shade!” she called.

Within a few paces, Wynn stepped through the break and stopped.

She stood in a broad clearing wholly roofed by the forest and touched Chane’s hand upon her shoulder, looking up at him. His eyes opened before she turned back.

Wynn looked across the moss-covered earth to the immense glowing tree in the heart of First Glade.

* * *

Sau’ilahk watched the forest floor rush past through the eyes of his servitor. The experience was disorienting.

He had caught only glimpses of tree-bound settlements in his creation’s furious racing. It caught up to Wynn somewhere northeast of where he waited on the grassy plain. When thickening forest forced his servitor out of the trees and onto the path, Sau’ilahk caught only a glimpse of Wynn between Ore-Locks’s thick legs at the rear of their procession. Worse, his creation’s resistance grew the farther it went.

It began struggling to turn back.

Continue, he commanded, and he drew upon more of his consumed life and forced it onward.

Ahead, light rose beyond Ore-Locks’s broad, tromping boots. It filtered through the surrounding low underbrush, and Sau’ilahk had one clear glimpse of Wynn leading Chane into that lighted place.

Where was she headed, and why at this time of night?

The servitor began to writhe.

Sau’ilahk’s awareness spun with shattered sights and sound. Vertigo sickened him as he seized the servitor with all his will. A strange pressure built on him, as if he had suddenly become corporeal. He felt submerged as in mud, and forced down as it began to shift and push him back.

A sound—a feeling—like wood splitting apart stunned all thoughts in his mind.

Sau’ilahk lost all awareness as his world went pitch-black.

“Vanâkstí Bäynœ,” Ore-Locks whispered from behind Wynn, as she gazed across the broad clearing at the faint glow of a tree too large to be real. An unnerving sensation spread through her, almost as if Chârmun watched her in turn.

She had heard some an’Cróan refer to its offspring in the Elven Territories as an ash tree, but it didn’t look anything like an ash. Massive roots split the turf in mounds nearly as tall as she where they emerged from the trunk to burrow deep into the earth. Its great bulk, the size of a small tower, twisted and turned like a slow, serene dancing giant frozen in time. Though it was completely bare of bark, it hadn’t grayed like dead wood. The soft glow emanating from its glistening and pale tawny form lit up everything in the clearing with shimmers.

It was alive, as impossible as that seemed, and Wynn looked up into its huge branches above.

They spread and mingled into the forest’s canopy. These were the origins of the “vines” she had seen. She understood what Shade had meant by “follow the tree.” Shade had been following the limbs of Chârmun, as if the dog knew what they were. Now that Wynn looked upon Sanctuary, that tree, she questioned that overwhelming drive to see it this night.

What had she expected to find here? She only knew of this place from ancient memories Chap had stolen from Most Aged Father.