She restored her kit and set out, climbing over and scurrying beneath the deadfalls that lay like repeated hedgerows across her path. There were other puddles and these she used to float the bit of magic, the intelligent stone her father had given to her. Thus she renewed her direction and felt the fog of despair fall away. In time and events unknown to this scribe, but perhaps recorded by others, she escaped the drear boughs of Myrcwudu, and came again to travel the footpath of this tale.
There Osley faltered. “This place, Myrcwudu, was the black heart of it all. The pathless place. The trap that sets us to turn on ourselves and cycle away our days in false reckonings and petty errands. I’m worried, Cadence. I’m also famished. I feel like I’ve been stuck in there with her and can’t get out.”
Cadence smiled. “I’m not worried. She kept her head and she got out. So will we. Let’s start with that fuel.” She called room service and ordered breakfast and coffee. After eating, Osley gathered steam, feverishly jotting words. Pages of scratches later, he handed her three sheets and said. “Get this….”
Cadence read the first one:
Freed from the suffocating eaves of Myrcwudu, Ara was soon in sunlight, crossing a grassy plain leading to a series of hills. She felt exposed and watched, and so she moved as swiftly as possible.
Hafoc had recovered well. First a few feet, then a dozen yards, then a stone’s throw it flew. At the beginning it followed in the direction she was heading, but now it seemed to provide guidance when she was uncertain of the path. It would wheel upward, surveying the land and then alight within her sight.
Watching it float almost motionless on an updraft and then drop out of sight, she guessed that a precipice lay ahead. She passed dual ranks of stones propped and unturned by long ago labors. They were like guiding fingers forming a massive V across the plain. Suddenly, where the V closed to a narrow opening, the ground dropped away in a breathtaking sheer of several hundred feet, ending in a boulder-strewn streambed. The boulders were covered with a latticework of what looked like thousands of giant bones.
So steep and abrupt was the cliff that it took her an hour to pick her way to the bottom. There she stood, ant-like, surveying the confused wilderness of giant, white bone. The skeletons were all of the same kind, all immense beyond her experience, diminishing even the great-horned bison of the North. There were tusks exceeding a dozen arm-spans of men in length, and rib cages through which teams of horses could pass three abreast.
A jagged lens of ice protruded from a seep at the shaded foot of the cliff. From it protruded a mass of wrinkled hide with long tufts of orange-red hair.
A clearing among smaller bone fragments and flint shards told her of an ancient butchery preserved as the stream wandered off to the other side of the canyon. Sitting atop a pile of boulders like a lost and imperial edifice, presided a huge skull. Its long curving tusks would easily encompass a village feasting table fully laden and seated.
After a while, the smell from the ice lens and the lingering sense of disaster left her uneasy. The hawk departed straight south and she followed.
“Don’t stop reading, cause I’m on a roll now. Look at this!” He thrust several more pages at her.
Ara traveled swiftly now, beneath a growing hunter’s moon. It was in the desolate foothills, on a path lost to the memory of even the Woodsmen, that she found the lost wives.
She had traversed Knarch, the Long Downs, and passed into a land of scrub and sinkholes etched unto the back of a great limestone karsk. There she arrived at the first full knees of the Goat Mountains. Above the tree line was a defile no wider than a halfling’s shoulders. Through this she squeezed and squirmed, sometimes looking up to a thin slice of skylight blue. At length, she entered a great rift valley. Oriented to the south, it opened up into a bowl of light, sheltered from the storms and north winds, and fed by cascading streams plummeting from surrounding cliffs. At its far end, it narrowed again but remained open, leading to a plain obscured from her sight by copses of trees.
As the sun warmed the air, the sea-hawk circled above her and rested on a cliff. Ara fell asleep without realizing it.
Awakening with a start, she was encircled by them. They were tree-like, but of varieties more supple and wan than their stiff and thick-barked mates, the Treoherd.
“Who are you, intruder?” She heard this not with her ears, but from a sensation that traveled up her arm where a tendril grasped it. The tendril led to a branch that was part of one of the tree-like beings.
“I know you!” said Ara. “I have heard tales of how they were separated from you, from themselves really. They have been searching for you for centuries too many to count.”
The creatures stood still for the longest time. Ara began to feel foolish, she had been talking to the air. Then the tendril coiled one more loop and the meaning rushed into her.
“Yes. We came here long ago, beyond and before the time of the many races of mortals that walk on two feet and learned to burn and hack. Before animals began their endless procession across the face of the world, we were there. In those elder days, our kind, plants that grow on dry land, migrated by their generations to fill all these places-above-water. This is our earliest memory. It was our purpose it seemed, for we were never told another. At least, it was the purpose we became the most comfortable with. We furthered this march of green inland from shores so ancient that even we could no longer recognize them. “But that is not how we ended here, in this valley of imprisonment.”
“Why don’t you leave? Nothing kept me from getting here.”
“Be cautious with your bravery, small one. There are grim perils here.” The warning passed through Ara with a shudder and she understood the depth of terror that kept the lost wives of the Treoherd within the valley.
“There yet lives but one Worm known to the world outside this valley. Grimmer and more terrible than all others. His lair is unseen by any that walk on two legs. He is hidden in perpetual fog. He sags forth to tear and rend.
The lands beyond this valley, bare and bleak, stripped of trees for a thrice-score of furlongs, are his domain. But that is not all.”
Ara shivered in the dawn chill. She felt a fear, throbbing through these now clutching tendrils, limbs that had lasted a thousand years.
“It has allies, a plague of locust-like hornets, red-striped and each the size of a sparrow. They bite and chew as well as sting with a bitter venom. They ensure all is ruined. Though a multitude, they are as one. They live as a single being even with the Worm. They fly in a great black cloud that turns and wheels as if guided by a single instinct. They are his eyes and outliers. Worst of all, they confuse and disable his victims by their constant buzzing and stinging. For their reward, they are his scavengers. Perhaps we are wrong in this. Perhaps it is they that control the Worm as their own instrument.”
“But where does it live?” Ara spoke, but somehow felt that she could now pass this thought back through her body.
“Where? Once, a great army of men sought the answer. They marched into these lands. Marauders. Strong and well armed with the greatest machines of death. They came in search of his lair and treasure. They were wise in their plans. The plague of hornets they lured to a herd of bison, which they drove before them. The wheeling multitude came to test and harass, and stayed a moment to feed. That was their undoing, for the Men had poisoned the carcasses. The insects died with their jaws full of torn flesh, and others fell from the sky as they escaped in panic, realizing this trickery. A scant remnant of the dark cloud blew away eastward, against the wind.”
“And so the men found the Worm?” Ara questioned.
“No. The Worm found them. The next night, camped near the shore of the Flat Sea, a dense fog rolled into their camp. It extinguished their campfires. The handful of survivors who fled into the high war engines where they had the vantage of strong timbers and a view unto the camp below, later described the encounter to us:
“‘The Worm came in the stillest moment of the night, and was everywhere at once. His tail and taloned wings, and the great sail on his back we saw above the white shroud. The cries of our comrades and the clank and hew of their swords we did hear, but only for a moment. Then all was still. The night and the fog receded in equal stealth, until the dawn saw the bitter remnants of a massacre. Weapons and bodies were strewn in great confusion. A trail of blood and discarded parts of men, bisected by the groove of a great, lazy tail, led unto the sea. We wept at this sight and fled in panic back toward the Misty Wood. The insects, though fewer in number, harassed us and picked at one warrior at a time until he fell. Then they would select another. Five of a force of two thousand did survive. The rest sleep the sleep of the sword, and their spirits float in the slop and gore of this evil thing.’
“Thus do we believe that this thing abides beneath the salty face of the Flat Sea.”
