As the oldest and most populous human city in Cerilia, Anuire was a vibrant center of trade, learning, and entertainment, a bastion of the arts and of political intrigue. Each time Aedan left the city, he always felt as if he were leaving civilization behind to venture out into the wilds of the outlying provinces, and he could not wait to return. This time, in particular, he was eager to get back … not only to Anuire, but back into the world of daylight.
As they rode through the cold and misty woods, he knew that they would soon be approaching the lands of Diemed, roughly sixty miles from the city of Anuire, which lay just across the River Maesil. The river marked the boundary between the provinces of Diemed and Avanil, where the capital was located, and Aedan was extremely anxious to see it’once again. He knew they would be there soon, and he kept trying to reassure himself with that knowledge, while at the same time forcing himself to remain constantly on the alert. He could not afford to become preoccupied. Not here.
They had journeyed this way several times before, and Aedan had learned, over his last few reluctant and uneasy expeditions to this foreboding, chilling land, to recognize some of the natural features of this most unnatural place. Even though some of it had
begun to look familiar here and there, other parts of it kept changing, and he knew he would never, as long as he lived, truly grow accustomed to the Shadow World.
As they rode their horses slowly through the thick, dark woods, past grotesquely twisted and misshapen trees choked with hanging moss that resembled the gray hair of old women, Aedan thought about the first time he had traveled through the Shadow World, eight years earlier. He hadn’t liked it then, and his tolerance for the world between the worlds had not increased with time. It was, after all, the world of his worst childhood nightmares and, unlike most things in dreams, in this case, the reality was worse.
Eight years ago, he and Michael had set off from Tuarhievel together with the elven mage Gylvain Aurealis and his sister, the elf warrior Sylvanna, on their return journey to Anuire. They had traveled with an escort of elven fighters and a halfling guide named Futhark. From the elven city, they had traveled on foot for two days through the Aelvinnwode until they reached the foothills of the Stonecrown Mountains to the south, near the lands of Markazor.
Even back then, Aedan had known that they were venturing into dangerous territory. Markazor had goblins living in its forest highlands, and the Stonecrown Mountains sheltered gnolls and ogres and desperate human renegades who had fled from persecution by the law in their own lands.
Yet, this was where Futhark had brought them, because for some unknown reason, as the halg had explained, the veil between the worlds was thinnest in those regions whert-chaos reigned over order.
Futhark was unable to explain why this was so.
Perhaps, he had said, it had something to do with the energies generated by negativity and evil. Perhaps those places where people had descended into depravity were brought closer to the Shadow World, which became more and more permeated with evil with each passing year.
Or perhaps, he theorized, the awnsheghlien rendered their domains temporally unstable by their massive expenditures of dark power and the profligate bloodtheft required to support it. The halfling didn’t know for certain, and Aedan found it difficult to follow even his theoreti_
cal explanations. All the halflings really knew, said Futhark, was that it was easier to cross over in certain areas than in others. And those
“certain areas” were definitely not places Aedan would have visited by choice.
This time, as in the previous few journeys they had made through the foreboding Shadow World, the place where they had crossed over was the Spiderfell, but that first time, returning from Tuarhievel, it was a little-known mountain pass in the Stonecrowns, near the border of Markazor. Aedan thought back to how it was then, and the memory seemed as sharp as ever. Even though it had occurred eight years ago, when he was just eighteen, it seemed as if it had been only yesterday.
Aedan had always wondered about the reputed ability of halflings to create dimension doors so the could shadowwalk. while he had dreaded actually crossing over into the world of his childhood nightmares, at the same time, he had been perversely curious to see how it was done.
As they had moved up the path leading to the mountain pass, Futhark had gone into the lead, a bit out in front of all the others, but not so far that they lost visual contact.
As he walked, the halfling seemed to sense the air, almost as if he were an animal, stopping on the trail every now and then and sniffing the wind to detect the presence of any predators. There were halflings in Anuire, but Aedan had never really spent any time with one before, so he watched Futhark closely, with fascination.
The halfling looked like a more-or-less normal adult human male, except for the fact that he was about three-and-a-half feet tall. Everything about his proportions was in proper scale, unlike dwarves, whose legs and arms were smaller and out of proportion to their heads and torsos.
Futhark’s hair was thick and black, rising in a crest on top and descending to the middle of his back almost like a horse’s mane. His features were angular and sharp, similar to those of elves except that his eyebrows were thick and lacked the pronounced, delicate arch that elves had, and his ears were not as sharply pointed. In fact, one had to look closely to notice that they were pointed at all. City halflings, Aedan had heard,
