Moths, each glowing with the same light as the tree bark, flittered and danced through the trees on all sides. Their wingspans easily measured three hands across.
Taal breathed in air thick with the perfume of night flowers. His mind whirled … not with the heady scent, but with the rapid transition of locations. He’d spent too long at Forever’s Edge to suddenly be jerked hither and yon and not suffer pangs of displacement. If he was forced down one more path of shadow to discover another fascinating, extraordinary, utterly unique vista, the contents of his stomach would join the tableau.
He swallowed. “We are back in the Feywild?” he managed to say.
“An imperfectly connected portion,” murmured the eladrin noble. She was studying the movements of the moths. “The Spellplague restitched Sildeyuir, a fragment of Faerie broken off long ago, back with its parent. But Sildeyuir was in pieces before the rejoining, thus the process remains ongoing, and the seams where the two sibling planes meet are unstable. Some pieces are hardly reconnected at all.”
“Is it dangerous here?” Taal asked.
“Of course,” Malyanna replied. “And home to creatures stirred from wherever they lurked before, like these moths. They are fey spirits of flux and instability.”
“Undead?”
“No. Spirits of the land itself, of Faerie’s pain. They are manifestations of the disruption.”
“And they’re dangerous?”
“Yes, I just said that. But they will also guide us to the ruins of Stardeep. As spirits of the tumult and reconnection, they possess a link to the shattered geography that would require Tamur weeks to learn.”
Malyanna lifted one hand to her mouth and bit her palm. A spurt of cold air preceded the ruby red blood that welled from the wound.
She lifted her arm and whistled. Blood trickled down her ivory limb in ragged lines.
The closest flux moth twisted in the air and arrowed toward the eladrin noble. Taal’s tiger tattoo snarled.
The moth all righted on Malyanna’s palm and unfurled a proboscis half a foot long. It sipped the red fluid like dew from a flower. Its wide, glowing wings shimmered from white to red.
The insect jerked up and fluttered in the air for a moment, then darted away, streaking the night with crimson radiance.
Malyanna made a fist with her bleeding hand and followed the creature. Taal and Tamur darted after her.
“I’ve temporarily bound it,” the eladrin threw over her shoulder. “While the binding remains active, its fellows will not harm us. Do nothing to provoke them!”
Taal made no answer as he followed.
He lost track of time as they rushed through a fey wood of dreamy radiance. Only he and Tamur did not glow; Malyanna began to leak a radiance similar to the trees as she stalked after the spirit moth. A sickly purple undertone gave her skin a diseased aspect.
The forest boundary was knife sharp. When the moth broke out into open space, Malyanna followed without comment. Taal realized that what he’d taken for a bank of mist beyond the tree’s edge was a thrashing swarm of flux moths. The mass extended off into a hazed gloom to the left and right, and dozens of feet into the air.
“There must be thousands,” he said.
“Thousands, or perhaps just one, iterated many, many times over,” said Malyanna.
“Ah. And our route is through the press of wings?” Taal said.
She nodded. “Though it’s different elsewhere,” she said, “in the Forest of Moths, the flux spirits guard weak points and serve as the agents of reconnection.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Malyanna,” he said.
“Think of them as needles and stitches that, before they are drawn tight in torn flesh, can draw blood,” she replied. “Just follow, and guard me.”
Malyanna whistled, producing a hollow, low-pitched hum. The bound flux moth returned to her hand and sipped again. But before it could flutter away, the eladrin noble closed her fist, catching the creature tight.
The moth flapped madly, buffeting Malyanna. New lines of blood appeared on her face and arms where the wing edges caught her. Taal realized the insect’s wings were sharp as razors.
Ignoring her fresh wounds, Malyanna approached the greater mass of spirits. She thrust the captive moth out before her like a brand set to ward off gathering dark, and chanted in a low, steady voice.
The bank of moths parted before her. A causeway of clear air formed ahead. She walked down the constricted way, careful to keep to the exact center.
Taal followed her into the lane. It wasn’t so narrow their shoulders risked brushing the edges, but if they were to swing their arms, their fingers might well graze the moth wing walls. Dead grass crumbled beneath his feet. The stars overhead wheeled in the sky, and he had to look away. The open air churned with the movement of thousands of flapping musky membranes. He resisted the urge to sneeze.
A totem growl drew his attention up.
A mote of glowing white fell from the left wall and stopped at Malyanna’s head. Taal leaped, snatched the thing out of the air with his right hand, and smashed its body into his left elbow. One of the trailing wings brushed his forearm. Blood welled instantly, and a line of pain stitched his skin. He dropped the unmoving body to the grass, careful to avoid the flaccid wing membranes. The body dissolved into dust.
The eladrin noble continued her steady progress forward.
Then they were through.
They stood before a massive gate, tumbled and broken beneath a darkling sky suddenly bereft of stars. The gate was mounted in the side of a great tor that rose up out of a “lake” of flux moths. The visible portion of the massive hill featured dead grass and tumbled stones.
Granite fragments of the ruined gate were half-buried in loose soil. The throat of the opening was completely collapsed and filled with rubble. One section of the fallen stone was chiseled with the stylized sign of a white tree. A great crack split the symbol nearly in two.
Nearly every other piece of stone was etched with lines of script. A few used letters familiar to Taal. He squinted, reading:
This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … Nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive. This message is a warning about danger.
… And more of the same. Taal looked up. “The warning written on these stones; it is scribed in many tongues,” he said.
“For all the good it did,” replied Malyanna. “The Traitor fled when this pocket plane lurched back into conjunction with Sildeyuir, and Sildeyuir with Faerie. But with the Spellplague raging he obviously didn’t get far, for he never returned again to the Spire of Winter’s Peace …”
Malyanna studied the collapsed gate a moment longer, then turned and ascended the slope. She and Taal picked a path between tumbled stones that looked as if they had extruded from the earth as slender rocky splinters, only to fall and shatter on the hillside.
Tamur bounded ahead, sniffing at every surface.
The summit resolved in the gloom as they drew closer. On it grew a single tree, larger than any tree Taal had ever before seen-and he’d seen his share of woody giants. But the one on the hilltop was bare of leaf. Its many branches clenched into a tight fistlike cyst.
“A Forest Monarch!” said Malyanna, her voice surprised.
“A dead one, if you mean the tree,” said Taal. “See-it’s petrified.”
“So it is.”
They approached until they stood beneath the mineralized growth. It was even larger than Taal had first surmised. Its trunk was easily more than a hundred feet in diameter!
“Forest Monarchs,” said Malyanna, her voice soft, “were primeval trees. But they were more than mere plants; they were emblems of the Feywild itself, vigorous beyond measure, and vessels of pure life force.”
“You sound melancholy,” Taal said. Was the eladrin actually showing sentiment?