They'd spent a bitterly cold night sheltering from another snowfall beneath the downward branches of a mighty conifer. Adrik had gathered several cones and exclaimed over their novelty. Only Xet seemed to care.
Today they'd walked only a few miles when Kiril said something in a language he didn't know.
The swordswoman stood at the base of a snowy slope crowned with evergreens and massive boulders. The confluence of boulders and boles created, from a particular perspective, an inviting cavity.
"This is an entrance to Sild?yuir," said Kiril.
"I thought all the gates were magically scribed menhirs," pondered Adrik.
The woman shrugged, "Stab me if I know. This one isn't." Raidon and Adrik followed as she headed up the slope. She paused when she stood between two of the veined, snow-dusted boulders.
"How does this damn thing function again?" Kiril muttered. With uncertainty writ plainly across her features, she traced a series of geometrical signs in the air as she spoke several words unfamiliar to Raidon.
"Something's happening," reported Adrik, his hands out before him. "A magical charge comes into alignment. . ."
Kiril finished speaking and a silvery light flared in the cavity between the boulders. "The gate is open. Welcome to the realm of the star elves." She walked into the gap, Xet sitting quietly on her shoulder. As she moved, whirling shadows leaped and spun from the boulders. As the shadows proliferated, she became harder to discern, while her tracks in the snow became shallower by the step. When Kiril reached the center of the hollow, she was nothing but a fading shadow, and a moment later, completely absent.
Raidon and Adrik looked at each other. Adrik yelled, in fear or exultation, Raidon could not determine, and plunged into the hollow. Gone.
The monk, surprised to note a faint tinge of nausea, walked forward.
* * * * *
A handful of heartbeats passed in silence. Of those who had walked ahead and disappeared from the Yuirwood, no sign remained. A two-legged shadow slid from behind a boulder and dashed into the hollow, one hand bare, the other gloved with a bound demon.
* * * * *
To Raidon, it seemed day plunged into night's darkling gates. In the extravagant sky revealed, cloudless and crystal clear, all the stars of the cosmos seemed crowded. Heaven's span glittered with a million points of sparkling light, diamond white, ruby red, emerald, sapphire, and citrine. He saw circular clusters and bands of light that, when he focused on them, revealed themselves as millions of yet tinier brilliant points. Streamers of glowing nebulae poured and frothed across the firmament, mingling within them all the colors of existence.
The monk gasped, realizing he hadn't drawn breath for many heartbeats as he stood transfixed, staring upward.
The dragonet darted above them, diving and soaring, chirping bell-like tones of wonder. When it occluded a star, its crystalline body flashed sapphire, green, or red. Xet's antics broke the spell, and Raidon dropped his gaze from the entrancing heights.
Raidon stood in a half-forested valley whose opposing ridges spread away from each other as if the land itself had thrown wide arms to embrace the glorious sky. A pearl gray glow clung to the horizons, as if promising the first hints of dawn. A promise that would never be met, according to Kiril. The valley, glimmering and dreamy in the brilliant starlight, had left winter behind, or perhaps had never known it. A stream burbled through the valley, sparkling.
He breathed and smelled an odor not unlike dawn's promise, rich with growing things. It was cool, but not cold.
"Incredible!" repeated Adrik every few heartbeats. The sorcerer was turning in a slow circle, his head bobbing up and down as he sought to absorb it all.
Kiril said, "Enough sightseeing. Take it all in as we walk. We have a fair march ahead of us."
The sorcerer asked, "Will we see a glass castle? And meet any star elves? I mean, besides you?"
The swordswoman merely grunted, "Could be. There're fewer of us than there used to be." She walked toward a far ridge, paralleling the stream.
The monk yearned to demand an answer to Adrik's question. Instead he concentrated on finding his focus. The shock of bodily traveling to this alien place, coupled with the thought that his mother might be close .. . well, truth to tell he was too much in the grip of the moment, not apart from it. He wrapped the lessons of Xiang around himself and followed. Adrik skipped along behind, stopping every ten heartbeats to marvel at some newly revealed celestial phenomena, then running to catch up, jabbering with a child's unrestrained wonder.
As he walked, Raidon was mostly successful in keeping his gaze below the trees' crowns, away from the captivating sky. The otherworldly landscape was somehow bound to the Yuirwood; he could see the connection in the way the starry realm's forests and hills matched the landscape he recalled from the snow-speckled forest they'd left behind. The congruence was not perfect. Here the trees were taller and wider, and more majestic, silver-trunked with little undergrowth. Their smooth boles stretched in elegant lines, supporting a silvery green canopy.
Adrik's voice rang out, calling more questions after the swordswoman who stalked ahead. "How wide a realm is Sild?yuir?" The sorcerer seemed oblivious of the dangerous mood that enveloped their new-met companion since they'd arrived.
Raidon saw the woman's hands clench, then loosen. She threw back over her shoulder, "As large as the Yuirwood, no bigger."
The sorcerer's brows knitted as he muttered something under his breath. Then, "Nearly three hundred miles?"
Kiril made no reply. Instead she raised her hand and pointed at a stone bridge silvered with moss, and a partly paved path. Here and there, silver-green grass burst up through the loose paving stones, indicating the road's infrequent use, Raidon supposed.
"Ah ha!" Adrik exclaimed, gazing raptly at the bridge and path.
Kiril walked across the bridge; monk and sorcerer followed. When he reached the top of the span, Raidon gazed down into water. It reflected the stars above, rippling and shimmering with the moving water. Of the bridge, or himself and his companions, he saw no reflection.
They walked the broad path into the forest depths, passing fully beneath the canopy. It was cooler beneath the eaves, and darker without the direct radiance of the starlight. Despite the relative gloom, the dearth of undergrowth provided Raidon long, open views to either side. As they walked, he heard the rustlings of forest creatures, and the occasional cry of a night owl, the lonely howl of a distant wolf. A few times he saw silver-gray deer flashing in the distance. Another time he saw a wheeling, darting flight of gemlike dragonflies whose slender forms burned emerald and sapphire. Because he couldn't accurately judge their distance, he was unable to measure their size, but he guessed they were large. Once, a dark, furred beast shuffled parallel to their track for a mile or more. Raidon strained his eyes to discover the creature's shape, but soon enough it turned and was gone.
"What was that?" inquired the sorcerer.
Raidon replied, "A bear, perhaps?"
"No, something bigger," said Adrik, looking forward for some confirmation from the elf.
Kiril paused and frowned back to where the sorcerer pointed. She squinted and shook her head.
"It ran off, I guess," Adrik explained, peering into the gloom.
"Sild?yuir is not entirely free of threat. You can die here from a wild creature's attack as easily as you could in the sunlit world."