Dark Earth: Reunion

Reunion Part 2


Climbing out of the Land Rover, the first thing that struck me as different was the smell. It wasn’t like any other forest I had come across in the New World before - you get to know these little things when you spend twenty years on the job and I like to think that I can smell the wood from the trees, if you’ll forgive the pun. It is the combination of the leaves, the undergrowth, the rotting wood and the insects, usually. The air here smelt sweet and fair, with a strange spice to it that I’d only come across in a handful of elder woods before, but that had been in Wales and Scotland - different trees and different climes to these. The track stopped abruptly at the edge of the tree line, which seemed old by the size of them.

Then I saw it.

I turned around to the ranger who had driven me here.

“They shouldn’t be here.”

“No. That was one of the reasons we got onto you guys. Our mages couldn’t make sense of it.”

He shifted from foot to foot and rubbed a weathered hand through his red gold beard. I’d be uneasy as well if I were him. Rangers spend their lives in their wilds, learning them, guarding them, knowing them. He knew it as well as I. The forests around here in the boreal north should be conifers -spruce, pine and firs. These were wych elms, common yew, golden linden, ash and oak.

“Surely something had been noticed before this.”

“It’s a big country up here. The local Indian elders say this has been a place of the spirits since their people first came here and even the game steers clear of it.”

“How large is this...anomaly?”

“Pretty small. About 25 square miles, most all of it like this - narrow valleys and small hills. Pretty darn rugged, though. When we first tried exploring it last year, we had to literally cut our way in; only time I’ve had to do that before was in the jungle in Borneo when I was in the army. Strangest thing, though - the more we blazed a trail in, the more the forest seemed to fight back against us.”

This set alarum bells ringing in my head. “Grew back quickly then?”

“Sure did. This was the spot of our first attempt. You can see all that is left of it.”

There were a couple of felled logs lying just outside of the edge of the trees, but the forest itself looks just as virgin as if it had never been touched by white man.

I walked forward, knelt down, closed my eyes and tried to see. ‘Only when we don’t look can we truly see’ was the phrase my old master had been want to spout pithily at every opportunity back when I was an apprentice in Sherwood. I didn’t understand the truth of it until it was my time and I took my Walk. Now I let my mind fly, just for a moment, to explore the verge of the woods. This gave me the third clue and sealed the matter for me.

Beyond the immediate border, which was thick with fallen branches, twisted undergrowth, overgrown thickets and thick bushes, which stretched for a hundred foot or so, the trees were more evenly spaced, though still surrounded by brush and long grasses. There wasn’t any sign of browsing by small animals on any of the plants, but the most striking sign was that some of the smaller trees appear to have been layered. This wasn’t a wild forest, but one that had been managed.

Or shepherded.

I closed my real eyes and opened my ordinary ones.

“Well?” Ranger Keeso asked expectantly, curiousity breaking through his usually taciturn mien.

“I think I know what this is.” And then I told him.

He took it well, surprisingly.

“We’re going to need to get in some help.”

“I think you’re right.”

Steve,

Your last sentence hits the matter on the head - they crossed when the land bridge was still extant.

Simon

Reunion Part 4

Malevius took a fair bit of convincing, but when when I laid out the evidence for him and conjured up what I had seen in my scrying bowl, he came around. The prospect seemed just as unreal to him as it did to me, but it only seemed to point at the conclusion of the Treewives.

The Treewives! Even now it seemed to many like some half-remembered myth embedded in a children's tale, like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Mysterious Cities of Gold, but the ways of the modern world had closed off the eyes, hearts and minds of so many to the legendary past with all its beguiling wonders. There were many who thought that the Lords of the Trees were some sort of vestige of an ancient tree cult, although most of those were particularly foolish in their wholehearted abandonment of the past. But, despite the world shifting and changing away from the old ways and the straight paths fading, the Lords of the Trees were still there, sleeping deeper than the dryads and nymphs who were now fewer by the year.

I knew it because I was one of the few who had seen them and met them. Malevius was another. It was eighteen years ago, when I was but a feckless journeyman and he the wise and knowing master. His kind were rare enough in the lands of men and the ancestral disdain of his kinfolk cut him off from their succour in the mystic havens half in this world and half in the other. For him to still dedicate himself to the ways of trees and nature was entirely admirable to me; you could say he was even a hero to this callow young apprentice. We were in Gwydden Wood, a small but ancient tract of forestland near Llangynog in the Berwyn Range, looking into an old tale of standing stones. Malevius was at that stage quite obsessed with his theory on the inverse relationship of the ley lines and the elder woods; this was back in 1947, just after the war and none of the breakthroughs of Professors Wyllt, Pelydrolel and Ffonelf on the paths of resonance were yet common knowledge.

Gwydden Wood itself seemed straightforward - overgrown and teeming with the little creatures and sounds that most ignore. We spent a productive afternoon cataloguing and scanning the trees for their ages and health, all very conventional stuff, but then I felt myself gradually more and more disoriented as we moved further in and further up. Malevius seemed perturbed by the same thing, although he seemed to keep his head more. At some point, the trees changed - changed in size, changed in age, changed in shape, somehow. Now there were oaks far larger than anything I'd seen before, thrice as tall and broad as they had nature to be, and great and tall ash trees soaring beside them. All were gnarled and mighty, their aged and thick bark twisted almost in the shape of faces, although that seemed to be part of my lightheadedness.

Until, that is, one of the trees opened its eyes. And spoke.

"Hrum, Hoom. What is this? A manling and one of the Vinyaháno? You walk the road in the old woods as one of the star children yet are of the Daedar. Hast the Ascantë been healed?" The tree creature was tall and sturdy, with a great head topped with green leaves and vines, all of them flowing and growing. Its thick bark or hide was of green and brown, its long grey beard was of moss and lichen and it stared at us with deep and solemn brown eyes shot with green. This entirely alien visage would have been terrifying, but it gave off a palpable aura of stability, of calmness and of peace. And its smile was of pure good.

"Nay, Old One, it has not." Malevius's voice trembled with wonder; to this day, I have ne'er heard an elf of any kind moved to such emotion of any sort, yet this was deep and true.

"What are you?" I could not hold back any longer.

"Me? In the tongue of your kind, 'ere I last stirred, I am Daurwydd."

This meant nothing to me until Malevius breathed out slowly. "Daur-Wydd...tree beard. It has been a long time, Old One. You are remembered."

"Hm. Hrum! This is good, then. Few had ken of our folk, even back when the days were brighter. "

"Where are we. This is not Earth, is it?" I blurted out, surprised even that I could talk. There was something about this place...

"Right you are, manling, but wrong also! This place is of Earth, like a shadow, but also a reflection, like the moonlight on a lake. If your want and your wyrd was for ill, then the path would bring you to other places, even to where that which is not dead can eternal lie...But if you be of good will and for the weal, then it is far nicer. Were you to go further on and further in, then you might find yourself at the edge of the blessed isle beyond the summer sea or in the wood between the worlds. But that is a tale for another time, hrm hum! By the lion's mane, what a tale it is!"

"How long have you slept, Treebeard?"

"I know not. It was after the last cold, certainly, and the day when the sky fell. The elder children were fading, even before then, and our woods were growing silent. Yet I remember what woke me last time - it was the cry of a newborn child, somewhere far off to the east. It was...strange...like the great music come anew or the One reaching out to remake that which was marred. Since then, I have not slept, just...napped...a little. I have seen in my dreams the song of the days, both great and ill. Much dread has been done by your kind, little manling, much dread and much woe. But there is hope, nonetheless. There is always hope."

I could barely process this and simply stood in amazement. The Treelord seemed to stretch up and swell and then roots broke out of the long dormant earth.

"Ah, hm. That is...better...Much better. That had been getting...sore. I last shifted that root back a while in that week when there was no sun and the skies were dark as night."

Week with no sun...Hell's teeth, he meant the Fimbulwinter!

"There is much we would tell you, Old One, and much you can tell us. We would sing the Song once again, as of old."

"Good! Good! Hoo, ho! This is as it should be, dark child. It has been long since I had visitors. I shall awaken the others and then we shall meet and sing. Yet there is one thing I must ask, as it has been a long, long, long time. Know you any tidings of the Treewives? Long we did search, yet never did we find them, and I long to see my Lelyafernë so. It has been far too long."

Reunion Part 5

The group that now stood at the verge of the nameless forest two days later was larger than before. Malevius was beside me, along with a dozen Canadian rangers, the Archdruid of British North America, the Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a Professor Omerfreond from the Imperial Ministry of Magic over at Stonehenge and the Canadian Minister of Forestry as an official witness, who was looking and apparently feeling altogether out of place in this company. I really didn't blame him, as our side of the business can tend to be a bit different. I remember back when I was dealing with a haunted wood in New Zealand; the look on the face of a Kiwi forestry official when one of the witchfinders insisted that "all pigs must swear to a priest that they were not servants of the evil one" was an absolute picture. This Canuck chap had been mumbling about aliens and flying saucers on his way out here, so clearly he wasn't assessed as having the need to know everything just quite yet. There were plenty like him that ascribed everything strange to some extraterrestrial presence, but this world here still had more than enough mysteries for me.

Usually, the predawn air would be filled with the sounds of birds, yet their absence here was an indicator of something awry. Animals are often the best clue of the unnatural or the enchanted, whether it be horses fearing the undead or insects actively avoiding the site of a profane ritual. This was not an emptiness born of darkness, though. The stillness of the forest, that palpable 'feel' in the air was a sign of that, but looking forth at the tangled wall of undergrowth, there were two definitive marks. The first was that smell - sweet, fresh and heavily spiced, which I had only ever experienced in proximity to the Treelords, but conjuring up scents is no great dweomer. It was the second that now made up my mind - the colours. Slipping into the second sight, I could see the colours undulating and dancing. Thin streams of silvery white flickered in and out of existence next to flowing streams of blue, but by far the predominant hues were green, pulsing and glowing with life. That could be from any natural source and was far from unique in a forest, yet the veins of gold that stretched back from each tree into the depths of the wood were the sign we had been looking for.

It was time.

As the sun began to rise above the horizon, Malevius began to sing in a soft voice, the arcane words stretching forward in their own unique yet comforting melody. I joined in now, adding my own song, then, one by one, the other three casters. The music swelled and soared as it was pushed forward, taking on a physical force that seemed to warp and change shape in the air. The trees and bushes drew back then, forming a near perfect circular passage into the forest. The singing stopped then, its purpose done. Taking in a deep breath and giving a silent prayer for luck, I stepped forward. The forest was silent, but we were not alone. There was a presence watching us as we walked forward into the heart of the wood, not too slowly nor too fast. The grass and leaves upon the ground seemed impossibly soft and although little of the dawn broke through the canopy, our way was lit by a gentle glow somewhere up ahead.

Finally, we emerged into a broad clearing, one that had not been visible from above as we had overflown the forest the previous afternoon. Tall yews and ashes stretched up into the sky around this grassy circle that shone both with new sunlight and its own inherent glow. In the midst of the glade stood a tree unlike any I had ever seen, rich with heavy golden fruit, broad and fair, and seemingly born aloft, wound round by light, the brightest of beams. Standing next to the tree was a very tall being, long of limb and slender. The creature was as delicate as the Lords of the Trees were broad and strong, yet there was no weakness present, only beauty. Flowing fronds of wondrous leaves and gay flowers cascaded down and around her, like flowing locks of hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn. They girded a face that was fair and kind, with cheeks like red apples, but her eyes were those of the Treelords, deep and solemn eyes of green shot with hazel.

She bowed gracefully and then spoke in a voice that made our music of before seem as sounding brass.

"I bid you greeting, Young Ones. Long has our time been in the wood with no visitors, yet now you come. And with the song, as it should be. What do you seek?"

This was it. I had rehearsed the words all through the last sleepless night and now was the time."

"We do not seek. We come, with tidings of great gladness."

As I told her, she began to laugh and sing with pure joy. Others from the verge of the glade joined her in a symphony of celebration. It was a moment of absolute wonder and utter grace.

As it finally came to an end, a flock of birds flew above for the first time, their song now echoing that which had gone before. And slowly, as it had done so many times before in the trackless ages of sundering, the great sun rose and shone down its warmth upon the life below.