As she slept, the sounds collected in a black sack in her mind. The sack bulged and swelled and refused to spill out its contents. Ara writhed in her sleep until she felt silent hands, perhaps her own, but leprous and scabbed, feel their desperate way across her cheeks and plunge hungrily into her mouth to grope for that foul bag.
She awoke with a gasp. Her heart thudded. Her ears sensed something. A dim, gray light, precursor of a far away dawn, seeped though the entrance. Her small and delicate hands, this time unquestionably hers, pulled out her knife as she coiled in readiness.
Then she realized what had awoken her.
The silence.
No birds, no wind, no moans or whispers or creaks or groans. She sensed Hafoc was gone. Everything was waiting, and something had arrived. She held her breath and stretched her eyes wide, straining to hear or see. Or smell. She flared her nostrils. Floating in the air was the waft of some creature rustic and unwashed, fouled with the stench of raw meat. It was close.
Ara’s world closed down to that graylit entrance. She knew this was no dream. She watched in horror as, beyond all her imaginings, a ghastly arm — large and knobby and bristled with hair — finger-walked through the opening.
As she held her breath, a dark bulk followed the arm, filling the gray mouth with a deadly intruder. Her own movement surprised her. She uncoiled her body and, quick as an adder, drove the knife into the shadowy form. It screamed and fell back. The sound cut into the forest like the thudding bite of a sharp axe.
She crawled out, parting the roots and blinking in the luminous mist. Before her lay an orc-captain, his throat bleeding in spurts. He coughed but could not speak. His eyes locked on hers. Dismay, regret, sadness were all there. Whatever had brought him here — perhaps the same inexorable spell that had controlled her path— their fates had at this spot thrown the dice together. Her heart broke as she watched him fade, his orc-life ruined. Her sorrow sliced through the sack in her mind, and the loathsome spell of Myrcwudu gushed out.
Now she could focus her fury. She looked up and around, and thought, I am no insect, and I will not quail before you!
She struck out, heedless of direction, and wandered, whether for sleepless hours or days she knew not.
At last she came upon a clearing, shot through with lances of sunlight. These bright shafts highlighted the immensity of the trees. She stood in awe, her gaze climbing the trunks until her neck ached. At her feet, amidst a riot of auroch-sized roots, a puddle of water caught the light between floating leaves and twigs and created a vicious sparkle that assaulted her unadjusted eyes. She held her hands to her face and looked down between her fingers. She realized she had a bit of magic that might get her out of this place. She knelt and cleared the debris from the puddle. She felt in her cloak and found the small leather kit hidden in a pocket of its folds. This she opened and brought out a tiny, flat bit of wood, no bigger than her fingernail. She lifted from the leather fold a splinter of rock. It was dull gray and each end tapered to a point. One end had been marked with white chalk. She put the bit of wood in the pool and let it float freely. Then she placed the rock splinter on it. It turned and twirled, and came to rest with the white end fixed in one direction. The opposite end was south.
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.