Awakening with a start, she was encircled by them. They were tree-like, but of varieties more supple and wan than their stiff and thick-barked mates, the Treoherd.
“Who are you, intruder?” She heard this not with her ears, but from a sensation that traveled up her arm where a tendril grasped it. The tendril led to a branch that was part of one of the tree-like beings.
“I know you!” said Ara. “I have heard tales of how they were separated from you, from themselves really. They have been searching for you for centuries too many to count.”
The creatures stood still for the longest time. Ara began to feel foolish, she had been talking to the air. Then the tendril coiled one more loop and the meaning rushed into her.
“Yes. We came here long ago, beyond and before the time of the many races of mortals that walk on two feet and learned to burn and hack. Before animals began their endless procession across the face of the world, we were there. In those elder days, our kind, plants that grow on dry land, migrated by their generations to fill all these places-above-water. This is our earliest memory. It was our purpose it seemed, for we were never told another. At least, it was the purpose we became the most comfortable with. We furthered this march of green inland from shores so ancient that even we could no longer recognize them. “But that is not how we ended here, in this valley of imprisonment.”
“Why don’t you leave? Nothing kept me from getting here.”
“Be cautious with your bravery, small one. There are grim perils here.” The warning passed through Ara with a shudder and she understood the depth of terror that kept the lost wives of the Treoherd within the valley.
“There yet lives but one Worm known to the world outside this valley. Grimmer and more terrible than all others. His lair is unseen by any that walk on two legs. He is hidden in perpetual fog. He sags forth to tear and rend.
The lands beyond this valley, bare and bleak, stripped of trees for a thrice-score of furlongs, are his domain. But that is not all.”
Ara shivered in the dawn chill. She felt a fear, throbbing through these now clutching tendrils, limbs that had lasted a thousand years.
“It has allies, a plague of locust-like hornets, red-striped and each the size of a sparrow. They bite and chew as well as sting with a bitter venom. They ensure all is ruined. Though a multitude, they are as one. They live as a single being even with the Worm. They fly in a great black cloud that turns and wheels as if guided by a single instinct. They are his eyes and outliers. Worst of all, they confuse and disable his victims by their constant buzzing and stinging. For their reward, they are his scavengers. Perhaps we are wrong in this. Perhaps it is they that control the Worm as their own instrument.”
“But where does it live?” Ara spoke, but somehow felt that she could now pass this thought back through her body.
“Where? Once, a great army of men sought the answer. They marched into these lands. Marauders. Strong and well armed with the greatest machines of death. They came in search of his lair and treasure. They were wise in their plans. The plague of hornets they lured to a herd of bison, which they drove before them. The wheeling multitude came to test and harass, and stayed a moment to feed. That was their undoing, for the Men had poisoned the carcasses. The insects died with their jaws full of torn flesh, and others fell from the sky as they escaped in panic, realizing this trickery. A scant remnant of the dark cloud blew away eastward, against the wind.”
“And so the men found the Worm?” Ara questioned.
“No. The Worm found them. The next night, camped near the shore of the Flat Sea, a dense fog rolled into their camp. It extinguished their campfires. The handful of survivors who fled into the high war engines where they had the vantage of strong timbers and a view unto the camp below, later described the encounter to us:
“‘The Worm came in the stillest moment of the night, and was everywhere at once. His tail and taloned wings, and the great sail on his back we saw above the white shroud. The cries of our comrades and the clank and hew of their swords we did hear, but only for a moment. Then all was still. The night and the fog receded in equal stealth, until the dawn saw the bitter remnants of a massacre. Weapons and bodies were strewn in great confusion. A trail of blood and discarded parts of men, bisected by the groove of a great, lazy tail, led unto the sea. We wept at this sight and fled in panic back toward the Misty Wood. The insects, though fewer in number, harassed us and picked at one warrior at a time until he fell. Then they would select another. Five of a force of two thousand did survive. The rest sleep the sleep of the sword, and their spirits float in the slop and gore of this evil thing.’
“Thus do we believe that this thing abides beneath the salty face of the Flat Sea.”
“And you stay here?”
“Yes, for the Worm knows we must pass unto his barren soil to make good our escape. Some have tried this passage and none returned.”
“Maybe they made it to safety.”
“Perhaps, but none other has dared leave in many lifetimes of great trees. And so we stay here. Arriving by folly, we are contained now by fear.”
Ara responded, “Do you not think that this, too, is folly, for in time you will lose all by your fear?”
“As have you. You left with a mistaken heart and now are as lost to your loved one as we to ours.”
“No,” said Ara, “for with your leave, I am departing this valley to find him. Now! “
He watched her finish reading, then said, “OK, enough of dragons. Here is something more recent.” He handed Cadence fresh pages of ink-covered Algonquin stationary.
It is said by a few bards, though vigorously disputed by the dwindling guild of Scholars of the Red Book, that the famous halfling traveler Aragranessa learned much of the secret lore of trees. Of her wisdom the details are all but lost. Only the dimmest reference to the Lost Vale survives as a lyric in nursery rhyme.
One surviving fragment, however — attributable to students of the self-proclaimed wizard Colorfall — tells of the orphans of the wisest and most agile trees, the Treoheord. As these “keepers of the forest” became indistinguishable from old and surly trees, and their mates were lost in time, so their last offspring, perhaps never more than a few in number, wandered the forests as unlearned orphans.
In time, some of these tree-orphans longed for discourse and company, and so grew closer to men. They attended men’s parleys and the tellings of sagas. They put down deep roots and spread immense sheltering canopies. In time they became known as “council trees.” They hosted many momentous meetings and came to have esteemed names. Some were ascribed a spirit of their own.
Should you or your heirs visit one of these last sentinels, perhaps ravaged and cracked by long years, honor them as venerable orphans that chose their own destiny.
From an account in 1720:
After the Scattering of the Halflings some centuries ago, and the recent opening of the Froelboc Mine, there remains in this area, in a park surrounded by low hills of coal and hardscrabble mine tenements, a single, immense ash tree. It is gnarled and oddly shaped where predominant limbs have cracked and fallen. It bears its leaves late, and old men wager as to whom, it or they, will survive another year. But every year, like the sluggish steam engines working nearby, it finally warms to its job. It slowly drives sap to the highest branches and a nimbus aura of green emerges. By late summer it bears a rich canopy of leaves. By the second week of frost, it is the first to go scarlet and drop them all.
It stands in the unmarked park known locally as Shirecommon, and is called, for reasons unknown, the Party Tree.
Osley held up the original document, which had angry smears across it. “It isn’t just cut off here. It’s obliterated by black dye. Maybe we’ll catch up with it later, but this part is lost.”