Delven dreamed. His mind drifted amongst the great forest, and his feet wandered the paths of fallen leaves beneath the twilight sky. Moths faintly glowing blue flitted around him as he walked.
An elven woman stood upon a balcony above him, with purple skin darker than was common for a song elf, and hair like yellow sunlight streaming down her shoulders. It took him a few minutes to notice her, as she silently watched him, and when he did, they gazed at one another without speaking for another minute longer before she turned to descend a spiraling staircase around the broad trunk of the tree.
“What manner of being brings his dreams to the forest on this night?” she said, her voice like a clarinet.
“Human,” Delven replied, holding his hands away from his sides to indicate he was unarmed. Although did it matter so much what he’d taken into the forest physically, if this were just a dream? He hadn’t dreamed himself armed. “My name is Delven.”
She tilted her head at him. “I am Arayal. I will admit, I knew our mutant cousins were somewhere on this world, but I have never before encountered one.”
“Mutant cousins?” Delven repeated with a touch of amusement.
“What brings you to our forest?” Arayal said. “I had believed our staunch guardians, the zephyli, watched the borders of the forest more closely than this, but then, even they cannot be everywhere at once. Did you stumble in here unawares, or did you intend to seek us out?”
“I sought you out,” Delven said. “I am a bard, you see. I tell stories of what was and what has been, and there is much that has been lost or forgotten over the ages. And there is much that I do not believe you have heard of what has happened in the world outside of your forest, as well. I wished to exchange tales with you.”
“Your goals are admirable, although I doubt that many of us are truly interested in what happens in the outside world,” Arayal said.
“Why not?” Delven asked. “Surely your dreams can only reflect reality and your own experiences and knowledge. One cannot dream about what they do not know.”
“Yes, but we have been dreaming for so long that many of us do not wish our dreams to change,” Arayal said.
“So, you’ve stagnated in your own dreams, and none of you seek anything new or fresh?” Delven asked. “Surely there must be some of you who desire novelty.”
“Perhaps there are some,” Arayal admitted. “But we would prefer our dreams to remain stable, for the sake of our charges.”
“The zephyli?” Delven asked. “Are they not living, breathing creatures? Aren’t you afraid of them stagnating as well?”
“They have yet to advance anywhere close to our level,” Arayal said.
“Why don’t you let them go off on their own?” Delven asked.
“They are not ready to dream their own dreams,” Arayal said.
“How do you know unless they’ve been given the opportunity to do so?” Delven said.
“They are like children yet,” Arayal said.
“Someday, children need to leave home and discover their own path,” Delven said.
“Not until they’ve grown up, though,” Arayal said. “They are brief, flickering creatures who rise and fade like the sun. Without the dream, they would be nothing more than mere animals.”
“Perhaps you do not give them enough credit,” Delven said. “My own people live maybe sixty years. I’ve seen thirty-six years. This would also be brief to your eyes, would it not?”
“That is true,” Arayal said. “You are also a child. You speak rashly and hastily, and you have not thought through what the consequences of your suggestions might be.”
“Neither I nor the zephyli have the luxury of spending centuries considering our actions,” Delven said. “Some of them, at least, want to go experience the world at large. They want to see new things. And they cannot truly grow if all they ever see is your own dreams, especially if you refuse to allow your dreams to expand and incorporate new things. They are woefully unprepared for the current state of affairs of the world, and insulating them and isolating them will not help that.”
Arayal sighed. “They will make mistakes. They will find suffering and despair.”
“They will also find joy and wonder that is entirely their own,” Delven said quietly. “And not merely dreamed for them by a people who has not seen the world in many ages.”
“If they truly wish to go, they may go,” Arayal said. “There is nothing we might do to stop them. We have never stopped them.”
“You’ve discouraged them,” Delven said. “You’ve made their elders disdain them so heavily that they must go off on their own, without support even from one another. If they depend upon their dreams, as you say, they cannot even dream with one another.”
“They cannot even initiate a dream on their own,” Arayal said. “They can only enter into our dream.”
“Then why not teach them?” Delven asked. “Either they must learn to create their own dreams, or they must learn not to depend upon them.”
“We plan to do so eventually, of course,” Arayal said.
“But can they not begin to learn?” Delven asked.
“I will discuss this with the others,” Arayal said.
“That’s all I can ask,” Delven said.
“I will also ask if anyone wishes to exchange stories with you,” Arayal said. “As you say, I am certain that there will be some.”
“I appreciate it,” Delven said. “Thank you.”
The next morning, Yennik was nowhere to be seen. Keolah thought he might just have gone off to water a bush, but when he didn’t turn up again in the next hour, she started to wonder where he’d wandered off to. Keolah headed down into town to see if she might spot his green aura somewhere. Maybe he’s just gone to get a drink.
“There’s been talk of laying in a new railroad through here,” said the bartender at the Forest Crossing Inn. “Some of them hope that that will turn this place into a bustling new trading hub. Me, I know better. That’ll just mean trains will zip through here without even bothering to stop on their way to Kedresida. Ain’t nothing here worth stopping for.”
“Have you seen a goblin?” Keolah asked. “Name of Yennik?”
“Been a few of them through here,” the bartender said. “Most of them are near the caravan camps, though. Hasn’t been one in my inn this morning.”
It didn’t take Keolah much longer to find Yennik hiding in a hay wagon. With a roll of her eyes, she climbed up and nudged him with her foot. Yennik groaned and poked his head out of the hay in startlement. His face fell when he saw her.
“I’m sure you just came over here to catch some sleep where it’s comfortable, right?” Keolah drawled.
“Uh, right, right exactly,” Yennik said. “Damn, you’ve got good eyes if you picked me out of a crowd and under the hay.”
Keolah smirked and folded her arms across her chest. “If you couldn’t help us with the translation, all you had to do was say so.”
“Ugh,” Yennik mumbled, sitting up and wiping hay out of his face. “Yes, I lied. I didn’t think Sedder would have helped me get out of the slave mines if he thought I’d be useless to you guys. I don’t actually know a damned thing about ancient Astanic. The whole thing is beyond me.”
“It was worth a shot,” Keolah said, shrugging. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to help anyway.” She hopped down to the ground. “So, what are you going to do now? Ride away in a hay cart to who-knows-where? Or stick with us and find out what we might find out? Or were you lying about being a scholar and interested in uncovering ancient knowledge too?”
Yennik paused thoughtfully. “It might be safer with you guys. Unless you’re going to flay me alive for lying to you, in which case I will happily be on my way to Desán Deruna and be sunning myself on a beach in Kalor by the time you get to the Valley of Gal.”
“We live in Kalor,” Keolah said with a smirk. “That won’t help.”
“Oh,” Yennik said. “In that case, the Sunrise Islands. I hear those are nice.”
“I’m sure I can convince them not to hurt you,” Keolah said. “Besides. Your Astanic is probably already better than my sister, anyway. Even that much would be helpful, even if it’s not much.”
“I guess,” Yennik said.
“I don’t ask for a miracle,” Keolah said. “Just that you try. Alright?”
Yennik climbed out of the cart and brushed himself off. “What if the books are cursed?”
Keolah shrugged. “I’m willing to take that chance.”
“Fair enough,” Yennik said. “I guess I’m in, then.”
“So you are here, Delven,” Keolah said. “How’d it go?”
“Productive,” Delven said. “I could definitely use a drink, though.”
“I don’t suppose you somehow managed to learn Tinean along the way?” Keolah said, although she didn’t hope for much, realistically.
Delven chuckled and shook his head. “No, but I think we might be seeing zephyli outside of the forest at some point in the next several decades. Hopefully it won’t take them centuries to get around to deciding on anything.” He shrugged and headed over to the Forest Crossing Inn.
Silver was already inside, drinking away at a mug of frothy pink liquid. Sedder sat across from him, attempting to engage him in conversation, unsuccessfully by the looks of things. Delven went up to the bar, ordered a glass of elven wine, and went to take a seat at a table.
“Guess I’ll need to get a new lute,” Delven said. “There’s no telling what might have happened to mine. I’ll look around town and see if anyone’s got one for sale. Hard to say what goods might be flowing through this place.”
“I could grow one for you,” Keolah suggested.
Delven chuckled. “Have you ever shaped an instrument before?”
“Well, no,” Keolah said. “But I’m sure I could keep adjusting it until it worked right.”
“Worth a shot, I guess, failing all else,” Delven said. “We should see if anyone’s got a cart for sale, too.”
“Why?” Keolah asked.
“So we can carry all our stuff more easily?” Delven said.
“I guess,” Keolah said. “We did kind of load ourselves down pretty heavily, didn’t we.”
After some asking around, Keolah found an old cart for sale. It was even within their budget given the gold the goblins had traded them, although upon actually inspecting it, Keolah suspected that was because it was broken. With a sigh, she set about channeling Earth Magic to repair the derelict vehicle. This might not wind up being very comfortable to ride, since she didn’t think she was going to manage to get the broken wheel to be properly round. No matter. She figured they’d have Zendellor pull it and have it haul their stuff, and just let the rest of them walk. Their supplies, books, and artifacts wouldn’t mind if the were jostled around a bit.
The next morning, they set out, trailing along after another caravan for safety in numbers. Keolah wasn’t too concerned about being ambushed by bandits or slavers just at the moment, but there was no reason to take any chances when it wasn’t really necessary. There were plenty of other people heading east along the road to Kedresida, after all.
Yennik, for his part, kept his word and at least tried to help translate the Astanic books. considering how he’d discounted being able to help at all, Keolah actually wound up being a bit surprised at how much progress he was making. He wasn’t nearly as bad at making sense of ancient Astanic as he’d claimed. Then again, even just as a native speaker, he was in a better position than Kithere to puzzle through it.
“You know, I’m starting to realize that modern Astanic actually borrowed more from the old goblin tribal tongues than I’d ever imagined,” Yennik commented, poring over a book at camp one evening. “Pretty sure it’s borrowed a bit from Tominian too, although not too much, though. The frost trolls and mountain trolls never really see eye to eye.”
“How many languages do you speak?” Keolah asked.
“Astanic and Zarhian, obviously. Bits and pieces of a few goblin tongues. I can carry on a conversation in Tominian and Tevric, though don’t expect me to be translating any scholarly works in those tongues, assuming the frost trolls even have any scholarly works. Snow elves might have some pretentious court documents, I don’t know, pretty sure they’re the only ones in Zarhanna that still have a bleeding monarchy.” Yennik jabbed a finger at the book. “There’s a lot of formal language in this that nobody really uses anymore. Word forms that have since been simplified. Vocabulary I’m completely unfamiliar with. I’m going to venture a guess that when trolls lost their magic, they forgot all their magical jargon because they didn’t really need it anymore, and when they enslaved goblin mages, they just re-borrowed goblin terminology.”
“That would make sense, I think,” Keolah said.
“What this does mean, though, is that I can probably translate everything except what would actually be useful to translate. Without the magical terminology, these books are nothing more than a historical curiosity.”
Keolah grunted. “If this is what I think it is, though, it’s only one set of a collection of magic books. The League of Wizards supposedly translated the Tinean magic books into each of their languages. If we ran across any of the other books, we could cross-reference it with these. It would be a fascinating opportunity to piece together ancient Astanic. But I guess this does mean that even if we do locate the original Tinean books, we’re not going to be able to translate them with just these.”
“Nope,” Yennik agreed.
“Let’s catalogue and classify them, at any rate,” Keolah said. “If we find any other books, we can compare and see if any of them correspond with these.”
“Sure thing,” Yennik said.
Unlike the Thorndelle pass, the border crossing out from Thalarey consisted only of a single tall tree-tower with a shrine to Ozelin, god of travelers. Keolah figured they probably just grew defenses as necessary, or maybe what they were watching for wasn’t invading armies. These were elves, after all, not humans or trolls armed with rifles. They probably fought their wars with magic, so what they needed weren’t walls and fortresses, but a forewarning that something was happening so that they could put up wards and illusions. Rascalanse had depended upon illusions for defense for over two hundred years, after all, and it had worked. It was only after the illusions fell that Flylanders started making incursions into their hidden elf kingdom. Like the one which had taken Kithere away and sold her into slavery.
The caravan stopped for the night at a stop in the mountains. Although there were no permanent buildings constructed at this point in the pass, it looked like a spot where travelers regularly stopped. There was even another caravan heading the opposite direction camped there when they arrived.
“Ugh, I wish there were a real inn up here,” Hawthorne grumbled. “Why isn’t there an inn?”
“Dragons don’t like it when people try to build things in their mountains,” the caravan leader said.
“Dragons?” Hawthorne’s eyes lit up. “There are dragons up here in these mountains?”
“Yep,” the caravan leader said. “You don’t see them often, thank the gods. You might see one fly overhead, but they tend to leave travelers alone. Besides, nobody would want to build an inn here of all places, anyway.”
“Why, what’s so special about here?” Hawthorne asked.
He gestured vaguely off to the left of the pass. “The Caverns of Rizzkeer is off that way. They’re supposed to be haunted. I never wanted to get close enough to see for myself.”
“Haunted, huh?” Keolah exchanged a look with Hawthorne. She didn’t even need to wonder if Hawthorne was considering running off to go check out these caves, no matter how ill-advised the excursion might be. And Keolah was just going to wind up getting dragged along with her.
Oh well, she had to admit that now she was curious about it herself. Places described as mysterious and haunted often turned out to be nodes, after all. Why more mages didn’t take better advantage of them, however, was a mystery to her.
Come night, when they thought no one else was watching, Keolah and Hawthorne slipped away from the caravan camp and made their way toward the Caverns of Rizzkeer. At first, Keolah thought that they were going to be difficult to find and was afraid of missing them, but as it turned out, she needn’t have worried. She could see where they were easily enough. She just had to follow the colorless mana.
“It’s over this way,” Keolah said. “I can see the mana in it.”
“Let’s check,” Hawthorne said. “But the entrance might not be where the mana is concentrated.”
“That’s a point, I guess,” Keolah said.
“Although, I just noticed something,” Hawthorne said, pointing to a small pile of rocks stacked beside the trail. “Cairns.”
Keolah had been so busy staring at the mana that she hadn’t even been paying attention to the real landscape around her. The trail markers weren’t as obvious as they could be, but it was clear that someone wanted to be able to find their way to this ‘haunted’ cavern now and then.
“At least we know we’ll be able to find out way out of here again,” Hawthorne said.
“I could probably have tracked the mana signatures of the people at the camp,” Keolah said.
“How far away can you see auras?” Hawthorne wondered.
Keolah shrugged. “Depends. At a certain point, auras just fade into the background, although I can manage a bit further if I cover my eyes.”
They found a cave entrance and headed inside, and after a short tunnel, emerged into what must be the Caverns of Rizzkeer. The place greatly reminded her of Dalizar, full of faintly glowing colored crystals, although it had a distinct feel to it. While Dalizar had a constant sound reminiscent of singing, Rizzkeer echoed with ghostly wailing. She could readily see why people thought it was haunted.
“Well, this is kind of creepy,” Hawthorne said, cocking her head. “Do you think this place is really haunted?”
“If it were, I’d probably be able to see the auras of ghosts,” Keolah said. “All I’m seeing is ambient mana.”
“So what is making that sound?” Hawthorne wondered. “For that matter, what made that weird singing noise in Dalizar? And, for that matter, the whispers in the Witchwood?”
“It seems to be a common feature of nodes, doesn’t it,” Keolah mused. “I’d originally figured it was a side effect of the ambient mana itself, but in the pocket-world itself, it was completely absent.”
A whooshing sound rushed through the cavern. Hawthorne jumped in surprise and looked around this way and that. Keolah didn’t react. It was probably just another weird noise brought on by the node. Even if it did sound like breathing. And enormous footsteps.
“Keolah,” Hawthorne whispered. “I think there’s something in here. With us.”
Keolah turned slowly toward the most recent sounds to find a vast scarlet aura moving into the caverns. From its outline, the large creature was serpentine, with wings folded across its back.
“Dragon,” Keolah breathed.
Hawthorne’s eyes widened, and she gripped Keolah’s shoulder. Hurriedly, Keolah shuffled them down into a tunnel that looked too small for a dragon to fit even part of itself down, and that barely let the two of them pass as it was. The tunnel curved around and opened into a small cave that Keolah figured they’d probably be relatively safe in for the moment.
“This doesn’t seem like it was such a great idea any longer,” Keolah murmured.
“Hey, I didn’t hear you arguing,” Hawthorne protested.
“You take me on the most wonderful dates,” Keolah said dryly.
“This is a date?” Hawthorne said.
“A date is going out with someone you like to do something together, isn’t it?” Keolah asked. “Broadly speaking.”
“Dates are supposed to involve flowers,” Hawthorne said.
Keolah concentrated and pulled together strands of Earth Magic. Between cracks in the cavern floor at their feet, a thorny stem emerged and leaves unfolded, undaunted by the lack of sunlight overhead. A bud formed, and bloomed into a vivid red rose. Keolah plucked it and offered it to Hawthorne with a wide grin. Hawthorne took the flower with a giggle, and leaned over to give her a kiss.