Chapter 12:

Zephyli

At the group’s make­shift camp, Keolah pored over the maps the goblins had given them. Although she couldn’t read Astanic, the geological features and biomes were quite clear. Not far to the south of them, across a line of hills, lay the forests of Thalarey. There was some­thing about those forests she’d been curious about, al­though she hadn’t anticipated that she’d wind up going this way. It had not been part of her plan to come through Thalarey at all, but Billy’s betrayal and the div­er­sion through Garateck had dis­rupted all of her plans. At any rate, sea travel was still the quickest way to get to the Valley of Gal, or back to Kalor if they wanted to deposit the books some­where safe first, and Thalarey bordered the sea.

“The most dir­ect route to the Valley of Gal would be here,” Delven said, running his finger along the map of Zar­hanna. “Head to the shore of the Great Bird Lake and sail east across it and up this river through Tregas Valley. It’ll take us right across the moun­tains from Gal.”

Keolah shook her head. “I want to check out the forests of Thalarey first.”

“Great, an­other weird forest,” Haw­thorne said cheer­fully.

“The goblins said to beware of the ‘zephyli’ if we went near there,” Kithere said.

“What’s a ‘zephyli’?” Haw­thorne asked.

“I don’t know,” Kithere said. “I couldn’t make out any­thing else they said about them. A bunch of words I didn’t recog­nize.”

“I guess we’ll need to keep our eyes out,” Keolah said. “But I want to see if I can find out any­thing about the ‘tongue of the trees’, if Tinean is even connected to these giant forests to begin with.”

“The maps don’t seem to make note of any towns in the forest,” Delven said. “Although I guess they might just be too small to men­tion.”

<It might be difficult for me to scout ahead for you here,> Nar­cella tepped. <Or even to follow you into this area.>

Silver nodded to her. “Head off on your own for a bit, then. I’ll con­tact you once we leave the forest.”

<Very well,> Nar­cella tepped. <Good for­tune to you. I will double check that the trolls have not followed you, first, and then I will fly south around the forest.>

Their second day out of Garateck, a group of knee-high flight­less birds ambushed them, leaving them with a few nasty bites for Kithere to heal up. They passed through three more goblin villages on their way out of Rízán, but they had nothing to offer worth trading an­other arti­fact for. They were friendly enough, though, and the group found it suff­ic­iently safe to make camp near the goblins. Although it seemed that the trolls weren’t still pursuing them, the cold desert was home to some dan­gerous an­imals. In addition to the flight­less birds, which Kithere said the goblins called sariks, they also spotted large creatures with rough gray hide in the dis­tance and around each watering hole. Keolah didn’t see any real need to bother them. The deadliest creatures, though, were among the smallest. After Haw­thorne al­most got stung by a scorpion and it only being blocked by her innate wards, she decided to keep a light an­imal-repellant ward around the group. The running mana cost was worth avoiding getting molested by snakes, arach­nids, and insects, at any rate.

“This would have been use­ful while we were trudging around in the Witch­­wood,” Delven commented.

“Yeah,” Haw­thorne agreed. “It hadn’t occurred to me until I saw the ward on the door to Kebab-de-Garateck that you could key wards to block cer­tain types of souls.”

“Kadabi-Gharatik,” Kithere said quietly. “Oh, what­ever.”

“I’ve got this tuned so low that it’s only even going to keep out small an­imals, I think,” Haw­thorne said. “Whatever those walking hills are, I don’t think it would affect them. But bugs have itty-bitty little souls.”

“It’s not the size that matters, it’s the strength,” Keolah said.

Sedder snorted and al­most choked.

Keolah raised an eye­brow at him. “You okay there?”

“Uh-huh,” Sedder said.

Keolah shrugged and turned back to Haw­thorne. “If there were any magical insects around here, your ward wouldn’t keep them out.”

“Well, yeah,” Haw­thorne said. “I’d need to put more mana into it, if I wanted to stop magic bugs. And, you know, if we were dealing with magic bugs, we’d prob­ably have more prob­lems than just some minor annoyance of them try­ing to sting us.”

“I think those scorpions are supposed to be deadly,” Kithere said.

“You don’t need magic to kill some­one,” Sedder added.

“Pssh, yeah, yeah, but magic things usually do weird stuff,” Haw­thorne said. “Like those bees that drain your mana. Screw those things. If I ever run across any of those, they’re getting whacked.”

“You’ll get no arguments from me,” Keolah said.

Once they’d climbed over the line of hills, the forest came into view. At first, it seemed no more than an ordinary forest, with normal-sized trees, but as they con­tinued south, the smaller trees gave way to giant ones, towering high above their heads. The sun filtered down through leaves so high above that it seemed as though the sky it­self were green. Keolah spotted the occasional flicker of an­imal souls in the branches overhead and running along the ground, even though she didn’t actually spot any of the creatures with her bare eyes.

“There’s some pretty big birds in here,” Haw­thorne said. “I mean, not like floka-big. Like big for ordinary birds.”

“And monkeys,” Sedder said. “I think I saw a monkey.”

Keolah frowned and peered off through the trees. “I don’t know that those are birds or monkeys.”

“What do you mean?” Haw­thorne asked.

“Their auras are too bright to be just ordinary an­imals,” Keolah said.

“Ugh, just what we need, weird magic critters.” Haw­thorne put more mana into the wards around them.

“That’s going to leave you with­out the mana to do any­thing else,” Keolah said quietly.

“Yeah, but the last thing we need is to get ambushed by weird magic critters that we don’t know what they do,” Haw­thorne said. “Do you notice any spec­ific colors in their auras that might give a clue?”

Keolah shook her head. “They’ve each got diff­erent colored auras, just like elvenoids.”

“Could they be elvenoids?” Haw­thorne asked. “I mean, some sort of weird, fly­ing, furry elvenoids?”

“I don’t know,” Keolah said. “That seems a bit far from the beaten path for elvenoids. Though I guess they could have been changed with magic.”

“Did the Mother of Monsters ever make it this far north?” Delven won­dered. “Or were these offspring of hers who some­how migrated here?”

“Whatever they are, they’re watching us,” Sedder said.

Keolah frowned and looked up at the branches overhead. More and more of the creatures gathered around them. Though they resembled furry monkeys in some ways, they bore a pair of wings with bright gold or silver feathers that folded away into fur when they weren’t fly­ing. Their auras sparkled when they flew, just like it did with floka. They were prob­ably subcon­sciously assisting their flight with magic, as did other creatures whose physical struc­ture alone could not support flight.

There was some­thing about the forest even stranger than magical fly­ing monkeys, how­ever, and it took Keolah a while to put her finger on it. The great trees around them also had auras. Keolah frowned deeply, examining them again, cer­tain that she must have misinter­preted what she was seeing. Ordinary plants never had auras, either. Maybe she shouldn’t be sur­prised that the trees were magical, though, but they also had auras no diff­erent from any elvenoid. Some­thing very odd was going on here. At least this forest wasn’t saturated with color­less mana on top of every­thing else.

“They’re magic trees, too,” Keolah added softly.

“Of course they’re magic trees,” Haw­thorne mum­bled. “That’s just the way these things go.”

“I don’t think those are sim­ply magical an­imals,” Delven commented. “Some of them are wearing belts and carrying spears.”

The ones Keolah had first seen were unarmed, but more and more spear-wielding creatures were fly­ing in. A squad of them flew down and landed dir­ectly in front of the group, each of them carrying spears. Their leader, dark-furred and slightly larger than the others, shook its — his? her? — spear at them and spoke in per­fectly good elvish.

“You are intruding upon zephyl territory.”

“Oh, so you’re the zephyli,” Keolah said. “My name is Keolah Kedaire. It’s nice to meet you.”

The zephyl glared at her. “Yes, we’re the zephyli. I am Tumán of Ramar. State your intentions or begone.”

“Well, at least you’re giving us an op­tion rather than just begone-ing us,” Haw­thorne said.

“We came here to learn more about the great trees,” Keolah said. “We intend no harm.”

Tumán narrowed his eyes at them. “No. We are the sacred protectors of the great trees. You have already done enough harm just being here. You will leave now.”

“We’re not try­ing to dis­turb your forest,” Keolah said.

“Your very presence here dis­turbs it,” Tumán said. “I want you out of here before nightfall, lest your dreams dis­rupt the harmony of the forest.”

“Aeris’ tits,” Haw­thorne muttered. “I don’t give a twig about the harmony of your damned forest.”

“Haw­thorne,” Keolah hissed.

Tumán glared at her. “And you claim you mean no harm!?”

Sedder rolled his eyes. “Right, she doesn’t mean harm, she just doesn’t care one way or an­other.”

“Ignore her,” Keolah said. “She means well, but she’s blunt.”

“Tumán of Ramar,” Silver said. “Please permit us the oppor­tunity to learn a bit about your forest.”

“We came here seeking know­ledge of the ‘tongue of the trees’,” Keolah said.

Tumán frowned. “What do you know of Tinean?”

“Very little,” Keolah said. “But the League of Wizards was supposed to have books written in it, as well as trans­lations of those books into each of their own tongues.”

“Zephyli do not write books,” Tumán said. “You will not find any of those here. And I know nothing of this League of Wizards. Now, leave at once, or we will force you to leave.”

Haw­thorne snorted softly. “You? Force us to leave? The trolls couldn’t force us to do any­thing, and they were wielding guns! What are you going to do to us with spears?”

Keolah raised a hand to her. “We’re not here to fight. Haw­thorne, shut up.”

“If we can’t con­vince them to let us pass and talk to their scholars, then let’s just go,” Sedder said. He met Keolah’s eyes meaning­fully.

“Is there nothing we can do to con­vince you?” Silver asked.

“No,” Tumán said firmly. “Begone.”

“Could you at least take a message to your scholars petitioning to them to speak with us?” Keolah asked. “Perhaps if you don’t want us in your forest, we could meet at a neutral location some­where else?”

“I don’t see what good it would do, as I doubt they would agree to meet with you,” Tumán said. “But fine. If all you want to do is talk, maybe some­one will want to talk to you.” He shrugged. “Now go. Remove your­selves from the shadow of the great trees.”

“We’re going,” Keolah said, holding up her hands.

The group went back the way they came. It turned out to be pretty easy to spot the edge of the zephyl forest. The size of trees decreased abruptly when they got far enough, and they stopped having auras. Once they were a bit of a dis­tance away from the edge of the giant trees, Keolah held up a hand and beckoned them to make camp.

“So, do you think they’ll actually come through?” Keolah asked.

“Not a chance,” Haw­thorne said.

Sedder shook his head. “They’re either hiding some­thing, or they just really don’t like visitors.”

“Or both,” Delven added.

“Why were they afraid of our dreams dis­rupting their harmony?” Haw­thorne won­dered. “We never indicated that we actually wanted to hurt them.”

“You did,” Delven pointed out.

Haw­thorne waved a hand. “I didn’t want to hurt them. I just wanted them to stop being putzes and let us in.”

“I see you’re getting some good use out of the Fly­lish in­sults,” Delven said.

Haw­thorne said, “Think the fly­ing monkeys are listening in on us?”

Keolah peered around the area. “I’m spotting a couple near the edge of the great trees. None nearby.”

“I’ll put up a sound ward any­way,” Sedder said. He wove a dome of dark mana around them like a silent shadow.

“So, have we actually found out any­thing of use about these trees you wanted to study?” Haw­thorne asked.

“Absolutely,” Keolah said. “We found out that they have souls just like elvenoids.”

“And that they’re mys­teriously protected by fly­ing monkeys,” Sedder said.

“It’s rather rude to call them ‘fly­ing monkeys’,” Silver said. “They’re zephyli.”

“Well, they were rather rude to us,” Sedder retorted.

Silver grunted.

“I have to won­der if Tinean is an ancient tongue spoken by zephyli,” Keolah said. “Tumán recog­nized my reference to it.”

“Bah, them?” Haw­thorne said. “Thousands of years ago, they prob­ably didn’t even know how to make a spear yet. Never mind that a bunch of old wizards would have respected books they wrote. Tumán said they didn’t even write books.”

“He could have been lying,” Sedder said. “He clearly knew what a book is.”

“They seemed confident in their ability to drive us away, despite their seemingly primitive weapons,” Silver said. “They could be powerful mages.”

“Those weapons weren’t enchanted, either,” Keolah said.

“We should sneak back into the forest and locate one of their settle­ments,” Sedder said. “See what we can find out. I can hide us, though there might be trouble if any of them is a Seeker.”

“It’s too dan­gerous,” Silver said.

“Anything they attack us with, I can defend against,” Haw­thorne said. “And Kithere can heal.”

“I see no need to antagonize the poor creatures,” Kithere said. “Why are we doing this again, any­way?”

“I want to know if there’s any con­ceivable connection between the trees of Thalarey and the pocket-world we dis­covered,” Keolah said. “We don’t need to go slaughtering them to do that.”

“I suppose,” Kithere said.

“Alright, here’s the plan,” Keolah said. “Sedder and I will sneak into the forest under cover of invisibility and see if we can locate one of their settle­ments. The rest of you can stay here and guard the books, and wait to see if any zephyli actually want to speak to us of their own volition. If any­one spots us through the illusions, we will retreat.”

“You are not going to get captured again,” Haw­thorne said.

“Well, I know what those mana suppression collars look like now,” Keolah said. “If I spot any­thing with the same pattern of mana, we’ll back off rather than risk it.”

Haw­thorne grumbled, clearly still not happy about the situation, but didn’t argue any further.

Keolah grew several veg­etable plants for them before going to sleep. Come morning, Sedder cloaked them in shadows, and the two of them set off to the south, into zephyl territory.

Sedder commented, “When you men­tioned that you might want me to help you break into people’s private collections, I didn’t anticipate that we might want to sneak into the homes of fly­ing monkeys.”

“After all that’s happened, I think we’re going to need to learn to roll with the unex­pected,” Keolah said.

“You can say that again,” Sedder said. “Be care­ful to avoid dis­turbing the undergrowth too much. There’s only so much en­vironmen­tal change around us that I can mask.”

Wherever the zephyl nests, settle­ments, or even cities might be, they were no­where near the edge of the forest, at least not the edge that the group had come in by. Cloaked in illusion, the zephyli gave no indication of having det­ected Keolah and Sedder. She spotted them, here and there, fly­ing amongst the trees, but none of them came close or paused to look in their general dir­ec­tion. Mostly, they used their wings to break a fall, assist a jump, or glide from tree to tree. Keolah doubted that they could sustain long-dis­tance flight.

“I don’t think that there’s any real need to fight Sardill,” Keolah said suddenly. “Surely there’s room enough in the pocket-world for all of us. Can’t we work together?”

Sedder shrugged help­lessly. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to see what happens. I doubt that Haw­thorne will be so open-minded, though. Nor Kithere.”

“I don’t really agree with her forcing you to swear not to betray her,” Keolah said. “I know that must be uncom­fortable for you. Under the cir­cum­stances, we were all in the same boat, and there was no real reason not to trust one an­other. Even if you were to free your­self at our ex­pense, you were still under orders from Sardill to go with us, weren’t you? He wouldn’t have been very happy with you if you’d gone back to Kalor empty-handed.”

“That’s true,” Sedder said.

“Fly­landers kid­napped my sis­ter and, app­ar­ently, sold her into slavery,” Keolah said. “I really doubt Sardill was per­sonally responsible for that, though. What would he care about one young song elf? He cer­tainly didn’t give orders to William Cooper to do the same to us, after all.”

“He did not,” Sedder said. “I would have known about it, and would have been freaking out less.”

Keolah spotted, high in the trees, a single building, with a hand­ful of zephyli. Perhaps a nest, or a small outpost. Not nearly enough people there to be a real settle­ment of any sort. What sort of societal organ­ization did they have? Judging by the number of zephyli who came to accost them earlier, there were a lot of them around some­where.

“You see that up there?” Keolah pointed.

Sedder nodded. “Maybe a watch tower.”

As she watched, she noticed that zephyli were coming to the building laden down with bags. She couldn’t tell what they were carrying, but at a guess, she figured it must be food or supplies of some sort. Then, she spotted one zephyl with a violet aura leaving the outpost laden down with as much as he could carry.

“Follow that zephyl,” Keolah said, hurrying to catch up.

The zephyl couldn’t move as quickly as it might while carrying so much. He mostly used his golden wings to keep his balance while relying on crossing limbs on foot and climbing with his claws. Keolah had to won­der whether it wouldn’t be quicker to carry smaller loads at a time, but the zephyl didn’t seem to mind. At least it made keeping up with him on foot easy enough, even if she had to care­fully keep an eye out for the violet aura even when the zephyl was not actually vis­ible through trunks and leaves.

Hours passed. The zephyl seemed to have end­less endurance. Eventually, though, many brightly colored auras above and ahead of them came into sight. Nothing near the ground, but up in the trees, buildings clung to the trunks and sprawled out across the limbs, and rope bridges swayed between them.

“Looks like we found zephyl town,” Sedder said.

Keolah nodded thought­fully. “There’s a lot of zephyli here. But we’re quite a ways into the forest.”

“Do you even know what you’re looking for?” Sedder asked.

Keolah shook her head. “Not really.” She sighed and went up to one of the trees, and put her hand against the trunk. “I keep thinking I’ll know it if I see it. I wanted to see if those zephyli had any­thing even remotely resembling the trian­gular runes from the pocket-world. But I can’t tell from here, and it doesn’t look like they even have any writing at all from down here. And they don’t need to have ramps or ladders up into their city. They can fly! Argh.”

“And climb,” Sedder added.

“It’s getting late, at any rate,” Keolah said. “Can we find a place to hide out nearby and figure out some way to get a closer look after we’ve slept a bit?”

“I could just keep myself awake again,” Sedder said.

“You know what happened last time you did that,” Keolah said. “It worked out, yes, and you had no better op­tions at the time, but we were stuck in Kebab-de — I mean, Kadabi-Gharatik — for days, waiting for you to come to.”

“One night won’t hurt me,” Sedder said.

“Can you keep your illusions up while you’re asleep?” Keolah asked.

“If I set them up to be self-sustaining, yeah,” Sedder said. “It’ll take a bit to set up, like a sim­ple enchant­ment, but yes, I can hide us over­night.”

A short ways away from the zephyl city, they located a small hollow next to the truck of one of the giant trees. They tucked in, and Sedder wove an illusionary web of shadow over the en­trance. Keolah hated to be try­ing to sleep so far into unknown territory while undercover like this, but the city was too far inside the forest to avoid it.

“This is stupid,” Haw­thorne griped. “What are we even doing?”

“Waiting for Keolah and Sedder to scout out the forest,” Silver said, leaning back casually and clearly more relaxed than Haw­thorne was. “Have faith in them. They know what they’re doing.”

“Why did we even agree to this?” Haw­thorne grumbled. “I want to go out and do some­thing! I hate just sitting here and not even knowing what’s going on.”

“I believe my sis­ter doubts your ability to be sub­tle,” Kithere said.

“I’m per­fectly sub­tle!” Haw­thorne yelled, leaping to her feet and flailing her arms out.

A yellow zephyl landed on the ground in front of them. “Ah, here you are. I was looking for you. Thank you for signalling for me. My name is Tir.”

“Erm.” Haw­thorne lowered her arms and sat down. “So you are here, Tir. I’m Haw­thorne. I totally meant to be signalling for you there.”

“You wanted to talk to somebody!” Tir said, prac­tically bouncing. “So I came to talk. I don’t know if I can help much with what­ever it is you wanted to talk about, but I’m happy to meet visitors. Where are you from? What have you seen out­side the forest?”

“Well, he’s an ex­citable one,” Delven said quietly.

“I’m a she!” Tir protested.

“Sorry,” Delven said. “I haven’t met too many zephyli.”

Tir smiled. “It’s not a prob­lem! Males have gold feathers and females have silver. I don’t ex­pect many elves are too familiar with us. We kind of keep to our­selves. The elders won’t even let me leave the forest! This is about as far as they’d let me go. It’s totally not fair.”

“Why don’t you just leave any­way?” Haw­thorne asked. “That’s what I did.”

Tir crinkled her muzzle. “They say zephyli who leave the forest and lose the dream will slowly go mad. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I don’t think I really want to risk it.”

“Here the dreams again,” Haw­thorne said. “What is it about zephyli and dreams?”

“Oh,” Tir said. “Maybe I’ve said too much. I don’t know if I was supposed to talk about the dream. Um. Just forget I said any­thing!”

“Tumán already men­tioned the dreams,” Delven said.

“Oh, okay,” Tir said, relaxing. “So you left home against your elders’ wishes? Won’t you go mad, too?”

“Some might say she was already mad to begin with,” Delven said lightly.

Haw­thorne rolled her eyes.

“Elves don’t… dream like that,” Kithere said.

“Really?” Tir won­dered. “Then why were they so afraid of you dis­rupting the dream if you came into our forest?”

“I don’t know,” Haw­thorne said. “I don’t think there’s any­thing special about our forests, though.”

“You don’t dream together?“Tir said, her face falling.

Haw­thorne shook her head. “Nope.”

“Aw!” Tir said. “Now I feel sorry for you. That seems like an awfully lonely existence.”

“Normally, we dream about things like going to do a job only to realize you’re not wearing any pants,” Delven said.

“Why would you dream about that?” Tir made a face. “That’s a silly thing to dream about!”

“It is,” Sedder agreed.

“I dream about being the most badass warrior in the world,” Haw­thorne said.

“Are you?” Tir asked wide-eyed.

“Well… prob­ably not,” Haw­thorne admitted. “Maybe someday? I don’t know who is, though. So I could be!”

“Have you done a lot of fighting?” Tir asked. “That sounds scary!”

“Not really,” Haw­thorne said.

“Mostly a lot of running,” Delven added.

“The elders say elves fight all the time,” Tir said. “And the trolls. And the goblins. They’re mean! Well. That’s what they say, at least. I’ve never met a troll or goblin before.”

“The goblins we’ve met were per­fectly decent,” Kithere said. “I don’t know about the trolls, but the trolls I would have en­countered were prob­ably the worst of them. Nice trolls don’t go down to the slave caverns. They might not even know they exist.”

“Tell me all about every­thing you’ve seen!” Tir exclaimed.

Haw­thorne and Delven exchanged a look. Delven shrugged.

“Sure,” Delven said. “I even managed to compose a song while we were sailing here, but now I’ve lost my notes and my lute. Oh well, bards usually work off mem­ory any­way, and I guess I can just sing it.”

“Or, you know, just tell it,” Haw­thorne said.

“Well, sure, but I want to test my new song and get a feel for what I might want to change!” Delven said.

“Sing it! Sing it!” Tir bounced around.

“Okay, okay,” Delven said, clearing his throat. He sang a riveting tale of hapless travelers lost in a forest, hearing voices and having nightmares, when a thun­derstorm rolled in, sparking a forest fire that forced them to take refuge in a strange cave. He told of a world of magic and possibility, for­gotten in the mists of time.

“That was totally not how it happened,” Haw­thorne grumbled.

“It totally was,” Delven insisted. “And quit inter­rupting.”

“I thought you were finished,” Haw­thorne said.

“Well, okay, I was,” Delven said. “But I was try­ing to figure out a better way to word that last verse!”

“It didn’t really rhyme,” Haw­thorne said.

“I wasn’t try­ing to rhyme,” Delven said.

“Why not?” Haw­thorne said. “Songs are supposed to rhyme!”

“Fine, I’ll try to make it rhyme,” Delven grumbled. “You know elvish isn’t my first lan­guage.”

“Me either!” Tir said. “But the elders tell me I’m good at lan­guages. I’m even try­ing to learn Astanic, because I figured maybe if I asked the trolls and goblins why they’re mean, maybe they had a good reason to be, and I can con­vince them not to be so mean any­more.”

Haw­thorne groaned softly. The zephyli had sent an over­enthus­iastic, naive little child to come speak with them? “Tir, how old are you?”

“Me?” Tir said. “I’m eight!”

“Eight!?” Haw­thorne said.

“Uh-huh,” Tir said. “I know you elves live like for ever, but zephyli only live twenty years.”

“Oh,” Haw­thorne said. “Huh.”

“How old are you?” Tir asked.

“Twenty-three,” Haw­thorne rep­lied.

“So old!” Tir exclaimed. “But, I guess that’s young for an elf?”

“For the record, I’m not an elf,” Delven put in.

“Oh?” Tir said, turning her atten­tion to him. “You look kind of like an elf. What are you, then?”

“Human,” Delven said.

Tir cocked her head. “A what now?”

“Human,” Delven repeated, chuckling.

“Is that a kind of elf?” Tir asked, looking at him curiously. “Or is that just what they call a brown elf? They call the pur­ple ones song elves and the blue ones snow elves, don’t they? I don’t really know why. Zephyli are zephyli, no matter whether our fur is red or black or white or brown or gray or what­ever.”

“Humans aren’t elves,” Delven said in some amuse­ment. “I’m from across the ocean.”

“What’s an ocean?” Tir asked.

Haw­thorne had a feeling that this conversation was in no way going to be pro­duc­tive for them, at any rate. She hoped Keolah was having better luck.

* * *

Keolah dreamed. Her mind drifted in images that slowly coalesced into a surreal duplicate of the forest in which she and Sedder were currently in. She thought she even recog­nized some of the landmarks and forms of the tree buildings around her. But amidst that, un­real elements crept in as well. Bright crys­tals shone out from the trees, and the sky far overhead above the canopy held in a perpetual twilight lit by fireflies and lanterns.

The most striking difference, though, was the buildings them­selves. There were far more of them, clinging to the sides of the buildings and stretching across the ground. An en­tire city lay here, within the dream, and it was populated by elves. They were tall, taller than she was used to, but not freakishly so. They bore a range of vivid hair colors atop pale violet skin. She might have mis­taken them sim­ply for normal song elves, but there was some­thing about them that felt… diff­erent. Maybe it was their eyes. No, not their eyes. Their auras. None of them had an aura. They were just images, pro­jec­tions. They weren’t really here.

A pink-haired man app­roached her, and gestured her into the building. “My name is Sarin. I under­stand you wished to speak with one of us? I didn’t ex­pect you’d be here already, though.”

“Er, yes,” Keolah said, heading inside to take a seat on a bench. “I asked to speak with some­one, at any rate.”

“The zephyli told us of your quest,” Sarin ex­plained. “They could not ex­plain the details, though. What do you wish to know of us and our tongue?”

“So you are the trees that the ‘tongue of the trees’ was supposed to be of?” Keolah asked. “This was… not what I ex­pected.”

“Did the zephyli not come to you and tell you to enter into our dream?” Sarin asked.

“Well… no,” Keolah admitted. “Sorry. We snuck into the forest.”

“Ah,” Sarin said. “I see. The zephyli have been zealously guarding the borders, but they really cannot actually keep any­one out who enters by stealth or by force.”

“I didn’t want to hurt any­one,” Keolah said. “But I wanted answers.”

Sarin tilted his head. “So long as you do not cause trouble, I am not concerned. There are those who have come here to try to cause trouble, many of them stumbling into the dream unwittingly. I do not believe you are one of those. What is it that you seek to gain know­ledge of?”

Keolah nodded. “I’m hoping you, at least, might be able to tell us just what it was that we found. A pocket-world, reached through some sort of portal, with amp­lified magic and a large rune com­plex in the center. I’d made a bunch of notes about it, but we lost them along the way here due to cir­cum­stances beyond our con­trol…”

Sarin held up a hand. “Dream us there.”

“Pardon?” Keolah said.

“We are in a dream,” Sarin said. “We’re in the dream­world. Imagine the place you visited before, and take us there.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Keolah said.

Sarin sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “Focus. Fix the place in your mind and recall having been there. Imagine it and place your­self there. Visualize the place around you. Remember what it looked like, what it felt like.”

Keolah rem­em­bered. The air shimmered and shifted around them, and suddenly the two of them were standing in the pocket-world just as she rem­em­bered it. The eight obelisks towered in the center of the com­plex, and the small inn she’d grown stood off to the side.

“Was this building here originally?” Sarin won­dered, looking over to it.

Keolah shook her head. “No. I grew that. We needed a place to rest while we were studying the place.”

“I see.” Sarin nodded. “And this…” He walked up to one of the obelisks, care­fully examining the runes along it. “You have a good mem­ory. These are clear and well-defined.”

“I spent quite a bit of time studying them,” Keolah said.

“I know what this is,” said Sarin. “I recog­nize this. This is a Nexus.”

“A Nexus?” Keolah repeated.

Sarin nodded. “The Vel’dari use them for transportation.”

“Vel’dari?” Keolah repeated. “I’m not familiar with that term.”

“Void elves, let’s call them,” Sarin said. “They inhabit an artificial ethereal plane called Vel’kira. We have a common origin with them, in that we were all originally from Til’raine, but we do not get along.”

“Alright, you’ve lost me,” Keolah said.

“Perhaps it’s best that I start at the beginning, then?” Sarin said. “You’re an elf, are you not? You still speak a lan­guage recog­nizable as descended from my own. But you do not know your origins? Where do you believe the elves came from?”

“I couldn’t tell you for cer­tain,” Keolah said. “Legend teaches us that we were the chil­dren of Aeris the Mother Goddess, but the Trick­ster lured us out of the heavens and trapped us in mortal forms on Lezaria.”

Sarin snorted softly. “So far as creation myths go, it’s at least not as bad as some I’ve heard. Aeris did have quite a number of chil­dren. But as to the rest… You see me here? You saw the others, walking around in the City of Dreams?”

“You’re elves,” Keolah said. “Yes.”

“Tin’dari, we call our­selves,” Sarin said. “Tree elves, you might say in your dialect. The elves who live on Lezaria today, the ones who call them­selves song elves and snow elves? You’re our descendants. Many millennia removed, and I’ve afraid most of we Tin’dari have paid little atten­tion to the affairs of the mat­er­ial world and often have little capacity for dis­tinguishing reality from the dream. To us, the dream is just as real as your reality.”

“You’re thousands of years old?” Keolah won­dered.

Sarin gave a small grin. “You have to under­stand that time does not pass the same way in the dream. Have you ever dreamt, and closed your eyes for what felt like hours, but opened your eyes to dis­cover only five minutes had passed? Or closed your eyes for what felt like five minutes, and hours had passed?”

“I know what you mean, I guess,” Keolah said. “I just never really thought that some­one could spend all their time in a dream.”

“Some of us decided to sleep, and sim­ply never wound up waking back up,” Sarin said. “We’d found a way to place our souls within trees, while keeping our bodies held in magical stasis. While in such a state, we had no need for food or drink, but we had full access to the dream­world and con­trol over our own powers. To some of us, this was con­sidered an ideal situation, to the point that when cir­cum­stances changed and we lost our original elven bodies, those of us who even noticed no longer cared. We hadn’t intended to wake up again any­way.”

“How did you lose your bodies?” Keolah asked.

Sarin shrugged. “I don’t even know. The world changed. Perhaps our chil­dren turned against us, or an in­vading force slew us in our sleep, or our magic sim­ply fal­tered and they decayed away. It hardly matters at this point. The trees were well warded enough that they were not harmed.”

“So you’re my ancestor, you’re saying?” Keolah asked.

Sarin chuckled. “Not dir­ectly. I had no chil­dren of my own. But yes, for what­ever that’s worth. And even if you were an elf born of an­other world, we would still share a common heritage in descent from Til’raine.”

“Til’raine?” Keolah asked. “I think I might have heard of that.”

“Oh?” Sarin said. “What do the current myths say of Til’raine?”

“That it was a garden of paradise and our ancestors were cast out into the darkness for being unworthy,” Keolah said.

“Hmm, close,” Sarin said. “I don’t know where the self-recrim­ination came from. The legends I grew up with were a little diff­erent. We weren’t forced to leave. We chose to leave. They say the Til’dari were cruel and mad, and our ancestors turned their backs on the sun and set sail amongst the stars.”

“That’s quite the allegory,” Keolah said.

“I am un­cer­tain as to how much is allegory,” Sarin said. “I was born on Lezaria. I lived my whole life under its sun. But Til’raine was an­other world, with a diff­erent sun. There are many, many worlds in the uni­verse, more than one could ever visit, more than one could ever ­imag­ine.”

Keolah’s eyes widened. “Really? And here I’d thought just ex­ploring my own world would take a life­time.”

“A life­time,” Sarin said sadly. “How long is a life­time?”

“Most people live around sixty to eighty years these days,” Keolah said.

“I grieve to see what has become of our people in these later days,” Sarin said. “I had already lived for over seven hun­dred years by the time I went to sleep within my tree for the last time.”

“Seven hun­dred?” Keolah gaped.

“Tales of old spoke of age­less people living as long as the stars,” Sarin said. “Tell me you still have those tales?”

Keolah nodded. “The old stories tell us that the elves were once immortal. A lot of old stories seem fanciful and impossible, though.”

Sarin chuckled. “Be wary of deeming any­thing impossible.”

“So, will you tell me about the people who you say made this place?” Keolah asked. “The… void elves?”

“I have only stories to go on, as this was all long before my time as surely as it was before yours,” Sarin said.

“But your stories are closer to the source than mine,” Keolah said.

“True,” Sarin said. “And I must warn you about this place you have dis­covered. It is very dan­gerous, and I urge you not to fall down the path that the void elves did.”

“Noted,” Keolah said. “What happened here? When we came close to it, I kept seeing visions of a world breaking apart.”

Sarin tilted his head and looked thought­ful. “Is that what happened? Destroyed by their own hubris, per­haps, I had won­dered why this place was empty, rather than the burgeoning city it once was.”

“This was a city once?” Keolah asked.

“When Til’raine fell, the Vel’dari fled not to the stars, but to the under­world,” Sarin said. “The ethereal world. Or plane, per­haps. They made their home here, built a great empire spanning an un­imag­inable breadth. In each of their mighty cities, kingdoms unto them­selves, stood a Nexus.” Sarin gestured to the circle of obelisks. “They used them to travel in­stantly between the cities of their empire.”

“How do you know all this?” Keolah asked.

“They kept gateways open to the overworld, the mat­er­ial world,” Sarin said. “Sometimes they deigned to come through. Sometimes they took people back with them. Sometimes those people even returned. This all comes of a tale in which a Tin’dari woman named Breseva, who was taken into what you now call the Witch­­wood, where she spent six hun­dred years before returning to us.”

“Breseva?” Keolah repeated. “The goddess of springtime?”

“Goddess?” Sarin snorted softly. “Perhaps the Tin’dari are like gods to your eyes, but you’d be better off worshipping the nature spirits.”

“Oh,” Keolah said feebly.

“When Breseva returned to us, she spoke of vast riches, a sun brighter than a thousand of our suns suffusing all the world with blinding light, and magic stronger than any­thing we could ever achieve.”

“The sun went out,” Keolah whis­pered. “That was one of the visions I saw.”

“So it seems,” Sarin said quietly.

“How did she leave?” Keolah asked. “And why?”

“A woman by the name of Adis had taken Breseva as her wife,” Sarin said. “A princess among the Vel’dari. She was cruel and vain, and kept her locked in a golden tower, and forbade her to ever leave. But the Trick­ster helped her to escape, broke the wards that bound her, and showed her the way to the portal whilst the guards dozed in enchanted slumber. She sang her way through the magical forest, the trees and plants falling in with her command.”

“I think I’ve heard this story before,” Keolah said. “Although in a slightly diff­erent version. ‘Adis’ wound up being a man, and we called him ‘Hadis’. I’d ­imag­ine your version is more acc­urate.”

“And this…” Sarin looked around. “The skies are dark and the city is gone…”

“The world ends in a ledge dropping down into the void,” Keolah said.

“It’s quite the tale you’ve brought back this time,” Sarin said. “What has happened to the Vel’kiran Empire, then, I won­der? I can’t ­imag­ine this was an isolated in­cident. Perhaps the same thing that happened to Til’raine. They destroyed them­selves.”

“So this… Nexus… could be used to visit other places?” Keolah asked.

Sarin nodded. “I urge you to leave it be, though. No good can come of the under­world. It is full of dan­gerous beings who would kill you or en­slave you. And even if you avoided that, in time you would become as the Vel’dari did, their old power twisting you and corrupting you.”

“So you can’t tell me how to use it,” Keolah said.

“I would not even if I knew how,” Sarin said. “I sought to warn you, not to assist in a foolish endeavor such as that.”

“Do you under­stand this lan­guage, these runes?” Keolah asked. “Can you at least teach me that?”

“Knowing what you intend to do with it?” Sarin said. “I will not.”

Keolah sighed. “Thank you regard­less for the infor­mation, and I will bear in mind your warnings.”

“I hope so,” Sarin said with a sigh. “May your magic never fal­ter.”