We stuck around, watching the purple sprites dance their magical ritual, curious how long it would take. When there hadn’t been any change for over an hour, we realised that it might very well be some sort of permanent, or at least all night, activity. I briefly wondered if we had just happened to arrive during a significant night, something that might boost their powers like the full and new moon had done for me prior to crossing the second Divide, but I couldn’t think of any events of such significance during this night. It was just an ordinary night.
“Should we wait for dawn? Maybe that’ll change things,” Rai quietly asked, obviously unsure if we should simply continue watching, even if none of us was able to figure out what was going on.
“We’d have to hope we can escape without the cover of night,” I reminded him, not sure just how fast the local population would switch from the monsters of the night to the weirdness of the day. There might be some sort of downtime between, just like extremely few people moved about just before dawn on Earth, the weird beings might want to sleep in, while the monsters might go to sleep early. Or maybe they had some overlap and trying to escape at dawn was the worst we could do.
“Do you think we can sneak around the clearing and get to the large tree from the other side? I’d like to get my hand on it,” Adra admitted, looking at it with a certain longing in her eyes.
“Are you sure that’d be wise?” I couldn’t help but ask, remembering how the last commune with a tree had affected her. If the same happened in their centre of power, it would likely be bad, and that was ignoring the very real possibility that the tree was somehow intelligent and independently thinking, maybe even the lord of the place or bound to it. In that case, trying to commune with it would likely raise every alarm they had and see us in serious trouble.
“I want to try,” she insisted, the longing in her eyes turning even stronger.
A part of me wanted to reject her idea but I could understand her thinking. We were united in a desire for power and the tree and the power it contained would likely be enough to propel Adra past the second Divide, a chance she had been looking for since we had battled Tegi and she had stolen that Dryad’s power. If she could get her hands on this, it would be a major accomplishment.
But with the potential for massive gain came massive risk. Looking at Rai and Adra, I thought that the two of them should be able to escape if things went bad. Similarly, if I only focused on Sigmir, I was reasonably confident to keep her safe and escape together with her.
“Okay,” I accepted Adra’s request after a few more moments of thought. Risk and reward had to co-exist and I had done some pretty risky things in the past, trying to get stronger. Taking a risk for Adra was just fair.
Without any additional discussion, we retreated back into the forst, carefully making our way around that central clearing. There were quite a few alien monsters scurrying around, all of them moving almost perfectly silent, adding to the incredibly eerie atmosphere of the forest. Every instinct in my body told me that these things really shouldn’t be and slowly but surely, the sensations began to give me a headache.
It took almost two hours to creep around the clearing, despite only crossing about two kilometres of distance in that time. The terrain wasn’t really difficult, we just had to be incredibly cautious.
The central tree didn’t look too different from the backside, compared to the front. There was a large pond near its roots, with some of them directly reaching into the water, but otherwise, it was simply serene.
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“Rai, watch out for Adra, she might need the help. I’ll keep us concealed as best as I can,” I ordered him, before briefly hugging Sigmir and whispering into her ears, “If anything happens, I rely on you to get me out. I’ll be completely focused on our concealment, so you might have to carry me and run.” Given that I had lowered my voice as much as possible and deliberately used the old Jotun-tongue only the two of us spoke, I was reasonably confident she was the only one who knew what I had said.
She studied me for a moment, before giving a slow, deliberate nod. Her acceptance took a load off my shoulders, if worst came to worst, the two of us would get out.
The last stretch across the open ground was nerve-wracking. Sure, I could call upon the shadows of the night to conceal us, but anyone looking closely would notice something amiss. It was concealment, not invisibility and no amount of crouching would allow you to cross an open field without being seen.
It might have been pure luck that no creature looked closely enough, or maybe a certain arrogance that nobody would dare approach their tree in the middle of the night, either way, we managed to get there without waking up everyone.
Adra first stepped to the small lake near the roots, carefully placing her hand in the water. Her action made me raise an eyebrow, as it was far too gentle and careful to be without purpose, so I stepped up myself, looking through Lenore’s eyes to see if I noticed something. Curiously, just with Lenore’s eyes, I was unable to detect anything but when I got closer, I could detect a faint, almost imperceivable scent in the air and it drew my attention.
My tongue flicked out, almost instinctively at this point, and I tasted the air, trying to make sense of what I was smelling. It took me a moment to realise what I was smelling and tasting was the clear, almost illusionary taste of moonlight, but not the ordinary moonlight that fell from the sky, but something more tangible. If my Liquid Moonlight was the magical essence of the moon’s cold, this taste was something similar. Moonlight, only devoid of the cold, of the darkness it had passed through, purified into something more. Or maybe something less, it all depended on perspective.
“It’s the water, isn’t it?” I quietly asked Lenore, getting on one knee next to her and carefully cupping a bit of water from the pond. In direct contact, I could detect a faint trace of the cold and darkness of space in the liquid, but it was almost gone, the light washed and bound by the water.
“It’s fascinating, the tree feeds on the light, taking in power from Sun and Moon. Duality,” Adra quietly whispered, staring at the massive trunk before us. “It merges with Death and Life from the forest, giving birth to something more.”
“Do you think you can take what you need?” I asked, speaking just as softly. I had no idea how the change, the alteration, of the moonlight in front of me had occurred, I could barely tell that it had been moonlight in the past. And that ignored how one could bind light into water. It was fascinating, but also more than a little worriyng.
“Give me a moment, I need to prepare,” she replied, as she took off her shoes and stepped into the cold water at our feet, wading through the shallow water and to the roots that were stretching into the water.
Rai was following along and I moved back to Sigmir, focusing back on the concealment, trying to strengthen it as much as possible. If Adra did something big, I might be able to prevent or at least delay detection, giving us a bit of time to flee. Next to the tree, I could see Adra pause, clearly focusing inwards. For the first few moments, nothing much happened, just a tiny ripple starting in the water, moving towards Adra.
Finally, she looked up again, likely staring at the roots in front of her and raised her hand to tough the tree.
The moment Adra placed her hand against the tree’s roots, I could feel a ripple go through the Astral and did my best to smother it in Darkness. For a moment, I managed to push down that one wave, only to feel another, this one slightly different from the last. Lenore’s mind was with me and we started to quickly work, smoothing some of the waves with our own power, letting other waves ripple outwards, but injecting some concealing Darkness into them, making them more difficult to detect.
As the seconds dragged on, I felt the waves getting faster and more chaotic, to the point that Lenore and I couldn’t just work together, we had to work as one. With little but a mental shift, we merged, becoming the Raven’s Shadow once more, eager to cover our companions under our dark wings.