Spring comes suddenly in the Vale of Rydus. Once the sun has grown strong enough to induce melting on the high slopes, water rushes down, sweeps snow out of the forests, and induces a rapid burst of life. This, however, comes late, not even beginning until the very end of the fourth month. The land bursts into growth, color, sound, and life in the fifth month as the days lengthen, and everything seeks to take advantage of the short period of warmth and growth to come. Flowers and green shoots abound. Insects and rodents emerge from burrows, and the waters resound with the croaks of countless frogs.
This change brings with it a sudden, brief, surplus of food. Numerous mushrooms, especially, emerge at this time. The dryads, moving about with speed unseen throughout the winter, piled bundles high and shared the resurgent bounty of this period with us. Many of the trees of the vale spread their characteristic reddish-pink cones at this time, and the dryads revealed to us a method to render these down to something human stomachs could consume. At the same time, their careful eyes kept watch on the mountains to the east, carefully measuring the snow pack in order to gauge when it would be possible for us to depart.
Lady Indili and I were eager to leave. The dryads had been kind, in their way, but the changes wrought upon them by wizards make them strange, unsettling, and a poor match for human life rhythms. Nor did their simple bands produce the full range of goods necessary to sustain civilized life. Our clothes were brutally worn, surviving only through extensive rabbit fur patches. Paper, ink, and other tools were either lost or exhausted. Any more time spent in the vale would reduce us to savagery from which we could not easily escape. Nor would the dryads have allowed any attempt to tame their realm in any case. Shelters dug forth from the snow were tolerated, for they melted away to nothing in due course, but any attempt to build a house would have been forbidden.
It was judged that the passes through the mountains might be passable midway through the fifth month, and we departed at once. Aileira led the way and guided us up a gentle rise all the way to the ridgeline that marks the edge of the vale. We said our goodbyes there, atop the saddle. The dryad warrior gave me a stone knife she’d crafted herself and dyed blood red using yew berries. It was a most useful blade, and I utilized it capably for some time. After it dulled, I made certain to keep it close, and in due course it was taken to Crisremon and gifted to the emperor himself. Few indeed are the artifacts made by dryads found in human hands, and most were obtained by theft. Felallai gave Lady Indili several fossil fragments, strange teeth like tiny tridents pulled from the depths of their lakes that seemed to come from some strange shark-like creature. In return, I provided them with an index to the alphabet of the Sairn script and a map of Shdustu on my last remaining sheet of vellum. It was my hope that this would aid them in future generations.
Upon exiting the vale, we descended down the mountains into the territory of the Green Spruce Bahab. These tribesmen were very busy with the needs of spring, hunting birds, frogs and fish, gathering reeds, repairing houses, and otherwise working from dawn to dusk. Despite such a surge of activity, this portion of the mountains remained wild and untamed, with few residents. It was over a week before we encountered a group at a duck hunting camp on the shore of an alpine lake. They were astonished to encounter us, for the Green Spruce tribe lives in the deep mountains and conducts minimal trade with outsiders. No member of the tribe had ever seen a Sairn before, and they could not imagine anyone overwintering in the Vale of Rydus. They thought we were half-breed slaves who had escaped from the mines of a neighboring tribe. Lady Indili disabused them of this notion by blasting the first who attempted to lay hands upon her unconscious. Here the vast spread of the chapter house worked to our advantage. All know of sorcery, and no sorcerer is a slave, ever. Their rules restrain, but also protect, them. Why a sorceress would be traveling in the mountains with only a single servant, a role I adoptly swiftly despite its considerable inaccuracies as it greatly simplified relations, was something they simply did not desire to interrogate. The hunters simply directed their youngest member to guide us to the chief as swiftly as possible.
The chief did not believe our story either, but he was extremely apologetic regarding the attempted assault on a master essence user. He showered us with gifts in response, including, most helpfully, a mule to carry our supplies. Following this, I developed a story that Lady Indili was from Shnudidishgu and had spent the winter prospecting for fossils in the mountains while I served as her scribe. This was unlikely to be believed, since most would assume we had spent the time trading secrets with wizards, but it was the sort of lie that everyone was prepared to allow to pass unquestioned. Other Bahab tribes accepted this story easily, and often offered condolences for the lost servants they believed we had endured. This was welcome, for it was true enough, though not for the reasons they suspected.
I did not enjoy this deception. While it was no trouble at all to pretend to be the Lady Indili’s subordinate, and truthfully prior to the expedition I would have only been too happy to work alongside a master sorcerer, the lie obscured the truth of the Dragon Expedition and carried with it an implicit admission that we were afraid to claim our proper origins as emissaries of the Sanid Empire. This was especially rankling as it was untrue. We had not failed. We found the dragon, and even managed to obtain some few scraps of evidence of the encounter. Worst of all was that the dryads had never once doubted our story, which made the incredulity of human ears doubly painful. I resolved to reconstitute the expedition on some level as soon as possible, despite the lack of any resources to do so.
Stolen story; please report.
Travel was very difficult, and slow. The Dumum Mountains are challenging to cross at the best of times, and spring is the opposite of such. In some ways it is worse than winter. Snow may be impassible and cold, but it is at least dry. The vast melting of the spring, coupled with seasonal rains, soaks into everything. The trails turn to mud, or even to freely flowing streams, the vegetation soaks through every morning with dew, and even firewood is damp and burns fitfully. This drenched backdrop was compounded through our lack of properly maintained clothing. Water seeped through broken boot seams, leaving our steps to squish and plop all day long. Skin suffered as a consequence, and blisters and sores developed in considerable number, slowing progress due to pain and the need to carefully wrap the feet in rags for support. We might have bartered with the Bahab for new footwear, but we were utterly without trade resources. The only items we had brought forth across the Cracking Void were treasures of research such as the cast-off scales of the dragon that I would under no circumstances part with. Instead, we endured privation in the hope of obtaining funds upon reaching a Nikkad settlement, either through use of the imperial signet I retained or through hiring out our skills as we had done during the winter in the Tasgusun Hills.
The abundance of water stains the mountains green. Though the mostly coniferous trees are generally evergreen, their needles and scales flush and darken during this time, and other trees such as birches that drop their leaves bud out and reveal vast emerald fans. Ferns and herbs rise in the undergrowth, joined by scraggly vines. In the mornings and evenings this produces a wall of dark shadows, for the days are still rapidly growing in length. Hungry predators such as wolves and lynx stalk the shadows, seeking new young-of-year lives taking their first steps out of the burrows of their birth. Thankfully they avoid humans, and our mule was mean enough to give any stalker pause.
Beyond wetness, the greatest impact of this rush of activity is felt by the ear. During the mountain winter the only sound regularly heard is the wind, and beneath thick canopy such as in the Vale of Rydus even this fails to penetrate, resulting in a world draped in silence. Spring restores noise, riotously, to the uncovered world. The rush of water, the chirp of frogs, the songs of birds, and the buzz of insects all fill the air. Many of these sounds are briefly positioned in time, fading soon as summer comes. Somehow these mountains seem to pack the vigor of the entire year into a few short months. Remarkable, but not easy on humans. The Bahab scrambled through the mud, just as miserable as we were, seeking to exploit this brief blossoming. In this they are broadly undisturbed. Outsiders do not generally visit the mountains at this time, preferring late summer or autumn. The opposite trend is known to the birds, who descend through the trees in great numbers with the coming of spring but leave swiftly once their chicks are fledged in summer. While most of these birds are small compared to the great wanderers of the steppe or even the heavy bodied ducks that fill the lakes, the little forest fliers that fit comfortably within the palm of the hand can be shockingly numerous. They tend to be quite colorful, and the Bahab use nets to capture them for both meat and feathers. The latter are used widely in trade to decorate clothing.
Despite sluggish progress, we managed to exit the mountains by the conclusion of the sixth month and stepped out onto the grasslands amid the rapidly growing early summer grass of the upland pastures. This was only days after the Kharal completed their seasonal relocation to these areas, an unexpected benefit. It is pertinent, at this point, to describe the plan Lady Indili and I devised regarding our efforts to return to Crisremon. To try and brave the wilds of Shdustu as a mere pair was madness, sorceress or no. In order to travel with any expectation of safety we would need to rely upon a larger party. While I hoped that by invoking the imperial status of the Dragon Expedition I could prevail upon local authorities for escorts, I knew it would be essential to work with existing caravans for protection. This was especially critical given the need to conceal the small satchel of dragon scales that we had preserved all winter and spring.
The general plan was to head east to the Mumum River and from there proceed downriver by ship, or rather barge, taking advantage of the current to reach the city of Summugigus. From there we would proceed southward overland to Shtusisinu and eventually Snushgud along the key north-south trade route of eastern Shdustu. This path is well-established and heavily trafficked. From Snushgud we would join the southern east-west trade route, proceeding westward to Shnudidishgu, Gudishgul Fortress and then across the desert toward the Sanid Empire. I estimated that, if we pressed hard and the weather cooperated, we might be able to complete this journey in a year and a half, returning to the Core Provinces in the beginning of winter next year, though I suspected a second winter on the road was likely, perhaps in the Foothill Kingdom or Gudishgul Fortress. We were not, at this point, compelled to rush, though I had considered the possibility of attempting to reunite with the Princess Romou if she had been severely delayed. This, of course, did not happen, and as the reader may have recognized from my relation of her tale prior to this point, she returned to Crisremon significantly in advance. Though she remained in Shdustu, far to our south, upon our exit from the mountains, the continued hostilities between the khanates obscured news and we had no means to learn of her whereabouts. For some time, I came to believe that all the others had perished.
Overall, I chose our intended path in the hope of maximizing safety. The trade routes I have just described, with the addition of a north-south trade route in the west from Dusgus to Shtudus along the Shgutu River, form a neat box of commerce surrounding almost all Shdustu. The Dumum Mountains, as I had become intimately familiar, served as the primary barrier to the flow of trade. Even the goods that do manage to flow across them move slowly, passing from one village to the next. I firmly believe that if a path to avoid danger in Shdustu existed, the one chosen was correct. Unfortunately, or perhaps the opposite, we had not failed on the ice, not completely, and the legacy of the dragon followed us regardless of direction.