The traveling stone brought him to the eaves of the Brightwood. Useph slid his thumb along the cool, smooth surface of the black stone and slipped it back into the pouch he wore tied on a string around his belt. He double-checked that the pouch was fastened shut. It would not do to lose the stone. He had spent a considerable amount of time traveling the conventional way to make a mental map of locations. Along each way from the desert he memorized a series of waypoints to allow him to use the traveling stones far beyond their usually short range. It had taken seven hops from waypoint to waypoint to reach the Brightwood, including many locations that did not lie along the roads. It was faster that way, but safer, too. He did not want to be spotted by chance by a merchant on the road. Too many of them knew him on sight, which he could not allow. Even if they didn’t recognize him as a lord of the realm, a man blinking in and out of existence would make a story that would spread.

The traveling site he had memorized was on the northern edge of the Brightwood. Useph had added it to his list originally because it was along a straight shot between his palace and the city of Belir. The disadvantage now was that it was likely to be quite some way from the Eldan site that his spy had described by way of Neal. It would have been preferable not to hear such important information secondhand, but death had removed his chance at a first-hand account.

Besides the location that he had memorized for his traveling route, there was another spot in the Brightwood, along the Forest Road, that Useph remembered well, where the road circled around a hollow that was filled with water when it rained, and blossomed with colorful mushrooms in-between times. Those yellow mushrooms fetched a high price in the markets of the cities for anyone willing to make the long trek to gather them. They were delicious, earthy and sweet at the same time when cooked on an open flame, like the camp cook had done on Useph’s last trip to Belir. The memory was strong enough that Useph knew it would work if he was in range, and so he tried to make the jump. But the stone had taken him no further, leaving him at the forest’s edge. It seemed he was to make this part of the trek the slow way.

The sun was just rising, and at first Useph told himself that it was the long rays of dawn that lit the wood so strangely, but as he came under the trees, and the canopy shut out all the direct light, it became very clear that the glow was not from the sun at all.

“Brightwood,” Useph said aloud. He reached out and traced a hand along the glowing edges of a nearby branch. “It never looked this way before.” Had his spy, by disturbing the Sceptre and its guardians, somehow awakened the wood as well?

~

It was a long day’s walk alone in the Brightwood. Useph was a man not easily spooked, but as the day wore on he began to get a creeping sensation. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, prickling at the gaze of unseen watchers. The sounds in the trees weren’t right. They seemed to move with winds that weren’t there. The creaking was too loud to be explained by the movements of small hiding creatures. The eerie light of the trees wasn’t the only thing about the forest that had changed, Useph felt sure. As the day wore on, his body tensed in response to perceived peril. He exercised his long experience with dangerous situations to school himself to calm alertness. He might not know what the threat was, but he knew how to be ready.

When the landscape failed to provide any distinctive place to make note of as a waypoint for the traveling stones, Useph had learned to improvise. He carried with him a small jar of red paint, specifically for the purpose of making his own distinctive target. Before doing anything else when he finally stopped for the night, Useph got out the jar and picked four trees, arranged near enough but with a safe space between them, to mark for the waypoint. He used a handy bit of branch to dip in the paint and mark the symbol for shelter on each tree. He had marked two and was onto the third when the wood unleashed its power on him with the suddenness of a snapping bowstring.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A loud, explosive crack was the only warning he had, but Useph was more than ready. He leapt aside as a tree--one of the two he had already marked--crashed down into the spot where he had been standing. It fell fast, as though it had been pushed. Still moving backward, Useph drew his sword.

Something had ridden the tree down. It had started at the far end of the tree, which had been the top, but was now loping along the trunk toward Useph. It was halfway to him before the echoes of the tree’s crashing fall had faded from the wood.

It was huge, bigger than any creature Useph had ever seen, and he had hunted the snowy bears of the White Waste in his youth. It was a creature out of legend, a chimeric mix of eagle and lion that Useph knew from nursery stories was called a griffin. He realized with the clarity of a man in mortal danger that he had been a fool to dismiss that part of the Eldan tales. Their magic was real, why not their monsters?

Useph didn’t like his odds against this thing. What were the chances he could even cut through that hide? He shoved his blade back into its sheath and groped for the black stone. It was moments like these that he regretted his precautions against pickpockets. He kept backing away, not daring to take his eyes off the griffin, though his fingers were fumbling with the pouch. The griffin crouched at the end of the tree, then sprang, its body stretched out to its full, monstrous length.

“Faiga!” Useph called as his fingers closed on the stone. The griffin disappeared.

~

It seemed the Brightwood was not open for visitors.

After initially jumping back to the target point at the north end of the wood, Useph had tried some other angles of attack, as he thought of it. He regretted the time wasted on the long trek into the wood, and could not tolerate waiting until morning. Racking the memories he’d built up in his extensive travels, he had made a series of circuitous jumps to points approaching other edges of the wood. The south edge of the wood he’d found was patrolled by flying creatures that looked exactly like harpies. The western approach, by the Swiftway, had a burned waystation. He took the brightness of the wood’s glow there as a bad sign, and plotted out a series of jumps that would take him to the eastern edge, by Belir. That was the way the spy had come, so at least he could retrace her steps. The jumps to get there were punctuated by a quick encounter with an amorous couple at a spot on a hill Useph had remembered for its romantic view of a waterfall, but Useph moved on before the angry man could get near him. Now finally, he was at the edge of the Brightwood, and the road was completely, totally, washed out.

It would have been wiser to wait until morning, but cautious man though he usually was, Useph was through with waiting. At least the light from the trees gave him a little guidance as he picked his way through the gully that cut across the road. It was touch-and-go--the slope crumbled away under his feet as he moved--but he made it. It was not his imagination, but just another nerve-racking addition to his tension, that as soon as he stood secure on the wood’s side of the gully, every nearby tree flashed brighter for a moment before fading back to their previous level of light.

“An alarm.” He muttered. “Perfect.”

He encountered two more wash-outs before he came to the area where the road skirted the river-or it used to. Now it was all river. There was no road left here at all. This was the place where his spy had said that Lord Fel’s party had left the road. Useph turned to the south, away from the river, to hunt for the Eldan road. He was grateful now for the Brightwood’s glowing trees. Even if it did mean the forest was magically, dangerously, awake, he never could have safely navigated these woods at night without it. He would no doubt have turned his ankle on a root or fallen into a hollow. They were mundane hazards, but no less real or dangerous than monsters.

He saw the glow of the road before he reached it. It was a bright line along the ground, cutting through the trees. He almost laughed when he finally stood on its stones. The Brightwood may have been trying to keep him out, but in the end it had shown him the way.