“Don’t hurt her!”

Zantheus woke himself up with his own exclamation. His shattered weapon was glinting in the early morning sun. He must have been sleepwalking. But he never sleepwalked. The first thing he saw was Anthē, sat upright and clutching Tromo, who looked terrified up at him, his face soaked in tears.

“The poor thing had a nightmare,” said Anthē.

Zantheus sheathed his sword and turned to conceal the look of embarrassment on his face. The boy must have called out in his sleep and shocked Zantheus awake. He had been having a dream as well, but he could not remember what it was about. Something about someone close to him being attacked? He was not sure. He was mildly ashamed to have jumped up and drawn his weapon for nothing, but he was also annoyed at the boy: He was frustrated at Tromo for being so weak and letting himself be mollycoddled by Anthē. The boy needed to grow up, he thought, to stop shivering all the time, to stop having nightmares, to talk, for goodness’ sake.

Leukos had been standing just behind him, one of his favourite tricks. “Let’s go,” he said as if nothing had happened. Zantheus suddenly realised that he had fallen asleep before Leukos, which added to his frustration. But he was glad to get moving and followed on after the writer, ignoring Anthē’s protests that they wait a moment.

After a while however Anthē caught up with him, Tromo alongside, holding her hand. “You could have given us a minute.”

“Leukos is in a hurry,” said Zantheus.

This jerked Anthē’s memory. “Did you stay awake?”

“Unfortunately, I did not.” Zantheus sighed.

“What?” she was genuinely surprised. “What about all that –slow down, Zantheus!– what about all that,” her voice dropped in mock imitation of the knight, “‘I’ve been trained for this’ business? You couldn’t even stay up for one night?”

“Nor could you.”

Anthē countered bitterly. “Well, what did you expect? I’m just a weak ‘woman’, remember?”

When Zantheus agreed with her, thinking she had been serious, she nearly went red with rage. Tromo waved his arm; she had been squeezing his hand too tightly. “Oh, sorry, sweetheart.” She bent down and picked him up. “Don’t worry about silly Zantheus. We’ll catch him out tonight. We’ll stay up together and wait until Leukos stops writing, won’t we?” She said this just loud enough for Zantheus to hear, but quiet enough for him to pretend not to hear. They continued in silence until Leukos decided it was time to stop for breakfast.

The next few nights they carried on rehearsing this effort of staying up as long as they could. But inexplicably they would always fall asleep before Leukos did, assuming that he did at all. In the morning they would get up (Tromo would often have had another nightmare), tell each other off for not staying awake, and resolve again to retain consciousness for as long as they could when night fell once more. The problem was that this only made them more and more tired. The only person who looked well-rested each morning was Leukos. Eventually they gave up altogether. The problem was, without this distraction to occupy them there was little of interest to keep their minds busy as they walked. Leukos still stubbornly insisted on walking alone, ahead of the rest of them, and Tromo didn’t speak, so that left Anthē with only Zantheus to talk to. Most of the time he might as well have been mute too, since if she did not make an effort to engage him in conversation only rarely would he say something of his own accord, usually a comment on how much progress they were making. Most of the time he traipsed along at her side in silence. He never once made attempt to ask her about her life, about her past, about what interested her, or even why she had come on the journey at all. And since he showed no interest, she didn’t ask him any of the same questions. If he was going to be as rude as that, she didn’t want to know anything more about him.

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Two weeks on the plains, and Choresh appeared. Though that was the wrong word. It did not just ‘appear’. It loomed.

Because Avarah was such a flat country, they saw it while it was still very far off, when it was still a day or so’s journey away. It was just there all of a sudden: A dark shape simply rose up out of the horizon before them, not on the horizon, but out of it, literally spanning the whole of the width of their vision in one direction. It occupied the entire horizon. There was something slightly disturbing about this. When he first saw it, Zantheus ran ahead to question his guide.

“Leukos, is that it?”

“Yes, Zantheus,” said Leukos, “that is the forest.”

Zantheus felt a surge of excitement. Progress, real progress! He was nearly finished with these accursed plains, soon he would be moving on to the next stage, the next leg of his journey. He was one more increment closer to Qereth, to Aythia, to Awmeer... He slowed his pace and hung back, knowing Leukos would only race ahead if he kept stride with him for too long. He was so excited he even said to Anthē, “That is Choresh forest in the distance. We are making good progress.”

Anthē did not react in quite the way that he would have liked. “You mean we have to go in there?” Now they could see that the dark mass was made of trees, but not so long ago it had looked like an unbelievably big wall. “It’s so...” She struggled to find a word. Vast. Enormous. Massive. “...gigantic,” she settled on, but that still didn’t really cover it. The forest seemed to rise up out of the earth, monolithic, like some deliberately placed organic obstacle to their journey.

“We are making good progress,” Zantheus repeated, unwilling to let her dampen his spirits.

“Well of course we are, we’ve been walking for two weeks,” said Anthē. “At least we know that these plains don’t go on forever...”

“Who could imagine that they would?” said Zantheus, a little self-consciously.

They spent the rest of the day with their gazes fixed intently on the forest, watching it grow and swell before them. Zantheus was forced to admit, it was somewhat intimidating. It was even more intimidating when, that night, as they settled down to sleep, they could still see its dark outline in the distance, even darker than the darkness of the night sky. To make matters worse, over dinner –rice, as usual– Leukos had taken the care to warn them about the dangers they may have to face in the forest.

“Now, understand,” Leukos had said. “Choresh forest makes for very tricky travelling. Because it is so big it has never been accurately charted. There are many weird and wonderful creatures, both fair and foul, that live in it, and many interesting people besides. Many have got lost in it and gone mad as a result. Some people live in it, and there are rumours of whole cities that exist far to the south of it. Some even say that it is constantly shifting and altering, and that it changes its shape and character depending on who is traveling through it.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“You’ll be able to show us the way through, though, won’t you Leukos?” Anthē had asked.

“I will do my best,” Leukos had said. “Luckily we are crossing a region where it is not thought to be particularly wide.”

This did not fill them with confidence as they prepared to enter the forest the next day. Soon they were in amidst little clusters of trees that grew just at its edge. Each time they thought that they had arrived in the forest proper, they would come into a small clearing of open air, as if the landscape were teasing them. These pockets of air became briefer and more infrequent, however, and eventually they were walking along unbroken corridors of increasingly tall, magnificent trees.

For some reason, Zantheus felt obliged to whisper to Anthē, “I think we are in the forest now…”

This was no quaint little woodland. If they looked up, they could not see the canopy, so far was it above their heads. The sky was obscured, and the sunlight that reached them glanced down along innumerable leaves and branches, casting shadows everywhere they looked. It was unsettling. Also, it was harder for them to follow their guide. Whereas on the plains it had been easy to pick out Leukos however far ahead he cared to walk, now Zantheus had to keep side-stepping trees just to keep him in view. He would chide the writer when they stopped for meals, saying “Leukos, you must make sure not to walk too fast. If you go too far ahead we will risk losing sight of you.”

To this Leukos would simply reply, “Yes, Zantheus, I will be careful.”

But he never seemed to modify his incredibly frustrating habit. Zantheus wondered how Leukos even knew where he was going. He was not very sure he did know where he was going, but he tried to avoid thinking about this too much, as Leukos was all he had for a guide. He would certainly not be able to find his way through the forest without following anyone at all. It was now much harder, indeed often impossible, to work out the position of the sun because of the immensity above, except at dusk and dawn, so he would not even be able to tell if he was still journeying east any more.

This was the sort of thing he started to worry about at night, before he went to sleep. Admittedly though, nights were a bit easier now. It was less chilly in the forest than on the open plains, though this made more of a difference to Tromo and Anthē, who could snuggle down with their cloaks in the clefts of trees. Surprisingly, Tromo had far fewer nightmares, perhaps he felt protected in the enclosure of the tree-trunks. He was also starting to practice more and grow more proficient on the little wind-instrument that had been given to him by Merimna. Sometimes he would practice during the day, repeating the same note or group of notes over and over again, finding satisfaction in holding the sound for as long as he could, or at least until Zantheus reached his limit and said “That is enough now, Tromo.” But mostly he would practice in the evening, when the meal was being cooked or just before bed. The bright tones comforted him in the face of the slow onset of night. He would conscientiously move a little way away from the group and sit curled up with the instrument, playing it very gently and listening closely so that only he could hear it, trying out phrases on it and trying to come up with a tune. One night when he was satisfied that he had composed his first melody, he ran up to Anthē with a smile on his face.

“What is it, little one?”

He put the ocarina to his lips and played a short tune, using no more than five notes, twice through. When he was finished, Anthē clapped.

“Very good! You’re so clever, Tromo!”

Delighted, Tromo went off to continue composing, with an even bigger smile on his face.

This was a welcome if momentary distraction for Anthē. The dark forest had not improved her mood. She was by this time beginning to find the travelling almost unbearably wearisome. Zantheus seemed to have fallen into a bad mood now that he was actually in the forest, his excitement at entering it having long faded, and they still had nothing to talk about, or that they did talk about. The only time they did regularly open their mouths to talk to each other was when commenting on how ominous the forest was. This did not make things much better. Zantheus had still not asked her one single question about her life after all this time. She occasionally thought about giving in and asking him something about his, but stubbornness held her fast. And Leukos was aloof and monosyllabic himself. Only Tromo, slowly teaching himself to play his ocarina, ever seemed to be enjoying himself.

Then, one day, something happened.

At the precise moment that it happened, Anthē had just made some remark about an animal she had thought she had seen –a squirrel maybe, perhaps some kind of bird– up in the branches above. Zantheus turned his head to look, but, whatever it was, it had gone before he had a chance to see it. When he turned his head back, Leukos was not there.

That was no problem, he was used to this by now. He had been making sure that Leukos was not too far in front of them. He was probably just behind that tree. He was accustomed to performing this manoeuvre, he had performed it many times. He walked slightly to the left to peer round the offending tree. No Leukos. Oh, maybe he was behind this tree? He walked slightly to the right. No, not there either.

“Where is he?” he said aloud.

“You can still see him, can’t you?” asked Anthē.

Zantheus weaved left and right, trying to catch sight of the writer.

“Leukos!” he cried.

Anthē realised what had happened. “He was there just a second ago! You can’t have lost him!”

The three of them started to run. Zantheus continued to call out Leukos’s name. Anthē’s cries joined him, and soon they became louder and shriller as she ran ahead even farther than Zantheus and Tromo. She had started to panic. This could not be happening. With each new tree and its failure to reveal their guide, she became more and more agitated.

“Leukos!”

They kept running, but no-one answered their cries. Leukos was nowhere to be seen. It was if he had vanished.

Anthē fell to the ground and started to sob with frustration. Zantheus could just stand awkwardly by; he felt embarrassed and confused by the girl’s emotion. But to a degree he empathised with her. Where had Leukos gone? What was he playing at? He had warned him again and again not to get too far ahead of them. Had it been an accident, or had he done it on purpose? They had come this far together, why would he abandon them now? Tromo went over to Anthē and put his little head next to hers. She put her arm around him in response, but continued to sob all the same. Zantheus felt himself strangely moved by this odd display of weakness. Woman and child just lay there together, sharing the tears. After a while he knelt on the ground and tried to say politely but as firmly as he could “We should not dally here.” At this Anthē raised her head instantly and her face contorted with an expression of absolute rage. Zantheus could see that she was just on the point of shouting at him when all of a sudden she hesitated and the look left her as quickly as it had come. Something else had caught her attention.

“What is it?” said Zantheus. He had been ready for a barrage of anger.

“Shhh!” ordered Anthē, irritated, putting her finger to her lips. “Can’t you hear that?”

All three of them stood up slowly and listened. At first Zantheus could only hear the soft rustling of the leaves in the trees, but soon he began to make out another sound, an odd sort of crackling, as well. It was getting louder, and as it did so Zantheus noticed that there was a sort of pattern in it, it was stopping and starting at regular intervals, which suggested it was being made by a person.

Without warning Anthē set off at a run in the direction of the sound. Certain this was a bad idea, Zantheus started after her at once, but then turned back and picked up Tromo so that he would be able to keep up. “Wait, Anthē!”

The sound was still a long way away, and as Anthē chased it she began to notice other sounds too. Now the rattling seemed to be complimented by a kind of birdsong, only with clearer and more drawn out notes than are sung by birds. It floated on the wind and seemed to use the rattling pattern as a counterpoint, soaring above and under it in the most beautiful way. As she neared their source the sounds became clearer and clearer and soon a third sound joined in. She was getting close now. The crackle became the loud noise of something being hit rhythmically, the hum on the wind became the melodious tune of some whistle or pipe, and the third –that was definitely the sound of a human voice, and a female one at that, and by now Anthē could hear that it was forming words...

Know the way, dear child of the music

Know the way

Hear this flute, hear this drum

We journey long

Towards the Sun