It was late in the afternoon when the forest of white finally came to an end. As James slowly awoke, slumped across Torrinth’s back, he watched the last of the trees part before them.
The molten orb of the giant sun was beginning its slow descent, illuminating clouds like colossal mountains hanging in the sky. After more than a week spent travelling beneath the endless forest, the huge expanse of sky opening before them took his breath away.
An immense valley, like the crater of some ancient meteor impact, cleared the forest for miles in every direction. In the absence of trees, gorse and wild grasses coloured the slopes in greens and purples, sweeping down to where a vast lake filled the valley’s basin. And there, protruding from the centre of the lake like the pupil of a gigantic eye was the island.
Despite the beauty and scale of the vista opening before him, James frowned. Fragments of a strange and disturbing dream returned to his mind as though bidden by the veil of white finally parting before them. In the dream, he and his companions had become hopelessly lost within the white forest, until they had stumbled upon a clearing beneath an impossible black sky…
James’ tautened nerves flinched as Fen appeared beside him.
‘Are you well rested?’ she asked, a slight frown contesting with the tentative smile she offered.
‘I’m ok,’ he mumbled.
He caught a glimpse of the woman’s quiver filled with fresh arrows, all of them gleaming white like polished bones. Fen noticed his scrutiny and her frown deepened as though unsettled by this new weight she carried at her hip.
‘A gift from Derredin,’ she said, returning her gaze to the lake beyond.
The mention of the tree spirit’s name was enough to confirm what he already knew. This time he hadn’t merely dreamed the impossible, it had actually happened! With a shudder, he recalled how his mind had been plundered like an open book before Derredin’s ancient mind, his deepest, darkest memories dredged from those places he had spent a lifetime trying to bury.
There is some good in you, but I wonder if that will be enough…
James shifted uneasily upon Torrinth’s back and returned his gaze to the island growing steadily upon the vast lake below.
For the first time, he noticed the great wall that surrounded its edge. He assumed it to be a wall of stone, because its sides were sheer and towered hundreds of feet into the air. But the longer he stared, the more he realised his mistake. For it was a wall not of stone, but of trees; a seamless ring, woven from the countless trunks of the Leander tree. It was only then that the true scale of the structure became apparent. Beyond the giant walls and the red-golden canopy above them, was a space large enough to conceal an entire kingdom.
‘Behold, the last of the great forest Citadels,’ Fen said. The woman’s voice was devoid of emotion, her former smile transformed into a grim line upon her face.
James frowned as he completed his scrutiny of the island.
As awe-inspiring as the Citadel was to his astonished senses, something about it felt undeniably wrong. A discordant note seemed to permeate the organic construction like a beautiful violin incorrectly tuned. The Gelder dwellings he had encountered until now were all alike, their constructions graceful and modest, their forms perfectly in balance with the environments that contained them. But the Citadel was different. It was like a vast protest, a screaming violation of the natural forms that composed it.
As though reading the concerned sweep of his eyes, Fen spoke again into the heavy silence that had followed them out of the white forest.
‘As you may have already discerned, the Citadel is a construction unlike any Gelder dwelling you will have yet encountered. It is ancient, formed in a time when war and conflict were commonplace within the lands of the Gelding.’
Fen looked at him for a moment as though gauging what more she might be permitted to say. But the look that lingered in her eyes told him that she no longer cared how much he knew.
‘When the Bitter War was ended, almost one thousand turns ago, the Citadel was returned to the forest. As when in peace time our blades are returned to the earth to seed anew, so were the trees of the Citadel quietened of the imposition that had bound them into the shaping of the fortress. In the turns that followed, the fortress was transformed into the peaceful city of Kellandria and slowly the balance of nature was restored.’
Fen paused, her darkening expression betraying a glimpse of the inner conflict so unsettling her bearing.
‘Alas, that is no longer the case. Lord Balen has reversed the quietening of the trees and gradually the city becomes a garrison once more.’
Hearing the name of Lord Galen’s brother pulled James physically out of his thoughts. The words Galen had spoken within the watchtower of Galendar returned to him like taunting ghosts… ‘My brother’s advice was that you should be executed at once…’
After the hardships and toils of the past week, he had slowly replaced the implied dread of his meeting with Lord Balen with the more immediate trials that had assailed him. But now that they neared their final destination, the imposing edifice sitting upon the island resounded with renewed foreboding.
James suddenly gasped, jerking his head up to the sky. Shaking his head in confusion, he looked all around him for evidence of what he had just felt. The silence that had followed them into the valley remained, but some nameless essence within the landscape had suddenly shifted like the rumble of an earthquake that could not be felt or heard.
‘Did you feel that?’
‘Feel what?’ Fen replied in alarm.
James growled in frustration and turned his eyes back towards the island. But the disturbance in the land had not come from there…
On impulse, he tapped Torrinth upon the shoulder and brought his bearer to a halt. The old man gently lowered him to the ground before turning to regard him with his thin, expressionless face.
For a moment, James merely stood where he had been placed, his aching head reverberating with the echo of the nameless disturbance. The familiar numbness that had plagued his every moment back in the real world returned now like cold water sluiced across his body. The very ground beneath his feet seemed to tilt, and grudgingly he turned to where his body was pitching him. Upon the sea of purple gorse, he noticed a small copse of white trees; the only trees upon the great slope that had strayed beyond the rim of the crater.
Distantly, he was aware that Leander had appeared in front of him. It was the first time he had properly laid eyes upon her since the confused blur of memory that was his meeting with Derredin. Her face wore the familiar apparel of scorn, but a hint of apprehension seemed to blunt the usual venom of her words.
‘Why does he stop,’ she said, addressing Fen as though James were as incapable of speech as the old man beside him.
Fen answered with a concerned shake of her head before anxiously following James’ gaze to the copse of trees.
Now only dimly aware of the others gathering around him, James swayed upon his feet. The shift in the balance of the land was building. He felt it in the stillness of the air, in the very ground beneath his feet. Again and again, his eyes were drawn back to the small island of white trees as though their swaying branches conveyed some obscure warning.
Another silent shockwave rippled through the landscape and James stumbled. Torrinth’s hand reached out to steady him, but as the pain inside his head intensified, his knees began to buckle. This time, the silent earthquake brought a vivid image to his mind. He saw again the hideous black monster emerging from the ravaged ground of his vision, its slick malevolence crawling through his mind like dark fingers raking through his brains.
With a trembling hand that no longer felt his own, he pointed to the lonely copse of trees.
‘We have to go there!’ he said, his voice choking in his throat. ‘There’s no time, it’s coming!’
Leander’s face flinched, causing the scar trailing across her face to blaze like the red-golden light dancing upon the lake far below. Her rigid bearing seemed to demand answers to questions she had yet to ask, but she responded with urgency, ordering the party on towards the waiting trees.
Before they had crossed half the distance to the lonely copse, the silence was torn by an inhuman scream. The sound seemed to come from a great distance, but its echo reverberated around the valley like a drum tightened to the point of breaking.
With a curious mixture of fear and relief, James noticed that for once he had not been the only one among them to hear the sound, for Fen and Leander responded by hastily notching white arrows to their bows. But it was Kirrin who was the first to see what only James had glimpsed within the nightmare of his vision. Drawing his sword soundlessly from its clasp, he pointed to the west. Framed between the distant peaks of forested mountains, a black star was dawning.
‘Oh god, it’s here!’ James cried.
The black shape grew in the sky as the foul creature coursed its way towards them. For the first time, James saw alarm register upon the faces of his companions and it made him want to scream. When faced with the brutality of men or the cruel faces of Weevil, they had been stoic and resolute, but what they saw arcing through the sky seemed to fill them all with a shared dread.
‘What the hell is it?’ James whimpered, as Torrinth unceremoniously dropped him to the ground beneath the swaying white trees.
Leander answered through clenched teeth, the trunk of one of the trees pressed firmly to her back. ‘Demon,’ she seethed, drawing a brace of white arrows from her quiver. ‘We cannot best such a creature alone. We must pray that we have gone unnoticed.’
Without fully comprehending why, James knew that “sight” was not something the beast was relying upon. Somehow, within the horrible vision he had suffered at the abandoned house, he had been marked; his very existence had become a lodestone, guiding and beckoning the hideous creature to their very location.
‘It’s too late!’ James cried. ‘It knows I’m here!’
There was only a moment of realisation upon the young woman’s face before the creature exploded into the air above them, unfurling its many black tentacles like a great hand. The trees creaked and snapped as its glistening limbs wrapped around them, hoisting the sickening bulk of its bloated body above their heads. It opened its mouth and roared, releasing a sound which bludgeoned them to the ground.
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Fen’s exclamation of despair matched James’ own. The vision he had been afforded in the bath of the ruined house seemed wholly inadequate to describing the reality that now twitched and shuddered above them. The beast was like a bloated octopus, its countless tentacles snapping and slivering across the tortured branches as though plundering fragile fronds of seaweed for prey.
With his mind on the verge of collapse, James raised himself from the ground and stared open-mouthed at the abomination writhing above them. Even now, there was a part of him that could not believe this was happening; that this was actually real.
His breath exploded out of his lungs as he was thrown to the ground, a flailing tentacle snatching the air where he had been stood an instant before. The beast howled its rage as broken branches rained down from above.
Dazed, he looked up into the impassive face of the old man who now crouched over him, his drawn sword glinting in the crimson light of the setting sun.
Above them, the monster’s undulating body became suddenly rigid, and with an obscene tensing of its many limbs, it braced itself against one of the trees like a cruel vice. A terrible creaking rent the air as the roots of the tree suddenly exploded from the ground, showering dark soil into the air. The bloated body of the beast squeezed into the gap it had created and bellowed its fury down at them.
The terrible sound was like the breaking of a spell, and Kirrin was the first roused into action. With a deft sweep of his dark blade, he sliced through a flailing tentacle, severing the limb in a gout of gushing black liquid. Beside him, Tavin dodged to the side in time to avoid a blow that would have snapped him in half before severing another of the deadly limbs in a torrent of black.
The monster howled and hammered its tentacles against the trees, pulling another trunk from the earth as easily as a weed plucked from dusty soil. Wellin limped from behind the fallen tree and swung his sword with two hands, but in his weakened state the blade stuck fast and he was jerked into the open. In a deadly blur, two opposing tentacles ripped his body in half, showering the air in a mist of red.
‘Wellin!’ Kirrin screamed.
No longer mindful of the danger that surrounded him, Kirrin lumbered out of the scant shelter of the copse. His bloodied sword hung limply from his hand as he knelt before the mutilated remains of his brother. Taking Wellin’s head between his hands, he cradled him to his face. A groan of anguish escaped the man’s throat as he slowly turned. His features were contorted by grief and remorse, but the eyes that sought James’ were blinded by hatred.
With a clumsy lurch, Kirrin scrambled in the dirt for his brother’s discarded blade. Bellowing a cry of rage and despair, he rose to his feet, each hand now extended in a blade. Springing forward, he lumbered between the slithering coils of the monster, cleaving and stabbing in a wild frenzy; the beast’s blood rising in testament to his hatred.
Recognising the madness that had gripped his brother, Tavin cast his bow to the trampled ground and sprinted forward, drawing his sword in the same instant.
‘No! Kirrin, no!’ Tavin screamed.
But it was too late.
Kirrin had severed the three tentacles that had rushed towards him, but he did not see the single column of black hurtling towards his back. His eyes widened in shock, as a tentacle as rigid as a lamppost dashed him against a tree; the force of the blow snapping the trunk in half. Kirrin’s body crumpled lifelessly to the ground as Tavin dived to avoid the toppling tree. His fall was controlled, and quickly he found his feet… but the monster was quicker. He had but a moment to turn his anguished eyes back to his companions, before a column of muscle stamped him lifelessly into the ground.
James covered his face with his hands as Leander shrieked her rage.
‘The eyes!’ Leander screamed. ‘Shoot out the eyes, Fen!’
The row of putrid yellow eyes blazed around the circumference of the monster’s bloated body, but its eyelids opened and closed in a complex dance, protecting them from harm. Time and again, the arrows of white thudded against the impervious black lids, only to fall uselessly to the ground.
After another furious flexing of its remaining limbs, the beast tore open the last of the trees, casting them aside like brittle sticks. Emboldened, the beast stalked forward, its heavy body carried upon its tentacles like living pillars; the severed stumps no longer bleeding but reforming to replace those already lost.
With their scant shelter ripped from above their heads, Torrinth sprung from James’ side and stood before him, his hand gripping his sword delicately despite the violence poised above him.
At last, one of the arrows finally met its mark, destroying one of its grotesque eyes in an explosion of yellow gore. The beast convulsed and shrieked its rage, the many tentacles that had been poised for attack, now squirming across the ruins of its eye.
It was the briefest moment of distraction, but Torrinth took it.
Rushing out between the whipping tentacles, he swept his sword through the thickest of its limbs, felling it like one of the trees so recently pulled from the ground.
The beast tottered, and for one palpable moment, appeared to have been defeated. But, when its body fell to the ground, it wasn’t to die, but to kill.
Realising all too late what was happening, Torrinth raised his sword above his head, but against the wall of black that descended upon him, it was a futile defence. Like a great hand swatting a fly, the beast dropped its great bulk to the ground, pulverising the old man into the trampled earth.
As though Torrinth’s death were a signal, the two women at last abandoned their useless bows and rushed forward with their own swords drawn. Moving like grim ballerinas, they danced in and out of the thrashing tentacles, scything the black flesh as they went. Their actions were desperate and brave but against the mountain of muscle towering above them, it amounted to little more than suicide.
Fen managed to sever two tentacles before a third wrapped around her sword arm and tossed her twenty feet into the air; another tentacle stamping her into the ground like a butterfly crushed underfoot. Leander screamed and rushed forward but before she could land a single blow, she too was savagely cast into the air to land with a sickening crunch amidst the wreckage of fallen trees.
The sound of Leander’s body hitting the ground signalled the sickening conclusion to the violence that had been visited upon them. After the shouts and screams, the snapping and rending of wood, the silence that followed was far worse. The battle had been brief, but the destruction that now surrounded James was complete.
For the duration of the attack, he had sat immobile as the others battled for their lives. But now his shocked senses took what control they could muster and propelled him awkwardly backwards. The monster slowly turned to face him, its many tentacles now arrayed beneath it like innumerable crutches. Now that the slaughter was complete, it seemed to gloat from its lofty perch, relishing the prize that had been so easily won.
Its mouth opened, its teeth flashing for a moment in the light of the dying sun. Slurred and distorted by the cumbersome physiology of its throat, it spoke three words into the heavy silence that remained.
‘You will suffer.’
James’ legs buckled beneath him as he tripped upon the roots of a fallen tree. His hand brushed against cloth and instinctively his fingers closed upon it. When he realised what he held, he frantically tore the sack open, seeking the dagger that had saved his life from the weevil only days before. Against this beast there was no hope that it could save his life a second time, but still he clung to the only weapon available to him like a drowning man stealing his last gulp of air.
The knife, still wrapped within its protective cowl, fell into his hands as one of the flailing tentacles curled around his leg. James recoiled in horror, but the silky column of muscle quickly snaked around his chest, pinning the weapon uselessly against his side.
His chest shuddered with sobs as he finally submitted to the coils of black, slowly tightening around his body. The malevolent eyes of the beast stared back at him, the protective hoods ratcheted open as though eager to feed upon his abject display of despair.
A shrill whistling pierced the air as one of its gloating eyes was destroyed in an eruption of yellow fluid. Before James could register the cause of its injury, the beast recoiled, sending his body lurching violently to the side. The languid coiling and slithering of its many limbs stopped as they became suddenly rigid, tensing into deadly pillars of black.
The monster seemed to falter, hurriedly bracing its many tentacles into the ground for balance. Blinking through dust and tears, James at last saw a lone figure standing amongst the litter of fallen trees, another arrow drawn across her defiant face. Leander released her hand and the arrow fizzed across the ruin of trees destroying another of the monster’s eyes.
Enraged, the beast surged forward, trailing James within his prison of coils. The complex dance of the armoured lids resumed across the eyes that remained, as arrow after arrow left Leander’s bow. The last of her arrows skittered uselessly across the black hide of its body before she threw her bow to the ground and reclaimed her discarded sword. James screamed as the monster closed upon her, but just before it got near enough to rip her to pieces, its many limbs brought its lumbering movement to an abrupt halt.
The ground trembled and shook as a new sound thundered into the valley. Ignoring Leander, the beast turned its array of remaining eyes towards the distant lip of the valley like a dog scenting blood upon the air.
Etched upon the darkening swathe of gorse, forty or more fragments of white had detached from the edge of the white forest. The furious thunder of hooves shook the ground as a great herd of stags resolved out of the gloom. Each carried a warrior garbed in armour as white as the charges they rode. Soon, a storm of arrows was rising into the sky, falling moments later like a rain of white sparks upon the beast. An instant later, two more of its eyes were destroyed amidst a deafening howl of rage.
No longer confident of its victory, the beast’s tentacles suddenly constricted, squeezing the air from James’ lungs. In the sudden panic of suffocation, he felt the beast quiver beneath him, its many limbs pressing into the ground as it prepared to take flight.
The beast wasn’t aware of Leander until her sword was plunging deep within its body. Her teeth were bared, her body soaked by the sudden discharge of gore erupting from the wound. But whatever damage her attack had inflicted it was not nearly enough, and with an enraged snap of a tentacle, she was flung with savage force against the trunk of a fallen tree. There was a sickening crack, followed by her limbs becoming suddenly still.
Fighting with all his strength, James tried to wrestle his trapped arm from the coils of muscle. His breathing came in quick gasps, his vision dancing with vivid points of light. Somehow the knife had remained in his clenched fist and slowly he angled it upwards.
The beast exploded into the air in the same instant his blade tore through the muscle surrounding him. The vice-like pressure was suddenly released and he gasped a lungful of air as the ribbons of black fled into the sky.
The ground came up to meet him, knocking what little air he had back out of him. Gasping for breath, he stared up in fascinated horror as the hideous shape poised in the sky above him. Arrows scattered against its blackness as it reversed in the air, suspended for a moment like the splayed legs of a gigantic spider. The first of the stags were storming into the ruins of the copse when it fell back to earth. Two of the animals were instantly crushed to death beneath its blackness, but elsewhere warriors were leaping into the air, interposing themselves between James and the beast like a fragile white fence.
James crawled backwards, unable to take his eyes from the monstrosity clawing its way toward him. The demon’s many eyes were now destroyed, but still it continued to drag itself remorselessly forward as its limbs were hacked from beneath it.
It wasn’t until the last of its quivering tentacles was severed that the vast bulk of its immobile body finally tumbled to a halt. Exhausted, the warriors stood around the hideous remains of the beast, warily keeping their distance, as though only now registering the enormity of the creature they had felled. It was as they looked uncertainly on, that the great mouth of the demon gurgled upon its final words:
‘It will never end.’
A grim-faced warrior came forward and with two hands dragged his sword through the beast’s great mass, severing it in two. A foul stench erupted into the air as its putrid viscera spilled across the ground, searing the grass where it fell.
James crawled on, his head trained upon the matted grass passing before his tear-soaked eyes. Slowly, he made his way to where Leander had fallen, her limp body spread across one of the fallen trees like a grisly sacrifice. A trickle of blood ran from her nose and mouth, the close-fitting armour cracked open from neck to waist.
Ignoring the soldiers that surrounded him, he got unsteadily to his feet and limped towards her broken form. He had almost reached her side when a great white stag interposed itself between them. Its flaring nostrils steamed in the cool evening air, its hooves restlessly raking the ground.
With disbelief, James looked up at the figure sitting astride the majestic animal, the man’s familiar dark eyes regarding him coldly from the disarray of his long white hair. At last, James believed he had finally succumbed to the madness that had always threatened to claim him, for the man who now so gracefully dismounted from the great stag was Leander’s father.
‘Lord Galen,’ James sobbed, looking down upon the lifeless body of the man’s daughter, ‘I’m so sorry.’
Galen’s face flinched at the sight of Leander’s crumpled form, but his eyes darted back to James in an instant. His hands were clenched tightly upon a staff of carved white wood, his face contorted by grief and snarled by rage. With one swift movement, Galen sent the staff arcing through the air, and with a touch as light as a finger tapping his chin, all of the light and pain of the dying day fled from his body.