The swamp’s trees formed the walls of a canyon. The river was the gulch. The cliff a mile tall behind was the mountain peak to close all in, and everywhere beneath, atop the canopy and the sheer rocks, gathered mist which flooded in miasmic fog downstream into the lowlands.
Foaming white water poured from the cliff’s edge. The cliff which concealed the densest jungles of Telmos high above the swamp. The rainforest highlands, the place from where the river was sourced.
Sourced—and fell. Torrents tumbled off the mountainside. So much water, so constant, falling such a distance, that from far-off it looked more like a solid icicle stretching the whole of the cliffside than any kind of cascade. These were the world’s largest terrestrial falls.
Yet the deafening roar of that deluge meeting the river’s surface gave its animation away long before Eris saw any movement; and the mist, vaporized by the violence of its descent, crept like something alive, away from its point of origin; and the rowing of their boat grew harder as the current turned from river to rapid; and soon they were close enough to watch the falling of the falls.
Pyraz stood on the bow like a ship’s front-facing ornament. Aletheia was at his side, an arm wrapped around his chest.
“Heaven Falls,” Eris yelled. “That is what they call this place.”
Rook now rowed beside her. He said something she couldn’t understand but nodded, and he pointed to the cliff’s western edge. “There,” he yelled back, “that’s the way up.”
She frowned. To her it looked like more trees and more mountain and no easy path to the top of the cliffs. Even she was not so reckless to attempt levitation six thousand feet into the air.
Travel through Telmos was proving more unpleasant than she anticipated. But it was necessary. There would be no easier way to reach the promised ruins of the Magister’s Keep, said to be lost far within the highlands, past the unnatural formation known as the Petrified Jungle.
They led the boat into clouds of mist. All vision obscured by white; wet air condensing on their skin. Pyraz shook himself dry. Eris’ ears rang. When they emerged once again they were surrounded by gnarled trees much like those about Hebat’s hut, these protruding from the water at the roots. Beneath the murky surface darted countless fish and on small patches of green land lazed huge lizards covered in bony armor as they waited for prey to swim into jaws left halfway submerged.
Unlike so many other wild places Eris had traversed there was never any wondering whether or not that distant shape was a predator, or if the movement from her eye’s corner was only her imagination. The mind needed to conjure little in the way of false threats in Telmos.
At some point they lost sight of Heaven Falls. Even still its cascade deafened them. Moving into the swamp, away from the river, eventually the water became too shallow to row the boat easily, and Rook jumped out to guide them farther by hand.
Aletheia stood up with her bow. Waiting for something to bite. Eris was happy to let others work for her, but she stayed alert in the hull, watching their rear and to the sides for anything that might follow up behind them in search of a bite to eat.
Everything in the swamp looked the same. Progress was impossible to gauge except by the gradual fading of the waterfall’s roar. They’d left the main river early, so hours passed before they reached the swamp-facing cliffs miles west of Heaven Falls itself. If Rook was to be believed, following this direction would lead them to a path up the highlands.
He tugged them beneath a fallen log stretched between two twisted trees, like a bar set down to block off an opened gate. Eris watched it as it passed. Nothing to notice. She looked away…
Pyraz barked. Once, then a howl, faced her way. She scrambled upward just in time to see a snake materialize from the green log overhead. Its scales flickered from the color of the log and to a murky gray, the shade of the sky overhead, as it revealed itself; its head was the shape of a diamond and for a brief moment Eris saw inside its mouth, saw its fangs open toward her—
“Look out!” Aletheia said.
An arrow flew past her head. The snake struck with its fangs, but only too late; an arrow pierced beneath its head. Blood at first gray then green and finally brown poured from the wound, into the boat. For a moment it seemed dazed, but it was large and strong and even with the arrow still lodged in its body it tried to strike out at Eris again.
She grabbed hold of it by the neck. It tried to lurch in her direction, but by an unseen force she held it at bay, as if reaching around from behind to keep it in place, and she tugged hard with a burst of mana. The snake’s body unraveled from around the log overhead and it fell like a coil of thick rope into the boat. The moment its green and gray scales collided with the brown wood all its color turned the precise same shade as the hull.
Rook drew his sword and jumped around from the front of the boat and with a single clean strike he chopped off its head, freeing Aletheia’s arrow in the process.
Now its blood was brown. Eris kicked the head away. Though clearly a snake, she saw then it had no eyes and no slits for a nose; its head was smooth save its mouth.
Pyraz sniffed the remains.
“What is it?” Aletheia said.
“A small taste of this land’s perils,” Eris said. She tried to pick the snake’s body up, but it was too large and too heavy. Rook helped her heave it back into the water, where it sunk immediately into the shallows. She glanced at Aletheia’s bow and considered momentarily offering praise—yet what to say, and how to offer it?
Better not to. The girl did not need encouragement anyway. She might have missed and hit Eris in the back—no, there was no need for praise, no matter how good her aim. Eris continued, “We had best make it to the cliffs before dark. I do not wish to sleep in this place.”
Rook nodded. He rubbed Pyraz’s ears. “Keep a look-out.”
Eventually they came to land. The boat was hauled onto a collection of rocks and tipped over out of the water, stowed for their return trip.
“You know we will never find this again,” Eris said.
“Don’t be so cynical,” Rook replied. “I have a perfect memory for swamps.”
“Your memory for swamps is surely worse than mine, and I am here to tell you not even I will be able to lead us back to here.”
“Then we’ll just have to manage. Unless you’d rather turn back now there’s nothing else to do.”
He was right, so they began to climb up the rocks, glancing ever uphill for what might be a viable path into the highlands. A few steps later Aletheia called out to them.
“Wait,” she said. Her voice was soft. “I think I know a spell.”
“By my estimation you may even know two,” Eris said. “Shall we celebrate?”
“No. A huntress’ spell. One that Astera never taught me, but…” Aletheia hesitated. She glanced around and found a polished stone about the cliffs. She closed her eyes, and Eris watched as she pulled a small breath of energy from the air. She imbued it into the stone. The spell left no visible mark but any creature attuned to the aether would be able to sense the magic as he passed by.
“How useful,” Eris said.
“A beacon,” Rook said. “Like a distant bonfire. That’s the spell, isn’t it?”
Aletheia nodded. “Now I can feel it.” She placed the stone beneath the boat’s upturned sides, concealed. “I don’t know if I did it right…it won’t last forever…but I think we can follow it—I mean I think I can lead us back here.”
“You did not know you had Astera’s spell of cleansing wounds,” Eris said. “How did you know to use this now?”
Aletheia glanced down at the ground. Despite being well-armored and well-dressed and unreasonably well-armed, she was a young woman in her most awkward years, strangely proportioned and marred by acne. She looked ridiculous, clad in all of Astera’s things, and she shrugged.
“It just felt right,” she said quietly, yet there was more to it than that.
“Indeed,” Eris derided. “How convenient that I find I no longer care.” She contemplated the cliffs once more. “Well. If you are the wilderland ranger, then you will have no trouble leading the way.”
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The sun set soon after they began their ascent. They camped in a damp, uncomfortable crevasse and slept little. Night was when the swamp truly came alive. During the day it was loud, but under cover of darkness it was riotous, cacophonous, deafening and terrifying, and however unpleasant their chosen location was, they were grateful for the protection of the mountainside.
Come next morning the process began anew. They spent the whole of the rest of the day searching for paths cut in the stone by rainwater and batting away the curious approaches of huge, scaled birds. Looking back down at the swamps from a high vantage point Eris saw countless more birds, like the giraffe from near Hebat’s hut, which took to the sky like clouds unto themselves and were more terrifying to see in flight than nearly any other mundane animal.
As night fell once more they gazed upward and saw at least another thousand feet to go. They stood on a narrow pathway, the drop off of which led to certain death, and were yet to find anywhere convenient to rest. Worst of all it rained hard once again.
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Eris decided she was tired of this expedition. “We are done with this,” she said, “be still.”
“Is it too far?” Rook said.
“No.”
“Eris. If you can’t—”
But she had already started. By now she was very familiar with both Rook and Aletheia. Lifting them was easy, and the muscles of her will which controlled remote manipulation were well exercised. Yet it was a very long way to levitate three people. To descend such a distance was one thing. To fly was quite another.
A green swell overcame the white fog that always surrounded them in this place. Eris felt her skin tingle, and the green surrounded each simultaneously, and they lifted ever upward toward the top of the cliff.
At first there were no problems. Halfway through she began to feel drained. Three quarters of the way and she slowed considerably, which prompted Aletheia to scream and Eris herself to close her eyes and focus. By the time they reached the top she collapsed onto the edge of the cliff face coughing, and both of her companions shivered in terror.
But it was done. And now the affair of climbing Heaven Falls was behind them.
“Please don’t do that again,” Aletheia whimpered.
“I never had any doubts,” Rook said, but he brought the girl into an embrace. Eris was not paying much attention. She spent a few minutes in recovery, then looked upward, and thus she saw the highlands before her.
Not a swamp: a jungle. The thickest in all the world. But their path would take them a different way soon.
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The highland jungles of Telmos were like any other rainforest, only three times as large. The ferns grew to human height. The leaves were Aletheia’s size. The vines took halberd strikes to clear away. The party was assaulted by mosquitos the size of mayflies and they found ants and maggots the scale of squirrels. More than once in the distance they spotted, far off, creatures that could be described only as dragons, covered in scales and feathers, browsing at the jungle canopy with long necks and standing at heights which made even the largest elephants look miniscule. The earth shook at their distant footsteps.
That night was not much better than the previous, but by noon the following day they found the first sign of their destination.
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The tree was turned to stone. Trunk, branch, leaf and all, even hanging vines were nothing more than polished tigerstripe statuary, like a sculpture put up on the border of a forest in jest. Aletheia tapped her sword against the vine: first softly, then harder, testing the strength, but finding nothing liable to give way. She looked back over her shoulder toward Eris and Rook.
Every detail was preserved. Every spot of discoloration and granulation. The sweeping arches and supple curves and gentle spirals that led up overhead. The rings and spots of injury from clawmarks and burrowing creatures: not a hint of it had been lost, even as the colors melted and grayish-brown rock was left in place of wood.
“It’s solid,” Aletheia said.
Eris grabbed the lowest hanging vine and tugged. This was still dull green, yet fossilized just as the tree adjacent. Indeed it was solid.
“This is the border of the Petrified Jungle,” Eris said. “There is much more ahead of us.”
“Petrified?”
“As the forests in Nanos became red and as the sun in Darom locked in place during the Fall, much of the highlands of Telmos turned to stone in the blink of an eye. The rain has done naught to wash it all away, even after millennia.”
Rook considered the tree. “Can hardly be worse than the swamps.”
“Or the jungle,” Aletheia said.
“No doubt ‘tis a safer place to camp,” Eris said. “We will find the Magister’s Keep beyond.”
As they left the jungle of the highlands behind they sure and soon enough came to be surrounded entirely by stony trees. The detritus of fallen leaves and insect mounds on the ground was replaced by an uneven crunching of rubble, like walking down the streets of Katharos after a building had collapsed, and the constant chirping, croaking, groaning, and fighting they had grown so accustomed to in their travels so far disappeared entirely, replaced instead by pure silence. Every whisper echoed between the petrified trunks.
Animals were frozen everywhere in time. Not the extraordinary creatures of earlier, but mundane creatures, the true creatures that once dwelled in this place: small birds and toads and ants with stingers in branches and snakes on vines, all now like marble statues stuck into a display case in the Archon’s Court. They passed everything by in silence, making no sound except with their footsteps.
Aletheia gasped as she rounded a tree. Rook rushed to her side at once; there, concealed from their path, stood a pack of six wolves frozen in motion. Each was locked in a trot, some pushing past foliage, others bypassing branches, and now all were stuck together in time. Though some color was preserved in each of their furs they looked mostly like weathered statues, yet upon close inspection they, like all else here, had nowhere near the erosion that should be expected in such a rainy place like Telmos. Eris tapped her hand against the fur of one wolf and felt nothing but stone, but still she saw every detail of each hair.
Rain came down even then. Patterings which caught against the petrified canopy in roars and created streams which yielded to the eternal strong-standing stone trees, sometimes forced to find their paths downhill toward the river and ultimately Heaven Falls by digging beneath or splitting around the stone trunks.
As darkness descended they found a large tree with particularly generous coverage, the solid leaves of which acted like a cave to deflect the rain. Shards of stone detritus were cleared away to make room for their camp on the muddy ground. Eris set a fire for them to dry off against.
“Does anything still live here?” Rook said.
“Perhaps a creature which feeds on stone?” Eris said. “We are not far from the jungle. No doubt some of its denizens come this way in their travels.”
“Maybe they find it as unnerving as we do,” Aletheia said.
“Or maybe they are too stupid to realize these predators are nothing more than rock.”
They were silent for a long while.
“I’m so tired,” Aletheia said.
At this Rook stood. “Don’t be too tired yet,” he said. “We have a lesson before bed.”
She looked up at him. He smiled back—then motioned toward her sword. With that her whole demeanor shifted, from sullen to energetic, and she jumped to her feet. “Now?”
“I think we’ve put it off long enough. May I borrow your ward?” he said to Eris.
Eris glanced between them. “For practice?”
“We don’t have training swords. I’d prefer the protection when being swung at with a real blade.”
“There is only one.”
He smiled. “I don’t intend to swing back. I’ll take the hits on my false edge. But just in case.”
She sighed. Aletheia looked at her like a puppy waiting for dinner. Eris did not approve of these instructional activities; a magician did not need to be an expert duelist. Then again, if instructing the girl in magic fell to her, she might prefer to disclaim the responsibility to Rook after all. There was no risk to the ward, and she did not need it now, but she still hesitated. Aletheia had some uses, as most followers did, but she did not approve of this running of a daycare. The girl could have been left with their treasure at Patiyali; why did she need to come?
One thing was certain: her presence certainly made the nights much less fun. For that reason alone Eris resented her.
“Please?” Rook said.
“Fine,” she relented. She rolled the jade ward off her wrist and tossed it at him. “Do not break it.”
So the two of them ran off together to practice swordfighting and she was left alone. She refused to engage in a battle of attention for this man with a thirteen-year-old, but there were times when she wondered…
Of course Eris did not need Rook’s attention. It meant nothing to her. She cared little for being doted on. For the most part she was happy to be left to her own devices. What irritated her was when she did desire him, for whatever reason, and the girl got in her way. That aggravated her greatly and shifted much in the way of power back into Rook’s hands. Eris did not like that at all.
So she sat alone against the petrified trunk of the petrified tree, her arms folded and her legs crossed, staring at the fire. She was much too exhausted for sex, probably, but there was something she had been meaning to ask Rook, a point of curiosity that burned in her stomach and would not let go. That was why she was ever more irritated the longer his absence lasted.
The words of the oracle.
None had been too eager to discuss the secrets she spilled, and from that unwillingness Eris gleaned that the words themselves were true in all case. For her they certainly were. Like the Wyrm this Hebat saw something in her past—her attempt to betray Robur and Kauom at the Magister’s Vault—and saw it well enough to understand her thoughts on the matter. That one might so easily see through her lies disturbed her. Until now she always relied on the sanctity of her own thoughts. The Seekers had spells to extract even the most repressed memories and deeply-held lies, but they were conspicuous, challenging, burdensome things, not anything like the casual prophesying of Hebat.
If Hebat saw through her, then she most certainly saw through Rook and Aletheia, who were far simpler creatures. Whatever trauma the girl had experienced concerned Eris little, but Rook was a different story.
She did not think often of others. Mostly she was concerned with herself. She meant what she said to Rook: whatever there was between them was purely physical, and over the preceding months their dalliances had done much to quench her interest in him. In bursts, at least. But she did care for him in the manner one cares for a valuable possession. His clear dedication to her was eminently useful, and relative to some others she had traveled with he was no idiot. That was why she had wondered at times where precisely he had come from. Wherefore he found himself on the Life. What his family must have been like. Great halls and armed guards, lords and ladies, tournaments and romance. Precisely the sort of comfortable place she had longed to be before a more suitable one found her.
Over their years together she had gathered there was some tragedy in his past which stole that life away. Hebat’s portentousness suggested the same. Yet still she realized, more in the weeks since that encounter, that she knew nothing of it.
Her curiosity was not exclusively toward matters of the aethereal. Some mundane concerns did arouse within her a desire to learn more. This was increasingly one of them.
There was one other matter.
She was skeptical of any creature’s ability to foretell the future. There was no such magic in the world, as best she knew. Yet all the same Hebat’s power to see the past was manifestly real; as such only an idiot would reject her prophesies entirely. They were at least worth taking under some advisement. Therefore…
She considered her parting words:
Your crow will bring you more happiness than you may ever imagine, yet not in the manner you or he ever could imagine.
Time and time again each syllable was pondered. She set forth hypotheses, staring at the fire, of how he might help her attain some objective, yet that made little sense. She considered everything she never would have considered, but nothing came to her that she would associate with ‘happiness.’ Indeed the notion of happiness in general she did not understand. What did this word even mean? Power, of course; gratification, yes; fulfillment, that all made sense. Happiness? What a worthless sentiment.
There was only one explanation. Hebat was insinuating love. Eris shuddered at the thought. She was well—yes, happy—without such frivolities in her life. She had seen men and women alike converted to selfless imbeciles by pointless dedications to each other and powerful magicians turned to oysters in the paralysis of emotional intimacy. There was no greater weakness in life. It was the worst form of greed, to want not just another’s body, but to crave also his very soul.
And yet…could Hebat see something Eris could not? Might she be so converted? She did not know. She was not certain as she sat alone in the darkness. She did enjoy Rook’s company, not so unlike how Rook enjoyed Aletheia’s; and would Rook not say he ‘loved’ Aletheia? Could she come to feel for him as he felt for that girl? As he undoubtedly felt for Eris, too?
She could not tell. She hoped not, for both their sakes, but it seemed possible. Yet she swore upon herself then that she would not let it happen; and if it did, then it would be the end of their relationship. Eris lived for herself and no one else. She did not care for anyone’s prophesy. If love was happiness, then she would disavow it forever. Nothing ‘hasty,’ as Hebat said, needed be done. This was a carefully considered plan of action.
Meanwhile, she decided then that she needed to learn more about the power of this priestess. Eris doubted Hebat was what she appeared to be. She would study the manner of her magic when she found the time. She would come to learn what precisely this witch in the swamp was.
That quickly became her obsession.