David Niemitz
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Faerie Knight 156
🕑 Added 2025-02-26 12:00:11 +0000 UTC156 - Road’s End
I have commanded that the ancient seal be broken, to reveal what lies beyond. As the governor of the province, I cannot be expected to make decisions in ignorance.
The Journal of Decimus Avitus
☀
13th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297
As the hooves of Cern’s faerie steeds brought them further north, and closer to Vellatesia, Trist and Acrasia found that the very land had been twisted by the evil of the ruins. The roots of the trees grasped at the old Etalan road like the withered fingers of an old man, but with far greater strength. At first along the edges, the road had crumbled under the assault, and after the first day’s riding, they lost the track entirely.
“Can you still feel it?” Trist ask Acrasia, looking back to where her horse had paused, swishing its tail against the flies. The motion was unconscious: even without eyes to see, he found himself constantly turning toward the sound of voices.
“Not even an itch,” the faerie lady admitted. They had been relying on her reaction to the ancient spells worked into the Etalan roads for the last stretch, but now even that was gone. “Auberon said nothing of this - when he took your father here twenty years ago, the road was still intact.”
Trist sighed. He had hoped to avoid using the Hunter’s Boon, because he did not know how the corruption that had seeped into the area might impact him, but they could no longer put the attempt off. He took a moment to examine the forest all around them, seeing now as clearly as ever, but in a detached way that constantly felt like he was looking in on the world from the outside. He felt as if he were looking in the window of a home, instead of joining those within at the dinner table.
Not only were the roots of the trees twisted and gnarled, but their trunks and boughs as well. In many places, the bark was split and weeping sap, as if the forest itself had been wounded. In others, the trees were obviously dead, without any greenery. Instead, there was such a proliferation of mushrooms up the side of the trunk and in the roots that Trist could think of it as nothing so much as a pack of hungry dogs gnawing at a carcass.
In contrast to everywhere else in the world, here the temperature only seemed to rise as they moved closer to Vellatesia. While Trist caught glimpses of his wife in the frozen north, or Ismet shivering around a campfire under the desert stars, he found himself slick with sweat beneath his armor.
The ground was muddy, and mosquitos and flies buzzed about them no matter how the horses flicked their tails. Trist might have expected the Will o the Wisps, the faerie lights, to dance in the darkness of the Arden, now that there was no sunlight to chase them away: but here, at least, he found no trace of Auberon’s court.
“The Gate of Horn,” Trist murmured to himself, casting out a glittering thread from his core into the forest. The strand sparked orange, then settled on something in the distance, ahead of them and to the right. A wave of nausea boiled up in Trist’s stomach, leaving him gasping and hunched forward in his saddle.
“Trist?” Acrasia asked, placing a hand on his shoulder. He had not noticed her ride up alongside him.
“Angelus,” Trist breathed, leaning his forehead against the warmth of his steed’s mane. “I can feel it, Acrasia. Nothing is right where we are going. No place should feel like this.”
“Do you need to rest?” she asked.
“Resting will not help.” He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. “I will get used to it.” Trist pulled the horse’s head around by the reins, correcting their path ahead, and pressed his heels in. Acrasia rode alongside him, half a step later. “We had lost the track truly,” he explained. “And our path was turning west. If we had kept on as we were, we would never have reached Vellatesia, and found ourselves at the western sea instead.”
“I no longer feel any of Auberon’s power here,” Acrasia admitted. “This part of the forest has become twisted against his will, to serve the purposes of another. I suspect this will only be the first attempt to keep us from the gate. To say nothing of the bindings laid down by Aurelius and his priests.”
“Can you be certain those bindings still hold?” Trist asked, as the picked their way forward without a path. The underbrush was dense, and the horses' hooves sucked at the mud with every step.
“If they had broken completely, the king would not need you,” Acrasia pointed out. “Your ancestors worked to seal out daemons and faeries alike, but not mortal men. Your father walked there, and so can you. But I could not enter on my own. I will need to take shelter inside the sword, when we arrive, until you have carried me through.”
Trist nodded. “A problem for when we get there. Let us see to the journey, first.”
Without a sun to mark the passage of days, the bells of a nearby town’s church, or the routines of an army on the march, time lost all meaning. They rode until the horses needed to rest, and they could not even see the white ring of the blotted sun for the thick foliage above their heads. While the horses recovered, Trist and Acrasia ate faerie fruits packed by Queen Niviène, and he found that a single apple or peach was enough to fill his belly until the next stop. The horses had bags of oats, but Trist worried about them nonetheless.
They had yet to find any water that he could feel confident was clean. The parts of the Arden that he had known from boyhood were criss-crossed with shallow streams, fast running over stony beds. Trist had assumed this part of the forest would be the same, but found he was entirely wrong. Here, there was little but mud, and what water they did find was brackish, slicked with slime and algae, and buzzing with flies. He let the horses drink from it, because there was nothing else, even though he knew it was a mistake.
Their progress slowed; the undergrowth grew so thick, and the footing so soggy and treacherous, that Trist had to dismount and pick them a path himself, trying to find earth that would hold the weight of the horses one step at a time. Acrasia, perched atop her mare, followed directly behind his horse in silence.
It was during their fourth break to rest the horses that the effects of the brackish water became clear. The horses were sweating even after a rest, their eyes dull. When the mare released a load of dung onto the forest floor, it was wet and loose, and reeked of death.
“Unsaddle them,” Trist told Acrasia.
“It will slow us down to go on foot,” she protested.
“If we keep the horses with us,” he countered, “they will die before we ever reach Vellatesia. If we let them go now, they may be able to find clean water, or make it back to your brother. Either way, we will walk the rest of this journey. They are no longer strong enough to carry us.”
Trist set the saddles and the rest of the tack aside, leaving them beneath an old willow in a heap. The saddlebags, he slung over his shoulders, carrying their supplies himself. Then, he pressed his face to the forehead of each horse in turn. “Find your master,” he told them. “Find Cern.” Then, he slapped them each once on their haunches, to get them moving. They were faerie horses; perhaps they understood. Whether they did or not, neither seemed to feel any hesitation in getting out of this haunted, cursed land.
As Trist had suspected it would, setting the horses loose actually improved their progress, for a time. No longer was he forced to seek a way for the massive animals, only for he and Acrasia, who were much smaller. She, at least, was lighter on her feet then him, and he had only to find ground that would support his own weight, knowing the faerie would be able to follow.
The sick feeling never left his stomach, and Trist did not expect any relief until he released the strand that linked his core to the gate, somewhere in the distance. He forced himself to eat anyway, when they stopped to rest, because he knew his body needed the food. Every third rest, he slept as best he could.
It might have been the second day of their travel, or perhaps the third, when the spirits first came.
It began with moaning and coughing, so close and so like a sick child that Trist was instantly on his feet, casting about for the source. “Hello?” he called out into the woods. “Where are you?”
There was no response at first, and then the moaning resumed. Trist let his vision expand, scanning the dark forest for any sign of a person other than he or Acrasia, but there was nothing.
“Do you smell that?” Acrasia asked. “It smells like smoke.”
Trist inhaled, and got a lungful of it. Not just woodsmoke, but the scent of fouler things burning, as well. He had at first thought the coughing that of a child afflicted by a winter fever, but when it came again he instantly recognized it for what it was: someone choking on smoke. “A lightning strike?” he asked, turning to Acrasia.
“No,” she said, after a moment. “It is too wet here for anything to catch fire. Do you recall what happened to Vellatesia, Trist?”
“It burned,” he answered.
There was no child in the woods, and no fire, but when they moved again they were accompanied by the constant reek of smoke, and piteous moaning, coughing, and eventually wailing. The sounds made it impossible to hear any ambush or predator coming through the underbrush: worse, they grated on the soul so badly that Trist could no longer sleep.
They had moved into a true swamp, now, though he had never read that the old provincial capital was built in a marsh. Tussocks of strong earth could only be found where they were anchored by roots, and the rest of the terrain was a thick, dark sludge that sucked at any boot which slipped in. Trist could not have guessed how deep the briny swamp mud went, and he had no desire to find out whether he could touch the bottom. The trees around them were swamp trees, now, exclusively: willows of various sorts, hanging with moss, and the sort of reeds and shrubs he might have expected to see near the ocean.
Before long, he was soaked in mud and sweat, with mosquito bites itching beneath his armor, and a stomach that still roiled with the sickening wrongness of what lay ahead. There was no point in even trying to sleep, but Trist comforted himself with the idea that the ruins could not possibly be far, now.
When the trees finally broke, it happened so suddenly that Trist didn’t even realize it at first. It was only when his boot scraped on an ancient stone that he looked aside from picking his way forward, and saw the blotted white sun and the pale moon above in the starry, open sky.
The Ardenwood had never truly reclaimed Vellatesia, it seemed, for the ruins loomed ahead, painted by moonlight. They were in the Etalan style, white limestone with fallen pillars, the wreck of palaces and statues, long-dry fountains, and a great circular building of many stories which Trist could not even guess the purpose of. The moans and cries of the dead had ceased, and the first cool wind they had felt in days whistled through the ruins. Trist’s orange thread stretched from his core into the center of the city, sparking in the night.
“We made it,” he said, with a sigh.
“Now comes the hardest part,” Acrasia said. “And you will have to do it alone, Trist. I cannot pass the seals.”
She stretched out a hand to the hilt of his sword, shimmered, and vanished, leaving Trist alone on the edge of the ancient ruins. He rolled his shoulders once, cracked his neck, and trudged forward out of the swamp and into the haunted city.
