Sometime after checking his gun for the two-hundredth time, he dozed and fell into fitful dreams.
The first step beyond the veil raised the sharp crackle of dry leaves, cause enough for Kirelle to stiffen in alarm when she had known nothing underfoot but lush moss. Then the air, equally strange, edged with frost and suffused with the underlying scents of rot and decay. This was the other side, where the wrong word or the mishandled chance encounter could doom the unwary traveller to lifelong exile and death.
Kirelle paused, aware of the pull of the moon in her blood, of the wheeling swing of strange stars, and the slow, insistent aging that ruled all aspects of earthly life.
Curiosity filled her, too. She had been born here, taken across the veil as a changeling unknowable years in the past. Never before had Kirelle felt moved to wonder whether her human parents had grieved when the glamor left by the fey wore off, and they discovered an unbreathing bundle of twigs left in place of their stolen child.
A moment later, listening uneasily Kirelle noticed the wood's appalling silence. Wind alone dared raise voice in this place. No crickets called, nor any night-singing bird. The missing, subliminal thread of harmony her art should have sensed from growing wood raised panic, until she realized: stripped branches and hard-edged, unsoftened moonlight were proper, here. This world went dormant for winter, its smaller creatures frost-killed or departed until the renewal of spring.
The only vibrant life within reach of Kirelle's senses seemed to be the Wizard's white owl, that carved impatient circles as it waited for her to regain wits and purpose. Kirelle touched a sapling to borrow from its rooted firmness the assurance to brace her failing nerves. But her contact revealed something worse than dormancy; the young beech felt sluggish and dull under her hands, stupidly
reft of its power of being and retarded from self-awareness. Horror and pity sent her reeling a step back.
These earthly trees were mute, brutishly groping through soil and sunlight without the gift of wakening. No one had walked this wood for many years who understood how to nurture the spirit nature of wild trees.
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