Key of Stars

by Bruce R Cordell

Moths, each glowing with the same light as the tree bark, flittered and danced through the trees on all sides. Their wingspans easily measured three hands across.

  Taal breathed in air thick with the perfume of night flowers. His mind whirled … not with the heady scent, but with the rapid transition of locations. He’d spent too long at Forever’s Edge to suddenly be jerked hither and yon and not suffer pangs of displacement. If he was forced down one more path of shadow to discover another fascinating, extraordinary, utterly unique vista, the contents of his stomach would join the tableau.

  He swallowed. “We are back in the Feywild?” he managed to say.

  “An imperfectly connected portion,” murmured the eladrin noble. She was studying the movements of the moths. “The Spellplague restitched Sildëyuir, a fragment of Faerie broken off long ago, back with its parent. But Sildëyuir was in pieces before the rejoining, thus the process remains ongoing, and the seams where the two sibling planes meet are unstable. Some pieces are hardly reconnected at all.”

  “Is it dangerous here?” Taal asked.

  “Of course,” Malyanna replied. “And home to creatures stirred from wherever they lurked before, like these moths. They are fey spirits of flux and instability.”

  “Undead?”

  “No. Spirits of the land itself, of Faerie’s pain. They are manifestations of the disruption.”

  “And they’re dangerous?”

  “Yes, I just said that. But they will also guide us to the ruins of Stardeep. As spirits of the tumult and reconnection, they possess a link to the shattered geography that would require Tamur weeks to learn.”

  Malyanna lifted one hand to her mouth and bit her palm. A spurt of cold air preceded the ruby red blood that welled from the wound.

  She lifted her arm and whistled. Blood trickled down her ivory limb in ragged lines.

  The closest flux moth twisted in the air and arrowed toward the eladrin noble. Taal’s tiger tattoo snarled.

  The moth all righted on Malyanna’s palm and unfurled a proboscis half a foot long. It sipped the red fluid like dew from a flower. Its wide, glowing wings shimmered from white to red.

  The insect jerked up and fluttered in the air for a moment, then darted away, streaking the night with crimson radiance.

  Malyanna made a fist with her bleeding hand and followed the creature. Taal and Tamur darted after her.

  “I’ve temporarily bound it,” the eladrin threw over her shoulder. “While the binding remains active, its fellows will not harm us. Do nothing to provoke them!”

  Taal made no answer as he followed.

  He lost track of time as they rushed through a fey wood of dreamy radiance. Only he and Tamur did not glow; Malyanna began to leak a radiance similar to the trees as she stalked after the spirit moth. A sickly purple undertone gave her skin a diseased aspect.

  The forest boundary was knife sharp. When the moth broke out into open space, Malyanna followed without comment. Taal realized that what he’d taken for a bank of mist beyond the tree’s edge was a thrashing swarm of flux moths. The mass extended off into a hazed gloom to the left and right, and dozens of feet into the air.

  “There must be thousands,” he said.

  “Thousands, or perhaps just one, iterated many, many times over,” said Malyanna.

  “Ah. And our route is through the press of wings?” Taal said.

  She nodded. “Though it’s different elsewhere,” she said, “in the Forest of Moths, the flux spirits guard weak points and serve as the agents of reconnection.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Malyanna,” he said.

  “Think of them as needles and stitches that, before they are drawn tight in torn flesh, can draw blood,” she replied. “Just follow, and guard me.”

  Malyanna whistled, producing a hollow, low-pitched hum. The bound flux moth returned to her hand and sipped again. But before it could flutter away, the eladrin noble closed her fist, catching the creature tight.

  The moth flapped madly, buffeting Malyanna. New lines of blood appeared on her face and arms where the wing edges caught her. Taal realized the insect’s wings were sharp as razors.

  Ignoring her fresh wounds, Malyanna approached the greater mass of spirits. She thrust the captive moth out before her like a brand set to ward off gathering dark, and chanted in a low, steady voice.

  The bank of moths parted before her. A causeway of clear air formed ahead. She walked down the constricted way, careful to keep to the exact center.

  Taal followed her into the lane. It wasn’t so narrow their shoulders risked brushing the edges, but if they were to swing their arms, their fingers might well graze the moth wing walls. Dead grass crumbled beneath his feet. The stars overhead wheeled in the sky, and he had to look away. The open air churned with the movement of thousands of flapping musky membranes. He resisted the urge to sneeze.

  A totem growl drew his attention up.

  A mote of glowing white fell from the left wall and stopped at Malyanna’s head. Taal leaped, snatched the thing out of the air with his right hand, and smashed its body into his left elbow. One of the trailing wings brushed his forearm. Blood welled instantly, and a line of pain stitched his skin. He dropped the unmoving body to the grass, careful to avoid the flaccid wing membranes. The body dissolved into dust.

  The eladrin noble continued her steady progress forward.

  Then they were through.

  They stood before a massive gate, tumbled and broken beneath a darkling sky suddenly bereft of stars. The gate was mounted in the side of a great tor that rose up out of a “lake” of flux moths. The visible portion of the massive hill featured dead grass and tumbled stones.

  Granite fragments of the ruined gate were half-buried in loose soil. The throat of the opening was completely collapsed and filled with rubble. One section of the fallen stone was chiseled with the stylized sign of a white tree. A great crack split the symbol nearly in two.

  Nearly every other piece of stone was etched with lines of script. A few used letters familiar to Taal. He squinted, reading:

  This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … Nothing valued is here.

  What is here is dangerous and repulsive. This message is a warning about danger.

  … And more of the same. Taal looked up. “The warning written on these stones; it is scribed in many tongues,” he said.

  “For all the good it did,” replied Malyanna. “The Traitor fled when this pocket plane lurched back into conjunction with Sildëyuir, and Sildëyuir with Faerie. But with the Spellplague raging he obviously didn’t get far, for he never returned again to the Spire of Winter’s Peace …”

  Malyanna studied the collapsed gate a moment longer, then turned and ascended the slope. She and Taal picked a path between tumbled stones that looked as if they had extruded from the earth as slender rocky splinters, only to fall and shatter on the hillside.

  Tamur bounded ahead, sniffing at every surface.

  The summit resolved in the gloom as they drew closer. On it grew a single tree, larger than any tree Taal had ever before seen—and he’d seen his share of woody giants. But the one on the hilltop was bare of leaf. Its many branches clenched into a tight fistlike cyst.

  “A Forest Monarch!” said Malyanna, her voice surprised.

  “A dead one, if you mean the tree,” said Taal. “See—it’s petrified.”

  “So it is.”

  They approached until they stood beneath the mineralized growth. It was even larger than Taal had first surmised. Its trunk was easily more than a hundred feet in diameter!

  “Forest Monarchs,” said Malyanna, her voice soft, “were primeval trees. But they were more than mere plants; they were emblems of the Feywild itself, vigorous beyond measure, and vessels of pure life force.”

  “You sound melancholy,” Taal said. Was the eladrin actually showing sentiment?

  “I grew up on stories of the Forest Monarchs,” she said. “Like the Golden
Tree of Dawn that clutched the sun in its boughs and whose leaves split the light into creation’s prism …”

  “Sounds beautiful,” he replied.

  “Yes …”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “But that was before I found the strength the Far Manifold offers,” she said. Her face lost the softness of reminiscence. Had it been there at all?

  The great dog brushed her flank, then bounded away back down the slope, its nose to the ground. Taal doubted it’d flush any game in the dead and decaying pocket world.

  Malyanna reached for the tree. Before her fingers could touch it, a spark of cerulean fire leaped the distance, like static discharge. She cried out as a wave of ice materialized from the air and pushed her away from the tree’s rigid surface.

  Taal dropped into his ready stance, his oath tugging him to protect the Lady of Winter’s Peace. But how could he defend her from a petrified tree?

  Malyanna examined her hand.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded. The ice shield she’d reflexively conjured steamed away. “Residual charge of Keeper warding fire,” she said. “This Monarch was an embodiment of it, most likely … but its energies are spent.”

  “Spent on what?” Taal said.

  “Unless I miss my guess, capturing that which attempted to flee Stardeep,” she replied.

  They traced the periphery of the gnarled tree until they came to a place where the contorted, squeezed branches offered a gap wide enough to serve as passage inward, toward the heart of the cyst the tree clutched.

  Malyanna bowed her head and muttered a few words whose meaning evaded Taal’s understanding like fish darting away from questing hands. When she finished, she stood straighter and nodded at him.

  He preceded her into the opening. The fissure tapered, constricting more and more as he went. Finally he was forced to crawl. The stone-hard bark abraded his knees.

  The faintest glimmer of blue light danced somewhere ahead. It was enough for Taal to see that the gap narrowed even further. Dropping to his stomach, he squirmed forward. He was relieved to finally emerge into a larger space.

  The curling branches of the petrified Monarch formed a cathedral-like cavity of stone: the heart of the cyst. A figure hung above Taal, caught at the apex of the cavity. It was the source of the blue light. A male elf or perhaps an eladrin … at least from the waist up. A forest of sinuous tentacles splayed from where the man’s hips should have been. Most were dozens of feet long. Grasping tree branches and reaching tentacles were an interwoven mess. He could well imagine how the Monarch’s woody limbs had snatched the horror out of the air and wrapped it within the tree’s confining embrace.

  And, then, apparently, it had sacrificed its own life by petrifying itself and its captive, ensuring the Traitor would never break the trust of the Keepers.

  Malyanna squirmed into the cyst. Her eyes fastened on the hybrid horror held above them.

  “Poor Carnis,” she said.

  “It’s really him?” Taal asked.

  “After all these years, I never thought to see him again.”

  “Do … you mean to free him?”

  “No!” she said, laughing. “He had his time, and failed. Besides, look at him. He allowed the influence to have its way with him, warping his body in return for easy power. Do not doubt that his mind was similarly twisted. Moreover, he is dead.”

  “You could bring him back, in some form, if you wanted,” Taal said, knowing he was baiting her, but his oath allowed him that much.

  “From this,” she said, waving her hands to encompass the entirety of the stone cyst, “there is no coming back.”

  “Then what use was our trip to this dead-end dimension?” asked Taal.

  “Carnis’s spirit may be fled or shattered, but his remains can still be persuaded to give up his secrets.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “Join Tamur outside and defend the Monarch’s corpse.”

  Before he could ask from what, his totem growled. Something from the world had followed them.

  “Very well, my lady,” Taal said. “I sense someone has come calling. I’ll deal with them.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Feywild Splinter (Stardeep)

  Japheth’s cloak unfolded like the wings of a soaring hawk. Where it touched, a swarming, glowing moth disappeared, pulled into the realm of darkness that lived in its folds.

  The path that split the bank of flapping oversized insects had looked navigable. But as the blood staining Raidon’s forearm attested, the boundaries were not constant, and the moth wings were as sharp as swords.

  The monk leaped and spun, swatting moths from the air and stamping them straight into the earth. He was amazingly proficient at avoiding the wings, but a few cut him nonetheless.

  “They’re not alive,” Japheth said. “They’re constructs of spiritual energy.”

  The monk didn’t answer; he continued down the wavering lane. Japheth realized the lane wasn’t so much a breach in the moths’ ranks as a bridge created by his and Raidon’s mere presence. Sure, a bridge fraught with the possibility of severed limbs, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Raidon sped ahead and exited the inconstant corridor. A moment later Japheth joined him and looked around the slope of a dreary hillside.

  A jumble of ruins lay immediately before them. The monk was gazing at them with eyes that, just perhaps, conveyed sorrow.

  The thread of power Japheth followed shuddered and pulled. He craned his neck back and looked up the barrowlike incline. Darkness shrouded the summit, but he knew his quarry was that way.

  Japheth pointed. “Malyanna is close, up on top of this hill,” he said. “And she’s started some kind of massive spell or ritual!”

  Raidon’s eyes narrowed. The design on his chest brightened. “I feel it too,” he said. “If she’s still here, she must believe she can find the information she seeks.”

  The monk hauled Angul forth. The blade flared with cerulean fire. His legs were a blur as he raced away from Japheth up the slope.

  “Wait!” the warlock yelled. The monk didn’t slacken his pace.

  Japheth cursed and followed. He couldn’t hope to match the half-elf’s speed, but he could take shortcuts here and there through his cloak.

  An explosion burst on the summit. The hill shuddered, and Japheth stumbled. A shaft of shimmering purple light shot into the air, pulsing with an energy he was becoming intimately familiar with. It was the power of the stars as embodied by his new pact. He gasped as vigor warmed his skin.

  The illumination revealed a tree of incredible proportions crowning the hilltop. Its branches, closed like a fist when he had first glimpsed them, were moving. They uncurled like colossal fingers reluctantly giving up their grip on something precious. The clamor of splintering stone boomed down the hillside. White dust billowed up from the unfurling tree, hiding it again in a purple-tinged haze.

  Japheth spied the monk, well ahead of him. Raidon dashed for the spreading, tumbling cloud of stone dust. Just before he reached it, a black dog leaped from a boulder’s shadow and slammed the half-elf to the ground.

  A moment later, a billowing wave of white fog enveloped both the monk and the hound.

  “By the Nine!” Japheth swore.

  The noise ceased. In its place Japheth heard chanting. It was a woman’s voice, but magnified by magic so palpable each word struck him like a slap. He recognized the voice as Malyanna’s.

  Then he, too, was enveloped in the white fog.

  It was a fine dust of pulverized stone. Japheth coughed, and blinked tiny specks from his eyes. He could see only a couple feet inside the spreading cloud. But he could still hear the eladrin’s chant, and the bay of a hunting mastiff, off to his left.

  He made for the thunderous chant. Raidon was more than competent enough to deal with a big dog, however much shadows empowered it.

  Japheth hustled, but didn’t hurtl
e forward headlong; he didn’t want to run full tilt into a jutting boulder. The haze was thinning. Was the dust settling? And why was Malyanna pulverizing stone in the first place? He’d see soon enough.

  Then the woman’s voice rang out speaking … Elvish. He knew the fey tongue well enough, though he was rusty. “Where is the Key of Stars, Carnis?” she said.

  Who was Carnis? Japheth wondered.

  The warlock increased his pace. He was close; he could see the hilltop silhouetted above him, and the broken remnants of the colossal tree, by the pillar of light that still played over the area.

  Something hit Japheth across his face. Streaks of light and pain crazed his senses.

  His cloak translated him away from a flurry of follow-up blows that cracked the air where he’d been standing. Had the monk gone berserk and attacked him again?

  Japheth appeared a dozen paces back in the settling cloud where the haze was thicker. He reeled, but caught himself on the side of boulder covered in dead, flaking lichen.

  “You mind-bent fool …,” he said before he realized the man who’d just attacked him wasn’t Raidon.

  First, his attacker was human, not a half-elf. Where Raidon’s hair was black, the human’s head sported a carroty mass of hair. He wore a black robe belted at the waist, not a silk jacket and pants as his friend preferred. The man had bare arms, and the tattoo of some kind of hunting cat curled down one arm.

  The man stood with his legs set apart and bent slightly at the knees, with both hands half raised, ready to deflect an attack or launch one. He scanned the periphery of the dispersing dust. Japheth took a moment to regain his breath, but the man’s head swiveled to face the warlock. The man’s pupils were slender splinters, as piercing as a cat’s. Or a demon’s.

  “Where’d you come from?” said Japheth. The man sprinted for the warlock.

  “Caiphon, unfurl your stairs!” Japheth called out.

  Wind shrieked in his ears and bore him upward, even as his form faded into invisibility. From his perspective, he ascended a wavering staircase of indescribable colors. A pseudo-landscape tried to unfold around him, attempting to displace the hilltop, at least in his mind’s eye, but Japheth concentrated on keeping his attention firmly planted in reality.