“What does that mean?”
The old tree-man furrowed his brow, wiped a tear, and rested his smile. “I find myself tongue-tied. I will show you.” He knelt to whisper in Teuren’s ear.
She rose to her feet. “The Lesser Council is adjourned, and the Greater Council shall meet in thirty-nine rotations.” When the dryads exited en masse, Khyte expected an awkward wait on the dais with the royal voices that denied his request, but as they stepped down, the crowd opened a path, and they effortlessly departed the amphitheater.
After the elders parted ways, Garin led Khyte down a broad avenue to the city’s walls. While the murmuring throng of tree-women and tree-men flooded Wywynanoir, within minutes they vanished down side streets and behind slammed doors, some even swarming over the walls into the encroaching forest in their desire to disappear into the woodwork. Compared to Inglefras, they had incredible prowess, scurrying up the wall bare-handed to spring from the battlements. Was Inglefras only feigning weakness? Her fear had seemed very real.
Having reached the gatehouse, Garin simply tottered through, and Khyte followed. The building was not only unattended, but all the portcullises were raised. Not that there were no signs of activity: Everything about the building and the attached walls looked new, from the stones to the paint to the gates—except the scaffolding, which on second glance seemed to be trees shaped by their service to the walls. It was as if they had grown in place for a long forgotten siege and, only after invaders and defenders crossed swords on their leaning trunks, fallen into a deep slumber.
“When was Wywynanoir built?”
“Three thousand revolutions ago, or about one hundred years in human reckoning.”
“Why do these walls look so new?”
“Forgive me,” said Garin. “I need the remainder of my journey for reflection. At journey’s end, there will be no more mysteries.”
“I understand,” said Khyte.
Three hours later, they were still walking. Though Wywynanoir was obscured by the dryad forest, Khyte did not yet feel that they had left civilization for the wilderness, for he felt the gaze of the colossal columns. Moreover, as these were not trees, thinking it a wood felt both a lie and a grave offense to his hosts. He wondered what the dryads called this arboreal residence; surely their assemblage made some kind of city, albeit a sad, taciturn city.
Mulling over his lamentable proposal and the mocking that followed, Khyte told himself he couldn’t be faulted for thinking the tree-women the true population, as they were the ones acting, talking and laughing. “Are we lost?”
Garin smiled. “No, I know this path very well.”
“Hours ago, you said this journey’s end is near.”
“In my haste to be done, I underestimated the time. We are within two hours of our destination.”
Khyte ignored the absent-minded dryad for the rest of the trip, and it was Garin that spoke next: “We have arrived.”
While another world might have marked these clumped trees and profusion of waist-high grasses as a bleak backwoods, Khyte followed Garin down the eroded path until they arrived at a titanic, walnut-brown tree, somehow darker than its shadow, for the Abyss-light stirred in its rustling leaves. Though the tree-mother was too much to take in at once, being several hundred feet around at the trunk, it was Khyte’s upward glance that awed him, for though the girth tapered, a village might have nested in the first diverging joint, and the branches extended further than he could see. This tree was only the gigantic vanguard of thousands of enormous tree-mothers, and though most were dwarfed by the titan, they were yet so huge that Khyte could not have reached their lowest branches.
“Khyte, do not judge me too harshly, for this face has lived. Here is Inglefras. Here lies my name, my honor, my past and future, and all that I am.” When Garin knelt between the broad roots, he burned white until the brightness took on his lover’s likeness, and like the final, charitable act of a flower going to seed, Inglefras the seed broke into countless white threads. From the disintegrating sheaves, a spark went into the giant tree.
“Inglefras?” Khyte fell to his knees and fumbled at the thread, which was so dry it chaffed his fingers. Khyte wept, and allowed himself to understand. At the end of her journey, Inglefras had become not only male but old, and, as Garin, enjoyed Khyte’s company for another day. With this knowledge as the key, he saw that Sarin Gelf was an anagram of Inglefras, and that Garin also used word play to clue Khyte in: Inglefras was Garin-Self. He wept until the Abyss-light rested on the horizon. As he had never grieved, in that moment he released all his unnamed grief, from the slaughter of his birth parents, to the loss of Huiln and Kuilea to machinations which he had approved, to the strange sense that Eurilda had taken something more than innocence, to all the joy he would never know with Inglefras.
By the time Khyte stood to depart, he had caressed the gleaming threads until they crumbled into powder. Where this dust had mingled with tears, Inglefras’s remains were a paste, looking more like a rain-quenched campfire than a grave. When he turned to the overgrown path, a cracking sound—not like a snapped twig, but a broken door—put him on his guard. That someone was a spectator to his desolation and despair was too much for Khyte, and with the mocking dryad laughter of the amphitheater still fresh in his mind, he drew his sword and angrily stepped toward the sound, which crunched, then crackled, then pattered, as if a series of barriers were splintered by a battering ram. He followed the shattering noise around the trunk to a cavernous knothole, where four green women knelt in wooden fragments, and another hull shivered down the middle, toward the earth floor. When the seed burst with another loud crack, a fifth lay curled in the remnant. The tree-women were stamped with the image of Inglefras—exact duplicates, with not an eyelash out of place. Their likenesses were so cruel that he covered his eyes as they approached.
“Khyte!” While Khyte was no lesser man, to be stricken with madness upon hearing his beloved calling his name after her dust melted in his tears, even great heroes might have their minds riven when their name echoes in a dulcet chorus of the departed. When they embraced him, each was as warm as Inglefras, and each wore the scent of rose tea like Inglefras.
“Stop!” stammered Khyte. “You’re not her! You’re nothing!” Only moments ago, Khyte had feared that Inglefras was nothing, that he had fallen in love with a flower and grieved for nothing but love itself, and he had just clawed out of this deep well of narcissism, clutching his heart-spent, slaved passion as his right, when he was snared by this ten-armed affection. As each Inglefras took a different pose, it was as if memories of her clamored to shatter his bittersweet longing for her dissolved image. Moments ago, Inglefras may have been dead, but she had been whole in Khyte’s memory, and now his beloved was irrevocably fragmented by these teeming pretenders. While his eyes were still misted with grief, his brow creased and his choking sobs became long, impassioned jets of rage and terror.
What had he loved? He looked up at the towering tree-mother, her gnarled branches mingling promiscuously with neighboring boughs, and her roots bulging upward around the cache of sprouted seeds. Surely he had loved no reality, but a lovely image cast off from this tree monster. Having sown a tree-woman in Khyte’s heart, the tree-mother reaped only this crop of lies.
“Khyte, listen.” When the newly hatched tree-woman spoke with Inglefras’s sweet, soothing voice, his spine wiggled in revulsion and reluctant relief. “While the good of the dryad usually subsumes the memories of the seed, when the memories of she you knew as Inglefras and Garin passed into our tree-mother, she remembered you with the tree-woman’s eyes, and it is as if we were planted this day anew, as if she were a new dryad.” If this newborn tree-woman noticed his wild eyes and his shaking hands, she did not show it.
“This morning your proposal was an elaborate joke,” said another Inglefras, “but now we would go to war for love of you.”
“And it may go
without saying, but we accept,” said another. “We will be not only bride but bridal party, in whatever Hravakian wedding ritual you wish.”
If they meant to marry him as a group, they would have to walk him to the altar blindfolded. While each was as luscious as the Inglefras who had taken his lust, together they were not only too hot to look at, they were too hot to think about. Who could look on such a wedding party?
“But I don’t know you,” said Khyte, his voice breaking, reminding him for the moment of the boy who hid in his father’s furs. When he twisted free of their embrace, his flailing arms knocked two Inglefrases face down, but they only sprang up and renewed their caresses
“Look at me, Khyte, and know,” she said. “I am Inglefras. You rescued me from King Merculo.”
“And I. You leaped from the Alfyrian embassy for love of me.”
“And I. You followed me into the catacombs.”
“And I. You took the point of Eurilda’s dagger for me.”
“All of Inglefras, and Inglefras forevermore, will know and remember you.”
“And you must know us,” they said, laughing.
Khyte was about to call it off, then thought better of it, seeing that he was surrounded by five love-drunk dryads, and who knows how many within earshot. And he was almost persuaded by their round-robin argument that Inglefras was all of these women. His tears had only fallen on one of her cast-off garments. If Inglefras was whom he wanted, more of her couldn’t be a bad thing, could it?
Then why did his blood creep, his breath shudder, and his skin crawl from their warm caresses? That morning, Inglefras’s touch thrilled him, but now his teeming pulse felt like an infestation, and his desire a deadly disease.
“But quickly,” one said. “The threat of war is real.”
“What?” said Khyte.
“When we said we would wage war for love of you, that was no vain declaration,” said another.
“The Dryad World will break before it bends.”
“They are coming.”
the end
About the Author
Keith Hendricks holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University and lives in a loving, Doctor Who-addicted, anime-obsessed, Hamilton-quoting, and book-fueled family. You can find his thoughts on writing fantasy fiction on his blog: Shoreless Seas and Stars Uncounted. You can find his other writing on his Wattpad account, The Eye of Wysaerie. When Hendricks isn’t writing fantasy novels, he’s pumping out reviews for NerdSpan.com.
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