![]() – A moment of déjà vu, as I stood just outside the door, key in the lock. I was nearly back up to scratch, five days since my injury. The thrill of my heart accompanied me along my jog, slowly warming up, keeping pace. My heart slowed, but I could still feel its pulse. I took and held a deep breath, I checked my toes – they were uninjured – I checked my side – a little less pain than yesterday. The wind rose like wings.Īnd woke with the sensation of breaking bone, my heart thunderous and racing in my chest. Two steps either way – it was a dream, after all. The heartbeat of the stone and the heartbeat of the storm and the heartbeat in my chest were in harmony. ![]() The Wood was dark and distant, for all that I remained within it. I rested, for a time, peering out, peering down. Two steps either way and I would fall a hundred fathoms into the Wood. There were eye-signs, carved through the lichen here. This is a place of remembrance and this is a place of vigilance and this is a place of eternity, it said, words distant enough to be gentle, a storm just out of view. This is a sacred place, it said, the words made of thunder. The Glory would shine upon this rock some nights, I supposed but not tonight.Īt the very, very peak was a small stretch of level stone, and I lay there, an insistent, constant wind whispering over my coat. I could see the tops of the trees of the Wood, now, spilling into the darkness in all directions. There was a low thrum in the air, and as I left hoofprints in the moss I could feel its source – a heartbeat, in the stone that lay like petrified bones of a titan long gone. The slope was gentle, easy, despite the cliff-abyss just to each side. The highest of them just barely hooked the low whirling cloud, ribbons of cut fog spilling off its point. Great tangled crescent-arcs of stone, rising high into the night like a roc's nest, each one set at a shallow, precarious angle in the ground and altogether the size of a small town. In a clearing, there was a monument of stone. It was a long, long way further, and with my sure-footedness I did not notice when the ground began to slope and grow rough around the roots. ![]() But I was not much of a negotiator, and the Velvet was patient. ![]() Time, in the Wood, is negotiable, I had discovered. The marble was shifting, flowing, rising into Greek columns, creeping in from elsewhere without moving an inch, and a girl was curled at the centre of the place and breathing like a hare, with her toes in a flowerbed and earthworms on her feet, and the Wood SEETHED at the border of the heresy and I fled. The path continued ahead of me, but I stood still.įlies tasted smooth marble, a ways off the path to my right. At a trot no less timid for its pace I once more followed the pure guidance of the Velvet, and I found a path that curled and curled and curled, more than could fit on parchment without crossing itself, and it led me to – There are poison-yews, old and fecund, that I did not touch. There is another, but I did not know them. The dapple-king – the Moth – watched and wandered and waited in the dark whenever I was near, and he was not one of me. The Velvet, the Black-Flax, Moldywarp, so many names, but the Hour of secret-keeping and shelter shivered where my thick blood dripped on the Wood-roots. I set the maggots to their work and began my searching.Ī barber had warned me that the Mansus lay within the Wood, but I had set no foot upon its bounds – none of my thousands of feet – and however well the lichen led me, it was unwilling or unable to permit me that House. The wound in my flank itched, but bled little less than it had on nights before. Any passion any old yearning, any spare obsession is enough of an offering. I knew the secret now: sleep with passions roused. Three nights, I had found it, pressing through the silver-bright haze of sleep into the warm crowded whispering forest. I opened my eyes beneath black trees with black leaves.įor five nights, I had been seeking the Wood.
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