Chapter 40: 39. The Shadowed Lands

The sky was black and moonless, clouded in spots with pulsating auroras, but the ground was bright enough to see. The grass beneath their horses’ hooves glowed dim pink, and the drooping boughs of the trees above it glinted with silver.

Seneria was dark. But it was also the most colorful place in the world.

Corvo plucked a fern from a plant as they passed it by. Its blade cast purple on his hand when he drew it near. He stared at it in awe.

Mother pulled it from his hands. She closed her fist around it, and her eyes flashed golden; the purple faded until it became dark and mundane, and soon there was no glow left.

She exhaled, satisfied, as Corvo might have after taking a refreshing sip of water.

The fern fell to the ground.

“Touch nothing,” she said. “As the beauty of a rose belies its thorns, so too does the magic of these woods. Do not trust your senses. Only trust me.”

Corvo straightened in the saddle with a nod of his head.

“There’s so much power here,” Aletheia said. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“Magic pours down on us directly from the Aether,” Mother said. “The plants feed on it in place of sunlight. They are more like elves than the flora we know from the rest of Esenia.”

“And the fauna? What about them?” Dorian said.

Trito tugged the mane of his horse in place of reins. “You would prefer not to find out,” he said. “But you will find threats here that cannot be vanquished with idle magic. Keep your blades close at hand.” He turned to Mother. “And dim your light.”

“No,” she replied.

“You will be seen, and you will attract predators—both to its glow, and to its magic. If you leave it alight, it is a question only of when we will be found, and who will find us first. And you are unlucky, your spells will be of no use against them.”

“What does that mean?” Dorian asked.

“He means orcs,” Aletheia said. “They can’t be hurt with magic. Right?”

The elf nodded.

Mother wrapped her left arm around Corvo’s chest. She stared ahead. But suddenly, without any movement, the magelights that had followed them since Mother first met the Shadow Man went dark—and then disappeared.

For a moment, Corvo’s vision went black. He hadn’t been in such darkness since the attack of the trolls in Veshod. But then the world around him brightened, and the glow of the arcane plants around them seemed so much brighter.

“Good,” Trito said. “We will need to stay close to the boy, to ensure no harm comes to him.”

He kicked his horse in the ribs and continued deeper into the forest. The rest of the party did not wait up to follow.

The shadows of the Shadowed Lands came from below—not above. Corvo did not want to learn whether or not it was dark enough in the glow of the forest, beneath heavy branches or within fields of grass, for the Shadow Man to manifest, yet he felt safest when foliage was thick and his view was blocked everywhere by trunks and trees, and where the only true spots of blackness were out beyond his presence, in the open, beneath the moonless sky.

They traveled for an unpassing eternity. The sound of the forest never quieted. Corvo had tried to keep track of their direction, but within hours he was completely lost within the forest. The sun never rose. Time did not seem to pass. One grove they reached could have been the same as another they passed miles later.

But Trito never lost his way. He always moved deliberately, eyes on the ground, guiding them onward yet.

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Dorian asked.

“I am.”

“Are you, though? How? Did you use a spell?”

“No. I recognize this place. I know that tree.” He nodded to a towering pine, or it looked something like a pine, that had streaks of orange up and down its trunk. Its leaves pulsated with gentle, warm red.

It looked the same as any other tree they had seen a thousand times that day.

“You know the tree,” Dorian repeated, mulling over the words.

“I recognize the patterns of its veins. And its number of branches. And the shade of its leaves.”

“All right. You’ve been through here that often, then?”

“No. Only once.”

He pressed beneath a low branch, emerging on a darker clearing beyond.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Not human,” Dorian said. “Right.”

The others followed the elf. They ducked beneath the branch.

Corvo saw the lake.

The luminescent forest formed a ring around a large body of water. At the banks gathered animals, too dark to be seen clearly, but enormous; they dwarfed the party’s horses, and from the backs of each hung large crests or wings or clubs that grew at the ends of their tails. These were the creatures that had been making the noises that he heard as they disembarked, and had kept hearing for the hours since.

The lake had an island, and at its center stood a field of towering crystals. They shimmered yellow and red and gold beneath the dark sky, and across them grew glowing vines.

Everywhere across the island lounged huge birds with leathery wings. They stood ten feet tall and crests grew from their heads, and they sat by the crystals as a dog sits by an open fire, basking in warmthless heat.

One bird stretched its huge arms and stood upright. Its wings folded against its chest, and it walked on four legs toward the water.

A sip with its beak.

The water beneath it broke. In a blurred downpour, a creature from the lake erupted onto the surface. Corvo saw nothing of what followed except a rain of black droplets, a loud honking, a pained cry, and then another splash as the bird and its killer disappeared into the water.

The spike-tailed and crest-backed creatures turned and sprinted into the woods, knocking over trees as they went. The birds nearby took flight, but returned to the crystals soon enough. And then all was as it had been.

Corvo turned to his mother. “Will the bird be okay?” he whispered.

She shook her head. Then to Trito, her voice fearful: “Why do you show us this place?”

“To make sure you understand where you have found yourself in,” he replied. “Do you?”

Mother stared into his white eyes. She did not nod or say anything.

“We saw these animals in Telmos,” Aletheia said. “Before Corvo was born. They’re still animals. Aren’t they?”

“Is an elf an animal?” Trito said. No one seemed to know the answer to this question, so he answered his own question, saying, “Animal or not, they should be avoided.”

They returned to the woods. For the first time since they arrived in this place, Corvo saw the moon in the sky. Soon after it was time to make camp. Trito chose a place for them, and Aletheia proposed casting a spell of invisibility over them.

“Some foes might be dissuaded by such a spell,” Trito said. “Yet others will be drawn to it. I would sooner face the former. No. We will keep watches of two.”

“I will not leave my son’s side to ‘keep watch’,” Mother said. “And he must sleep.”

Trito nodded. “I will stay awake all night. You look after your son.”

The tent was set up. Mother normally used magic to hasten the process, to anchor it to the ground and unfurl the fabric in her saddle, but this time she did it by hand, with Corvo and Aletheia’s help.

When they settled into it for the night, the flap was closed, and Corvo was in true darkness for the first time in two months. He barely saw Mother as she embraced him, and her hold was the only assurance that kept his terror at bay.

He pretended the tent was a castle and that its fabric was stone. When he heard some creaking or rustling in the forest beyond their camp, he could do nothing else to keep himself from screaming in fright.

But he was a growing boy, and it had been a long day. He fell asleep with his head to Mother’s chest eventually.

Then he awoke to the sound of a too-familiar voice:

“The Mother brings my little crow into a place of such danger, just to kill me, who would never harm him?”

Corvo froze. Mother had seemed to be asleep, but she sat upright in an instant, solid and tense as stone. She stared at the tent’s flap, before her head glanced around her in a circle, checking the darkness for anything solid. Corvo cowered beneath her.

“If your intentions were pure,” she whispered, “you would have left when we asked.”

“I wonder if the Mother truly loves her son. She does not bring him here for his sake. He would be safe with me. She knows that. She only does it for herself—for fear that she will lose him. She is selfish.”

“Be off!” Mother shrieked. With that she pulled a light from her own palm, tossing it to the top of the tent; Corvo was bathed in yellow light, his eyes burning, and the darkness was gone.

She sat upright, panting, saying nothing, but holding Corvo’s shoulder. Yet when he had calmed, he managed to rise to her, and he looked at the light.

“Mama,” he said. “The light. Trito said you couldn’t have magic. That was his rule.”

She shook her head. “There are no rules, Corvo. There is only what benefits whom. We will not sleep in the dark.”

Then Dorian’s voice came from outside:

“Is something wrong?” he said. “Do you need help?”

“No!” Mother said. “Return to your post, Dorian.” She looked to Corvo and hesitated.

She grabbed the magelight and covered it in her hand, dimming it significantly, yet not altogether. Then she concealed it between her and Corvo’s bodies as she settled down beside him again.

“Try to rest, my little crow. I will not let him harm you.”

But the Shadow Man was not Corvo’s worst fear that night. He was just as afraid of what Trito thought the use of magic might attract.

He barely slept thereafter.

They readied as normal in the morning—if it could be called morning. The night was said to be over when the moon set again, yet this made it seem more like night than it had been before.

“Elven has lost the distinction between night and day,” he said. “It is one of the few dialect differences between my language and that of Old Regal.”

“So what do you call the time to go to sleep?” Aletheia asked. “In Darom, they count the outgoing tides. Do you do that?”

“Time is little to us here. We do not bother counting, and we sleep only when we desire.”

“Great,” she said. “That’s not confusing at all.”

It was warmer in Seneria than Veshod, but frost formed at the bases of trees. It sparkled beneath the light off their leaves. Corvo made sure to wear the armored jacket Mother had given him at all times. The weight of its chain was as nothing to the warmth it provided.

As they ate a quick breakfast, Corvo noticed a particularly strange tree that he had not seen the last night. It stood near two others and seemed to bask in their shade, which wasn’t shade at all; it soaked in the glow. Like an ancient mesquite tree, its branches sprawled in all directions, yet it seemed to have two trunks that reached into the ground. Its leaves were purple but dimmer than the others in the forest. It was shorter than the other trees, but still at least ten feet tall. Corvo watched it, curious to ask what it was, but he never did.

Instead, he waited until Mother came very near it, and then he screamed.

The tree came to life. It moved, revealing that two if its gnarled branches were truly arms with clawed twigs at their ends.

It reached out to grab Mother.

She was caught by surprise. She gasped and pulled away, but not fast enough; it wrapped its claws around her wrists, tightening them until her arms would have been crushed, and then it pushed her away and slashed spearpoint-sharp fingers, twenty of them on each hand, down her torso.

She fell to the ground. Its trunks lifted slowly to the air—not branches at all, but legs—and were placed upon her back, as it held a hand on the back of her head.

Then it did nothing except crush her.