Chapter 16

  The Feywilde was just as beautiful as Adeena remembered. Dazzling shafts of sunlight shone through a canopy of vibrant green, birdsong echoed between moss covered boughs, and butterflies flew overhead in great swarms of colour. The smell of wildflowers and honeysuckle permeated the air, and a warm, gentle breeze tugged at her hair as they made their way carefully along a rough path.

  “Careful,” said Clawdia from the front. “Dreamcap Mushrooms here, don’t touch – never wake up again.”

  Adeena stepped gingerly around the bright purple and white speckled mushrooms.

  Yes, it was incredibly beautiful, and it wouldn’t slowly sap your soul like the Shadowmeere, but the danger of the Feywilde was that it was full of beautiful and cute things that could kill you or worse.

  “Stream here, don’t drink,” said Clawdia a minute or so later. “Will anger the nymph.”

  Adeena stepped over the stream, peering at a place where the water pooled. Was that a face she saw?

  They moved through the forest for another ten minutes, before arriving at the edge of a large clearing filled with statues of people: elves, dwarves, feyleen, gnomes, orcs, and even a merfolk. Clawdia slowed to a stop, her ears flatting against her skull.

  “What is it?” asked Adeena.

  “We are not sure,” said the grimalkin, raising a paw and making a complicated motion.

  A wave of azure light rolled outward, washing over the statues and reaching the edge of the clearing before returning to the grimalkin sorceress as a ball of shimmering, fluctuating light. She peered at the ball, her pink tongue sticking slightly out of her mouth as she concentrated. It was sometimes easy to forget that despite her very fey nature, Clawdia was an immensely skilled sorceress with more experience with magic than many archmages, Adeena had no idea how old the feline woman was – she’d never properly answered when asked – but it was probably a truly mind-boggling length of time. Something about ‘years?’ Whatever those were.

  “Hmm,” said Clawdia. “Statues are mortals – petrified. Complex magic.”

  “Can we help them?” asked Heidi.

  Clawdia peered at the magic. “We don’t think so,” she said, before releasing her spell and entering the clearing.

  “So… it’s safe?” said Adeena.

  “We want to have a look,” said Clawdia in an irritated voice, waving a paw.

  Adeena swore as Clawdia approached one of the statues, an orcish man, and sniffed at it suspiciously. “Clawdia, is it safe?”

  Tink, tink, tink, went the grimalkin’s claws as she tapped the orcish statue.

  Almost immediately the light around them changed, and fog seemed to roll in from the trees. Clawdia looked around and yowled.

  “Don’t yowl at me, you did this!” said Adeena, rapidly backing away from the fog, beckoning Heidi and Xavier to follow her.

  “We just wanted a look!” protested Clawdia.

  “Well, as they say, curiosity killed the cat,” came a voice, speaking from all around them. It was deep and sweet, like layered honey.

  “You can’t say that!” said Heidi, outraged. “That’s incredibly racist!”

  “Heidi, time and place.” said Adeena, placing her hand on her sword, but not drawing it. “What are you?”

  “We have many names,” said the voice.

  “Something of a running theme with these fey…” muttered Xavier. “Clawdia, do you have many names?”

  “Meow, we have had.”

  “You may call us… the Pale Lady,” said the voice. The fog ahead of them swirled and coalesced into the vague shape of a woman in a long, hooped dress.

  “OK, so, Pale Lady, nice to meet you,” said Adeena. “We’re just passing through, we don’t mean you any harm.”

  “‘Don’t mean harm?’ Oh, you mortals are so delightful,” said the Pale Lady. “My dear, your meaning is meaningless. You are here, in my Garden of Truth, that makes you mine.”

  “I would prefer not to fight,” said Adeena carefully. “Do you have any rules you have to follow?”

  Clawdia was weird. However, compared to many fey, she was actually a fairly normal individual. She didn’t have any strange, seemingly arbitrary checks on her behaviour beyond not being able to lie. Other fey, however, were stranger. They often had all sorts of rules and codes that limited what they could do in certain ways. It might be that if you were clicking your fingers they couldn’t attack you, or that if you offered them bread they had to grant you a boon. Finding out about the rules, if you could, was the best way to navigate any encounter with a fey safely.

  Of course, she’d also heard of fey that would try to kill you for asking about their rules. But since Clawdia didn’t seem to know what this being was, it seemed on balance safer to ask.

  “Oh, a clever one,” said the Pale Lady. “Very well, know this: I cannot harm anyone who tells me their greatest fear, and those who speak it aloud will be free to leave my Garden of Truth. But if you do not, if you speak falsely, little mortals, then you shall never leave this place.”

  Her greatest fear? Wonderful. Because everyone enjoyed announcing that to the world.

  “Alright, so who’s first?” said Xavier with a half-hearted laugh.

  “We are most afraid of cucumbers,” said Clawdia in a matter of fact voice.

  “Cucumbers?” said Heidi. “What?”

  “We hates them!” yowled Clawdia. “All… green and… and…” She hissed again. “Cucumbery!”

  “You are free to leave, little grimalkin,” said the Pale Lady.

  Adeena looked enviously at the white-furred woman as she licked the back of her paw and cleaned behind her ear smugly. If only if were so easy for everyone.

  “I am most afraid of getting the people I care for killed,” said Adeena.

  “Hmm,” said the Pale Lady, wafting forward slightly. “That is… part of it. But no, that is not what you fear most.”

  Adeena frowned. “Huh?” she said.

  “That is a symptom, not the root,” said the Pale Lady.

  “What are you, a therapist?” said Adeena. “Fine, you tell me then.”

  “That is not my role,” said the Pale Lady.

  Adeena grumbled, but turned her attention inward. That was what she feared most, wasn’t it? That was what she had realised she had been running from ever since Chace. That was what facing had helped her reconnect with her Oathsworn power. Wasn’t it?

  “We’ll let you think on it” said the Pale Lady, turning her ethereal head to Xavier. “And what of you, high elf?”

  Xavier flicked some of his long hair back, and Adeena felt a stab of worry. She knew him better than almost anyone, he had been her best friend for hundreds upon hundreds of cycles, but in all that time he’d never really more than touched on his pains – and only when he’d been deep in his cups. She had theories, but had learnt that you needed to tread lightly with Xavier whenever discussing past sorrow: he spoke when he was ready to, and ‘ready to’ could take lifetimes of beings like humans or goblins. This was, for him, in many ways, perhaps his worst nightmare – being forced to reveal his worst wounds.

  “We can plug our ears,” said Adeena, putting a hand on his arm. “I know you don’t want to share this.”

  “Thanks, Captain-”

  “No, no, no, there are no secrets here,” said the Pale Lady.

  “That wasn’t in your ‘rules,’” snapped Adeena.

  “Or perhaps you did not probe deeply enough,” said the Pale Lady. “This is the Garden of Truth, and I will have it, or you will not leave.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “We can try killing it,” said Adeena.

  “No Captain, I… I’ve got this,” said Xavier. He closed his eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. “I fear I will never see my sister ever again.”

  Tears welled in the corners of his eyes, and the tall elf hunched in on himself.

  “Good, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” cooed the Pale Lady. “You may leave, high elf.”

  “You really are a prick of a fey, you know that?” he said.

  The Pale Lady ignored him and looked to Heidi, who fidgeted. “Well, um, Ms. Pale Lady, I’m not sure I really know…” said Heidi.

  “I punish the lies we tell ourselves, not ignorance on the path to self-knowing,” said the Pale Lady. “I will not harm you while you earnestly try.”

  “Well… I guess I’m worried that I will disappoint my parents? My family?” she said after a few moments. “Or that I already have? They… they weren’t happy with me running off…”

  “Close, but not quite,” said the Pale Lady gently. “Perhaps you worry that you will fail, and when you do, that they won’t be surprised? That they never had faith in you to lose in the first place.”

  “Oh…” said Heidi, looking at her hands. “Yeah, I… um, yes. I think that’s right.”

  “You may leave, young gnome,” said the Pale Lady.

  Adeena scowled. “So, she gets help, but I don’t?” said Adeena. “That hardly seems fair.”

  “I never said I was fair,” said the Pale Lady. “Come now, little cambion, I think you know what you really fear. Deep down. Tell me, and you too shall be allowed to leave here.”

  Adeena hand unconsciously checked for her glasses. What was it with fey and being able to see through her glamour? Could Clawdia do it? She’d never mentioned.

  What did she really fear then? The getting others killed was what she had thought was the fear that gnawed at her was, but this weird therapist-empath-monster seemed to think that wasn’t the core of it. Getting others killed – she knew how awful that felt, but she also knew from the aftermath of Chace that she could survive it…

  Oh.

  Oh.

  “I’m afraid of outliving everyone and everything that has meaning for me,” said Adeena. “That one day I will wake up in a future I do not recognise, and that does not recognise me.”

  “And that is the root of it, my little phoenix,” the Pale Lady cooed. “A being that can never die, in a world that must. How very sad.”

  The mist rolled back, and the Pale Lady vanished letting the sunshine back in and leaving them standing amidst the statues of those who had refused to acknowledge and articulate their fears.

  “Next time Clawdia, how about you don’t go and poke the weird statues?” said Adeena in a hoarse voice.

  ***

  They made the rest of the trip in silence, broken only occasionally by Clawdia announcing things that they needed to avoid or else suffer some horrific or unusual fate: pools of water that trapped those who gazed in at the reflection, incredibly delicious smelling fruit that would make everything you ate ever after taste utterly foul, and dancing lights that Clawdia said were conjured by some kind of massive trapdoor spider that tried to lure them off the path.

  But then she saw it, poking out through a gap in the trees. The three spires of the cathedral, and the squat, square fort on the hill overlooking the city. Moss and vines wound up the famous white masonry, and parts here and there had collapsed, but even after so long Adeena recognised the city she had spent more time in than any other, the only place she’d ever owned a house: Crowncourt.

  Before the Calamity it had been the greatest city in the prosperous human dominated midlands, and although not as grand and ornate and rich as the elvish cities on the northern coast and in the north eastern highlands, it had had a population of almost half million at its height.

  Adeena’s cottage had originally been on the outskirts when she’d bought it, upstream from the centre, but over time had been swallowed up by the town and had started to be referred to as ‘central.’ It hadn’t been much, a kitchen and a small bedroom, along with a wild, overgrown garden that had annoyed generations of neighbours, but it had been a nice place to occasionally hang up her sword between missions.

  One of her fondest memories was of sitting in her overgrown garden, in the relatively early days of her company, drinking rice-wine with Xavier and Mariah and Majdi and Clawdia after a rather dangerous mission to kill a Shoggoth. They’d spent almost two whole periods drinking, smoking, and taking turns to read aloud the first of the stupid serial novels written about her cover to cover. Well, Clawdia had mostly ignored them and fished from the low stone wall at the edge of her garden, but it had been nice. Mariah had been a merfolk, and Majdi a human – and were long gone, but she still remembered them.

  She’d been eventually driven out of the city as part of a wave of non-human hatred after five hundred or so cycles of intermittent inhabitance, but it had been ‘home’ longer than anywhere else. She wondered if it was still there…

  “Ring around the rosy,” came a lyrical masculine voice from ahead. “A pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes, they all fall down!”

  Ahead of them two large shapes burst from the trees: a pair of large white stags, riding upon which were two elves with glittering iridescent eyes and horns similar to their mounts: fey elves. One was female, the other male, but they looked so similar to each other they were immediately identifiable as twins. Both were armed with bows, and had arrows knocked.

  All the species on Ruvera, save the goblins and maybe the dragons, had come through the Feywilde from other places. Or, at least, that was the theory. If you kept on going far enough, in any plane, you could eventually find different worlds – or so it was said. Said journeys, however, typically took far longer than a mortal lifetime, and were so perilous as to be effectively impossible for denizens not of those realms.

  However, during certain, strange celestial events known as ‘Great Conjunctions,’ the distance between two worlds in the Feywilde or Shadowmeere or anywhere else could become greatly reduced, and the various ‘local’ areas of a plane associated with one world would crash into another – often resulting in wide-spread battles and wars between, for example, the ‘Ruveran Pandemonese’ and their alien counterparts. However, it was also possible, during these times, that a very lucky lost tribe of humans or feyleen or whatever else might stumble into a realm on one world, and then emerge on another.

  Adeena’s mother had actually originally been from the Pandemonium adjacent to another world, a strange place where the sun rose and set within twelve hours, and nights were so brief you could sleep them away – a planet, rather than a moon. Creepy.

  These Great Conjunctions were how most of Ruvera’s populations had arrived, along with most of its monsters, and the Feywilde was, generally, the way they arrived – being perhaps the least immediately lethal of all the different planes. This had been the case for the elves, too, although unlike all the other known races, some of them had remained in the Feywilde long enough to be… changed.

  No longer mortal, these fey elves were subject to the same general rules as creatures like Clawdia – they couldn’t lie, cold iron was cripplingly painful to them, and they were ageless. Killable, unlike herself, but ageless.

  “Blood and guts and glory,” continued the female fey elf in a sing-song voice as the pair split apart and began to circle Adeena’s party. “A posse full of mortals. Bone and sinew, it all boils down!”

  Adeena placed her hand on her sword. Beside her, Clawdia hissed.

  “These are of the Dreaming Court,” said the grimalkin.

  “We don’t want to fight,” said Adeena. “We’re here to seek an audience with your Queen.”

  “And why, pray tell, daughter of hell,” said the male fey elf. “Would our queen so divine, treat with someone of such a bloodline?”

  “Fiends are quick to try and trick, even those with the quickest wit!” said the female fey elf. “Wrap them in twists of ink, and parchments which of brimstone stink!”

  “No, I’m not trying to trick her,” said Adeena. “And do you have to talk like that? It’s very annoying.”

  “She does not like the way we talk, oh brother from the same sweet stork!” said the female fey elf.

  “How rude, how base!” said the brother, hefting his bow. “Sister, shall we give chase?”

  “We don’t want to fight!” said Adeena quickly. “Is there another option?”

  “Ah, she asks and prods, what a bore are these sods,” said the brother.

  “But asked she has, so speak we must,” said the sister. “A game with pizzaz, which win you must!”

  “Did you just rhyme must with must?” asked Heidi. “That breaks several conventions…”

  The fey elves glared at the small gnome.

  “Um, sorry…”

  “A battle of wits, with you little twits!” said the brother.

  “A game of riddles, we’ll play you like fiddles!” said the sister.

  “And if we overcome, you’ll cook till overdone!” said the brother.

  “And if we win?” said Adeena.

  “Oh bother and boil, then we’ll toil,” said the sister.

  “Take you to see our monarch, though ‘tis sure to be not a lark,” said the brother.

  “Captain, can we please kill them?” whispered Xavier. “I really want to kill them.”

  “We’ll play your riddle game,” said Adeena, ignoring him.

  “Then we shall go first, since we are most versed,” said the sister. “What is not alive, but grows and strives.”

  “Lungs has it not, though without air it’s shot.”

  “But feed it water, and it’ll be slaughtered.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme!” objected Heidi. “It would need to be slaughter, without the… oh, sorry. Oh, and um, it’s fire by the way.”

  “Curses, curses!” said the sister.

  “Clever little gnome, oh so far from home!” said the brother. “Speak your riddle then, though nought is beyond our ken!”

  “Alright,” said Adeena, thinking for a moment. Cards and games involving probability were more her thing, but she’d hung around in taverns and inns long enough to pick up more than a few riddles. “I have cities but no houses, seas but no water, countries but no land, and deserts with no sand. I can be rolled but never crushed. What am I?”

  “A map, a map!” cried the sister in a delighted voice. “You think you can trick us with such a simple trap!?”

  “Now then, hark, I have another to impart!” said the brother. “What grows in your wake, the more you take?”

  Adeena glanced at Heidi, who bit her lip and shook her head, Xavier, who was smoking, and shrugged, and Clawdia, who was batting at a butterfly. No help there, it seemed. She’s heard something like this one before, hadn’t she? Minus the whole irritating rhyming…

  “Ah, steps!” said Adeena.

  “How did you know you little sneak?” shouted the brother angrily. “Mayhaps you are naught but a cheat!?”

  “Be calm, brother mine,” said the sister. “We have until the end of time. Speak, hellspawn, lest we grind you up with corn.”

  Adeena clicked her tongue. What was something they might not know? Or might not be able to guess? Something that dealt with an unfamiliar concept…?

  “Ah!” said Adeena, snapping her fingers. “I am something people both celebrate and resist; I move in one direction at a steady pace; I can be seen in some, but not in others. What am I?”

  The elves hummed and hawwed and grimaced, growing increasingly agitated as they couldn’t figure it out.

  “Well,” said Adeena. “Do you give up?”

  “Never, just you wait, we will speak ere too late,” said the brother.

  “Seems to me you can’t solve it,” said Adeena, crossing her arms and tapping her foot. “Come on, it’s easy.”

  She waited a minute more.

  “No?” she said. “Nothing?”

  “Curse you, little devil, ‘tis a riddle to revile,” said the sister.

  “That isn’t a proper rhyme” began Heidi. “‘Devil’ ends in an ‘il’ sound, revile ends in a ‘iel’-”

  “Shut up!” shouted the sister. “Shut up, you stupid little gnome!”

  “Do you know how hard it is to try to express yourself entirely in rhyme!?” said the brother, abandoning speaking in verse entirely.

  “Hey now, don’t be angry because you lost, it was a good game,” said Adeena.

  “Fine then, just tell us!” said the brother.

  “Age,” said Adeena smugly.

  “Ooh! That’s a good one Captain,” said Heidi. She clapped her hands together “Because they’re fey, and fey don’t age!”

  “Thanks Heidi, I’m glad you explained it for the rest of us,” said Xavier.

  “That isn’t fair!” protested the sister. “A dirty trick!”

  “Now, now, I played by the rules; won fair and square,” said Adeena. “So keep your word, take us to the Queen.”

  The twins looked at each other sullenly, before turning their mounts and beginning to pad towards the city. “Very well, come.”

  A.N. Supporters on my can now read four weeks ahead on all my works!

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