Windchimes

he road beneath Ilvarin’del had once been beautiful.

Its muddy stones surfaced in long, deliberate lines, fitted so closely that the roots had been forced to heave them upward rather than split them apart. Along one side stood the remains of a narrow lamppost carved to resemble flowering branches, its light gone and stone petals softened by weather. Farther on, a basin lay broken beneath an oak, lilies worked around its rim, and beyond it half of a slender arch leaned broken beneath ivy where the other half had fallen. None of it belonged to a palace or temple.

Above them, the afternoon dwindled. The crowns of the trees overlapped until the sky survived only in fragments high among the leaves, and before long the light beneath them seemed several hours older than the day they had left behind.

Gaz had spent several minutes searching the canopy for some opening onto the sky before finally giving up.

“I suppose entering last night would have made very little difference.”

Navian glanced back.

The wizard gestured overhead with his staff. “The Golden Quiet seems capable of arranging its own evening.”

Lunara gave the faintest breath of amusement, though her attention remained among the branches. Ordinarily she would have found something there by now: a bird turning its head upon a limb, a squirrel vanishing around a trunk, the flicker of some small creature disturbed by their approach. She had seen nothing since they entered. After a while she stopped searching for animals and began watching the empty places where they should have been.

Jaeshu walked near Av'elyth at the front. He waited until the road narrowed around the exposed roots of a yew before speaking.

“Back there with the horse,” he said. “That thing you do when you vanish. You’ve done it more than once.”

Av'elyth kept her eyes on the forest ahead. “Shadowstep.”

Jaeshu nodded. “You’re impossible to track when you do.”

“That is,” she said, “the point.”

“Could ye not just keep doin' it, then?”

Av'elyth looked back.

“Shadowsteppin’,” Karneth said, still holding the reins of the bramblehorn. “Across the country, over and over. Just keep doin' it all the way to the Ironspines. Save yourself a fair bit of walking.”

Av'elyth nearly gave him the real answer, but one glance at Karneth told her she would need smaller words.

"Can you do a cartwheel?"

"Of course," he said, quite seriously. "We dwarves are natural dancers."

Ahead of them, Navian and Jaeshu exchanged a look.

“Could you do your cartwheels all the way to the Ironspines?” the elf asked.

He looked at the ground, considering the distance. “Well, no. I s'pose I’d tire rather quickly.”

Av'elyth's attention returned to the forest. “Is that so.”

She walked ahead, leaving a confused dwarf behind.

Beyond them the trees drew closer. Oak and yew crowded the road until their branches interlocked overhead, and what little daylight survived came through without warmth. The old stones seemed no longer to carry them onward beneath the afternoon, but downward into some older twilight that had settled beneath the leaves and never left.

They had gone perhaps another few quiet minutes when Oesora slowed.

Navian saw her hand rise to her chest. She was not hurt, but there was something inward in her expression, as though she had heard a familiar voice from very far away and was trying to decide whether she had imagined it.

“Oesora?”

She raised her other hand and called upon the Light.

A pearl-white radiance formed above her palm. For an instant it looked as it always had. Then the glow weakened, drawing inward until it barely touched her fingers before disappearing altogether.

The priestess stared at her hand and tried again. The Light returned faintly this time, no brighter than moonlight behind a cloud.

“My Light,” she said. “It feels so far away here.”

Navian reached inward. His own Light met him at once, warm and familiar, and a clean white glow gathered over his fingers.

Oesora watched it. “Yours is fine.”

“For now.”

She closed her empty hand, and Navian remained beside her when they continued.

The first web appeared not long afterward.

It was hardly worthy of notice, a narrow strand stretched between a sapling and a low blade of grass. Karneth noticed it anyway. He leaned from Beeps’s back and severed it with the edge of an axe, watching with distaste as the thread stretched before finally snapping.

“There.”

Lunara glanced back. “It’s one web.”

"That is how it starts." Karneth scraped the silk from his axe and said nothing more, though his eyes spent considerably more time in the branches afterward. "One web."

The road began its steeper descent, and the remnants of Ilvarin’del gathered more thickly beneath the trees. At a bend stood two slender pillars, each bearing a weathered sunburst.

Av'elyth stopped beside one and brushed the moss away with her forearm.

She had known that sun before she knew the name of this forest. Once each year it had come to Oth’golimn upon gold cloth and polished armor, worn by emissaries whose arrival drew children into the roads to stare. Av'elyth remembered the gleam of them more clearly than their faces, and the way even adults chose their words more carefully while they were there.

Somewhere beneath these trees, her grandmother had been born.

The elf let her hand fall and continued.

A faint note wandered through the trees.

Lunara tilted her head, listening. Another followed, long and distant, then a third beneath it, and for several breaths the strange music they had heard beyond the forest drifted among the ancient boughs once more. Av'elyth slowed but did not stop.

“There it is again,” Lunara murmured.

The last note faded into the trees.

Farther back, Navian felt the change in him soon afterward.

At first it was only a pressure beneath his breastbone, faint enough to blame upon armor and the close air. Then he reached for the Light and found resistance where none had ever been. The warmth remained, but deeper now, muffled beneath something he could neither see nor name.

He pulled his sword halfway out and called upon it. White fire traced the edge, then flickered almost immediately.

Oesora had already turned toward him. “It's reached you, too.”

Navian watched the last glow disappear, then dropped the sword back into its sheath.

As the road carried them deeper beneath the ancient boughs, Gaz breathed a word over his staff, and the amber fire within its crystal swelled. The darkness withdrew before it in slow degrees, drawing root and ruin from the gloom, then climbing higher into the tangled roof of Ilvarin’del where the branches had long since woven themselves into shadow.

Jaeshu’s gaze followed the rising light. The back of his hand hit the wizard's chest.

“Wait.”

The others stopped.

He was staring above them.

“Higher.”

Gaz lifted the staff. The glow climbed with him, spilling over moss-dark limbs and silvered leaves until something stirred at the very edge of its reach. At first none of them could tell what it was—too slow for a bird, too heavy for leaves. Then another shape shifted beside it, and another farther off, all of them turning almost imperceptibly in the dark.

The glow climbed farther, and one of the pale shapes resolved into the underside of a foot.

Then another beside it.

Above them, two wasted ankles disappeared into the dark.

Gaz lifted the staff higher still, and the Golden Quiet gave up what it had hidden:

Bodies.

High above the road, corpses swayed beneath the ancient branches, their hanging forms half-lost among leaves and darkness. The movement was slight, barely more than the turning of cloth in a breath of wind, but as the light spread, the turning bodies carried their heads slowly through it—silver hair shifting across dead faces as one after another revolved into view.

More appeared beyond them. Then more.

The canopy was full.

Countless elves hung lifeless above the road, moving together in the stale air with a slow, almost imperceptible sway.

Only then did the details begin to separate themselves from the mass.

Some heads had fallen sideways from the necks at impossible angles, the weight of years having stretched what flesh remained thin beneath the jaw. Others were little more than skull and wispy hair beneath rotted robes, their teeth bared where lips had long since dried away. A few still wore armor gone green with age, breastplates hanging crooked beneath rib cages that showed through collapsed cloth. One corpse turned slowly enough for them to see that something had cut so deeply into the neck that bone showed beneath it.

And still the bodies above continued into the darkness beyond Gaz’s light, both behind them and in front of them.

No one spoke.

Lunara stood beneath them with her bow lowered. The forest had been empty of life since they entered; whatever question that absence had raised in her was gone now, displaced by something far worse.

Av'elyth was looking up, turning, staring beyond the reach of the staff's light.

Navian looked toward her. “How many?”

The rumble that came from the bramblehorn was low enough to be felt more than heard. Karneth placed a hand against his neck. The muscles beneath the fur had gone rigid.

Navian turned toward her. “Lunara.”

She looked at him, already understanding. “On it.”

Slipping the bow across her back, she went to Beeps before Karneth could ask what she intended and planted one boot against the ram’s horn.

“Oi—” was all Karneth managed before Beeps lifted his great head beneath her, the archer using the motion to spring upward. She caught a low branch, swung herself onto it, and disappeared quickly into the higher limbs.

The dwarf watched her go, then squinted at the canopy holding the rotting elves.

“Webs,” he called. “Are they hanging from webs, lass?”

Lunara did not answer at once, moving instead along the branch toward the nearest corpse. She reached the body, leaned near the neck, and followed whatever held it upward with one hand. Her answer came quietly through the leaves.

“Worse.”

That silenced him.

Lunara remained above only long enough to examine two more bodies. When she returned, she descended without any of the easy confidence that usually accompanied her climbing, dropping from the lowest branch beside Beeps and remaining crouched for a heartbeat with one palm pressed into the damp earth. By the time she rose, much of the color had left her face.

“It’s just... rope.” the archer kept her eyes on the canopy. “Elven.”

Jaeshu kept his eyes above. “That can't be severed with any normal steel.”

Gaz's eyes moved slowly from Av'elyth to Lunara and then back to the ropes disappearing into the branches. The significance arrived before anyone needed to speak it aloud, but the wizard did so anyway.

“So they all...?”

The words changed what they were seeing. Until then the dead might still have belonged to some massacre—victims displayed after battle, bodies taken by whatever had conquered Ilvarin’del, remnants of a cruelty no one yet understood. But now, every rope suggested a choice.

Av'elyth looked up again, and Navian saw something in her expression close to disbelief, as though the dead themselves had offered an answer she was unwilling to accept.

Grand Elves never do this.

Elves never do this.

We would never do this.

Oesora wandered several paces from the road and stopped beneath a silver-haired woman whose robes had faded almost white; Jaeshu moved the opposite way, head tilted back as he counted shapes through the branches; Karneth took two steps beneath another corpse before glancing above himself and quietly moving aside. None of them spoke for a while. They had been walking beneath the dead without knowing it, perhaps since shortly after entering this part of the forest, and the same hanging silhouettes stretched both behind and ahead until Gaz’s light could no longer reach them.

“What happened here?” Oesora asked at last.

No one answered.

Av'elyth's boot scraped across something beneath the leaves. She glanced down before crouching to pull free a narrow vambrace. Age had greened the metal, but delicate lines remained visible beneath the corrosion, the workmanship far finer than anything they had found abandoned along the road. She turned it once in Gaz’s light and ran her thumb across the engraving.

“Ilvarin’del. Grand Elf.”

Av'elyth traced the engraving again. Her thumb slowed over the mark, searching for some flaw, some reason to call it something else.

There was none.

“It really is them.”

Jaeshu had come nearer, though he was no longer looking at the armor. “Av'elyth.”

He was staring at the tree trunk beside her.

Marks covered a patch of bark beneath the moss. At first they seemed little different from age and weathering, but Gaz brought the staff closer and rows of Elven script appeared—small, deliberate cuts made deep enough to survive whatever years had passed since.

Av'elyth cleared the remaining moss and whispered the first lines beneath her breath. She read them again before moving to the next tree.

There was writing there as well.

Once they knew to look, it seemed to be everywhere. Some inscriptions were only a handful of words near the roots; others climbed almost to shoulder height. The hands differed from tree to tree. Some had been cut with the patience of a scribe; others were driven so deeply and unevenly that the bark had split around them.

At the third tree Av'elyth’s brow tightened. She glanced toward the bodies overhead. The fourth held her longer; when she finally stepped away, her hand remained against the bark as though she had forgotten it was there. By the fifth inscription she had stopped whispering the words entirely.

Jaeshu watched her rather than the writing, as the elf stopped altogether at the next tree.

Karneth endured it longer than expected. Eventually he stopped beside Beeps and held its reins, waiting a moment before trying the rogue's name.

“Little rabbit?”

Nothing.

“Av'elyth.”

She turned then, and whatever he had meant to say died before reaching his mouth. Her eyes were wet but hard, and there was such naked anger in them that for once he offered no joke to soften the moment.

“Hey.” Navian stepped in front of her, one hand settling gently on her arm. “You’re okay. What do they say?”

Av'elyth looked around his shoulder into the forest.

“I'm going to the High Lord’s throne.”

She pushed past him and started deeper into the trees.

Jaeshu and Lunara glanced at each other before the ranger hollered. “What’s at the throne?”

Av'elyth did not turn.

“Vaerath khael draen...”

The elf drew both blades.

“...a reckoning.”