Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The sun woke him.

It was a big sun, a fierce, hot, golden thing, and it beat down on his face like an open hand. Fel lay on his back with his eyes shut, and for a long time he could not remember why his body hurt, or where he was, or what the smell was, wet and green and rich, like a whole forest breathing.

Then he remembered, and he sat up so quickly that the world spun.

“Vili?” he said. “Loria?”

Nobody answered.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying in a bed of moss the size of a bed sheet at the foot of a tree. It was a tree in the way that a mountain is a hill. Its roots rose around him in great arching walls, thick as the pillars of the Hall, and its trunk vanished upward into a canopy so high that the leaves at the top were only a haze of green. Ferns as tall as houses swayed on every side. Vines as thick as his body hung from the branches like bell ropes. Flowers the size of cartwheels turned their faces slowly toward the light.

It was hot. It was so hot. The sun poured through gaps in the leaves and struck his clothes, and where it touched his coat the wool smoked. His skin stung. He tore the coat off, and the sleeves of his shirt with it, and stood swaying in a haze of steam.

The Crown was gone.

So was the Hollow Citadel. There were no dark walls, no cold stone, no silver light, no scent of burning mercury. There was only the forest, enormous, humming and strange. Somewhere in it, a great many birds were singing, and something much larger was calling back.

His swords lay in the moss beside him. He picked them up. Falling Star was as black as ever. Krashing Fyr was warm and quiet in its scabbard, and no longer glowed, and when he looked at his left hand, the split scar had faded to a thin pink line.

“Okay,” said Fel, aloud. His voice cracked. “Okay. That’s not good.”

The ground trembled.

It came again, a slow, heavy, rhythmic thud, growing closer. Fel froze. The leaves of the nearest fern parted, and through the gap he saw, for a heartbeat, a foot. It was a foot, taloned and scaled and the size of a wagon, and it came down on a fallen log and crushed it flat.

He ran.

He did not decide to. His legs simply took him, away from the thud, through a wall of hanging vines, over a root as high as a house, down a slope of slick black earth. Behind him something roared, a deep, hoarse, thunderous sound that shook the leaves. Insects the size of dogs burst from the undergrowth. A flight of gaudy birds, each with a wingspan wider than his arms, exploded from the treetops, screaming.

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He climbed.

The nearest tree was a monster, its bark ridged and knotted with handholds, and he scrambled up it hand over hand with his ribs screaming. Below him, through the fog of leaves, a shape moved in the undergrowth. It was long and low and covered in green scales, and it had a great many teeth. It looked up. It hissed. It did not seem to know how to climb.

He kept going anyway.

He climbed through one tree and swung to the next on a vine, and dropped to a branch, and crossed a bridge of moss, and climbed again. The forest went on and on. It was a world made of green. It was full of things he had no names for: birds with tails like banners, snakes like ropes, tiny bright frogs the color of jewels. Once he passed a lake in a hollow where a herd of enormous, gentle, long-necked beasts stood chest-deep, feeding on the lily pads. He held very still, and they did not notice him.

Where am I?

He had no idea. It was a question so large that he stopped trying to answer it. He only climbed, and breathed, and watched his hands.

At last the trees thinned.

He clambered out onto the edge of a cliff, a sheer wall of red stone that plunged a thousand feet to a river of white mist, and the wind hit him in the face like a blessing. He stood there, panting, hands on his knees. Then he straightened, and looked out.

The jungle rolled away below him to the horizon, an ocean of green. Clouds hung in the valleys. Rivers shone like threads of silver. Birds wheeled in enormous flocks beneath him, and beyond them, on the far side of the valley, rising out of the mist, stood something that made him forget to breathe.

It was a city.

It was a fortress the size of a mountain, a great sprawling capital of pale stone walls and terraced towers and soaring bridges, almost as vast as the Citadel of Vows. It was ringed with gardens. It was crowned with banners. And rising from its very heart, so tall that its crown vanished into the clouds, stood a single, staggering tree.

It was the largest tree Fel had ever seen. Its trunk was wider than any tower. Its branches spread across the whole sky, and every leaf on every bough was pure, shining, dazzling white.

Fel stared at it. His mouth was open. His heart was pounding.

Something huge passed in front of the sun.

A shadow swept over him, wide as a sail, and a gust of warm wind knocked his hair back. He looked up. A wyvern was crossing the valley, not thirty feet from the cliff’s edge, powerful and slow and terribly graceful. Its wings were feathered, green and black, iridescent in the light, and its long tail streamed behind it like a banner. It turned its head. One golden eye, big as a dinner plate, regarded him for exactly one heartbeat.

Then it banked, and dove toward the white-leafed city, and was gone.

Fel stood on the edge of the cliff with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face, in a world he did not know, without his friends, his home, or a purpose, he began, slowly, helplessly, to grin.

“I have absolutely no idea where I am,” he said to the empty sky, “or how I got here, or what in the nine hells just happened or what im doing here.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I have never been plunged so deeply into despair before and yet i am so anxious to see what is to come of this tragedy.”

End of Volume One