15 In a manner similar to how he opened the portal to Faery, Lochlan traced a rune symbol on the barrier the next morning. Instead of the air blurring where the passage appeared, the already opaque wall became clear in a space just large enough for us to squeeze through. The Wilds resembled where we had been but was not as lush and didn’t seem to thrive as thoroughly as the vegetation on the Seelie lands. The most noticeable difference was the quiet—the ambient noise in the Seelie kingdom had been unremarkable until we had taken several steps onto Unseelie lands and the absence of sound was glaringly obvious. The rustle of trees, the scurrying of small animals and flapping of birds—none of those normal forest sounds were present. The stillness that grips the wilderness when a predator is o
