Chapter 4: Roots & Ravens
716 Words
"The forest does not hurry. Yet it covers everything."
— Thorn Miravel, speaking to no one in particular
The road to the capital took twelve days on foot and passed through the Mirefen — a stretch of ancient woodland that no surveyor had ever managed to fully map, where the trees grew so dense and old that daylight reached the floor in thin columns, like light through cathedral windows, and the air carried the particular silence of places that have been watching things longer than people have been around to be watched.
Kairu met Thorn Miravel on the fourth day, at a river crossing that wasn't on his map because the river had apparently decided, sometime in the last season, to change where it was.
Thorn was already at the crossing, sitting on a root the diameter of a cartwheel, doing absolutely nothing in the intent and focused way of someone who was doing very much indeed. He was somewhere between thirty and three hundred — it was genuinely difficult to tell. He wore robes the colour of lichen, his dark skin marked in faint spiralling patterns at the wrists and throat that glowed faintly green in the filtered light. His grimoire was not orbiting him like a normal mage's book. It was, instead, growing from the root beside him — its spine merged into the bark, its pages made of pressed leaves and spider-silk.
"The crossing is two hundred metres north," Thorn said, without opening his eyes. "The river moved this morning. It does that sometimes. I asked it not to, but rivers have opinions."
"You asked the river," Kairu said.
"Politely." Thorn opened his eyes. They were dark green, which Kairu was fairly certain was not natural. "You're going to the capital."
"Is it that obvious?"
"You have a commoner's pack and a noble road-map and you're walking alone, which means someone invited you but you're not sure you deserve the invitation yet." He said it the way one states atmospheric conditions — simply, without judgment. "I'm going too."
"Why?"
"I had a dream." A pause. "In the dream, a dark fire burned on the capital's tower. I followed it. That seemed like information worth acting on." He picked his grimoire out of the root with the sound of pages being gently separated from bark. "My name is Thorn. I'm a spirit-bonded druid, Rank Six, and I make excellent camp food if you have root vegetables, which I always do because the forest provides."
"Kairu. Unclassified mage. I have root vegetables."
"Wonderful," said Thorn. "Let's go find the river."
They made camp that night in a clearing that Thorn chose by the method of walking until the trees told him — in the wordless way trees communicated with spirit-bonded druids — that this particular spot was acceptable. He grew their shelter out of the living undergrowth in a matter of minutes, which was the most impressive casual magic Kairu had seen in his life, and then he sat by the fire Kairu made (darker than normal, quiet, which Thorn watched with keen interest but did not comment on immediately) and they ate.
"The forest has been uneasy," Thorn said, after a while. "For three years. Something changed in the deep roots — something far underground, something enormous shifting." He looked at Kairu's fire. "I've been waiting to find out what it was."
"You think it's me?" Kairu asked.
"I think you're connected to it," Thorn said. "The way a lightning rod is connected to a storm. You didn't cause it. But you'll be involved in what it becomes." He said this with the calm certainty of a man delivering a weather forecast. "More tea?"
Spirit Bond · Living Shelter
Rank 6 · Druid · Passive-Growth Construct
Kairu accepted the tea and looked up at the canopy where ravens were settling in numbers that seemed, even to him, distinctly non-coincidental. They watched the camp with careful, intelligent eyes.
"Friends of yours?" he asked.
"Messengers," Thorn said. "Word travels fast in the old forests. They've been following you since the village." A pause. "Don't worry. Ravens mean change, not danger." He considered this. "Usually."
"And when they don't?"
"Then the change and the danger arrive together," Thorn said serenely, "and we deal with them in order."
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