Chapter 21
The forest changed as we followed the Silverthread east. The familiar pines and oaks gave way to older, stranger trees. Their trunks were thick as towers, twisted into shapes that spoke of ancient, patient agony or ecstasy. Moss hung like tattered silver veils, and the air grew thick with the scent of damp earth and something else—petrichor and ozone, the smell of magic so old it had become part of the ecosystem. The sunlight, when it pierced the dense canopy overhead, fell in solid, dust-moted columns, as if the light itself was reluctant to touch this ground.
This was the eaves of the Everwood. The borderlands.
The silence Lyra had warned of wasn't an absence of sound. It was a watchful silence. The chirp of birds was too precise, the rustle in the undergrowth too deliberat
