He only knew he hoped that it would last forever.
It couldn’t have lasted forever.
By nightfall, the weather had turned. Their serene, sunlit journey came to a wet and windy end, just as the group reached the edge of the Elderglade forest.
The storm came from the east, black clouds roiling like a beastoverhead. Thunder cracked. Rain lashed sideways. And the narrow path through the woods—impossibly tall evergreen trees twisting into the sky, looming on either side—had already begun to flood.
And then there was the mist. It rolled in shortly after they entered the forest. It didn’t drift, didn’t swirl around ankles, a loose smoke covering the ground that the rain should have easily washed away.
No, it pulsed.
It breathed.
Like a heartbeat.
Like a warning.
“Oi! What’s the plan here, boyo?” Thraigg called from ahead. “Do we press on? Or do ye wanna make camp, wait out the storm?”
“Camping in this?” Jocelyn shouted from her position just a few feet behind the dwarf. “We’d drown in our bedrolls.”
“I say we go for the third option,” Elyria said.
“What third opt—” Cedric cut himself off as Elyria pointed ahead to a crossing in the path. Not just where the path itself diverged, though it did, splitting off in two separate directions. But where two silver-trunked trees were planted right at the point of divergence, perhaps ten feet apart, looking like they had grown toward each other. Covered in vines that seemed to glow through the rain, their trunks were bowed, their branches twisting, intertwining, reaching.
Welcoming.
For a reason he could not possibly have begun to understand, Cedric found the inner corners of his eyes prickling.
Damn rain in my eyes, he thought, and a zip of amusement lanced through his chest. He looked over at Elyria, perched upon Fjaethe, her periwinkle strands plastered to her face, dripping down the end of her braid. She was grinning at him, and Cedric furiously blinked the water—therain—away.
“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” Ollie muttered as he slowed his horse before the embracing trees. The overall effect they gave was something like a gate—an archway of silver branches and more of that low, pulsing mist.
“It’s...beautiful.” Jocelyn drew her horse close enough to brush her fingers across the luminous vines that curled up each trunk.
Thraigg grunted. “Beautiful and fuckin’ deadly. I can feel the magic here crawling in my teeth.”
With the rain still pummeling them, his hair sticking to his forehead and his vision blurred, Cedric couldn’t be sure, but—“Does it look to anyone else like it isn’t raining on the other side of that?”
Elyria and Fjaethe drew up beside him. “You’re not imagining it, Sir Observant.”
“I guess I’m not imagining that this feels awfully familiar either, then.”
“Another fucking gate,” she said with a grin, and even with the rain drenching them both, gooseflesh pimpling his skin beneath his soaked clothing, Cedric felt warm inside.
Young Shep guided his horse into place next to Jocelyn, all six of their horses lined up in pairs before the strange archway. “This is the entrance to Elderglade,” he said, his voice almost too soft for Cedric to hear. The words sounded heavy as he spoke them—reverent.
“Well, what’re we waitin’ for then?” said Thraigg, and with a cluck of his tongue, and a tap of his palm to the hammer slung on his back, the dwarf urged his horse forward.
Young Shep and Jocelyn followed suit, their horses already ahead of the dwarf’s, and walked through the archway. Cedricfeltthe forest shudder, a pulse of ancient magic spreading through the trees...And both the sylvan and the fae were gone.
Thraigg muttered something that sounded like half a curse and half a blessing as he followed them through—and promptly disappeared as well.
“Please, please, please, let it be dry on the other side,” said Ollie, before offering a joking salute back to Cedric and Elyria and vanishing through the archway.
Elyria moved forward, and Fjaethe nickered nervously. “My turn, I suppose,” she said. “Think Sid will know where to find us?”
Cedric smiled. “Oh, of that I have no doubt.”
