Secrets in the Wood
YC 1181
There are many names for what we of the City call ‘magic’, and as many variations in its practice.At its simplest, it is no more than manipulating ancient powers—artifacts and beings the First Folk left behind, which seem to mortal kind as gods and spirits.At its most base, it manipulates and directs the anger of the dead.Thaumaturgy is its most complex and thorough expression, but even it is but a few connected pieces of a vast, inscrutable puzzle.
Librarian Restin Lim,On Thaumaturgy,YC810
Not an hour after they’d parted ways, Trefor emerged from his house wearing a dark robe and set off into the forest.Llewyn followed from his hiding place at the edge of the wood, careful to hang back despite the Grey Lady’s enchantment.
Like everything in Nyth Fran, save its children, the trees of its forest grew thick and tall.It was autumn, and leaves littered the forest floor.Trefor kicked through them with abandon; Llewyn crept behind, each footstep careful.Crows cawed down from the denuded branches, watching all the while.
Trefor had tested him with raw iron.That, coupled with the falsified records, confirmed Llewyn’s suspicions.The villagers were not the victims of the fiend, but its co-conspirators.The sudden appearance of a count’s surveyor when the village had been protected from strangers for so long would lead Trefor to believe that the enchantment was failing.
They came to a clearing.At its heart stood a flat-topped stone, as high as the alderman’s waist.Trefor stood beside it, waiting, while Llewyn watched from a stand of trees.A haze like the heat of high summer shimmered in the air above the stone.Before Llewyn could ask the Grey Lady to show him what lay behind the glamour, two more figures emerged from the other side of the clearing: a man and a woman, both advanced in years.They began speaking with Trefor in hushed tones that, at such a distance, sounded like little more than the rustling of leaves.
Llewyn took a thin quartz crystal from his pocket: a faceted gem, binding ancient power.He cracked it between his fingers and whispered a word.A sudden breeze flowed as the spirit of air he had freed darted out to hover in the centre of the clearing, lending him an ear on the whispered conversation.
‘… so much as a pot-mender in all my years,’ the woman was saying, ‘and now all these strangers come at once.Our shelter is fading, Trefor.Onyourwatch.’
‘It might not be,’ the alderman said.‘At least, not so badly as you fear.One of the strangers visited me.He claimed to be in the count’s service, but he was lying, I’m sure.’
‘Then what is he?’said the old man.
‘A druid or a sorcerer, perhaps, come to bind the spirit.Perhaps a gwyddien.’
There was a pause.Llewyn swallowed a curse.
‘And what of these tumblers and singers?’The old woman broke the silence.‘Are they a troupe of gwyddien as well?’
‘They may be working together,’ Trefor said.‘They will all be dealt with.I swear it.’
‘Trefor,’ the old man said, his tone that of a father chastising his child.‘We have been safe here, protected from all manner of evil.The price is small when compared to the suffering of the wider world.It may be time to pay it again.’
Trefor shook his head firmly.His hand brushed the flat-topped stone, then darted away.‘There is time, yet.A generation before payment ought be needed.No.I will chase these interlopers out, and we will be safe once again.You will see.’
The old woman and the old man locked eyes.
‘Fine,’ she said.‘But know that if you fail, you will be stripped of all blessings.Not only your daughter.’
‘You need not remind me,’ the alderman said, his voice hard-edged enough for Llewyn to pick out the words without the wind spirit’s aid.‘Excuse me.There is much work to be done.’
Llewyn hid until the sound of their footsteps faded to silence, then approached the flat-topped stone.As he moved, he heard a whisper through the leaves behind him.A backward glance showed naught but a stirring of the leaves against the flow of the wind.
He drew his ghostwood sword and twisted his ring, digging fine-embossed oak leaves deep into his flesh.
Her blessing was twofold.The same power by which she shrouded Llewyn from mortal eyes let her unravel lesser glamours like loose, badly woven cloth.Where those leaves swirled against the natural wind, a wraith appeared, a churning mass of smoke and rage and the stink of an open grave.The pale fire in the skull-sockets of its eyes fixed on his.The wraith lurched away in surprise.
Llewyn lunged.The wraith rolled away from the edge of his sword, dissolving into a cloud of dust and clattering bones.It reformed and coiled, ready to pounce, but held back.Llewyn had fought enough wraiths to expect the attack, and to note when it did not come.Its purpose, then, had only been to follow, and not to kill.A purpose not born of whatever hatred bound it to undeath, but imposed by sorcery.
Afanan had sent a spy after all.
Llewyn reached into his pocket and broke a second stone: linarite, to release a spirit of earth.He pointed the broken crystal at the ground beneath the wraith and shouted a command.
With a breath like the scent of fresh rain, the ground softened and began to swallow the wraith.It wailed and gnashed lipless teeth, clawing against the sucking earth.Collapsing into dust only worsened its condition, burying it more deeply in the soil.Llewyn stepped forward and thrust his ghostwood sword through the wraith’s skull.
As it dissipated like fog in the midday sun, Llewyn felt a swell of satisfaction.He imagined Afanan peering into the stone that had bound the wraith, watching him, then yelping in surprise as the stone clouded and shattered in her hand.The wraith would reform—it was not so simple to rid the world of the undead—but without her geas, beyond the reach of her power unless she went to the trouble of conjuring and binding it anew.
He returned his sword to the loop on his belt, turned back to the heart of the clearing and touched his ring.
