Kade spent a day telling him what he knew of the creation myth of the Veil: how the patron gods of each shifter clan had turned away from the Earth and toward its mirror, taking their magic with them so that it could no longer exist on the Earth. Each god offered a piece of what they had taken from the Earth to aid in the creation of the Veil, so called because they had drawn a curtain between the two worlds—hence the name of the places where the worlds would cross and travel between them made possible.
He explained that the patron gods lent their powers to the inhabitants of their chosen lands, giving them the ability to shift so that each group could remember their origins, even as they worked together with others. Some shifter clans turned away from, or even forgot, their communal origins, instead turning inward to remain with their own kind; but the Wolf-God taught his people well, so the wolf clan remembered and had no qualms with the others. Though they valued their community, their pack, above all else, outsiders would always be welcome. There was always room for the pack to grow. He was sure, Kade explained, that the myth had changed over time, and each clan likely had their own version; but that was how it was taught in the wolf kingdom.
“And what about the fae? How were they made?” Florian asked at the end of the story. Kade was silent for a moment, thinking.
“Fae were associated with the seasons,” Kade replied. “I guess their patron gods were the same.”
They were more than halfway through their supplies when the environment around them finally started to change enough to notice. Something in the air felt less dry, somehow—not quite humid, but less dusty and arid. At first it felt a little bit like there was latent magic in the air, snapping Florian to attention, but Kade seemed to feel it too. It had to be something else.
The almost-humidity lingered in the air for the rest of the day and into the next, before anything else in the landscape changed. Halfway through the next day Kade slowed to a stop, Florian stepping up to his side with a curious glance.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Through the sun goggles he couldn’t quite see his expression, but Kade pointed out to the horizon.
“I think I see something,” he said, and Florian looked out to where he was pointing. “I can’t really tell... Does that look like anything to you?”
Florian squinted, straining to see at the very edges of his vision. With the intense light it was hard to see anything so far out, but there was what could be a hint of a dark shadow on the very edge of the horizon. It was too hard to tell for sure.
“Maybe,” Florian said, looking back up at Kade. “I can’t really tell. What do you think?”
“Hmm,” Kade sighed, his eyes still locked on the same point far in the distance. “I’ll keep an eye on it. We’re headed that direction.”
They trudged on, and after a little while the faint hint of a shadow on the horizon solidified into a dark shape. It almost looked like a hill; but as they drew closer, and more details became visible, the shape of it was too uneven and irregular to be a single hill. Something was making it darker than the color of the rest of the soil.
At some point Kade stopped again, shaking his head.
“It’s green,” he said, the disbelief obvious in his voice. “Do you see that? It’sgreen.”
It hadn’t looked green to Florian—just the same dark indiscernible color—but as soon as Kade said it, the darkness did start to appear greenish in hue.
“How?” Florian asked incredulously. Whatever it was, they still couldn’t tell.
“I have no idea,” Kade said. His hand fell away from where he’d been keeping it loosely on the hilt of his sword.
“Well, let’s check it out,” Florian said, continuing forward. He could feel Kade hesitate, not following right away; but after a moment his quick footsteps crunched through the dirt and sand behind him, and soon the taller man had taken the lead once more.
The shape far in the distance slowly became more and more defined as they walked. After nearly an hour had passed, the dark green of it was now readily apparent, and they were close enough to see that it was the remains of a landscape that had been utterly consumed by leaves, clinging ivy thick as blankets.
“How can something like this be alive in the Blight?” Kade muttered, shaking his head as they looked at the expanse ahead of them. What must have once been trees, completely blanketed in leaves, occasionally jutted up through the thick growth. Piles of the leaves, ranging from the size of bushes to small hills, rose up through the landscape as well. It was utterly unlike anything that they had seen in the Blight before.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it should be possible,” Florian mused. They were standing a good fifty feet from the first stretch of ivy, where the first few tendrils of vine and leaf stretched out along the dry earth, like roots searching for moisture. “It has to be magic, right? It couldn’t be alive without magic.”
“Someone must have warded all this,” Kade said. The blanket of green stretched in both directions and up ahead, as far as either of them could see. “I don’t know how else this could happen.”
“We have to go in, right?”
Kade bit his lip, considering. Florian was curious more than anything; it didn’t seem dangerous, but whatever allowed such an overgrowth of plant life this deep into the Blight must have involved some powerful magic. Kade was clearly less enthused, but Florian took a slow step toward the ivy anyway.
“Be careful,” Kade called out from behind him.
“I will.”
Florian stepped up to the very edge of where the sprawling tendrils reached, kneeling down so he was mere inches from the ends of the vines. From here he could simply reach out to touch the plant. He wasn’t exactly a botanist, but it didn’t look very different from the decorative ivy he had seen climbing walls around town, or the wild ivy that crept up the length of trees. But there had to be something different about it, something that allowed it to live and grow even in the harsh light of the Nova Blight.
Hopefully it wasn’t poisonous, he thought, as he reached a hand out to gingerly touch one of the small leaves near the very end of the vine.
When he touched it, two things happened all at once: he felt a tiny burst of magic from the leaf, like a rapid heartbeat thrumming wildly against his fingertip; and instantly, the leaf that he touched crumbled into ash, taking the pulse of magic with it as its pieces fell to the ground.
“It’s a shroud,” Florian blurted, looking back at Kade in surprise. The magic had felt exactly the same as his own shroud, though there must have been something different about it that allowed it to manifest in this way.
