The closer they got to where the horse had bolted, the more Kyan could feel the wards. Leaves and twigs crackled as he approached the canopy of shushing leaves. Despite passing the boundary, they still hadn’t breached the sacred forest’s protections. It reassured him that even if someone stumbled across this place, this cabin, they would have been repelled by the force of the magic that pushed at them like a magnet.
‘It’s strong,’ Nicole said, pressing her hand against the invisible energy.
Kyan reached out. The magic warmed his palm, reminding him of his mother trying to explain her power. The burning trees.
He swallowed and, reaching for Nicole’s hand, stepped back onto Druid lands for the first time in two thousand years.
The wards stroked over him like water.
Then, the new mystic feel of a hidden world.
Nicole’s breath caught.
The forest sprawled around them, stretching further and taller thanexpected, with so much green it was as if every shade of it lived here in this semi-divine place. The trees weren’t all ruined from that long-ago razing. Many were twisted with age, their leaves lush and fresh, adorned in every shape of leaf and native flower buds. Great ferns and not-yet-blooming yarrow and honeysuckle. Wildflowers and protective trees had regrown, some towered hundreds of feet into the sky – a remnant of the fact this island, along with England, Wales and Scotland, had been lush with forests long ago.
There was a palpable energy in the warm air, drawn taut. Merely being here felt like dipping a bucket into a well, drawing up something he didn’t even know was inside.
Kyan touched a tree, felt the distant thrum of its power.
Calling, calling.
He removed his hand, flexing it.
‘Anything?’ Nicole asked.
He shook his head mutely, then cleared his throat.
They began to walk, the ground loamy and the distinct hum of natural magic warming his every step.
The forest had been restored by nature over the years, but there were marks in the land that couldn’t be erased, like the great magic-carved fissure leading deeper into the trees.
Kyan crouched near its edge. It was only a few metres deep, but whatever force had made the mark had also scalded the earth white. He scraped up some soil to find it cooler than the rest, with no pulse of life in it. It crumbled between his fingers curiously.
He couldn’t help but think of the strange being that had killed the Druids. Had it done this?
Above, the sky was shifting deeper into burnished silver and iron.
Looking around to find no one was the strangest, most eerie part.
This place had been his home. Now it was alone in time. He felt the loss in the quiet: the lack of Druids collecting herbs or moving through the trees. The lack of apopulation. There was deep magic in the place, but it lived in the ground and plants, pulsing with the earth in latent veins, no longer moving up and out of the earth to dance with the Druids as it once had.
As he looked around, he spotted something in the tree to his left, a momentary lustre. A crystal at the tip of a branch. No, not a branch—
A staff.
A Druid staff that had been swallowed up by a growing tree from where it had been dropped, or slashed from a Druid’s hand.
But in the glade-green and the sacred quiet, there was also … a surprising peace. Coming back to chaos or a barren world would have been worse. But to see that this place had flourished over the scar of such destruction choked him. It was gone. That time and his people were gone.
But there was new life.
He looked at Nicole, her hair gilded by the last few beams of light. She was a vision of hope through time, eyes full of soft affection and awe. It made him fall in love with her a little bit more.
Every time he was in her presence she taught him how much he could feel.
For a moment, he got such a startling sense of déjà vu he had to shake himself.
‘Lead the way?’ she asked, a smile on her lips.
