15 - The Canopy of the Ents
The thicket wriggles and squeezes. From the left. From the right. Above. Under your sabatons, the bark of the arch tree buckles and squeaks.
Two paths lead up the trunk.
| Right The slope, in buckles and gnarls, rises gradually like a whole landscape of crags, of wooden hills and wooden cliffs. Branches, like trees in their own right, burst up from the rugged terrain like volcanic mushrooms. There is no easy path up the slope; the little ‘branch trees’ thicken into a thicket, the tunnels through the thicket shrink and shrink. | Left Your branch opens onto a wide, flat ledge. The light looks brighter this way. A place for your Blue Lady to catch her breath? |
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Taking the left path; on the wide branch-cliff of the mountain-tree, the old wood swells away like the sea. Far below The Old Soulwood foams in slow but heavy winds.
You see white fog rising in that lower wood.
The canopy of your arch tree spreads high over you. It darkens the sky, you cannot see the sun. It is as if you stand under some vast sweep of storm clouds. But there is no rain. Only that strangely pale fog below. It moves fast. You see it touch the base of your arch tree. Then, it climbs. It rises up the bearded sides like fast-growing ivy, spiraling in tendrils and helices. Reaching. Scaling.
Your Lady turns her face and coughs into the shoulder of her furred cloak.
“I never saw that mist before, during our night in The Soulwood. I think it never came that night. “For that, my heart is glad. “Even so high I taste it’s sting in my throat. “We should hurry.”
This wooden ledge tapers into a vertical wall of trunk. Returning to the crossroads, looking up the Right path, you see the foreboding crags, the density of verdure.
The thicket wriggles and squeezes. From the left. From the right. Above.
If you haven’t drawn your sword yet, now’s the time. You’ll have a hard time with the climb ahead. The narrowing tunnels up the rugged wooden slope are packed with thorny limbs. Your armor protects you, but your Lady’s cloak and dress offer no defense. You can use your Pinecone Crest Shield to hold back the pressing branches where they cut off a tunnel, allowing your Lady to climb through. The wood will creak and groan against you.
At some point the limbs turn so thick and tangled that you’ll have no choice. Draw your Steel. Start hacking. Each cut summons a shriek of protest from the living cloud piercer of wood, but you have no choice.
The thicket wriggles and squeezes. From the left. From the right. Above.
The dark swaddles you. Through its muffling arms, you hear your Lady’s coughing voice.
“It is here with us, my Knight. That white mist, though I cannot see it. “Hurry. “I feel it licking at my heels. I hear it hissing up around my waist. “Oh, please hurry!”
Swing. Catch. Yank. Cleave. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
With one last shriek of splitting timber the heaviest of the branches before you splinters apart. Like the heavy central support pillar of a temple, pulling down the roof in its demise, the thicket writhes apart as the timber crumbles. Down a single hole above you at an angle, a lone spear of the sun crashes. It shines on a pool of fog around your waists.
You waste no time; sheath your sword; take your Lady’s arm; pull her along the tunnel.
Warm light gleams against your helmet’s crest. You drag yourself from the black, knotted hole in the tree canopy.
Standing atop the ancient oak, you find the wide leaves and woven branches bear your weight. Springy, but stable. You lift your Lady out beside you.
You stand above the clouds. Beneath the drifting fleece, far away and far below your place in the sky, the sprawling Soulwood lies still. Its mist fades. The slate-colored sun paints everything up here in dull color. The mist cannot live in the sun.
Other great trees spread behind you, eastward. Dozens. They sway, more than regular trees, and twine their beam-like branches with one-another.
Ents are the oldest trees left in The Time of Dying. In the songs of men, they speak. They communicate with the other ents directly, through the long wooden fingers of their branches. Rarely, a smaller beast or plant is blessed with an ear for their language, and may understand what they want through the creaking and groaning of their limbs.
The Ents stand only in the remotest parts of the great Soulwood. Up on the forested mountain peaks. Or, hidden in ravines that run so deeply into the earth, their canopies lie lower even than that of the regular forest. They sway, but do not move from the place of their roots.
You have heard, in The Third Song of Splywater, that Ents dislike all men who touch their bark. This one on which you stand, though it gave you an arduous climb, seems not to have held a grudge.
Your Lady raises a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and looks east.
“Summer. But these old growths wear their autumn gold and rust. “Look. See that one beside us? Why are its leaves like stone? So drooping. Grey. “But better still to have come out of that dark growth. “I’m glad we see this place.”
Was it wrong of you to cut your way up to this place? You held back your Steel as long as you were able. But that matters nothing, now. You bore your cutting edge against this old, living thing. Surely, though you are far from The Road, this is a sacred place. To have chopped one branch is to have wronged a thing older than yourself. But your oath to your Lady - that is more important. Her words are happier ones, so it seems. Here under the sun. Would that you could remove your helm, and feel it on your face. Her words are happier. But her speech, her voice, those words - they are still not the same. Would that you had never been to Middlemoss.
You may choose to stand with your Lady for many hours, on that canopy of the ancient Ent. In this place, you will not be attacked by monsters of the woods, or by your enemies. The great tree will sway underneath you, perhaps more than any normal tree would. Its movements, however, are the movements of the heavy beasts - the movements of the whales and the elephants, and of the great canvases of wing on ten-thousand year-old birds. They are slow undulations. They will not shake you from your place, nor part the foliage beneath you.
When dusk finally spreads, the Ent trembles. The verdure underfoot moves uncertainly. Your time of rest has ended. You’ll want to get off the top of this tree before the fifth star blinks into place in the sky above.
Two paths lead off the trunk.
| Right One long branch swings out in wild arcs. Down and sideways. Up and sideways. Whenever this horizontal pendulum reaches the end of its arc, it draws near the bristling, swinging limb of a nearby juniper-Ent. If you take this path, and make the jump to the opposite tree, you will find the nest of a golden crow amidst the immediate bristles. Taking one egg from the nest will bring you ill-luck. If you take two instead, they will later hatch, and be your faithful followers. | Left One branch of your towering oak wriggles back and forth like the tail of a snake. At its end, it almost touches the still branch of the Ent you noticed earlier, the one with the strange grey leaves. |
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You run with your Lady along the swaying branch, toward the Ent that is mottled grey. A pine. The grey-shapes are not leaves, you now see, but calcified pinecones, with some of their grey bleeding into the wood.
The oak-limb bucks underfoot. You feel as if the thing is trying to throw you from its top, down to the forest below. Each step is a stumble, like walking over a suspension bridge during an earthquake.
Your Lady’s fingers slip from your gauntlet. You turn. You see her slide down the curving, writhing side of your branch. She reaches for a knob, she misses.
You throw yourself. Your armor clangs on wood. Jarring teeth. Reaching, you wrap your fingers around her forearm just in time. With your shield, you hook a limb.
You climb back. Run. A gap - you leap it. Your Lady leaps; you catch her.
You stand, at last, on stable footing.
The limb of this pine is like stone under your step. No motion. No give. Tapping steps. It feels as if you are stepping down the nave of a vaulting, silent cathedral.
The branches quickly weave together. They form a wide tunnel. The weave is tight, but not solid. It allows some of the purple dusk light to filter through. Even with its gaps, your footsteps still beat a muted echo.
The tunnel smells of old pine, like timber in a house.
“Knight, this tree is- How has it died, when all the rest of these old growths thrive? “It must be below. In the roots. “Yet… its voice is tranquil. “I knew a woman who spoke with such a voice once. A Sister of the Yellow Smile. “She had lived serenely.”
The Grove Within a Grove
A place of moonlight waits in the center of the elder pine. The trunk is wide, and hollow. One lone, inward-growing branch twists up through the flat floor of creamy-yellow rings.
The sky is open above, with the rays of the silver light slanting down to gild the twisted root. Your Lady’s hair shines like ice reflected in onyx as she steps into this moonlight.
On one side of the hollow space the outer wall has crumbled away. You step near the edge, glance over. This sick or dead archtree stands at the border of the Ent land. High trees sway to your right and left, but the forest that stretches off ahead neither pierces the clouds with its Ents, nor grows blackly packed as The Soulwood. It is an ordinary forest.
Something rustles behind you. Instantly your fingers are wrapping the hilt of your Polished Steel Longsword, but a familiar voice relaxes your hand.
“Where, oh where, hides the font of my light? “Where, oh where, can it be? “My day’s rather long, neverending, my song. “Here I’ve come, over roads, over sea. “But my star, like a thief, still evades me, “O’er these hours stretching forever on. “Broken bones, broken dreams, hopeless heart, “My star is gone.”
This is your last chance to alter the fate of this Living Bones, the Late Poet. His tall cap droops, the blue and orange feathers overhang his bent skull. His voice is melancholy. Your opinion, though unspoken, determines his end.
| He has wasted his time The Late Poet realizes there are no stars on The Road of Graves. Later, you find his bones in a defiled coffin, near Alsoburg. They appear to have been buried there for centuries. | Remember your Lord The Late Poet will compose a song about your fallen lord. The song wins him fame. He wanders The Road, singing it between the towns, long after you are gone. | Remember your Lady The Late Poet will compose a song about your Blue Lady. |
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As you leave the hollow chamber, The Late Poet remains.
There is a noise. At first you mistake it for the reverberation of your Lady’s feet on the floor of the narrow, winding tunnel down which you walk. But it is too loud for footsteps. It sounds like the ticking of a clock buried under earth.
The tunnel widens.
Small trees, within this great hollow tree, also dead, shoot up on your left and right. The skeletons of their branches brush your pauldrons. The blighting grey washes more and more of the color from the wood the deeper you go.
Many are the afflictions which might strangle an oak or pine.
| Petrification | Red King’s Curse | Stone Curse |
|---|---|---|
| Slumber | Wilting Disease | Millipedes |
| Curse of Soft Roots | Pulping | Shakes |
Something catches your thinking.
Why are your hands backwards? No, no this is not some trick of the light. Look at them here, against this crack in the curving vein. Look at how the moon is shining through them. Your hands, indeed, are bent wrong. Stranger still. They seem to writhe back into shape. Without pain. But there are smoky splotches now where your fingernails once grew. Is this a punishment?
While you have stood at the wall crack, fascinated by your hands, your Lady has held silence. She stands without looking at you, waiting only to continue walking down.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Ticktick.
Ticktick.
Tick.
Ticktick.
Tickthump.
Thumpthump.
Thump.
Thump.
Thumpthump.
Thump.
THUMP.
THUMP.
THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP.
THUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
Dread
An inexorable, choking sensation. Your throat is full of it. Your Lady keeps walking - forward, curving, down - so you follow. But you cannot breath.
One minute…
Two minutes…
As you pass under one low-hanging, red, stringy root, your breath returns.
It seems to your eye, as you inhale deeply, that there is a friendly air to the strange red root. A familiar face. Your Lady keeps walking - forward, curving, down - so you follow. But you look back at the root once. It seems so familiar - if only you had been able to study it.
Descending deeper and deeper and deeper, the tunnel constricts once more. The cracks in the exterior are few this deep within the vein of the great tree. The silver moonlight is gone; your Cat’s-eye Spear seems strangely cloudy in its glow. The wooden walls are dry and splintered.
This texture changes. Your spear gleams a blue streak along the tunnel’s surface. Resin-amber runs like ore veins through the wood.
The thumping drums through the steel of your helmet, and rings in the bones of your ears. For a time you have been able to hear the faint, fading singing of The Late Poet. Now the voice is gone. You are left with only the swelling thumps.
THUMP.
THUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
THUMPTHUMP.
The Four-Pronged Heart
In a tetrahedron-shaped room in the center of the Ent lies its heart. Erratically beating, as you enter the chamber the heart pounds behind your eye sockets. Veiny roots loop through floor and wall. Every seventh root undulates with sappy red light. The room is tangled like a mangrove.
At the top of the faceted dome you see, suspended, the giant head of a stag. Its long pink tongue lolls out between flat yellow teeth.
As your spear light shines in the space, one shadow moves obliquely. What is this shape? Too big for bug, too chitinous for man. It moves with a pen-on-parchment sound. The left side of where its face should be is a single huge eyeball, with a rectangular iris.
Your light awakens the stag head. It lows at the apex of the ceiling. Its opens one eye, its right, which it turns on you like a yellow spotlight.
The Four-Pronged Heart begins by closing off all three entrances to the room with walls of roots. Then it fixes its beaming eye upon you.
The corrupted right eye of this Ent will petrify you if you stand in its light for more than a few seconds. You can delay the onset of petrification by ducking under the huge looping roots, but the Heart controls the roots and will retract them one-by-one.
However, you have a way to divert the eye beam. By taking The Left Eye of an Ent which you found in The Emerald House, and by holding it aloft, you can turn aside the gaze of the elk-head.
Doing so comes at a price. You will draw the attention of the chitinous-man, with the other corrupted heart-eye on his head. He cannot be slain; his whole body apart from his hands is covered in chitin. He will try to steal your eye.
The Thief of the House of Maze
The Eye of an Ent is a valuable prize. This once-alive man tried to steal this once-alive Ent’s eye for his House. He forgot to bring a clotting salve for the wound, however, so the heart trapped and consumed him in vengeance. Whatever was human in the man is something else now. He has become the heart-mite, the insect-servant of the Ent’s thrumming organ.
To win, you must cut the thief-gauntlets from the hands of this chitinous servant. With your Steel, lop them as he reaches for your eye. Don the gauntlets while he is writhing on the ground. Then, using the roots, climb to the apex of the heart-chamber, and pluck the stag’s other eye.
The heart screams. A mix of dying stag and the ripping limb of a tree. The chamber thrums irregularly.
Then, the thrumming stops. The tree shudders, and crumbles.
You and your Lady fall in a ruin of sawdust.
Soft…
Dry…
Cold…
You awaken. You are on the floor of a forest, in a massive pile of sawdust. Your Lady lies beside you, stirring as you rise.
All about, this forest is loud with little sounds. Grasshoppers churr under a rooted stone a few yards ahead. In an oak to your right a cuckoo presents its two-note song. The forest is eerily ordinary. Nowhere do you see the towering Ents, nor the deep and writhing tangle of the Soulwood. All that remains is the sawdust pile.
Your Lady brushes the dust from her hair and cloak. Then she dusts your armor.
The air blows freely through the trunks as you walk, clear of a deeper wood’s mossy musk, brisk.
You stumble into a trio of sap miners. They are painting rings of lambent gold color around the shaggy trunk of a hemlock. The paint is made of glowing moss. When you reach out and touch it, the moss adheres to your gauntlet.
The miners are curiously unaware of your presence. Perhaps it is their heavy, bubble-like, pewter plate mail suits. You attract the attention of one by tapping the miner’s globe-helmet. The miner looks at you. He (or she) refuses to speak, but points with a thick leather glove in a direction through the trees.
Why does your Blue Lady say nothing, nor look upon you? In that corrupted tree she seemed to turn inward. She took shelter while you fought that stag with the gleaming eye. And the insect-man. The stag never looked upon her. The man never chased her. That she was safe - for that you should be satisfied. But it was as if neither saw her. As if she were dead, or the tree was a figment. She has of late been much changed. Her words- Not for you to question. For you, to serve.
You emerge from the trunks. A coarse and rocky tundra stretches away and away and further away. Far in the distance, white teeth. Mountains.
The cold open space tears your breath from the visor of your helmet in a visible mist. The sky seems almost dizzily high - as if you stood in a cathedral for giants, with a painted ceiling.
The thin woods behind you feel like the last ragged edge of your Time. Until you spot it. The Road. It is almost invisible against the washed-out, grey-brown grass, but you spy a thin line of paving stones winding through the land. And each stone has its epithet.
Your Lady speaks into the wind.
“I wonder, did that tall tree outlive its seeds? “Its line perhaps ended in that dust pile. “Thank you, knight. I felt that tree’s ill health while we walked among its sickly branches. “A fever.