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could almost grow to love
Torith Mir.'
'You're a very idealistic person, Tanthe,' he said.
She pulled a face. 'Rufryd used to say things like that about me, only not in
such a polite tone of voice.'
'But I like idealistic people,' Jthery said, realising she thought he was
criticising her. 'I feel drawn to them, somehow.'
'Why?'
'I don't know.' He smiled, picking at grass blades. 'Perhaps because I try to
be idealistic but I'm not very good at it.'
They were riding onto a high plateau country, where slabs of black stone
jutted from the ground and the trees were sparse and tough. The weather was
cold, the wind wild. They were tiny figures under a vast sky that was rilled
with an ever-changing display of clouds. The days shortened. The sinking or
rising sun flooded the clouds with brilliant gold light, with flushes of red
and violet. At night the three moons sailed impassively above them, changing
their positions and their phases in untouchable serenity.
Elrill seemed to be watching the skies constantly. Distant storms raged,
shattering the sky with sound and light. Once the whole sky was lit with
wavering curtains of colour, through which brilliant beams of white and red
light danced and flashed. The world seemed full of static, of unfettered
ethroth energy;
Tanthe had never felt anything so eldritch before. It made her skin prickle,
her hair float and crackle.
Everything seemed to glow.
'This weather isn't natural,' Elrill said uneasily. Eldareth nodded, but
Tanthe had lost patience with such cryptic remarks.
'What do you mean?' she demanded.
He turned his bright eyes upon her and for once he didn't mock her need to
know everything. 'I can't be sure, but I fear there is a disturbance in the
Aelyr realm that is affecting the Earth. Displacement of great energies. This
is not good.'
Not good, Tanthe said to herself with a sigh. She felt apprehensive but filled
with excitement, ready to shake off all her set ideas about the world and step
into chaos.
By morning, the weird storm had settled but left the earth reeking of
electricity and ozone. The plateau came to an abrupt end and they began to
descend the steep chalky slope of its northern flank. The valley that lay
below them was wide and filled with trees; the strangest forest Tanthe had
ever seen. Even for a forest in early winter, there was an eerie stillness and
coldness upon it.
As Eldareth led them down the slope, she realised the vast scale of the
forest. The trees were monumental, with rough grey trunks and white branches
stretched against the sky. Some had fallen, blocking their path or leaning
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against their neighbours to form arches. Then she realised why the forest
was so strange; there were no fallen leaves around them, only dark silt. These
trees had unfurled no leaves for many seasons; they looked long-dead, and
there were no animals nesting in their hollows, no birds on the branches nor
insects crawling under the bark.
Touching a trunk as she passed, she found it ice-cold.
'Gods!' she muttered, snatching her hand away in surprise.
'What is it?' Eldareth said with a wry smile.
'It felt like ' she placed her hand to the trunk again and the granite texture
flooded coldness into her palm. 'Anthar's horns, it's stone. These trees are
made of stone!'
They stopped and looked around in awe at these monoliths that had once lived
and swayed in the wind. She wondered how long it must have taken for the
living tissue to petrify.
'Did I never tell you of the stone forests of Torith Mir?' Eldareth said
quietly. There was a mixture of bitterness and pride in his voice. 'This is
Elta Arta, Valley of Black Stone.'
'I think you mentioned them,' said Tanthe. 'And I must have read about them.
But couldn't picture them. I never imagined anything like this. But how could
this happen? How long has it been like this?'
'I expect the Aelyr would have more idea than humans,' said Eldareth.
.
'Millions of years,' Elrill answered. His voice rang off the hard trunks.
They rode on, slipping like shadows between the great columns. There was
nothing but black and white and shades of grey in this ancient world; but here
and there Tanthe saw colour. Floods of amber clustered on the trunks.
She stopped and plucked at a mass that was like fossilised sunlight, with tiny
insects trapped inside.
She couldn't dislodge it.
'This must be valuable,' she said. 'Why hasn't it been taken?'
'Much of it has,' Eldareth replied, 'but Torith Mir is full of amber and
precious stones, so few risk their lives coming this far to find it.'
'What do you mean, risk their lives?'
'There are a lot of wild animals on the fringes of Elta Arta,' Eldareth said.
'Dra'a'ks, mountain lions, snakes, greenwolves.'
'Oh, thanks,' said Tanthe, giving the sparkling mass of amber a rueful
backward glance. 'Now there's something you didn't mention!'
Eldareth grinned with a touch of his old fire. 'Come on, Tanthe, you surely
didn't expect an easy ride?
We have our weapons, and it's no worse than anything else we've faced so far.
We may see nothing, anyway; most wild creatures are shy and only attack if
they're provoked.'
'Not where I come from,' she murmured.
Tanthe was silent for a time, but her senses were magnified to every tiny
sound. Above the petrified branches she saw tiny winged silhouettes floating
on the wind currents; eagles, she thought. Dra'a'ks don't fly like that. But
then she saw three tiny black shapes like arrows, a snake-like quality about
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