In time, bellies full and wide awake, the group began to cast around wondering what to do next. They were certain that as long as they were in the Grove of the averanym they were safe, but also the longer they rested here the closer Porillon got, and all she really had to do was wait outside the ring of willows for them to leave.
“There is no need to leave right now,” the resonance came through their bodies again as the averanym spoke. “Your steeds are on their way here as we speak. Friends of ours have come to our aid, have reproached the gnomes, and gathered your horses for easier traveling from here.”
“Who are they?” Jovian asked. “Those who are bringing our horses?”
But they were not to find out until the evening, when it seemed that they would be staying another night. Out of nowhere more food appeared before them, and they feasted yet again, wondering if possibly it was the wyrd of the place realizing what they wanted or needed, and providing it for them.
They heard the horses at about the same time they came ushering through the ring of willows. First was Maeven’s white stallion Ernet, followed by Jovian’s dappled stallion Methos, Joya’s tan mare Daisy, and Angelica’s roan stallion Jesse.
It wasn’t the sight of their horses, appearing for all the world now cleaner than they had when the party had left them behind, that shocked them. Instead what gave them pause were the creatures that led the horses into the clearing.
The skin of the feminine creatures leading the horses from the danger of the gnomes was like wood, weathered, creased, and knotted, yet as beautiful as any tree could ever be. Over the wood of their bodies laid thin bark of differing colors, from the shade of poplar trees to the dark, near blackness of wet pine. Their fingers nothing more than twigs, pliant yet strong, and longer than human fingers.
A few of the women were bald, but the majority of them had long willow leaves that extended from their heads like hair should, while others had various leaves that made up the hair of their head. The willow leaves drifted aimlessly around their bodies as if caught in a perpetual wind. When they walked it was like listening to wind blowing through the forest.
The women let the horses go, and each of them made their way over to their waiting humans. None of the horses attempted to graze, though they were hungry, for they realized the near-sanctity of these woods.
“Ah, the Wooden Shepherdesses arrive at last,” the averanym said.
“Dryads!” Angelica said in awe, a leg of chicken still clutched in her hands. She was suddenly aware of how graceless she appeared. The thought ruined her appetite, and she laid her food down on the ground, taking a deep breath.
The rest of the group watched as the dryads came further into the clearing, moving as gracefully and beautiful as trees blowing in the wind, a near-liquid movement to their limbs that one would not think possible in forms so stiff. Of course some of them, like the dryads of pine, had a hard time moving as gracefully as the others for the wood they were comprised of was harder.
One dryad came toward them. There was no doubt by the white color of her, scored with strikes of brown-black bark, that she was the representation of a poplar. She had no nose, only slits where a nose should have been, and she had no ears, only knotholes where ears would rest on a human. Her hair bunched around her a little less like silk in the wind as the others’, and instead appeared as velvety emerald leaves falling down to the back of her knees. Her hands reached out toward Jovian almost imploringly, as if her fingers were strumming a harp, or she was trying to grasp the strands of wyrd surrounding Jovian in her twig-fingers. Her mouth and eyes, though full and strangely wide, were the deepest black Jovian could ever remember seeing, like pools of ink that he could fall right into. While it was an eerie color to see on a living being it was not frightening, but instead hypnotic.
Joya realized what Jovian did not; this poplar dryad was literally filtering his wyrd through her fingers to get a feel for him.
“So,” the white dryad finally said. “You are LaFaye? Obviously you have died before, there is a sense of death about you. You do realize that death is not completely out of your system yet, correct?” The dryad cocked her head curiously to the side. “Death is not something you will ever be able to escape, for it will court you right up to its final embrace.
“I am Uthia,” she said, not extending her hand to shake it or proffering any other custom that the humans would recognize as greeting. Jovian’s head was spinning from the contact with the dryad and her words about death. He supposed that it had something to do with his wyrd being affected by his death; after all it had been the Pale Horse that had helped him slay all those hobbedy’s lanterns.
“You fight the darkness plaguing our home,” Uthia said, withdrawing her hand. “For that I will go with you for as long as I’m required, and from there, if my thicket decides to help, I will take the charge placed upon me by the Realm Guardians Sara and Annbell, and aid the falling Realm of Earth in their plight.” They could tell by the way she spoke that Uthia, and most likely all the dryads, were not accustomed to being told what they would and would not do, least of all from humans.
“I didn’t realize that the Realm of Earth was falling,” Angelica said anxiously, more to herself than to those around her.
“The Realm Guardians Sara and Annbell face a great foe right now. It is a historical foe that has plagued the Realm of Earth for ages — the chaos dwarves. You may be familiar with their brethren, the dwarves of Nependier, as they are from your Holy Realm.” Uthia pointed to Jovian’s upturned palm in his lap to explain how she knew where they were from. The white stigmata shone in the ambient light like a beacon, announcing they were from the Holy Realm. “It would be much better for us if the chaos dwarves were extinguished for good, but such genocide would do more than rid us of the chaos they breed.”
“What would it do?” Joya asked.
“None of us are sure, but we can speculate,” Uthia told them in her odd guttural accent. “Let me tell you how it works. When the Great Realms were formed, and the different races placed upon it, wyrd was linked to wyrd. The wyrd of the gnomes was linked to the earth, the wyrd of the dryads to the trees, the averanym to all earthen things, and so on. The wyrd of the races that took up residence in each realm became a near-integral part of the realm. Each race gave to the realm something that should not be taken from it. Each one of us are, in a sense, an extension of the realm, but still just a race no matter how linked.
“When Aaridnay ‘founded’ the Great Realms, she saw the need for humans to govern in each realm. Now, mind you, she was very smart and had incredible foresight, maybe to a fault. She drafted the Racial Proclamation and wyrded each realm to the document so that no Realm Guardian was able to rid their realm of any race. In essence she linked all the races to their separate realms, thereby protecting all of us from total extinction.
“Now, this is where the speculation comes in. Each Realm Guardian is linked to the land, almost as if the land and the Guardian are one. If the land is fractured, who knows what would happen to the ruling Realm Guardian? One could imagine that the mind of the Guardian bent on tyranny would also be fractured. Now Sara and Annbell, being very good Realm Guardians, would not think of such a thing as genocide. They might have entertained the idea, and how much easier it would be on all the Realm of Earth to finally be rid of the chaos dwarves, but they would not make plans for such a thing.”
“So you are helping them?” Joya asked, pushing the question a little more.
“That hasn’t fully been decided. The gnomes refuse to help, and the dryads normally follow them. But now it’s different. The dryads feel the burden to act in accordance with the Realm Guardians. War is eminent in the Realm of Earth. It has recently come to the attention of the Realm Guardians that the chaos dwarves are amassing forces around a weapon of great destructive power. The dwarves are flocking around this relic as if it was sent by the hands of Chaos himself, which it very well might have been. This one weapon they could use to bring the legislature of the Realm of Earth to its knees.”
“But that wouldn’t be so bad for the other races, would it?” Angelica asked. “Don’t all the races of all the realms live independent of humans?”
“That is how it was upon a time. Now there are no forbearers of the races that remember the time before the humans came, except maybe the averanym, but they choose not to speak of it.” Uthia shook her head, the velveteen softness of her hair catching on the rougher bark of her skin, which randomly stuck out at precarious angles like it would on an actual tree. “Now racial government and human politics are so closely linked that it would be a great struggle for the multitude of races to learn a life without humans. Only the strongest of the races would survive the plight, for some races are very dependent on humans for their survival, though they weren’t always.”
“What is this weapon?” Joya asked.
“The Realm Guardians do not know much about it yet, but they know its name: Wyrders’ Bane.” Uthia’s voice held a shiver of fear.
“You’ve heard of this weapon?” Maeven asked.
“I have. Wyrders’ Bane is not part of the Wyrding Ways, but instead the opposite of the Ways. It is the antagonist of wyrd.”
“What can you tell us about it?” Joya pressed, going back to eating.
Some of the dryads, settling in for the night, began to take root around them. They lifted their arms high and the change began. The fingers of their hands extended from twigs to branches, and the leaves all along their hands grew longer and more mature. The toes of their feet lengthened and burrowed into the ground like roots. They closed their eyes, and their mouths and facial features looked more like the knots and scars on the surface of trees. Before long one might think they were only looking at a small tree instead of a once moving, lucid being. Others just chose to sit and listen instead of taking root as their sisters did.
“I can tell you a great deal about it. What would you want to know about such a foul object?”
“Everything, but mainly, what is its power?” Joya asked.
“Very well,” Uthia agreed. “The chaos dwarves consider wyrd and all wyrders to be a plague that needs curing. Wyrders’ Bane is their answer to that plague.”
“So they are looking to get rid of all wyrders and wyrd?” Angelica asked.
“Very much so.” Uthia nodded. “The unforeseen problem is that when non-wyrding people learn of this, and with the current state of wyrd…” Uthia just held up her hands, and all of them understood that she thought the general populace of humans might rally on the side of the dwarves.
“Well that’s dumb,” Joya piped in. “All creatures have wyrd in one fashion or another.”
“But it’s only the wyrd of one fashion that it affects, not the other.”
None of them understood what she meant, and so Uthia explained.
“They seek to eradicate the Wyrding Ways within people, not the wyrd that runs the courses of the lives of the races. They seek to make the Wyrding Ways come to an end, not to end fate.”
“Who would make such a horrible weapon?” Angelica asked.
“It was not made; it was found many ages ago when the chaos dwarves lived within the Barrier Mountains. It was mined along with their ore. They found out how it worked nearly by accident. A long time ago, even the chaos dwarves had wyrders among their community. When the stone was found that all ended. Some of the wyrder dwarves escaped to their brothers, the dwarves of Nependier, where they were either killed or taken in. Not all the wyrders were that lucky, and instead became experiments for the inquisitive minds of the loathsome chaos dwarves.
“Eventually they began to regard the stone as holy, and they reasoned that if Wyrders’ Bane was holy, then those it afflicted must then be less than holy. It was after all the wyrders had been killed or run off from their community — though death was preferable in their minds — that the stone had been given its name.
“It had fallen out of their hands years back, when the first Guardian of the Realm of Earth, Darenous, pleaded his case before Aaridnay, and the Eradication Edict was drafted. Without the aid of their hideous stone they fell rather easily to the human forces and were driven out of the Barrier Mountains and their Council Building, what is now known as the Guardians’ Keep.”
“And now it’s back,” Maeven said.
Uthia nodded. “Yes, it’s back, and with it the numerous chaos dwarves who are joining forces for the first time since they were driven out of the mountains will be a great opposition for wyrders. Now that they have the stone, they will render the wyrders worthless so they will have to be fought on their own terms, in normal combat, which they are proficient at. There is rumor that the trolls are siding with them; together they will outnumber the humans three to one.”
“But the other races can still use their wyrd, can’t they?” Angelica asked.
“All of the races will be affected, and many of us will die from the effects of the stone itself. Some races were made from the wyrd of humans, and are in essence living wyrdings. They will take a heavy toll.”
“And yet you throw yourself into the thick of it?” Jovian scoffed.
“What would you do?” Uthia asked. “In point of fact, what
are
you doing at this very moment? You are going up against insurmountable odds to preserve your family, which is no more than we are doing.” Uthia seemed to be ruffled for the first time, and her thick black lips thinned into a frown. “We will be not throwing all our might at the chaos dwarves, however, and will instead leave behind a fraction of our numbers to carry on our race if we all die on the field of battle. We know that if all of us were to die it would affect the Realm Guardians greatly, and we would not add another burden to them in this time of need.”