I could see the sky, but for the trees.

Damn time goes by quickly when you're busy (busy mostly equalling: study, assignments and/or being sick - not necessarily in that order).

Still I feel bad for neglecting the blog, especially after my last spiel (I have been writing, I just like to get stories to a partially rounded off state before uploading - so that I don't cut them off right in the middle of a particular segment of plot) so I thought that I would give you something new (and comparatively longer than my last few updates) to chew over.

Just a few things before I get to it though:

- No it's not a continuation of the pirate story or an attempt at a play/play like dialogue - both those are coming along, but I started this up on a whim the other day and sort of got stuck in it.

- Yes it is fantasy - though is hopefully not terribly cliché (though undoubtedly I will have the clichés pointed to me).

- yes it is in a way part of the series that I have been working on/talking about for forever and ever - though it is not a main part, but is instead me playing with a new character (who may or may not be important) and their role (or lack there-of) in major events within the world/universe.

(As I think I have mentioned to people in the past - If I do at some point write this series I don't really want it to be a big unwieldy series, ala The Wheel of Time, but would instead be aiming for maybe a few smaller series of stories and stand alone novels set within the same universe (think Larry Niven's 'Known Space' series or Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels if you are in anyway familiar with them - which is a probably not given my current readership/me not really knowing anyone else who has read them).

Anyway without further nonsense, here is a story which I would like you to read, rip apart and generally criticise in a (possibly/hopefully) helpful way (also comments on last post would be cool too).


Wildwood

“Rowe!”

The boy froze, halfway over the fence.
“Where do you think you’re going!?”
Under his breath he cursed his bad luck. He was so close; he could almost touch the trees. He’d been so sure that he would be able to get away this time. So sure that she was too busy to pay attention to what he was doing, but now somehow he knew that she had been watching the whole time. She was always watching. He thought of the punishment to come and a hot and prickly sensation trickled down the back of his neck. There was no way that he was going to avoid the switch this time, not after being caught for the third time in almost as many weeks. He could hear her moving closer.
“What have a told you about going in there!” She was genuinely angry now. He swallowed, and then sighed under his breath. So it was going to be the usual lecture. He had heard it so many times now that he could almost quote her word for word: She would go on about how that now he was older he had to take on some responsibility. She would mention how sick his mother was. How he was causing her to worry. How that worry only made her condition worse. He hated her for saying that, knowing full well that he was not allowed to visit her had no way of knowing if it was true.
Normally he tried his best to ignore her, only coming back to attention when she came to mention his father and ‘what he would think’ or ‘what would he say’. It always came down to that and normally enough to drag him back in to line, normally. His father always knew when he was paying attention or not and a look of disapproval from him was always a hundred times worse than the switch his aunt seemed to prefer. He kept his back to her, hiding a grin.

His aunt had a fearsome temper when angered, which seemed to be most of the time as of late, but she had never been known for her originality. Always it was the same routine. He would have listened if the threat had any weight, if his father was here. But he wasn’t, he had left weeks earlier on business and would be away for weeks more; the fear of angering him was a distant one.
So, he thought, he may as well have some fun now, while he could get away with it. The old wood flexed as he completed his vault over the fence and then in an instant he was in amongst the trees. He could hear his aunt shrieking profanities; rushing towards the fence. She must be really angry now. Even more reason to disappear. He was running as soon as his feet hit the ground.

It didn’t take long for her voice to fade off into the distance; although this close to the village the trees were still relatively thin they had a way of muffling voices and making it sound as if people were in places that they were not. It was supposed to be like that all through-out the Wildwood, though the trees only began to thicken if you made it over the Northern Hedge and into the forest proper, something he had only done once before. In the outlying forest the distance between the trees meant that even from far away it was still easy to find the fingers of chimney smoke from the village drifting up lazily to clutch at the sky overhead; In the Wildwood proper you were lucky if you could see anything overhead besides the drapery of branch and leaf.

He knew no one would bother him for the rest of the afternoon. For reasons he had never understood the people from the village always avoided the Wildwood. The other children tried to explain it away with the usual ghost stories: sometimes the wood was a hiding place for murderers or madmen; sometimes it was home some sort of monster, or if they were feeling particularly imaginative, it was the forest itself that was out to get you, because it was haunted or old magicked or ensorcelled or whatever. The only thing the stories ever agreed on was that if you went too far in, it wasn’t too likely that you would ever be coming. For the most part Rowe ignored these stories. It doesn’t take much to scare children. What interested him more was the way the adults behaved: They simply ignored it. Never went in, never talked about it (unless they were telling their children to keep away from it). They even avoided looking at it; instead they seem to look through it or just at the fence that marked the border between forest and village. They went to a lot of effort to try and hide it, but Rowe knew that they too were afraid of the forest and that they had been afraid of it for so long that it had become habit forming. Firewood and lumber were brought all the way from the part of the wood that curled around the eastern side of the village, never from the Wildwood itself, even though it was right there in front of them. As far as Rowe knew, the only time an axe had ever touched Wildwood trees was when the fence had been built and that had been before his father had been born, when the trees near the village had been as thick as those further in. Before the villagers had cut and burnt the forest back. Making his way down one of the innumerable animal trails that wended their way through the young growth he could still see some of the left over traces of the fires; black scars on the trees which had by chance survived, and the desiccated remains of those that had not. Many of the more brittle ones had since collapsed into little more than piles of ash, either under their own weight and the simple passage of time or because they had been taken to with stone or branch and a youthful desire to break things when angry. But today was not one of those days. Instead he had just wanted to get away, away from the crowding and the heat of home and out the open, where the crisp air carried the hint of coming of cold and winter.

Eventually he came to his favourite place in the forest, a copse of elder trees which, huddled together, had somehow managed to make it through fires largely unscathed. With a sigh of relief he pushed his way through the thick knotting of branches and into the small glade hidden within. In a way it was like coming home, he had been coming here for years and the clearing was littered with things that he had found, made, or had simply wanted to keep hidden. Various attempted fishing poles were sat haphazardly by the small pond that bubbled up from somewhere underground - a few discarded fish bones lying in a rough fire-pit suggesting that at least one had at some point been successful. Out of habit more than hope he went down on hands and knees by the water’s edge, trying to see below the surface; it had been several weeks since he had seen, let alone caught, a fish. The water was cold and clear, but as usual it was empty. He wondered what had happened to them and hoped that he had not scared them all away. Though he had been much more likely bring them food than to catch one of them to feed himself, having only done so if he stayed the night and so missed dinner, something that had become increasingly common over the last few weeks. More often than not he would simply gather up some leaves and a cloak and sleep out in the open, but as it had grown colder that was becoming less and less comfortable and so instead he had put together a slightly more permanent area to bed down below the overhang of a large boulder that sat on the edge of the clearing. It was dry place to sleep but was not very comfortable, so he had ‘borrowed’ a sheepskin blanket from an old chest he had found in the attic. He sat down on the blanket and closed his eyes, wondering if it would be a good idea to stay the night again and wait until tempers had cooled off. Out of habit his hand moved to a small hollow in the rock face where he kept his more prized possessions. There were a few stones and odds and ends, pebbles with odd patterns and hard chucks of what looked like stone but let the light through when held up to the sun. The silver coin he had found one day when his father took him into town. Some feathers and some scavenged fish-hooks. Instinctively he grasped the handle of the heaviest weight he could find, bringing out the dagger that had been a gift from his Uncle he last time he had come down from one of the great cities in the North. Taking it from its sheath he tested the blade against his thumb, though not with enough force as to cut the skin (he had learnt that lesson within the first hour of owning the knife and it was for that reason that his aunt had decided that it was best that he not keep it – which was exactly why he had hidden it).
He slashed the short blade through the air experimentally, before sheathing it and tying it to his belt. The day was still young and he was starting to feel adventurous.
From the glade it was only a small trip to the Northern Hedge and he found himself wandering toward it before he knew where he was going. He found himself tingling with apprehension - If he was going to face another switching for going into the Wildwood he may as well actually go into the REAL Wildwood. Through the trees he could just make out The Midmost Mountains. He wondered if Wildwood stretched up all the way to meet them and, if they did, how long it would take him to walk there. Not for the first time he thought of running away. Maybe he could climb the mountain, or at least go and see if anyone lived there. His Uncle had told him of people in the far north, beyond the great inland sea, who lived in mountains. Though now, looking up at the snow-capped peaks, he was sure that it must be too cold to stay there for more than just a little while.

Slowly the trees began to thicken and grow taller. Gone entirely were the young saplings that made up the forest close to the village, here almost everything was old growth with no sign that the fires had ever touched them. Rowe found himself on edge, scared and excited at the same time. It was said that the animals grew strangely vicious this close in to the Wildwood proper and unlike all the other stories this was something he was inclined to believe. The last time he had crossed over The Hedge he was sure that he had seen a wolf, though he had been too taken by panic to really be sure. But, he told himself, he had been younger then and smaller and he had not had the dagger.

Then, all of a sudden the trees gave way and the Northern Hedge lay before him. If the other trees had been old, then these were truly ancient, but where their younger siblings had had room to spread out and grow in all directions the trees of the hedge instead sat shoulder to shoulder, with limbs that so closely intertwined that it was impossible to see what lay on the other side. He took a deep breath and pushed his way through.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust; everything was darker, with only brief slivers shining through the cracks in the leafy ceiling. The air was still, almost heavy, but still the trees seemed to sway to some unfelt breeze. Almost imitating them he began to shiver, though he was not sure whether he did so out of coldness or exhilaration.
He tried to move in a straight line, knowing that if he lost his sense of direction that he would most likely end up getting lost entirely, but that was easier said than done. Like the outer woods there were trails left by animals, but here they seemed much more chaotic and indecisive, crisscrossing over each other and often looping back upon themselves. The birds too acted oddly, as he heard no calls or cries of warning as approached, only the soft fluttering of wings and the moving of shadows.
Very slowly he got the impression that something was watching him. It started as a tingle on the back of his knew, a vague concern about what could be behind him and then gradually began to develop into something more. He had stopped to investigate a small stream that slipped almost silently between the trees when the feeling surged so strongly that he went into an instant panic; turning this way and that, clutching the knife and trying to see everywhere and everything at once.
He felt hot and clumsy and sick all at the same time. His eyes flickered from tree to tree and he began to wonder if this had been such a good idea. Something moved behind him; brushed against his shoulder. He bolted.
He ran and ran and ran. Absolute terror ripping each breath from his lungs. Branches whipped at his arms, at his face, he felt one or two cut the skin but was too pre-occupied to care. Not once did it occur to him that he was running in the wrong direction. He stumbled up and over a hill and into light and open air. He fell.
Something poked at him, rolling him the right way up. People were talking. He groaned, trying to push the needles of light back from his eyes. He blinked. He was on a road and there were people everywhere. A voice in the back of his head began to laugh. There are no roads in the Wildwood. It’s supposed to be secret. Full of dark things. Not full of people.

One of the men, and he realised that most of them were men, jabbed at him with his boot and said something. He looked up at him, at his dark green livery and the plate of burnished steel that was wrapped around his chest. Soldiers. Soldiers on a road in the Wildwood.
“Hey kid! I said ‘where the hell did you come from?’”

Rowe began to mumble dumbly in response when the soldier looked away and snapped rigidly to attention as a man in a dark blue tunic moved through the other men, likewise at attention, to come and see what was going on. He looked from the soldier to Rowe, crossed his arms and made a surprised but yet unworried exclamation.

“Huh.”
He turned back to the soldier and asked, “Where did he come from?” The soldier seemed to somehow go more rigid. The man in blue had bolts of lightning stitched into his sleeves.

“I was just asking him sir. Doesn’t seem to talk.”
The man looked back at him.

“From one of the nearby villages by the looks of it, though I thought they were all supposed to be terrified of coming in here.”

Rowe tried to say something, but the patted him oddly on the head and then turned to move away.

“Not that it really matters though. Seeing as what we’re doing here isn’t exactly on the books and we’re running short of time, we can’t really have him running back to whatever hovel he crawled out of and telling everyone he can that he saw a Magister and some of the imperial watch traipsing around deep in the Wildwood.”
The man’s voice seemed to echo and repeat itself. Rowe, found himself yawning deeply and then in an instant his eyes rolled back into his head and he went limp from head to toe.
“Just tie him up or something so that he doesn’t try and run when he wakes up.”
One of the soldiers nodded and the Magister smiled sadly.

“Looks like we’ve got another volunteer for our little trip. Poor kid.”



TBC

Next post should be up sometime next week - either pirate or play, I promise - though I do have a weekend away and essay proposals and a presentation to get through first so we'll see how we go...