Falling without landing is an extremely strange sensation.
It’s not that we fell forever, it’s that at some point we were no longer falling. And yet at no point were we abruptly stopped by contact with the ground.
Nevertheless, Hester and I found ourselves each on all fours on a patch of dirt amidst a tangle of roots. He looked about as dizzy as I felt, and it was what felt like an eternity (but was probably only a minute or two) before either of us had regained enough composure to kneel up and survey our surroundings.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.
We knelt beneath a towering oak tree. It was enormous, out of proportion of anything I had ever seen, taller than any building. Rivaling a mountain. Or perhaps, I thought, it was a normal tree and I had become the size of a mite. Its colossal roots twisted and undulated out for a great distance around us. A canopy of golden leaves glinted above us, bright and vivid like the setting sun reflected on the sea. And beyond that was the night sky: beautiful stars suspended with infinite depth in the midnight black firmament. There was no sunlight to cause the metallic leaves to shine so, but so they did.
This tree marked the center of a clearing, and a treeline of large but not quite as titanic trees surrounded it. Their leaves, too, glittered in the strange non-light, as if to rival the stars above them. The forest clearly went on for some ways. A few other gigantic trees could be seen towering above their peers in the distance.
We sat in silence—perfect, still silence, for not a single bird, bug, or breeze could be heard—for another minute or two, before Hester finally said, “where could Theodric have gone?”
Some part of me resented that he had asked the question and interrupted my meditation on the otherworldly beauty of this place. But he was right. We had something important to do.
“Anteianum,” a clear, still voice said.
Hester and I looked at each other. Then around. Then behind us, at the tree.
“I am here,” said the tree, from no mouth.
We stared at the gargantuan trunk.
“I am not so different than you. I am as Ae wills me. I am a will and a way.”
“You’re a…” I halted, suddenly realizing. “You are in the college. That was your bough, or perhaps root, we touched. That was not a table at all.”
“Indeed.”
“You are a will and a way, you say,” Hester said. “You are a… door… that Ae has willed to have a spirit?”
“Yes,” said the spirit. “I am a spirit first, in truth. I am here to make the way. How better to make a way than to become the way?”
“Huh,” I said, having a hard time grasping all of this.
“It is well. This is your first passage. As Ae wills it, perhaps you shall come to know this place better.”
I looked at the beauty around and above me. “I hope so. Say, this isn’t our night sky, is it?”
“Well marked. It is the same firmament, but different stars may be seen within it from here.”
I bit my lip, struggling to fit that knowledge within my working understanding of astronomy and astromancy. I hadn’t ever had the chance to see it, of course, but the great astronomers of the east wrote that the stars visible in the night sky of Cthonus (the “Umbral sky”) were different than those we are familiar with (the “Astral sky”). Did that mean, I wondered…?
“The Astral and Umbral skies have many more siblings. Few have studied them.”
“Interesting… wait.” I hadn’t said anything about the Astral and Umbral skies. How had…?
“Your thoughts are plain upon your mind.”
I had a million thoughts all at once, and I had the good sense to be quite embarrassed.
“Are everyone’s… thoughts… so plain to you?” asked Hester.
“To anyone in this realm. It is a place where thought and will flow freely. You need only learn to see and feel them.”
“We have a favor to ask,” declared Hester.
“You do.”
“Did Librariarch Theodric pass through… you? Here?”
“Yes.”
“Will you help us find him?”
“Of course. He was in flight from his sins, and you are engaged in righteous pursuit. As I have said, he made for Anteianum. He seeks refuge.”
“You did say that, didn’t you,” I mused. “But where?”
“Refuge. Conspirators.” Hester breathed.
“Just so,” said the spirit. “He has confidantes in the city to whom he flees. It was not clear to me who or where.”
“You have been very generous and helpful, friend,” Hester said. A thought popped into my head, unbidden, about whom else our friend might be helpful to.
“Yes, the order will be interested in finding the warrior who bested their understudy,” said the spirit. “They would surmise, even without my help, that you seek the apostate the same as they do. I will justly tell them the truth of what I have seen here. They will know that you are people of good intent.”
“The order?” I asked.
“It is a closely guarded secret, and I shall say no more. They serve Ae, as do you.”
“Then we should be going, ere they arrive. What is the path to Anteianum?” Hester asked, practically striking a pose to frame his graceful, conversation-closing initiative.
“My lowest branch points toward another of the tallest trees in this forest. Go there and speak with them. Should you lose your direction, there are twin red stars that sit high in the sky in a direction you may reckon as north. Anteianum is east of here, just as in the Mundus Medias.”
“And before we go… where are we?” I asked.
“The Halls.”
I had thousands of questions for the honorable spirit of the way, but we had an urgent mission to undertake. Theodric was a few hours ahead of us already, and every opportunity we gave him to widen that gap increased our chances of losing him… and, I worried, our chances of learning more about the location of the Great Work. Hester, however, had implacable faith. He was certain that the gods would not allow us to lose Theodric, and he was certain that, if we did, the gods would grant us the insight to carry on with the quest nonetheless. This was an extremely curious argument in the alternative, I thought, but having weighed that observation and tried it on for size, I decided to keep it to myself.
Instead, as we walked through the beautiful and perfect stillness of the Halls, I shared some of my many questions.
“Does anything habitate here, do you think?” I asked aloud.
“Rabbit-ate…?”
“Live. Do any animals live here?”
“Why animals? Perhaps people.”
“Not very many good places to sit.”
“Why not the shade of every stately tree?” Hester gestured broadly around.
“You know what I mean. And besides, what shade? No sun nor moon lights this forest.”
“Fair. Perhaps it lights itself.”
I considered this. “The leaves, maybe?”
We both glanced up. “Seems possible,” Hester said.
“No animals, though,” he continued, after a few seconds’ silence. “We’d hear them.”
“Suppose so. No animals, no breeze…”
“‘A place where thought and will flow freely,’ that tree said. No animals will to be here?”
“Or nobody wills them to be here. Or someone wills them not to be here.”
We carried on in silence as we made our way through the trees, wondering which of them might be watching, and what they might will.
When we arrived at the great tree that we had been guided to, we found ourselves quickly at an impasse.
I cleared my throat. “Hello?” No response was forthcoming.
Hester stepped forward and said, “noble spirit, we seek the path to Anteianum.” He, too, was met with silence.
Nonetheless, I felt a tremendous presence before us. I glanced over at Hester. The tense look on his face told me he agreed.
“My thanks,” he said to the titanic tree, with as much rigid formality as he could gird two words with. Then he stepped forward and touched the bark with his bare hands.
What happened next was almost completely unaccountable. At the time it was so alien that it essentially bounced off of my perception entirely, and I was unable to retain any useful impression of what had unfolded. I blinked, something happened (but what?) and he was gone.
Having had a few more opportunities to study events like this, I am now empowered to describe them a bit more effectively. What happened was that he touched the bark, and in that instant he began traveling. He did not travel up or down or forward or backward. He instead traveled out. He was within something, and he began to come out of that, and has he did so, he faded from view (myself, of course, still being within). The sensation was almost as though he were rapidly traveling into the distance, but if objects in the distance were perceptible with more clarity than objects nearby. And if the distance were physically quite close to me.
I’ve done it as much justice as I can do in my meager, vulgar hand. If that description leaves you wanting, you’ll just have to see it for yourself sometime.
Once I had gathered myself and it had sunk in what had happened, I took one last look at the golden glory around me. Each of those giant trees, a nexus to the realm. Each a spirit, each perhaps millennia old if their physical forms held any clues. And the smaller trees? What secrets did they hold?
But that would be for another time. For now, I reached out to the silent spirit before me, and asked to take its way.