Calign pulled its tongue back into its mouth. For a moment it had stood there, squatting by the edge of the river, the tip of its tongue peeking from its lips an inch away from the side of its scum-covered hand, but there was no lick-mark there. Its nose was sensitive enough. [colour=aquamarine]”Go back,”[/colour] it murmured. The water shuffled. [colour=aquamarine]“You have travelled far enough, gergaji.”[/colour] A pulse, stronger than the river’s natural flow, and the tip of a blade emerging from the water. [colour=aquamarine]“And thank you.”[/colour] The blade shuffled and disappeared, the tip of the sawfish’s dorsal fin following a slow, restful path back down with the water. It smelled the scum again. The horned suchus nuzzled it, and it held its hand out to the beast’s mouth, where it was licked clean. It was just murk, after all. Murk and scum from the bottom of a river. Upriver murk. [colour=aquamarine][i]Murk, upriver.[/i][/colour] What kind of river was dark at its birth, and washed clean at its languid final hour? Calign let its hand fall. The pine and cedar flexed their bundled fingers above. The world it had left behind, the world of sowing and fishing, praising and building and taming, that was alien. New forces worked on new creatures of the latter gods. Fire, prolific, speech, abundant. The beast called Man wrought the world around it with deliberate power. Akkylonia had nothing of the natural silence of Calign’s wood. And this place, too, was alien. Calign sang a high trill from its throat. There was a second of lizardly scrabbling before its companion arrived in a surreal leap, catching the air and gliding like a dart from the canopy on the webbing between its limbs. [colour=aquamarine]“Grow swiftly,”[/colour] whispered Calign. [colour=aquamarine]“We have far to go, and these are no woods for the naive.”[/colour] [hr] Indeed, the spirit had found signs that this thickening forest was not for unwary feet to tread within the first day. The ashen circle of a dead fire spread its acrid smell amid a sparse little copse overgrown with leathery fungi, though the proudly standing undergrowth and the wide domains of fat, lazy brown spiders stood to show that it had been some time since flames had danced among the looming trees. Yet the mound of charred bones was still there in plain view, untouched by such beasts as walked on four legs, and the skull propped upon a sharpened stick, in menace, ritual or idle jest, clearly had been split open not by tooth, but by stone. No, it would not have been well for one not hardened to peril to venture ahead as it did; but perhaps it would have been easier upon the mind. By night and by day, whether under the inattentive eye of the sun distantly seeping through the treetops or by the ghostly light of the moon, which made the gnarly firs and ancient oaks come alive with illusory shadows, things more lively stirred and watched all around. One less wise to the ways of the wild might not have noticed them, but to Calign’s senses they came almost deliberately, as if to flaunt how strange their nature was to it. Those winged feathery things up high, with sharp black beaks or great staring eyes, cried and sang in harmonies unusual for something that flew, and the grunting brown shapes that shuffled through brush and dead leaves were much too large for beasts clothed in fur. And all of them watched, whether quietly staring until it was out of sight or just throwing a dim-eyed glance from afar before disappearing who knew where. The woods knew strangers when they saw them. It was Buaya that took the greatest advantage of this. Repulsed by nothing and fearing little, the great horny beast tore up thickets, broke roots, ripped into mounds and tussocks to drag up snarling jaw-worms to chew on. Where the creeping things scattered from its feet, it rasped its crocodile hiss to make them scatter faster. Calign came to rest an arm on its horn when some shadow of a shadow of a living thing peered at them, calming its own heart with the dumb boldness of a beast among beasts. Strangely, those very waters that had seemed most odd to it at first were where life took on more familiar shapes. The rivers of the forest became darker and grimier the further it went, and more and more often they twisted into painful dead ends where they grew rank and choked by weeds. Their denizens were slimy, bony things, snapping pikes and bloated carps and sleepy long-whiskered catfish, not all of which were bad for eating. But a breath of a more familiar world lingered on their muddy banks or among the green scum that carpeted their surface. Squat little creatures that belonged neither to land nor to water puffed their wart-speckled throats when the suchus trod within sight. They spoke to the spirit. [i]Come on,[/i] they croaked in their simple little tongue, [i]come on,[/i] and then crawled away, while far ahead more of them picked up the song. Calign picked up a toad out of habit. It was the toads that, after days of shuffling through the woods without meeting anything but those outlandish beasts, marked a certain spot along one of those small, dark branching streams. It split in two after a bend, one side losing itself behind Calign’s back, another burying itself in a quiet marsh. That was already strange enough, for the toads did not sing there as they had been wont to every time until then. Instead, they called - [i]come on, come on[/i] - from somewhere beyond the approaching bend, hidden behind a wall of coarse grey trunks. No, not approaching. Beyond the bend, the murky water flowed, thick and sluggish, but flowed still - upstream. [i]Come on, come on.[/i] Sorcery. Buaya went to lap from the water and Calign stopped it. They were deep in the realm of foreign powers, dredged from the days of alien gods. The lizard had fallen behind to forage in safer trees. [colour=aquamarine]“Tell them,”[/colour] said the pale witch to the toad in its hands, [colour=aquamarine]“that we are coming. Tell them that I suffer no foes.”[/colour] It threw the toad to the mud and watched it go. Its compatriots stayed there beside it, saying [i]come on, come on.[/i] [colour=aquamarine][i]Silence,[/i][/colour] croaked Calign deep in the back of its throat, and there was silence. One after another, the toads slid into the unnaturally flowing river, and let themselves be carried away towards its hidden source. Just as the last of them disappeared, the stream stood still, as if frozen by a winter that had brought all of its chill to bear in a single moment, before stirring again, just as suddenly. Now, however, it ran as it is meet for streams to do, out from the heart of the forest, past the bend and towards the mire. Something else followed it. A long shape walked out from behind the arm of tangled trees that obscured the river’s further origin, very tall and very old. A woman, but not such as the spirit had seen before. Her hair was dire and tangled, of the colour of a birch tree felled by wintry winds, and her skin was like the silt at the bottom of a volcanic lake, dark and rugose. Though she was clothed, like the inhabitants of Akkylonia, her brown robe was rougher and coarser than even what the humble labourers of that land had worn. There was a slight limp to her step, but she did not lean on the gnarly staff she carried. Rustles and cracking steps among the trees. She was not alone. “Well, well,” the great hag’s wide nostrils swelled, and she spoke in a voice raspy like the call of a big toad, “what do I smell? Spirit of the under-wood, of ferns and moss. Who is here?” She squinted through the rays of dusty sunlight. “Will I cook you and eat you in my pot?” Calign thought hard about this. [colour=aquamarine]“That’s not very likely.”[/colour] The little spirit sent its gaze across the stream and sought the eyes that lay beneath that broad and wrinkled brow, and matched them, its ears high, the flowers of its antlers folded, listening. [colour=aquamarine]“You know who you’re talking to. You’ve said it aloud. Its name will wait on yours.”[/colour] Its hand rested on the back of the now-still suchus. “Heh! Come into my house and ask for things like that?” the crone chuckled, rubbing her jutting chin with her staff and briefly revealing a mouth full of long, yellow teeth. “But if I got yours that easy, it’s only fair I don’t make it hard to get mine. I’m Kulgha, and I’ve been for a long time. You are my guest, here,” she waved a hand at wood and stream, scattering old crumbs and crusts from her sleeve. From that gesture, she passed smoothly into rummaging in a leather satchel at her side, from which she produced a dead flower. Though wilted and missing several petals, it was of a kind with those that rested on Calign’s antlers. “And maybe you knew to act like one, after all, if you’re the one who sent that little gift to our feast.” [colour=aquamarine]“Perhaps,”[/colour] said the foreign spirit. [colour=aquamarine]“I am Calign. Magos. Where’s my bird?”[/colour] “Your bird?” Kulgha prodded at her upper lip with her jaw, thinking, “I’ve seen a lot of birds, but none as said it was yours, [i]mag[/i]. But that gift that came to us, it flew like a bird and smelled like your swamp-ox.” She nodded at Buaya, or maybe pointed that way with her nose. The animal shuffled. “It didn’t taste like a real one. Is that what you call a bird?” [colour=aquamarine]“It had feathers.”[/colour] It waved the matter away with one hand. [colour=aquamarine]“You ate my bird. So be it. You are Kulgha, elder of the twisted thorn and toad. You know… of things that I do not.”[/colour] “Maybe I do, though I thought everyone knew what you do with a bird.” The hag shook her head, as if recalling things long gone by. “So you’ve come for that, to ask of me? Many used to, once, but the people here lost the habit when they’d heard all I would tell them, and outsiders…” she flicked her fingers, vexed or maybe disappointed, “I’ll just say you’re the first who’s sought me out in a very long time. But I’m not like any other crone, I don’t forget, hah! If you want to ask and hear, there’s a lot I can tell you, if you’ll break bread and share a drink.” Calign, who had seen bones, did not doubt her. [colour=aquamarine]“I’m sure you will say more if I bring food. Have you a city, like the builders to the south?”[/colour] “They have a city now?” Kulgha picked at a hairy wart on her cheek with a pensive look, “It’s really been too long. I’ve never needed one - I said this’s my home, and so it is. People here have their huts, their houses, many together, sometimes. But that’s not a city, is it? No, must be this just isn’t a place for cities.” She glanced over her shoulder. “I do have a fire, though, and a pot - not for you, don’t worry. You’re my guest, so come and sit. I’ll get a dry throat if I talk much more without a sip.” [colour=aquamarine]“You know how to live,”[/colour] said Calign. [colour=aquamarine]“I’ll weary you no longer. Tell the tribe about you that they need not hunt long today.”[/colour] The spirit turned its body, still facing the crone across the river. [colour=aquamarine]“We will sit when the moon is high.”[/colour] “My old bones will be like dust by then if I have to wait that long, but we’ll have it your way. When the moon is high,” cackled the witch, and dipped her hand into her pouch again. The wilted flower vanished, and instead of it there came out a thick ball of coiled woolen thread and what looked like dried-out sinew, wound around a polished shard of bone. With an almost nonchalant swipe of the wrist, she tossed it to the spirit over the stream in a leisurely arc. “You’re quick on your feet, so if you’re too far by then this will lead you straight back to me.” Calign caught the talisman without breaking his gaze, and nodded. [hr] A strange forest it was, where water ran uphill. No stranger that than the way the woods only woke up after dark. Not even the trees seemed to rustle as they did when the sun was out. Night had brought strength upon the owl, the rat, and the razorback boar. It had brought strength to Calign, also. When its bare feet touched the moss beyond the canopy-hall of the Beast Hag, its hands were clean, but only because it had washed them. Its footsteps out in the forest beyond were sparse and widely scattered. These woods were weird but they were [i]woods,[/i] the stalemate of ancient trees and the home of all things that creepeth upon the earth, not the brickish never-alive machinations of the men of the river, and indeed of the huts. The time it had taken to hunt had taught it much, though it bore no map of the forest, not even in its brain; such things were the tools of men who thought like men and not like wizards. Such men did not study the shape-language of boughs, nor see its delicate fractal patterns of growth and death for anything but chaos. Calign wondered what would happen if it brought its new knowledge against she who was born fluent. With some examination, it set Kulgha’s token of bone and thread down on a bed of old leaves, where it began to twitch. Calign watched as the ball of yarn awoke, recalling life and animation to which it no longer had any right, and roll with feverish vigour back through the trees towards its master, leaving a still thread for the spirit to follow. Buaya had carried little of the burden of hunting and so was enlisted as packhorse. The sticks laden across her enormous shoulders were strung with young sturgeon and fat lizards, and upon her back, tied together by the neck, lay a bounty of partridges and wood-ducks. Missing was much of the more common and perhaps better fare of the woods, the doe and boar and queer standing-hare, and in their stead was a thorn-bush heavy laden with impaled scorpions and crays, and snakes of unusual size. When the last strand of yarn and sinew was unwound, its now lifeless end pointed to the shore of a river bend that had changed little since the first time Calign had seen it. Even the impossible flow of the dark waters, now silvery and shimmering in the pale moonlight like the flank of one great fish, was once more turned towards its birth where the rocky strand parted it, or had perhaps stayed like that all along. In the liveliness brought by dusk, the crystalline rush of opposite waves was all the more clear. At times, it seemed to take on a new meaning, maybe a voice of fear and warning, maybe a lament for far shores it could not reach. A familiar call broke through the bound waters’ murmuring. [i]Come on,[/i] said the toads, [i]come on.[/i] The magos guided Buaya into the bewitched waters and beyond them. Kulgha was waiting, a huge, shaggy shadow that only stood out from the looming trees because it shifted and moved against the breeze. She smelled differently from before, not of hoary age, dusty pelts and dried blood, but of pungent ash, freshly butchered meat and a myriad of herbs, fruits and berries that even now were difficult to trace. Her eyes, twice-sunken beneath her brow and the drape of night, could not be seen, but their gaze lay heavy on the spirit and its retinue as soon as they came into sight. A gnarly hand rose against the moon, greeting or beckoning. Her staff was nowhere to be seen. Calign barked, once, a short harsh advertisement of its presence and its nature. It presented its silhouette against Kulgha’s own, bearing the scent of fresh game and magnolia into the light of the gibbous moon. The hand waved it over in reply before sinking, and the great shade turned around and started shuffling back around the wooded outcropping, creaking over dry leaves. “Come on over,” like the first time, the hag’s raucous voice echoed that of her familiars. In the dark, the similarity was even more uncanny, as if the nightly air had given the words a reverb like that of a rubbery throat. “The pot’s on the fire, the meat is crisp and the brew is hot. Wouldn’t want it to burn out.” [colour=aquamarine]“Show me how you dine,”[/colour] said the spirit, approaching and following with its bloody haul. [colour=aquamarine]“I will join you.”[/colour] As soon as they turned past the old leaning trunk that hung closest to the water, the shadows were lit up with the fiery glow of stoked embers. Two beds of crackling wood and fizzling cinders, one long and one short, were spread over the sandy banks, loosely ringed with large stones so that the flames would not run rampant through the nearby forest. On the smaller circle there rested a low, round-bellied cauldron, steaming with a thick, aromatic green brew. The larger roasting-fire, wide and stretched enough to resemble a burial mound, was a clutter of skewers, frying-plates and simple warming stones, all smoking and sizzling with woodland game - if indeed it was only that - and shallow-river fish. The witch dipped a wooden cup into the cauldron as she shuffled past it, without so much as flinching when her fingers briefly touched the heating liquid, and came to crouch by the ashen bed. With a frothing sip, she downed the cup’s contents, then snatched and bit from a shin-bone directly out of the fire and motioned for Calign to sit without interrupting her chewing. “Phut uph your bitsh an’ have them roasht,” between her full mouth and her jutting teeth, her speech was harder to make out than ever, “E’ll be ready by when we’re done with mine.” Calign saw to the business of skewering a gutted lizard. As the reptile’s fatty tail began to drip and sizzle onto a copper pan, it busied itself roughly stripping some remaining unplucked birds and adding them, with the fish, to the cauldron. The scorpions it ate raw. [colour=aquamarine]“Strange herbs in your greatpot,”[/colour] said Calign, the warmth of the fire soaking into it, softening its face into something almost human. [colour=aquamarine]“Things that I can’t name. Where are your people?”[/colour] The hag swallowed a grotesquely large mouthful before answering. “Out afield. In the woods, under the mountains, over the hills. Up here, everyone’s my people, ‘least when they feel like it. I’d have my hands full if I looked after them all, but I’m not their [i]babka[/i], not really.” She took another loud crunching bite. “You mean the ones you heard last time, they always got something to do when the moon’s an eye. Better! Means more of the table for us, eh?” Her long, jagged nails flashed like pools of refractive water for a moment as she flicked them through a rising tongue of flame, scattering it into sparks and smoke. When it cleared, a wooden cup akin to hers sat on a flat rock within Calign’s reach - if indeed it had not been there all along. “Brew’s the best of the season,” the clawlike nails pointed at the fuming cauldron, “Some of it you won’t find outside some places only I can go. Boil and drink, the meat’s dry on its own.” [colour=aquamarine]“...Something to do when the moon’s an eye,”[/colour] murmured Calign, taking the cup and stroking its wooden surface with its fingertips. Even under Kulgha’s advice, it spent some time picking meat off the lizard before it finally filled its bowl. [colour=aquamarine]“You’re the one the brooks fear when they turn their course away. What grows where the rivers run in circles?”[/colour] It stared down at the meaty, herbal broth. It smelled of small lives stolen for their vigour. Its surface was dark, brown and green, infused with the woods and leaves, like the streams. Calign met the shaded eyes of its senior and drank. “There’s things, in the the places where the water goes like a heart that’s breathing, slow and sick,” the ancient’s gaze was hidden in the sunken hollows of her face, wrinkled but not sagging, like an owl staring out from the cavity of an old tree, “Things that are old, older than me, sometimes. Many of them can’t be spoken about because they don’t have names. What do you call the grass that hares cut when the fog comes down? A bird that’s never seen the inside of an egg? Something that can jump taller than the forest? Things like them, you can’t just hear, you have to see. It’s not easy. Nobody else than me knows how to walk there and come back. But sometimes,” she idly picked a half-chewed chunk from between her teeth, “I can bring some of these things out and show them. It’s always a good time when people meet something from the deep places. You’re never sure how they’re going to feel it.” The light of the embers glinted off the bottom of the sunken eye-hollows. Calign could see now that the look in them was intent, curious. Expectant. Calign drained its cup and cracked the bones, then filled it again. It took the snakes and lizards and stripped their bubbling white flesh with its teeth, drinking bowl after bowl of Kulgha’s sup. Errant feathers floated in the broth, nudged by the rising of crays and fish that bobbed, dead and yet swimming in the flickering twilight. And the shadows grew longer. Kulgha stoked the fires and Calign feasted and its beast slept a sleep that gave no rest. Bones piled around it, some picked, some charred, some still laden with shreds of flesh cooked and raw. Scorpions twitched on their impaling thorns. Scorpions twitched in the fire. Scorpions twitched on the earth. Magnolias scattered over the dirt like snow. The coals did not shine long enough to obscure the whiteness of the moon in their petals. The feast continued. The fire died. The world became too cold and dark to speak. A mat of filthy hair obscured its face. A wooden canopy creaked above Calign, rooted in no tree. Buaya grimaced and shuddered in its nightmares. Living wood clashed with dead as cold winds drove the branches of Kulgha’s world against the blades and claws of the imposter that stretched its fingers into the sky. Bloated was the spirit when it stood, heaving, shuddering under the terrible weight of ten dozen dozen antlers that pierced the woods above, dripping with the shreds of skin and flesh they had torn away with them. There was a crack of knees against earth as it collapsed forwards into the hell of bone and blossoms and the bile that fell from its open mouth. It seized its clothes, and the sound of tearing fabric could not hide the greater rip of skin. [hr] [i]Father, what cries out in the night? Its voice is like the bear. Father, what tree quakes there, in the grove of the hag? It cries out in pain, Father. Can’t you see it shaking in the light of the pale moon? [b]Quiet, son. There are witches about.[/b] I’m scared, Father. Father, it is walking...[/i] [hr] Gentle sunlight warmed Calign’s pale face, casting filtered patterns through its hair, clean and soft as lush moss. It set Buaya’s smooth white skull down upon the ashes and bones of the fire. A spire of lichen cast a queer shadow across the canopy, barely visible from below, sprouting from a nest of wet growth in the broken boughs of an enormous quillwort, itself rising from the shattered corpse of a clubmoss planted in a fern. A magnolia so crushed as to be almost a shrub was the bed of the broken stack of dying primitives, where the rest of Buaya’s bones lay at rest, the white plates of her armour still nestled in the familiar shape of her squat reptilian body. It was a chilly morning. Nearby, long, irregular rasps of nails on metal rang out, like sharp rocks in the flow of the awakening birdsong. Kulgha was scraping the last, caked residue of broth from the bottom of the cauldron. She pulled her long fingers out of the pot, passed them between hoary, arid lips, plunged them in again, another screech. A frown hovered over her brow. Eyes that had watched and waited through the whole night squinted in the cold rays of dawn. “Dreams are something strange,” she said, still intent on the pot, “They’re like the wind. You can’t touch them, but you can call them and make them come, if you know the way. Many can find them if they want, few can make others dream. No one can make the world dream. Only in some of the old places, it can happen. That’s the way it is.” She did not look up. “You’re not of the living folk, are you? You’re like those places, old and strong.” Her mouth broke into a crooked grin. “Didn’t know they could feast as good as me.” [colour=aquamarine]“Only here.”[/colour] Calign sifted white ash through its fingers. [colour=aquamarine]“Only with you. I am ill with this place, it rots me. If I stay here any longer I will rip it off my skin with my teeth and keep ripping. Two bullfrogs cannot share a hole.”[/colour] It lifted its hands and the ash fell away, revealing a blossom. Its eyes turned aside and locked with Kulgha’s over the rim of her great cauldron. [colour=aquamarine]“But you know that. Which came first: you, or your dens in the dark?”[/colour] “That’s the hardest question,” the hag gave a rasping chuckle as she set the now wholly empty pot aside. “Once, they were there, and I wasn’t. They were there when I was young, long ago. Then I became old, as old as them. I took some of what they are into myself, and the count of their winters became mine. That’s why I can make the rivers run to their birth, and my days crawl backwards, so that I won’t ever die. Like them, everything I take, I can make mine. That’s what you must be feeling, the hunger of the woods.” She lifted a charred bone from the crumbled embers, snapped it over her finger like a twig, smelled the inside. “You weren’t born with it, nor are you prey. This is why you must go.” A pensive glance down the undisturbed flow of the stream. “South away, the forest is ancient and sated. Perhaps it speaks in a way you can answer.” The silence that followed was punctuated by a wet, weak thud as some bough of the alien tree broke under its own weight and fell into the leaves and worms of an older forest. Somewhere a blackbird was croaking. [colour=aquamarine]“I’m missing a beast,”[/colour] said Calign. [colour=aquamarine]“It won’t slow me down much. My footprints will be mud before moonrise.”[/colour] It stood and then hovered, the force of the gentle motion pushing it a few inches away from the ground. Its eyes were bright and still. [colour=aquamarine]“May the roots of our trees never tangle again,”[/colour] it said, its claws digging into the bark of the oak with which it pulled itself forward. [colour=aquamarine]“I can offer no other blessing.”[/colour] “May the wind bring your dream to far lands,” the crone croaked, and scattered dust of crushed bone into the rising breeze, “And may the road wear out your feet no more than thrice.” And then the spirit was gone. [hr] Calign found its lizard hunting at the riverside, its neck having grown so long now as to browse the shallow waters like a stork, the tip of its snout likewise razor-sharp. It shuffled when Calign trilled, yet did not raise its gaze from the mud. Curious, Calign stood beside it. [colour=aquamarine][i]Oh. Of course.[/i][/colour] The lizard startled like a skittish cat and leapt up to glide away on the skin between its toes and lengthening arms, leaving Cal alone to meet eyes with the amphibian. It was fat, black and warty, probably a giant of its kind. The poison in its meat was its only defense before Calign, but the toad showed no sign of startling. After all, it too was a predator. [hider=Notes] Calign enters Kulgha’s woods. Sensing danger, it sends its lizard(?) away. We see the forest and its creatures in some detail. Kulgha guides Calign into the forest and greets it with some of the local people that follow her. They briefly discuss the matter of the crunched dino bird. She proposes a feast for the two to talk more that night, and offers Calign a magical device to find her then. The feast begins but Kulgha’s local entourage is missing. The two discuss magic and the woods before Kulgha’s soup kicks in. Some magic happens. The next morning Calign interrogates her a little more, and they part ways. Buaya is no longer with Calign. The lizard is no longer very lizardy. [/hider]