Water gurgled and glimmered in Anise's blue light. Tall grasses swayed, and critters rushed away from her feet into burrows and under roots. All around the forest buzzed, creaked, hissed and croaked with the sounds of night. A breeze sighed in the leaves overhead; blue reflections shimmered.
Simon would see a different scene through his one eye: gray shadows moved, ethereal, between the trees. Like smoke, they formed and then dissipated, never still. The gray spirits followed alongside the trio, keeping pace, always just outside the reach of the blue light.
One of those shadows glowed brighter and bluer than the others. Simon would recognize that spirit, even though its shape was nonexistent: Tyaelaem was following them.
Spirit flowers grew plentiful among the grasses where Anise and Simon walked. To Anise they were barely noteworthy, but to Simon they shimmered a white-golden blue.
Reus walked a bit behind Simon, steadily watching the soothsayer with bright yellow eyes.
The lantern light dimmed. For a moment, Anise and Simon were left in near-darkness. The water gurgled beside them.
A winged shadow crossed overhead, momentarily blocking the starlight. The gryphon disappeared again over the treeline, toward the mountain.
After a moment the lantern brightened again, showing the way ahead clear and blue. It reflected oddly on something metallic, coppery and stained with lichen.
In the dark, sitting on a stone at the edge of the trees, was a robot or a sculpture of one. It had been there for many years without moving. It was carved with runes much like those from the clockwork trees.
Simon would sense a hollowness about that robot -- that something was missing inside it.
Anise would see something floating on the water ahead: a small boy in a frog mask stood on a raft, pushing it along with a bamboo pole. He stopped when he caught sight of the lantern's light, and he stood silently on the moving raft, watching Anise.
Should Anise peer into his mind with the lantern, she would find that he was not angry nor afraid -- Anise was wearing a mask, after all, and to the boy she was merely a Kith in a funny dress.
"Where you goin'?" he called out, in a tone that indicated he thought she was lost. He burped and reached under his mask to scratch his nose.
Meanwhile, under the Red Lantern
After awhile, the platform faded again. Without human touch it was only something very old and very weathered, overgrown with twisting roots and lichen, illuminated softly by the lantern's steady red glow.
The tree ticked and tocked.
"Are you in need of assistance, My Lady?" The voice was that of an energetic old man, but there was no one around.
And then, when Artemis turned her head, he was standing in a place that had been empty a moment ago. This was indeed a grinning old man with a beard and a mustache and receding gray hair, wearing beat-up old armor that was painted with sloppy runes. He was illuminated oddly by the red light, and it was never clear where his eyes were focused.
"Perhaps I may be of service."Meanwhile, under the White Lantern
Grayce awoke on a rotted wooden floor, in the belly of a rotted ship. It was quiet and dim. Peaceful. The floor did not move; the ship was beached and still.
A cool night breeze flowed in through splintered holes in the walls, bringing with it the sound of lapping water outside.
At the center of the room was the wide, twisting trunk of a great white tree. Its roots -- some half as tall as Grayce herself -- had spread winding throughout the floor and walls. The sagging ship appeared to be held upright by the strength of these roots.
A white light glowed softly from within the tree, shining through a natural hollow at the base of the trunk where the roots met. Something was ticking and clinking steadily inside.
For someone with such a small stature as Grayce, it would be easy to crawl inside the huge tree if she wished -- and if she did, she might see a brightly illuminated system of cogs and gears and springs and thread that spun and crisscrossed and clanked and pinged in complicated succession. It was a masterpiece of complicated clockwork machinery that stretched on and on to the top of the trunk, where the source of the white light shone steadily.
Antlers
Shifter_Master
Neziul
Iluvtoji
IAmTheIsland
Bugman
Passable Writer
Fetzen
Not a Sayan
Stanifly
