I thought it likely, looking back on it now. There was one night he’d come back late, hair damp, his cloak gone. He’d been distracted. His smiles had seemed hollow. I’d been worried…but in the morning, he’d seemed perfectly normal again. I’d forgotten.
Maybe he came here,I thought.Maybe this forest is haunted but for him, it was with memory, not souls from an ancient battle.
Stellara was beautiful tonight.
Glittering stars of constellations I didn’t yet know peeked through the canopies of the trees. A chittering cry of a flightless bird echoed in the maze of trees, and I heard its scampering feet retreat when I got too close. As I clamored over a fallen trunk, I felt an icy touch at my spine. I sucked in a sharp breath, looked over my shoulder to find nothing there, and then waited until it left. When my warmth returned, I hopped off the trunk, the rustle of the deep purple leaves above me like a thousand whispers.
Resting against a trunk, I wiped my hands on my pants to brush away dirt and pulled the scroll from the archives out of the satchel at my hip. I was heading south, toward Erzos Keep. There was a section of the forest I’d yet to explore, about two miles into Stellara from RaanaDyaan. I’d painstakingly memorized the map and brought my aging Halo orb with me, just in case I lost my way in the dark.
Still, the sheer vastness of Stellara was overwhelming.
I put the scroll away, then continued onward. At one point, I briefly spied a turret of Erzos Keep in the distance when the tree line cleared.
Just when I thought that it would be wise to retreat back to Raana, considering the late hour, I came across a beautiful tree.
A tree, truthfully, like all the others in Stellara, if not for the decorated trunk.
My heart sped as I crept closer. The trunk had been carved painstakingly with a blade-like tool, the carvings reminding me of woodworm markings on Gwytri.
These markings were beautiful, deliberate in their randomness. Curving lines and swirls wound up the trunk, deep gouges in the bark. And into the valleys of the carvings, silver metal strips had been fitted inside them until they were flush. It looked like an armored tree. A beautifully armored tree with its silver-carved trunk.
Looking around the clearing, I turned up the brightness on my Halo orb, and light flooded the forest. To my right, I spied the twinkle of silver. Another tree. When I reached it, touching the cool silver, I spied another, a stone’s throw away.
A path,I thought, lips parting in hopeful realization.
A guide.
Next to me, my Halo orb hummed. Then it trailed me as I followed the path.
It didn’t take long to find where it led.
Show me,I thought, heart quickening with every silver tree I found.Please.
The moment that the thought formed, I froze, my eyes widening. Because, as though the thought had willed it, as though the thought had magic infused within it, a clearing came into view, deep into Stellara, though perhaps only a couple miles or so from both RaanaDyaanand Erzos Keep’s borders. A halfway point.
There was a cottage standing in the clearing. Dark and dead and overgrown.
The door had once been painted red, but the color had faded with time. The thick wood—inlaid with curving strips of decorative metal, the same as the trees—was hanging off its black metal hinges. There were two windows at the front of the cottage, one with broken glass as if someone had thrown a stone at it.
It was freestanding. Made of gray stone and wood, cobbled together in a style I’d seen in the coastal villages in Erzos, seams compacted tightly together to keep the salted sea breeze out. There were two windows that overlooked the front garden, though deadened blooms and blackened vines covered the panes, swallowing them up as if hungry. The door was a gaping mouth. Hesitantly, I took a step toward it.
I didn’t call out. I knew no one was here. No one had lived here in quite some time.
My footsteps were silent as they padded over soft moss and rotting purple leaves. There was a stone pathway leading up to the door, though a few were loosened and I nearly stumbled over one protruding block when my boot caught on it.
I ducked into the cottage, a sharp chill in the air making me curl my arms around myself. It was dark and damp. The vines covering the windows let in little light, and there was white fungus growing on one stretch of the back wall.
The interior was simple. A single large room with a set of stone stairs at the back, leading up to a second floor. There was one table, a chair toppled over beside it, made for the bulk of a Kylorr. A hearth was pressed into the left wall, barren and empty. Nestled among stacks of damp wood, the color a bright mossy green, sat a rusted cauldron.
When I ventured upstairs, I saw a single bed. The smell was musty. The blanket strewn across it was riddled with mold. There was a washroom attached, complete with a small black metal bathing tub, which looked like the cleanest and most modern thing in this cottage.
When I walked to the stretch of windows of the bedroom, I couldjustmake out the top of Erzos’s brightly lit keep, but only if the wind blew a certain direction so the trees swayed in the clearing beyond.
Releasing a soft breath, I returned downstairs. I righted the chair beside the table and gingerly took a seat, breathing in the damp, listening to the quiet.
My eyes trailed to a dark lump on the floor. I stared at it, thinking it was a blanket, before I let out a quiet gasp when I spied something familiar twinkling on the material. Scrambling from the chair, I nearly fell onto the floor and lifted it.
My father’s cloak.
