by James Fahy
“Well … no … not exactly … Splinterstem said it was so horrific … he disposed of the remains himself, to spare them …” Robin said uncertainly.
“Hmm,” Strife said again with feeling, still peering down at Robin. “And who, please enlighten me, was the only person to see this death, to actually discover this unfortunate body?”
Robin swallowed.
“Splinterstem,” he said quietly, beginning to feel foolish.
Strife cocked his pale head to one side, rather sarcastically. He rubbed gently at his green-haired temples as though developing a migraine. “The same person who claimed to have seen the king attacked by this dragon-scourge of the forest, even though, knowing now as you do, that the dragon was the king, that this is highly unlikely to be true?”
Robin stared into the black opening of the Labyrinth.
“Are we beginning to see a pattern here, Master Robin?” Strife sighed. “You witless child.”
“He’s a psychopath, isn’t he?” Robin muttered. “I’m going to find Splinterstem, and I’m going to make him pay.”
“Oh, I’m afraid you’re far too late for anything of the sort,” Strife said lightly, as he stepped into the shadowy tunnel under the archway. “Your scheming dryad friend was the pawn of my sister after all, a minnow playing games with a shark. Out of his league. I think you will find he has already ‘paid’ his dues.” He glanced back at them over his shoulder, his pale face lost in the folds of his hood. “Miss Peryl rarely keeps her toys once their use has expired. She bores very easily. But with that mask you carry in your little bag, you may find that your treacherous dryad still has sights to show you yet.”
Against every sensible instinct in his body, Robin followed Mr Strife into the dark tunnel, Henry close behind.
*
It had been dark out in the forest, but here, at the mouth of the maze, it was pitch black. The air smelled stale and damp. Close and earthy. Robin was acutely aware of the huge weight of the elder trees above them, the soaring heights of Rowandeepling, dark and silent.
They had walked maybe only ten paces into the blackness when Mr Strife muttered something under his breath and a dull, purplish light bloomed before him. He had conjured at ball of softly glowing mana, which he held aloft before him like a candle.
By its dim light, Robin and Henry saw the tunnel through which they moved. It was ancient, hewn from crumbling, damp stone. The floor was packed earth littered with rocks and stones, a forgotten dungeon. Here and there on the roof above them and trailing down the walls were roots, pushing through the stones, making the surface bumpy and irregular, cobwebs and trapped dry leaves stringing between them. The tunnel flickered and leapt about them, eerily animated by the dim luminance.
“I didn’t know you could make light,” Robin whispered. He felt uncomfortable speaking in anything louder here, in this bleak and silent place. It felt like any noise might make it crumble and collapse on them. “I thought your Tower was Darkness.”
“You cannot have darkness without light, you idiot child,” Mr Strife replied, not turning around. “They are two halves of the same thing. Now come … look at your answers, and the handiwork of my sister.”
Robin moved closer, his skin crawling at his proximity to the tall Grimm. By the light of his mana, the boy saw what lay before them in the long dark tunnel.
Splinterstem lay on the ground on his back, utterly motionless. His green eyes were wide, his strange face frozen in an expression of shock. His large body was splayed, laid out on his wings, half extended and crumpled around him like a collapsed parachute, brushing the wall either side.
He was quite dead.
“How?” Robin stared at the body, its green eyes oddly dull and empty of the usual glittering light.
“Dark mana,” Strife shrugged, unconcerned by the details. “Maybe a blade. Who knows? Or for that matter, cares? My sister is difficult to predict. Look at him, Scion of the Arcania.”
Robin peered down at the frozen corpse in the flickering shadows, horrified. “I am looking.”
“No.” Strife indicated his backpack. “I mean … look … at him.”
Robin realised what Strife intended. He slung his pack from his shoulders and rummaged around inside it, his fingers finally closing around the hard wooden edges of the Mask of Gaia. He pulled it out and regarded it in the purplish light.
“What’s that thing?” Henry asked, interested.
“A powerful object indeed,” Strife said, looking at it hungrily. “The Mask of Gaia.”
"Who’s Gaia?” Henry asked Robin.
“An elemental,” Robin replied absently, turning the mask over in his hands and looking down at the dead body. “They’re all gone now.”
“What’s an elemental when it’s at home?” Henry sounded more confused than ever. “Just how much did I miss?”
Mr Strife interrupted Henry, peering at Robin. “It will not work the same as when you look at the living,” he said. “Disjointed memories, fragments, may be all you glean. But it should shed some light into the darkness.”
Robin nodded. He knew what he had to do. He raised the mask to his eyes, feeling its smooth warmth mould to his skin. He felt the branches above the empty eye sockets twine in his hair as the flow of mana stored in the mask seeped into him. Looking down at the sad and sombre sight of the dryad before him, he blinked, and was engulfed by light.
The world fell away.
*
A series of visions danced across Robin’s mind, like a broken movie. The forest, sun dappled, a great rain falling on the canopy, and next moment, bright sunshine. He saw an acorn falling, a woodland stream filled with silvery fish. The images in turn were replaced by another. The glowing lights of Rowandeepling. All flashing through his mind, frozen snapshots. These, he knew, were the memories of Splinterstem. He could feel the dryad's mind.
Through the shifting images, Robin saw the court of the dryads, the king on his throne and the Princess Ashe seated beside him. Robin was an invisible presence in the great feasting hall, and all around him were dryads. Away to one side he saw Splinterstem, seated at a table with others of his kind. The dryad was looking up thoughtfully at the royals, and Robin could feel his hunger. Hunger to possess the throne, hunger to win the heart of the princess. His mind was filled with lofty dreams and ambitions. A determined and all-consuming want.
Images blurred, and another memory surfaced like a dream. Here, Robin saw Splinterstem walked along the amber bridges of the city, on some soft summer night in Rowandeepling, looking down to the similar pathways which crisscrossed here and there below him. He was watching a couple walk together, unaware they were being observed. It was the Princess Ashe, smiling and laughing, and by her side a tall and relaxed-looking male dryad. The two looked comfortable in each other's company, talking softly as they walked the lamplit paths. Robin knew from Splinterstem's emotions that this other man was Alder, and that the watchful dryad whose mind he inhabited was conflicted. Alder was his friend, almost a brother to him. But there was no mistaking the princess' laughter, the easy and private smiles passing between the two of them down below. And Splinterstem was feeling the throne slip away, his dreams of courting the princess too. Everything he wanted, everything that should be his, was being pulled from his grasp.
Another shifting blur, making Robin dizzy, and now he felt, years had passed. The forest was not autumnal but rich and leafy, a riot of greens in the height of a long ago summer. The Fae had come to their city, the one who called himself Hammerhand, bringing his treasure, this green and glimmering Shard of power. Outside the peaceful and isolated kingdom of the dryads' lands, he had told them, war was raging across the Netherworlde. A terrible war that would soon send echoes even here, in the deepest parts of the forest. The Fae King and Queen were gone, the Arcania itself had been shattered, and it looked as though Lady Eris would win her war.
Through Splinterstem’s memory, Robin saw the king solemnly accept the burden of the Shard from a sur
prisingly short and bearded Fae bearing twin sets of pale horns, twining around each other. This man was Hammerhand. Robin knew this because Splinterstem had known it, but the boy was curious nonetheless. He had never seen a portrait of the great Fae explorer and this was the first time he had seen what the man looked like.
The king of the dryads, with great ceremony, exchanged a gift with the Fae, a great treasure of Rowandeepling. A mask, to return to Erlking with, the Mask of Gaia, he told Hammerhand, which he hoped may prove to show a clearer way to troubled Fae during the dark times. Hammerhand accepted this gift, leaving the dryads with the Shard of Earth, with what would become the heart of the elder trees.
Time and vision blurred once more and Robin, thrust forward again through the haze of the dead memories, now found himself standing with many other dryads at the foot of the trees. The great Labyrinth was newly completed. The Shard had been set at its heart, never to be touched again. The king was giving a great speech to his gathered people, reassuring them about the growing menace of the swarm, their own lost kin, now growing far off in the south forest. He swore that the Shard would protect them, and he commended Splinterstem, standing at his side, on his genius contribution, at placing a guardian of his own creation and design at the centre, ever to keep the heart of the forest safe.
Pride poured through Robin, Splinterstem’s emotions, as he ascended in importance through the king’s court to sit at his right hand on his council, the respected genius of the labyrinth, the dutiful protector of the kingdom. But underlying this feeling was a terrible dark guilt, spreading like ink, burrowing troublesomely through what should have been a bright moment. Robin could not understand.
Robin closed his eyes within the jumbled haze of visions and memory, and focused his will. He knew this had all happened. What he needed was to see closer to the present, to understand how the Shard had been loosed in the first place.
Mentally forcing his way forward through the jagged slices of Splinterstem’s memories, he found years had now passed. The war had been won and Lady Eris ruled the Netherworlde, Empress of all. Much of the southern Elderhart forest had fallen to the swarm, and internal war loomed in the woods, no matter how hard the dryads had fought to remain separate from the troubles of the wider world. Alder was long gone, and Splinterstem had felt sure that in time, the princess would manage her grief, as he had himself, and see past her pain to the promise of the good mate who stood before her. He had been sure that in time, he would claim her hand. But she had not seen past her pain and loss. She remained polite but cold to him.
She would never marry. And by now the queen was dead, and the king ruled alone. The position of the dryads in the world was weakened further still.
Splinterstem was filled with injustice and bitterness. He would never have the throne. He would never marry the princess. After all he had sacrificed and done to engineer his future. Still power and happiness were forever beyond his reach.
He began to resent them. The time of the dryads was coming to an end, he decided. They were insular, hiding in their haven, wilfully ignorant of the world beyond, of where the true power of the world now lay. They had become irrelevant in the new world order, a relic, doomed to dwindle. The swarm at least had strength, Splinterstem knew. They were organised, powerful. They were part of something larger than themselves. The victorious reign of the Empress.
Robin suddenly saw a slice of memory then which made him stop. It had been as though he were sliding along a reel of microfilm, scan-reading old articles. But here, he sensed a tipping point, a moment of importance. He dropped right into the memory.
A forest glade, not far from the island of the elder trees, resolved before his eyes. Splinterstem had been walking alone, troubled and embittered, tired of the constant struggle to maintain a respectable face at the dryad court, tired of being so close to glory and never able to taste it. The dryad had been lost in a cloud of dark thoughts when he had met the girl. Wandering alone amongst the trees, carefree and relaxed, as though she owned the whole wood. Young, she had seemed to him. Smiling, and dripping with power.
It had been Miss Peryl.
Robin saw the dryad's wariness. And the girl's relaxed air. She seemed at once dangerous and friendly, like a playful cat that might tire of toying with its mouse with soft paws at any moment and fall upon it.
They talked, the two of them, isolated and secret out here in the woods.
She was from the Hive, she told the dryad. Things were better there, for people of his ambition. People of his strength were not ignored or cast aside. She, unlike his precious king, recognised, and rewarded potential.
They spoke at length of the Shard, buried deep beneath the elder trees, hidden and closely guarded in its impenetrable maze. It served no real purpose to the dryads, she had told him. They had been here long before it, and they would be here long after it was gone. No one had laid eyes on the artefact in years anyway. Who would know if it was gone or not?
No one knew their way safely through the maze, no one but him, its architect.
In the shadows beneath the trees, a dark deal was struck, a simple one. If he would fetch the Shard and give it to her. He would have proved himself worthy of the Hive. He would finally be rewarded with the power he craved, the status he knew he deserved. The status that she could see he was worthy of. The king of the dryads was an ailing fool. His daughter a cold-hearted brat. Neither of them deserved his loyalty. Had he not given his entire life to serving the dryads, she told him, and they repaid him with what? A seat on the council to quiet his grumbles, an appeasement to keep him happy. It was an insult. They cared nothing for his leadership, nothing for his strength. They were blind to it.
She, the girl with shining black eyes assured him, was not.
For the first time, in his darkest moments, here was someone who recognised his greatness, who confirmed for him everything he had always believed. That he was worthy, that he deserved better. She was right, the Shard was a trinket. And he the only one who could enter the Labyrinth and retrieve it. None would ever know it was gone. The Shards of the Arcania may recently have awakened, but what did it matter to the insular and remote dryads? It meant little to him. And if he brought the Shard to this girl who was no girl, he would reign in the Hive anyway, finally recognised. Finally, for once, on the side of power.
Robin didn’t want to believe any of it. That Peryl had been given the run of Eris' dark jail, that she had tempted this dryad away from his own people with empty, honey-laced promises of power. Making all his ambitious lifelong wishes finally come true. She wanted only the Shard. And she would have it from him however she could.
Once more, time and vision blurred, and now it was dark, and Robin was back at the Labyrinth entrance.
He watched as Splinterstem emerged from the doorway in the silent shadows, a stealthy thief unharmed by the minotaur. He was the only one that knew its secrets. Retrieving the Shard has been simpler than even his new, purple-haired patron would ever know.
In his gnarled mossy hands, he carried the Shard of the Arcania, an emerald jewel shaped like an arrowhead.
But, Robin observed from the periphery of the vision, someone had been waiting for him at the entrance.
Long suspecting something wrong with his most trusted counsellor, the king himself, concerned with Splinterstem's behaviour, had secretly followed him down from Rowandeepling in the pre-dawn mists.
Confronting the dryad now at the doors to the minotaur’s lair, the king demanded to know what was happening. What was his advisor, his trusted friend, doing with the heart of the forest? Was this treason?
They argued back and forth as Robin watched, helpless to intervene. He felt the king's sting of betrayal. He felt Splinterstem’s overpowering mixture of shame and anger, bubbling into furious resentment. And finally, the king lunged forward, trying to take the Shard from Splinterstem by force. Robin stared in horror as the traitor pushed him away, furious beyond measure that once again, his final chance at pow
er was in danger of being crushed, snatched away by his own people. Robin saw Splinterstem raise the Shard high, teeth clenched in rage, and bring it down with great force, burying it into the chest of the king like a green dagger.
The king staggered backward, staring down in disbelief at the glowing Shard protruding obscenely from his body. Splinterstem’s face was a mask of frozen emotion, his arms limp at his sides with shock, at the enormity of what he had just done. And then a great shockwave erupted from the king, a flash of green light which stripped the leaves from trees and shook their trunks, which sent Splinterstem flying, cannoned backward to land against the Labyrinth wall in a heap and a rain of stones.
Robin wanted to rush forward and help the fallen monarch, but of course, his legs would not move. He wasn’t really here. This had already happened and he was helpless to do anything but bear witness. The king crawled along the floor, bellowing in agony, as the grass roared up from the floor beneath him, tangling around his arms. Twigs and shoots wrapped around his body, stones rolling from all over the clearing to cover him as he struggled to get away, headed blindly for the trees. By the time he was out of sight, Robin could no longer make out the shape of the king at all, only a writhing mass of living forest, entombing and encasing him even as it moved and fought against it. The great and untamed power of the Earth Shard, thrust unwillingly straight into his heart, was lashing out, keeping him alive the only way it knew how … by devouring him, making him one with the living breathing forest. As he disappeared from sight, Splinterstem got shakily to his knees.
Miss Peryl stepped out from the shadows of the trees. She had her arms folded and her purple head on one side, looking mildly irritated.
“What have I done?” Splinterstem was whispering, and Robin felt his fear, his numb horror.
“You have lost me my Shard, that’s what you’ve done,” Peryl replied. She sighed, cupping the stunned dryad's face in her hands. “And you had better get it back,” she said sweetly. “This is your mess, tree-boy. Clean it up. By any means necessary, or every one of those fluttering insects you have just betrayed will know exactly what you are. Exactly what you have done. I don’t think that will go well for you, do you?”