Rook Fenwall's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

For three years Rook Fenwall had guarded the forest's edge, waiting for a way back in to kill the thing that had slaughtered the people he'd sworn to protect. Tonight he found the old trail gone. Roots had swallowed the path. Thorns wove a wall taller than his dented iron shoulders. He hacked at them with his sword until his arms shook. The wall grew back faster than he could cut. The horror waited somewhere deep, and the forest itself had sealed the door. He stood there until dawn, breathing hard, no closer than the night before. A dry voice spoke behind him. "You'll blunt that blade before you clear a foot." Rook turned. An old man leaned against an iron-limbed tree, hood pulled low, a longbow across his back. A gray wolf sat at his heel, watching Rook with flat yellow eyes. Rook knew the face. The retired ranger who used to walk these woods, back when there were still people to walk them for. Rook had turned him away from the tree line more than once. The man had always come back. "The paths answer to no one now," the ranger said. "But I remember where they used to run." Rook lowered his sword. "Then show me." "No." The wolf's ears flicked. "I walked away from that forest for a reason. I watched it take good people. I won't guide a dead man deeper in." "They were my people too," Rook said. "I let them die at that edge. I've stood here every night since so it never happens to anyone else." He drove his sword into the dirt. "Help me end it, or watch me claw through with my bare hands." The ranger studied him a long moment. Then he pushed off the tree and knelt by a cluster of twin-colored leaves growing at the wall's base. Pink and green, they shimmered faintly, wrong among the plain brush. He crushed a leaf and smeared its juice across the back of Rook's gauntlet. "These grow along the true paths," the ranger said. "Only there. Follow the bloom and you follow the old road, however the thorns twist it." He pointed. Ten feet on, another patch glowed in the gray light. Then another beyond it, a faint trail of color threading into the dark. Rook pulled his sword from the ground. "I'll take you to the last ridge," the ranger said. "No farther. What's in the hollow past it, you face alone." He whistled. The wolf rose. "And Fenwall — the thing knows the way better than the trees do. By dusk it'll know you're coming." Rook looked down the trail of glowing leaves, into the twisted dark he'd been locked out of for three years. The door was open now. He stepped through the gap in the thorns and started walking.