Draft 2 – Updated 30 SEPTEMBER 2026 (C037B/D001)
The weak light of a cloudy day was screened behind a dense forest of everwoods when they crossed the bridge and began the long climb out of the gorge on the other side. In a couple of fingers the hidden sun would fall behind the peaks and the valley’s shadows would thicken with early dark. After that, the granite grey sky would dim into twilight before succumbing finally to real dark. Through each of the night’s coming stages, the already chilly temperatures would continue their fall toward freezing.
“Don’t know how you stay warm when you can’t start no fires,” LT complained.
“We got ways,” Hunter said, offering no details.
A memory flashed in LT’s mind.
“I started a fire here once,” he confessed, laughing softly at the memory. “Accidental though. Didn’t know I was in The Wood when I done it.”
He was young and had just started working with the Brothers. They were smuggling three haff-ra families out of the colony through the mountains. A Company patrol ambushed them and they all scattered into the forest. Their instructions—in that event—were to head for a rendezvous point just across the border. But LT, new to the area, got turned around. He was certain he was still on the Eastbranch side of the border, when he built a fire to stave off hypothermia. He learned better when elven scouts arrested him and took him deeper into The Wood to face a trial for what was deemed a serious offence.
“Spent five months in a work camp,” he chuckled.
“That’s it?” Hunter’s eyebrows lifted.
“First offence. And I was a model prisoner,” LT grinned. “They let me go early.”
When they took him into custody, LT expected to spend a long time in a dank cell. But that never happened. He was disarmed and taken to a cluster of log cabins purpose-built for human guests.
His trial occurred there in front of an elven judge. The jurors, to his surprise, were all human and they, not the judge, asked all of the questions. When they were satisfied the young Brother had told them everything he knew about his situation, they persuaded him to confess. Then they negotiated a sentence with him.
When the trial was over and his sentence began, LT discovered that the jurors who convicted him were also prisoners. Most were guilty of the same offence he was. Three months after he arrived, he too was sitting on juries hearing cases against human transgressors. And, after convicting fellow humans, he too was helping to reeducate offenders.
“Y’all learn anything?” Hunter asked.
“Oh I understand the rules,” LT assured him. “No hunting or gathering. No fires. And no more than ten strides off the trail.”
“You know why?”
“I get it. Passage through The Wood is a privilege. I understand that the privilege requires obeying your laws. What I don’t understand is why the laws are so durn strict. I mean I appreciate passage, but I ain’t understand why folks can’t just pay a fine.”
“Council rules,” said Hunter. “I don’t make ‘em.”
Elves have a lot of stupid rules.
“Do you always do what the Council says?”
“When I’m in The Wood,” Hunter replied.
“And outside of The Wood?”
Hunter was silent for several heartbeats. There was enough light for LT to make out his face, but it was dark enough to hide his expressions.
“Outside,” he said eventually, “I do what I can.”
Hunter stopped then and bent over to examine something at the base of an everwood. It was a cluster of white mushrooms pushing out of the bark like a cluster of pearls. Hunter picked some of the larger ones leaving a near perfect roundel of smaller pearls untouched.
“Here,” he said, handing what he had picked to LT. “You’ll like these.”
LT held his hands up, refusing. “Is this a trick? You testing me or something?”
“Ain’t no crime to feed a guest, yo,” Hunter promised.
LT took the gift uncertainly. He was reluctant to eat anything he had not brought in himself. Not only was he unsure about elven laws, he was unsure about the mushrooms. He had seen them in the forest many times, but had been reluctant to try them. Eventually, however, his curiosity got the best of him and he began testing small bites. They were leathery, savoury, dense with the flavour of everwood tea.
The trail they were on rose out of the valley and nearly levelled out. The roaring churn of the gorge fell away below them. The smell of salt in the air reminded him of their proximity to the Bay of Bondage.
“So . . . your Council is like our Company,” LT said, more question than statement, after a long league of silence.
“No,” Hunter replied bluntly.
The denial puzzled LT. “Isn’t your governor the head of your Beloved Council?”
“She is,” Hunter agreed.
“So they’re . . . basically the same.”
There followed a long pause during which LT finished his mushrooms. He felt as if he had just eaten an equivalent weight of potatoes.
“Council’s job is to make sure we got food and shelter” Hunter explained. “Not just us what’s living, but those what ain’t been born yet.”
This was not an answer LT had expected. He had assumed that the two governments were more or less the same. But if what Hunter said was true, they were as different as night and day.
Under Company rule, he had to arrange his own food and shelter. And he was so busy doing that on a day-to-day basis, that he rarely thought much of people who weren’t even born yet.
It must be nice, he thought, not to have to eat three meals a day. No time wasted getting food, cooking food, eating food, or cleaning up after food. If we had that much spare time we might could think about the future, too.
The clouds above were thinning and the ambient light had improved slightly over the past few leagues of their hike. It might not snow afterall, LT realized, but it was still mighty cold.
A shadow shifted above and to his right. He caught it in his peripheral vision. The shape was humanoid. LT’s hand flashed instinctively to his hilt and he ducked while sliding deftly to his left.
“Ain’t nothing,” Hunter assured him. “Just a fella heading for home, likely.”
The shadow moved away and disappeared deeper into the canopy. LT regained his composure and turned back to the rocky trail.
“Other than the cabins in the work camp, I have never seen a house in The Wood,” LT said, vocalizing something he had been wondering about for years.
“Don’t have no houses,” Hunter replied.
“So you live outdoors?” He asked, wondering why this information was new to him.
“Mostly.”
“Even when it blizzards?”
“Got shelter when we need it.”
“Where?” LT looked around at the unbroken, seemingly unpopulated primeval forest blanketing the mountain slopes.
“Everwoods.”
LT imagined a bunch of elves crouching on branches, roosting like a conspiracy of ravens. Then he remembered how squirrels live.
“Do you build dreys?” he asked.
“Dens mostly.”
LT envisioned an elf, hanging by one hand from the trunk of an everwood, like a woodpecker. He was holding a hatchet, chopping chunks free from a circular opening.
“So these trees have dens big enough for elves?” he asked, looking around, doubting something he’d once heard but never seen evidence to corroborate.
“Some do.”
How are they heated? LT wondered, thinking about the fire ban. Then it occurred to him.
“So the fire ban only applies to outsiders,” he said in a moment of epiphany
“No,” Hunter shook him off. “No fire. No exceptions.”
That didn’t seem possible to LT. “How do y’all stay warm?”
“Dens warm enough, yo.”
LT imagined hunkering down inside of a woodpecker’s nest during a blizzard. Cold air and snow were blowing in through a gaping, man-sized hole in the wall.
“And you don’t eat? Well, leaves and stuff. But you don’t cook meat. Right?”
“We ain’t eat neighbors,” Hunter assured him.
That was the strangest thing of all to LT.
“But every elf I have ever met is a hunter,” he objected.
“We he’p out.”
“Meaning . . . ” LT thought it through, “you feed humans.”
“Feed all our neighbors, if we can,” Hunter replied.
“Why?” LT could not square this circle.
“Cuz we neighborly, yo.”
Hunter stopped and turned to face him. Twilight was ending and true dark was about to begin. It wasn’t snowing yet, but LT felt the flakes were on their way.
“This way,” said Hunter, walking a few steps off the trail.
LT spotted a large roundel of the white mushrooms on the trunk of an everwood and assumed that was where Hunter was taking him. But the elf stepped past them and parted the low foliage of a different everwood. LT followed and found himself enveloped by a darkness that was nearly complete. His eyes adjusted slowly after which he was able barely to distinguish the darkness of Hunter from the darkness of the tree.
Hunter began climbing. When his feet were at eye level, he stopped.
“You see my right foot?”
“I think so,” LT replied.
“Grab the branch just outside my right foot.”
“Got it.”
“Reach out with with your right leg ‘til you feel a branch on yo shin.”
LT did that and felt the wood halfway between his ankle and his knees.
“Got it.”
“Put yo lef hand on the trunk, put with yo other and step up onto that branch.”
Keeping his balance was tricky in the dark, but LT managed.
Hunter moved up one branch.
“Same thing here,” he said.
Step by step, branch by branch, one careful instruction after another, they rose higher into the tree. How high they went, LT could not tell, but he counted twenty-three branches under his feet before they stopped. When they did, Hunter was holding bark back to expose on opening. He placed a hand on LT’s shoulder and guided him in through an entrance into a void of utter blackness. LT bent over and reached down, probing for the bottom of the cavity. His fingers touched dry, spongey wood that felt like the bark on the outside of the tree but was softer and without splinters or sharp edges.
The sensation was familiar to him. So was the woody odor. Like a familiar face with a forgotten name. There, somewhere just beyond reach.
“You safe here,” Hunter’s voice came from the darkness. “Get some sleep.”
“Where are you going?” LT asked.
“Gonna find my own hollow,” Hunter replied.
The entrance slowly closed behind him and LT stood on his knees groping around the pitch black space. With one hand on a wall, he was unable to touch the other side. But when he released and leaned out, he found it. It felt like he was inside a large wooden ball. The hollow was not so wide that he could fully stretch out flat, but he was able to lean back on the curved wall and recline with his legs bent comfortably at the knees.
When he was finally orientated and comfortable in the strange new space, he realized that he needed to unbutton his coat. A short while later, he felt the need to remove it entirely—which he did, tucking it under his knees. It was only then, when his bare neck touched the wall behind him, that he realized the soft, spongey bark was warm to the touch. It was not as warm as his flesh, but it was definitely warmer than his things. He judged this by comparing the feel of the bark to the polished wood of his scabbard.
What he had envisioned when Hunter described it earlier was a hard wooden box open to the cold night air. Instead, he was tucked snugly into a pocket, hidden from the chill and the eyes of skulking predators.
He wondered if this kind of shelter was unique to The Wood, or if others like it could be constructed in Wetheran. He imagined single trees with multiple pockets sheltering unfortunate travellers. Then it occurred to him how useful such hiding places would be to Brothers escorting slaves to the freelands. A moment later he fell into a deep and restful slumber.
He awoke some time later feeling fresh and healthy. Dim light shone in through a glowing seam running vertically up the wall. He moved carefully, at first, because his right hip was always stiff the morning after a long ride.
As he lifted his hand, he felt something tickle the back of his fingers. He realized his hand had become entangled in a web during the night. Then he had a frightfully discomforting thought. Entering the cavity from the near-freezing black of night, he had not considered insects. But now he looked around fearfully, alarmed by thoughts of the creepy crawlers he might have bedded down with.
The inside of the cavity was not brightly illuminated, but he could see well enough to know that there was nothing unclean about it. What he’d first thought to be a spider web was nothing more than soft fuzzy strands protruding from the spongy bark. It had not affected his clothing, but his body hair had become tangled up with it. But once he wiped his hands and his neck, the fine silky threads disappeared and were no longer a bother.
Scrambling to his feet, he found that the chamber was large enough to stand in. He also realized that the soft bark had cushioned him and saved his hip from its usual morning stiffness. As he marveled at the space in the hollow, the seam on the wall widened and Hunter’s face appeared at its centre.
“Let’s go,” the elf said impatiently, pushing against the sides of the opening to enlarge it. “We already a finger behind.
The pace set by Hunter was blazing and LT’s struggle to breath soon made conversation uncomfortable. While he had many questions for Hunter about the cavity, he could not ask them now. They would have to wait until next they took some rest.
Two fingers into their journey, they found themselves high on an escarpment overlooking what humans called the Bay of Bondage. Looking down on the far distant shore they could just make out the ruins of Southport.
Looming above them, meanwhile, visible through open patches in the canopy, was the snow covered peak of White Mountain. It appeared to LT that they were not far from the top of the treeline.
“From here, we canopy,” Hunter told him.
Hunter wrapped a rope around LT’s chest and tied the other end to his waist. As he had done the previous night in the dark, Hunter instructed LT where to put his hands and feet. At first, it was slow and difficult. LT’s sword and scabbard caught on branches so many times that he soon wished he’d left it with his horse.
“I can stash it,” Hunter offered. “We’ll pick it up on the way out.”
Their speed improved after that and LT began to get the hang of it. As the day passed, they moved faster. Early in the afternoon, Hunter removed the rope and their speed increased yet again.
LT was accustomed to walking on two legs. This was more like scrambling up a steep slope. It required arms and legs working together. He felt more animal than human, as if he were a bear or a mountain lion moving through the world on four legs.
Above the ground, at canopy height, small branches had been trimmed away and there were clear wear patterns showing him where to put his hands and feet. By the time Hunter removed the rope, LT was generally able to read these signs and had learned to follow Hunter’s example as he moved through the canopy ahead of him.
Occasionally, he would catch glimpses of the ground far below causing his stomach to swirl and his head to swim. But there were so many layers of branches below them that his brain soon accepted the density of the midstory as the maximum distance he might fall. So the fear of that fall became greatly diminished.
As difficult as this was on his unaccustomed body, travelling through the canopy had benefits that far outweighed the costs. The trail they had been hiking wound over the contours of the mountain face, zigging this way and zagging that. The canopy allowed them to move in a much straighter line down the mountainside, skipping over landscape elements that would have forced many hiking detours.
When they reached the lower part of the slope they followed the canopy trail over a tangled gorge that LT believed was likely impassable any other way. In fact, had the tops of several massive everwoods not leaned into each other from the gorge’s edge, even this route would have been impossible to traverse.
When they returned to the ground they followed a series of game trails through denser cover than LT imagined possible. Several stretches required getting down and crawling on his hands and knees.
As they moved deeper into Elvenwood, LT grew optimistic about the future. He didn’t know why. It just seemed like things were moving in the right direction.