Dullahan

6 - Court - 2

The forest only seemed to grow in scale. The ground flattened out after a while, returning to the hilly terrain they had encountered before the deep valley, but the trees remained as tall and huge as before. They became sparser as the morning wore on, the rising sun sending beams of light through the growing gaps between the giant trunks. Each was easily three or four times as wide as Eldred was tall.

After about an hour of travel Eldred started to see signs of life once more. They had been following a dirt road for the past two days, with very occasional sections of cobbles or stones. He had not seen a single settlement in that time, and the few lone houses he did see were small and far from the road itself. The first house since the valley seemed to appear from nothing. They rounded a trunk and there before them was a small cottage, its own cobbled path winding through a wild and overgrown garden. The windows were dark, although as the building started to disappear behind the next trunk, Eldred was certain he had caught a glimpse of movement from within one of the windows.

Before he'd had time to puzzle out exactly what he had seen within, another house was upon them. This one was one of a group of three, a little further from the path. Outside Eldred caught sight of a humanoid shape- a woman in a dark dress, straightening from garden work as their party of seven passed on the main road. She stopped to watch them, her head turning slowly to follow them as they carried on.

The two guards seemed to only grow more vigilant as they continued. Their grip on their weapons eased a little, but their heads swivelled from side to side, scanning for threats and watching the few people they passed intently.

Before too long, the buildings grew closer and closer together. The road, once dirt with the occasional stone, became cobbled and even, widening as other foot traffic started to appear. Ahead, he could see the beginnings of a market, colourful stalls spreading out across the roads, narrowing the pathway and forcing their party to travel in single file as the number of people around them increased. He didn't pay much attention to any individual person at first, interested instead in the buildings and their surroundings, which seemed to meld into one another. Houses seemed to grow from trees in some places, huge trunks splitting into a net interwoven with cloth and dry stone walls. There were very few straight lines in the construction, man-made structures curving and succumbing to the natural shapes of the trees they co-existed with. Interspersed between these meldings of nature and construction were houses more like what Eldred was used to- simple buildings of hewn stone and plaster, but each remained connected to the world around it, vines and plants growing close across walls and beams placed for that very purpose.

Amidst the bustle of the market they had stumbled into, a man stood peering into a shop window. He looked through the glass panes of the shop at a display of trinkets and jewellery. Usually, Eldred would skip over such an ordinary sight- he had seen many people browsing shop windows in his life, and there were far more interesting things to be watching in this place, but his attention was snagged on the branching antlers that rose from the man's head. At first, he thought the man must have been carrying them, or even wearing them as a headpiece, but the longer he stared the more it started to seem as though the antlers were sprouting from the man's very head. They curved with the shape of his skull, tines branching off on either side, decorated with coloured thread and a glittering chain.

He was still staring when a woman with dark, bark-like skin passed in front of the antlered man, her hair a cascade of deep red flowers, small green leaves sprouting from between petals. Eldred stared, trying to understand how such a costume was possible. She stopped when she reached a trio of women with similar bark-like skin, some holding baskets of groceries, one with plaited vines down her back, and another with a halo of tiny yellow flowers tied down in a headscarf.

He tore his gaze away from them to look up at Ness, trying to gauge whether she too was seeing what he was.

"This is a land unlike your own," she said as she noticed him watching. "There are people here unlike any others you have met."