A Kind of Magic

Thirteen

Leodhais looked once towards the inn over his shoulder-- the large stone building lay huddled, still and silent like a black, sleeping dragon behind them-- as he walked across the walled courtyard after his companions, leaving Annwyn and the promise of the future spent with a woman whom he could love and who might love him back, a prospect he had never considered before, behind. Inhaling deeply, drawing courage to walk away when he only wanted to stay, he stepped into the thick grey mist redolent of pine trees of the nearby forest and the muddy, stagnant waters of the omnipresent swamp reigning in the world beyond the tall walls.

"Annwyn is not a naive child. I don't know what she sees in you, elf, but I don't want to influence her decisions. I won't put myself in the way of what she thinks might bring her happiness, I love her too much for that. But if you ever break her heart, you'll be the first elf I'll kill, Leodhais, and I don't care if Alaric will have me murdered for it, I have nothing to lose." Peregrine's warning reached him from somewhere in the fog, the person who issued it perfectly invisible. 

However, the words couldn't wipe the content smile off Leodhais' lips and he moved forward with an unexpected spring in his step, eager for the moment of his return here, feeling light and buoyant because of the absence of his heavy bow, or rather because of the thoughts of Annwyn filling his head. 

The fog seemed to thicken the farther they got from The Gate Inn, the last vestige of Silmarea's civilisation, and deeper into the wilderness they could not descry properly. Gilderoy tried to talk to his companions initially to keep track of them-- he couldn't tell anymore who walked in from of him and who behind. But the fog distorted their words eerily, carried them around the three travellers unpredictably, and threw them back at them from impossible directions, making Gilderoy's hair stand on end. He had heard terrible stories about the giant orc tribes inhabiting the mountains beyond Draconia; who said that they didn't come down here sometimes to feast on the unsuspecting travellers?! 

So he paused and waited for Leodhais to bump into him then grabbed the hem of his cardigan, even as his friend's hand came to rest on his shoulder, and together they rushed after Peregrine, whose black cloak, only just visible as he tore the curtains of fog into swirling tendrils, floated around his legs in an eldritch wind which seemed to touch nothing else.

It took them a good hour of stumbling forward blindly to reach the most dangerous swamp of Draconia, in the middle of which The Stones were scattered unsinkably by some ancient magic or miracle.

"You'll have to stop daydreaming and start paying attention to where I place my feet, elf," Peregrine muttered as he helped Leodhais to pull his leg from a knee-deep puddle of gelatinous mud. "Focus, let us move on faster. The sooner we walk through the stones, the better; the ground is safer on the other side."

Gilderoy and Leodhais followed Peregrine who chose his footing carefully through the wisps of mist brighter than the grey fog surrounding the inn, glistening as if it had swallowed the sunshine they could not see above them, swirling around their bodies like a breath of some invisible creature, to the drier centre of the swamp outlined by a slightly elliptical circle of stones as tall as Gilderoy. 

As they stopped in the relatively safe patch of a grassy land, both the dwarf and the elf turned on the spot in awed surprise. Their tutors at court had told them about the portal leading into the other world hidden in The Stones, but they had never met anyone who actually walked through, apart from Peregrine, and Alaric and Emrys of course, and none of those had ever shared their knowledge and experience with them. 

Gilderoy had never given the portal much thought, and even if he had, he wouldn't have imagined it like this. His eyebrows rose as he turned around slowly, touching the grey stone streaked with golden-brown veins almost as large as himself standing nearest to him, even as the fog started to thin, finally allowing the bright sunlight to descend upon the world and banish the dark shadows, the last remnants of the night, which pooled around the rocks like puddles of black water.

In the distance, not too far beyond the closest stones, he spotted many more of them, tall pillars glistening like silver in the fog-infused sunlight, which he hadn't noticed before when they had walked by. They stood scattered around the circle he and his two companions were standing in, grouped in a couple of loose, concentric rings. The place was most intriguing, but he couldn't see anything that would give him a hint about how it functioned. Gilderoy was just turning to Peregrine to ask when Leodhais beat him to it.

"So, here we are. What now, dragon?"

Peregrine only sighed in reply, touching a finger to his lips, bidding patience and silence. An eerie wind picked up all of a sudden, tangling the stray tendrils of fog, knitting them back into a curtain like unraveling silk thread, sending Gilderoy away from the stones and closer to his friends even as the firm ground under their feet seemed to soften, then liquefy. Gilderoy was sure that they were sinking into the Draconia's swamp... that the mud would swallow them without leaving a trace of their existence in minutes... and he would never lay eyes on Aryana again... 

But then, moments later, just like the ground had vanished from beneath his feet, it was back as if nothing had occured.

"Down!" Peregrine whisper-shouted.

He grabbed the two stunned friends by the hoods of their cardigans and pushed them flat onto the ground-- not the waterlogged grass of Draconia but a dry and rocky soil similar to that of Goblinica-- pressed their heads down by their necks, and joined them in their prostrate position. 

Breathing heavily with the shock of what must have been the travel between the worlds, angry with Peregrine for not having prepared him better for what would happen, Leodhais narrowed his eyes at the dragon lying next to him as they listened to a small group of people strolling among the stones somewhere near but out of sight. The annoying man had the arrogance and impudence to grin at him in return... If he weren't Annwyn's brother, Leodhais would...

"What, elf? Peregrine asked nonchalantly as he jumped to his feet the moment the voices were gone, offered his hand to Gilderoy, who lay on his other side, and pulled the dwarf up. "I didn't want them to see us appearing from the stones like that," he explained, "but from now on, we won't be hiding. The humans will see us. So tidy up," he added, brushing stems of dry grass from Gilderoy's clothes, "and do your hair, elf." He pointed at Leodhais' ears that had escaped from the cover of his hair. "Hurry up, let us go! It's a ten minutes walk to the closest village, and then an hour to the train station, I'm not risking taking you two on the bus. We should reach the city early this evening." 

Leodhais opened his mouth to tell Peregrine exactly what he thought of him and his manners, then closed it when those thoughts were scattered by the onslaught of information he produced. Opened it again to start asking questions about this world, the people they had barely avoided, the train station and the bus he had mentioned, but closed it once more without making a sound upon hearing Peregrine's next instruction.

"You keep an eye on your ring, elf; it will guide us to your girl."

Leodhais stood, rooted to the spot, watching his two companions walk away from him, as those words reminded him why he was here-- to find Alaric's daughter, court her, and bring her home as his future bride...

"Come on, Leodhais!" Gilderoy called, looking back at him pityingly, then added as if he could read his mind. "Everything will sort itself out!"

~~~~~
Word count: chapters One to Thirteen = 20 208 words.

Third milestone reached, but the story continues :)