“Done told you already boy, there hain’t been nothin’ a’tall odd ‘round here a’late... ‘ceptin’ ‘f’course fer the two o’ you!”

Beidon managed a sickly grin even while groaning inwardly - this was going about as well as he’d anticipated.

The grizzled old Pothandler of a foreman sucked his teeth and glared down the broad plane of his stone-slab nose at Beidon. The nose, the crags, and the pencil-thin eyebrows closely resembled Gordun’s, though unlike his countryman’s the foreman’s stone-knob head was wreathed in a thick fringe of wiry, unkempt hair… hair which currently was practically quivering with annoyance. The foreman also lacked some of Gordun’s mountainous bulk… not that that took away from the daunting solidity of his presence. After all, the man was both mayor and master, a high official and adept tradesman whose chain of office showed against the stretch of grizzle-furred chest visible between the straps of his heavy leather forrester’s apron.

All assured authority and bustling impatience, he clearly had scant tolerance for the nonsensical questions of an itinerant, impertinent ‘prentice come walking out of the wild (and wearing half of it mashed into his clothing to boot) to trouble him with all manner of absurd-sounding questions in the sanctity of his office shack. In fact, the foreman gave Beidon the distinct impression that, should the boy try the man’s patience much farther, he’d find himself rolling home on a logging wain, most likely trussed and gagged and tagged with a note for the Clear Crucible authorities inquiring as to whether they might have misplaced an indenture...

Nor was Laurn doing much to strengthen his hand. The bounty hunter had separated from him as soon as the two had followed the river Logwash out of the forest and into the clearing marking Once-Were-Trees’ current location along it. As good as her word, she’d left the “interrogation” to Beidon while concentrating wholly on her own avenues of exploration. Beidon could see her now through the window of the foreman’s shack, crawling around the foundations of one of the bunkhouses ringing the central parade ground with another of her strange devices held up to her frowning face. And, as the forge boy noted with recurrent unease, the foreman was noticing her too. His lip twisted in a mixture of distaste, scorn, and incredulity. Small wonder, either. The slinky yet flagrantly unfeminine tracker was as outré a sight in the sweaty workaday world of a logging camp as a scars-and-roughspun lumberjack would have been in a baronial ballroom.

Nor could Beidon ascribe the Pothandler’s objections to mere provincial prejudice – as foreman, he could not be at all pleased by the disruption Laurn was causing to his camp’s operations. Whether by accident or design, the huntress had seemingly managed over the course of her sleuthing to somehow personally alienate every inhabitant of the camp. Every interaction had engaged the same hard-charging take-no-prisoners attitude that had marked Beidon’s first encounter with the woman… and given the matching brusque indelicacy of the clueless loggers, some of them had ended considerably less civilly. Looking out the window, Beidon could see faces pale with indignation at a cutting remark, dark expressions following pointed rejoinders to the odd crude solicitation, at least one fellow nursing an injured elbow following an impromptu stump-top arm wrestling contest… overall, the boy could swear that Laurn had spent as much time ignoring/distracting/insulting/outdoing the men as she had with the various esoteric activities comprising her “investigation”… not that the activities themselves had done much to better the impression they were making on the loggers:

First she’d systematically crisscrossed the camp clearing, solemnly brandishing what looked to Beidon to be a simple forked tree-branch. Then she’d walked the tree line, tapping out more storage canisters to draw out another thin line of dust (this time a sparkling silver) encircling the perimeter. Now she worked at the camp’s high end, combing the cutting grounds below the wooden weir that diverted the Logwash under a power-providing waterwheel there, at points scouring though the sawdust on all fours.

Practically every able-bodied man in the camp, from the shift leaders and Great Saw handlers on down to the dishwashers, had despite the demonstrated hazards responded by abandoning all pretense of work in favor of outright unsubtle ogling. Those closest to her had gone so far as to seek grandstand viewing, scaling the weir-top or cramming onto the widow’s walk atop the attached waterwheel gearing-tower. The thick articulated armature of the Saw’s power train rumbled idly where the men had left it stretched out in a zigzagging band from tower to treeline. Several more of the lumberjacks and foresters loitered amidst the split-log bunkhouses and scattered tree stands or stood atop the ubiquitous stumps dotting the encampment. At the base of the hill, half the sawmill crew had emerged to gawk. The fallers had either laid down their axes or stood leaning on their handles. Frowns and leers predominated in equal measure, and work was at an utter standstill.

The tension was palpable, and the likelihood of an impending blow-up all but choked Beidon as he fumbled for his next question:

“Well, umm, how about a …well, a girl?”

“Lad, this is a loggin’ camp. We have no truck with girls here. Ordinarily.”

Beidon deflated. This was not liable to end well. He cast about for some other avenue of attack, however unlikely, something that might elicit more information than empty scorn. Ah well, I should thank the Forgers for small favors. At least there hasn’t been any-

A piercing wolf-whistle erupted from somewhere in the clearing.

“Aye, that’s one fine old lady!” someone shouted in affirmation.

Beidon shut his eyes against the ensuing silence… he knew what was coming next.

He heard Laurn’s voice, too quiet for the words to be discernable. He heard a chuckling response, greeted by snorts and cackles from the assemblage. He winced sympathetically. And instant later, as anticipated, he heard a SMACK, a groan, and the potato-sack thud of a limp body hitting dirt.

“Oh Forgers…” he muttered.

He arrived outside on the heels of the foreman to behold Laurn standing over the laid-out body of a bearded logger half-again her height and easily twice her weight. She was rubbing her knuckles, grimacing, and shaking her head. She gestured desultorily at her handiwork as the furious foreman chuffed up: “Your man is the very soul of politeness. Indolent though, you might consider doing something about the sleeping on the job…”

The foreman was unamused. Ignoring Laurn’s quip, he pointed a quivering finger at Beidon: “FIRST I suffer fools!”

“Hey!” Beidon half-heartedly protested; nobody paid him any mind.

“THEN, I lose good daylight to… to pure rank immodesty!” Laurn shrugged, and smiled dangerously as his pointing finger found her in turn.

“NOW I find that the FLOOZY’s ambushed one ‘o’ me men!”

Laurn snarled. “That’d be ‘ambushed’ to his pig face, under your very ‘good daylight’!” She assumed a provocatively casual pose and offhand tone: “Care to see a repeat…?”

The foreman furiously rolled up his sleeves. “Gimme one good reason why I shouldn’t have me men truss the both ‘o’ ya to a log an’ run ya straight out ‘o’ here-”

Laurn and Beidon both spoke at once. Laurn, heated: “Think you have enough ‘men’ on hand to manage that...? Hope they’re more man than this one here-”

Beidon, determinedly diplomatic: “Master, please, we mean no disrespect! We’ll be leaving soon, and the quickest way to be rid of us would really be to answer a few… simple…”

But his voice trailed off, his attention caught by the chance glimpsing (under the upraised arm of the angrily gesticulating foreman, and over the shoulder of the posturing huntress) of a most peculiar phenomenon:

Several yards downhill and off to one side, out at the very edge of the camp clearing, the recently deposited silvery dust was stirring.

The movement was subtle enough that Beidon at first mistook it for a tiny dust-devil. But then a second puff erupted… then a third, this one noticeably beyond the original line of powder. Further dust eruptions continued sequentially, rhythmically, moving steadily inward … almost as if cast off from the fall of phantasmal feet.

The gape-mouthed forge boy stepped right past the foreman in pursuit of a better vantage. He took no further notice at all of the man’s continued ranting. What little notice he still took of the huntress impelled him to gesture weakly for her attention: “Ummm…”

Laurn, however, was mid-invective and completely focused on the foreman: “-think you owe your cushy little existence just to saws and axes? Here, at the mouth of a Thinning? HA! I’d like to see you last A SINGLE SLAGGING YEAR without-”

Beidon took another step forward. “Uhh, ‘scuse me…?”

The foreman shouldered past him. “-don’t care what manner ‘o’ nuttery yer peddlin’; if you think I’m a-gonna take ONE bit ‘o’ guff from some deranged FLOOZY an’ her pet MORON-”

Meanwhile the puffing footfalls had passed through the center of the clearing, climbing uphill toward the stream and weir. Beidon’s attention was wrenched away from the dust eruptions, however, by sudden movement from Laurn. His companion had apparently had enough, and was cocking back her arm in preparation for the punch that would set the whole camp to brawling.

The juxtaposition of the two urgencies finally goaded Beidon into action: he shouldered past the foreman and with sure forge-hammer instincts caught Laurn’s tensing shoulder, using the woman’s motion to deftly spin her around. Her shocked face swiveled toward him, but Beidon used his other hand to catch Laurn’s chin and nudge it ‘round to sight down his extended arm and pointer finger.

The beginnings of the huntress’ barked protest choked off into open-mouthed disregard as she also caught sight of the dust plumes. Then she was in motion, and Beidon went in an instant from grasping Laurn’s shoulder to being dragged insistently along in her wake by that wrist now pinioned under her tensely lowered arm. As he spun, off balance, he came briefly face-to-ruddy-face with the foreman. The inchoate man was in the middle of an apoplectic attempt at speech. Beidon could only shrug at him in passing. And the foreman, faced with the absurd spectacle of the husky boy’s sudden backwards-facing retreat, boot heels clattering over exposed tree roots as the woman dragged him, could only sputter out a face-saving “th-that’s right! An’ don’t come back, neither!”

Beidon, meanwhile, had regained his footing and was doing his best to keep pace with Laurn as she rapidly closed the eighty-odd yards separating her from the dust phenomena. The swift-striding faery huntress withdrew a small vial from her bandolier and unstoppered it with her teeth. Beidon watched her daub the contents onto a thumb, rub it with her index finger, then cup her brow with the anointed digits. She made a noise that was oddly like a sob.

“Say, what’re you-?”

Laurn responded by shaking more fluid onto her fingertips… then thrusting them right into Beidon’s eyes! He gasped, and attempted to recoil, force his eyes shut, but Laurn grasped the back of his head with one hand while insistently rubbing the substance in with the other. Whatever it was, it was warm, mucous-slimy, and it burned! The fingers withdrew before Beidon could mount a more effective resistance, leaving him swiping frantically at his tearing eyes as Laurn once again pulled him along.

“W-what was THAT?” he yelped.

“Faery ointment.” She tossed the now-empty vial away.

“Why-?”

“You’ll See.”

The odd emphasis was lost on poor distracted Beidon, who persisted in pawing at his face until a stumble over exposed roots impelled him to force his aching, teary eyelids apart. His vision was heavily smeared and oddly desaturated, almost as if a thick fog had settled over the camp while he’d been shuteyed. Objects were doubled, despite that his eyes didn’t feel crossed, and the condition proved stubborn, with no amount of blinking or straining to focus clearing the diplopic phantoms. Even more baffling, some of the elements of this ghostly doubled tableau appeared oddly non-identical, the left and the right not precisely agreeing in height, shape or coloring. Some of them presented to one eye only. And some of those ersatz blurry figures were disquietingly evocative, the shapes somehow oddly sensual… or ghastly… or achingly familiar.

The apparitions resolved out of the gray of the path ahead. One was an angular shadow that despite its familiarly ominous height barely registered to Beidon. The boy’s attention was seized wholly by the other, the bright willowy shape beside it wearing a crown of gold, brightest gold… gold that glinted in Beidon’s smarting-yet-now-wide-open eyes as it bobbed and bounced up the logging path.

He was on the move before he was even aware of it, bolting forward, evading Laurn’s startled attempt to hold him back without a thought spared. His feet flew, his blindered eyes saw only gold, and his lips formed a single word: “Emlie...

“EMLIE!!!”

Intrepid as she was, Emlie had initially balked at entering the fogbank.

It loomed ominously, barricading the top of the wooded upslope that climbed sharply skyward from where they stood. It was so tall… the trees that densely festooned the hill towered over the surrounding woods, yet still fell short of the height of the fogwall itself. It was so abrupt and so absolute, the sharply-sloped path running up against its stark white wall and simply vanishing. And it looked so… so eerily alive, all bristling with bulges, puffs and writhing tendrils and a-roil with irregular huffs and contractions like some old man gasping for breath.

It was uncanny, unpleasant-looking, and, truth be told, a bit daunting. Who wouldn’t hesitate?

Not Foxglove, of course. He had skipped up the slope while chiding her mercilessly for her “cowardly” reluctance, doling out sufficient provocation to carry her up the hill, past the barrier, and into the fog before she’d been able to notice it through the haze of her furious offense.

“You see, human? Here you stride through the heart of the mists, hale, unmolested, and not yet eaten by a grue!” He chuckled to himself. “Why, ‘tis nothing at all to be feared…”

She bristled as much at the recognition of the faery’s casual manipulation as at his easy condescension. And she was unheartened by his assertion that the fog, far from being mysterious or threatening, was a welcome telltale indicating that they’d reached the vicinity of the “demi-Thinning.” Whether or not the phenomenon was “normal”, the experience of it -from the claustrophobic press and constant oily caress of its wafting vapors to the deadening and echo-rich ambiance that flattened Foxglove’s patter into a tinny drone and threw echoes of their footsteps back from behind them- nevertheless set her teeth on edge.

Her unease infected her step – where before she’d strode easily, now she found herself all but tip-toeing, sticking close to her guide’s side and casting frequent nervous looks over her shoulder. Foxglove was equally mirthfully merciless in mocking this behavior (“Are the mists so fearful, human, or my succulent self simply so irresistible?”)

But her paranoia was borne out and her vigilance rewarded when one such random glance back revealed something extraordinary.

She’d been eying the point where the path and tree trunks vanished into the swirling mist-eddies below when she’d caught the first flicker: two yellow-white lights, side-by-side, springing into being amidst the gloom. They moved subtly against the background, bobbing and swaying, yet they sat at fixed distance to each other, as if attached. Though they’d begun as oblongs, twin horizontal slits, they rapidly changed shape - narrowing, flashing, and then widening into almond shaped pools of lurid brilliance. Eyes, came the shocked realization, they’re eyes.

The intense light sources illuminated the mist, sparking refration haloes even as they projected cones of orange light forward along the path. Their flickering (blinking, she numbly self-corrected) intensified, steadied, ceased… and then they surged forward, their light shafts sweeping, questing… looking, she realized with a thrill of horror, for us.

A warning needed to be conveyed, but Emlie’s voice had deserted her. Instead she tugged insistently on Foxglove’s arm. Far from reacting decisively, however, the faery yanked his sable clad sleeve out of her grasp, stroked it delicately, and beetled his brow over a reproachful gem-eyed glare directed squarely at her. She responded by jabbing her arm insistently in the direction of the light. Not me, you idiot, that! The vexed faery lingered on her for an instant more, heaving an exasperated sigh before turning to look in the indicated direction… just in time to be washed with orange light as it swept over both him and Emlie!

“Curses and drek!” The faery snarled at the oncoming lights. He began to backpedal up the trail.

Emlie stood rooted to the spot, transflixed by the dreadful fascination of the steadily oncoming lights. It was not until they swung on aside that she recovered her freedom of movement. She was on the verge of turning tail after Foxglove when her tardiness allowed her to bear witness to a new horrid manifestation: a second pair of eye-lights springing to terrible life alongside the first, incarnating through an even more pronounced series of awful twitches and blinks. Almost immediately though, they widened and brightened enough to eclipse their predecessors. And then this second pair settled on the girl, decisively and unequivocably, and grew wider still.

Paralyzing fascination or no, Emlie backpedalled in the face of their dire scrutiny. Then the new lights were accelerating, outpacing the first pair, eating up the separating distance and coming on in dreadful leaps and bounds. Their speeding approach snapped Emlie fully out of her reverie. She turned and tore up the path as if the Scrapper himself were hot on her heels, seizing Foxglove’s arm as she pelted by and yanking him into full-blown flight.

“They’re rabbiting…!” shouted Laurn as she overtook Beidon. “Gotta stop ‘em!”

“How??” demanded the forge boy on the strength of a gasping inhale.

Though he was pelting along at his fullest speed, the fleeing bloom of golden hair nevertheless pulled ever farther ahead, as unsusceptible to his sprint as to his shouts. He had the sudden impression that his pursuit represented some sort of transgression, one to which the wraiths’ inexorable retreat was the natural response… before the thought was utterly displaced by another tantalizing flash of gold.

He ran faster, groaned “-they’re too fast!”

Laurn responded with an arm slashed across the weir ahead: “Corner ‘em!”

“That dammed stream is-“ (gasp) “-barely waist-deep! It’s no obstacle!”

Laurn’s uncanny ability to run and smirk renewed his uneasiness. “Just wait and see…” And the snakt of her slingshot tines springing into loaded position elicited a nervous flip of his stomach. Something about this felt wrong.

Foxglove was again dragging Emlie in his wake. Their headlong flight strung them along the curving path as it arced up the forested slope. They weaved amongst blood-red trees reduced to indistinct pink smears by the omnipresent fog and leapt over the occasional fallen trunk. Glances downhill showed that they were at least keeping pace with the luminous menaces behind, perhaps even gaining an iota.

That progress, however, was wiped out at a sudden stroke when Foxglove brought them up short. Weird flickering light played across a face drawn back in a trembling snarl, preternaturally large. He hissed defiantly at the air ahead. Turning to the source of his dismay, Emlie stared in bafflement and horrified fascination.

A luminous display banded the air in front of them. Strands of particolored light wove a complex structure, a ribbon of ribbons of ribbons, its straight currents surging while whorls and eddies curled away like so many puffs of lanternlight-illuminated smoke. Flowing at a stately rate from one far distance to the other, the mass formed a phantasmal barrier bisecting the slope.

Emlie echoed the faery’s reaction with her own wordless yip of incomprehension.

“Water’s Shadow.” Foxglove muttered sidelong. “Very pronounced here, in proximity to the demi-Thinning. Rather inimical to my kind, Rose.” He fingered his black velvet sleeve. “Ruins the suit…”

He glanced rapidly back and forth between the barrier and their oncoming pursuers. “I must admit… this is truly wretched timing.”

“Ha!” The smirk was in full evidence again. “That weir is new. No way for our quarry to’ve known from their ‘Side that the ‘Treesfolk’d diverted the dammed Logwash right across their path! Now the bastard’s caught at the edge of the stream! Flowing water, basic ward in Thin spots.” She raised her slingshot-arm, the dark-cored wax balls snugged into their twin pouches. “So’s what’s in these.”

The huntress advanced at a confident stride. The forge-boy shadowed her, glancing from her extended weapon-arm over to the the glints of ethereal gold flickering before the wall of the weir. He fingered his belted forge hammer, but withdrew his hand without drawing it. What on the ‘Heap would I do with it?

Their quarry brought to bay, the distance narrowing to insignificance, the situation was coming to a head. Only it seemed suddenly apt to degenerate into violence. And Beidon had no idea how to slow or defuse it.

“Just be careful where you aim that!” came his ineffectual plea.

Cornered and well aware of it, Foxglove clenched his his hands. A hazy corona erupted from his fists, and as he put them up Emlie felt a sharp pang of nausea.

Assuming a pugilist’s stance, the faery made a double-handed feint at Water’s Shadow. There was no impact, indeed no interaction between fists and Shadow at all save for a sizzling sound when the one swung through the other. But Foxglove reeled back, cringing and sucking on fingers that had sprouted inky black blisters down their lengths. He regathered himself for a pair of follow-on attempts that produced similar results. Finally he was reduced to staring resentfully at the barrier while cradling his injured hands.

Orange light washed over Foxglove, drawing his attention. He stalked back past her and shook an enshrouded fist at the pursuing eye-lights, less than half their original distance away now and advancing with a predator’s slow confidence. “She orchestrated this!” he spat.

Emlie had no idea whether Foxglove cursed… “Black Laurn”, was it? She had no real idea at all who their eerie pursuers were. All she knew was that the pair of lights shining on Foxglove moved with a measured sureness that was inherently threatening, while the other pair appeared fixated on her, Emlie, with an absolutely chilling intensity. Between the two she was all but transfixed with dread.

The at-bay faery pivoted back towards the Shadow, and Emlie spotted clear desperation in those ruby eyes as they swept past. He was babbling now, pained and pressured and running his mouth: “-pox on the whole scion business! Curse the filthy miscegenates! Damn their ignorant ingratitude and their Sunside stink, their tricksy tricks and their cheapjack hand-me-down pow-… er, their…”

The words fell off, the mouth fell open.

The ruby eyes tracked slowly back, re-settling on her. And where an instant before there had been fear in them, now she could swear she saw dawning realization… giving way to active cunning. The aurae around his fists dissipated. Staring past him at their approaching doom, Emlie barely noticed.

“Rose…” he began with exaggerated casualness.

“Yes?” she asked, only half attending, attention still riveted to the approaching lights.

“I, ummm, I need your permission to impose on you… just the weest bit… in order that I might by your largesse act in hopes of extricating us from this predicament. May I borrow something?”

“Borrow…?” Those lights were getting awfully close; how could she hope to focus on whatever nonsense Foxglove was spouting? “Sure Foxglove, help yourself.”

“Freely and of your own will?”

They’re almost here… won’t he stop yapping and DO something?

Distractedly: “Yes… of course…”

Unseen by the distracted Emlie, Foxglove nodded decisively. When he resumed speaking, it was in oddly formal tones: “O chimes-hearer, unspoilt and more royal than ye know: let’s see if I didn’t choose poorly after all, eh?"

Shooting out both long arms, he grasped her head by either temple.

Emlie had barely begun flinching away from the unexpected seizure when her world exploded into searing white. An agony, a sudden depletion, an… outflow, was the only way to describe it, blazing through the points of contact at her temples. Her knees buckled, and she surely would have fallen had the faery not supported her. Slouching stricken in his arms, face turned up toward his, she saw something surrounding Foxglove… a quivering distortion of the air akin to yet substantially thicker than what he had manifested around his hands moment before. This time it moved, ascending his arms in upward-undulating ripples. The sight of this flow made Emlie acutely queasy, in just the same way as the sight of her own blood did. Moreover, each surge produced a strange pang of ever more acute weariness. Suddenly unable to hold her head upright, she let it droop just as the faery threw his own back in exultation.

“Yesssss…” His eye-gems flared with light. “Oh, yes.” He flashed a fleeting grin at Emlie’s prisoned face. “Dearest Rose, I can work with this.”

The faery’s hands sprang apart in a grand underscoring gesture, and the upsupported girl collapsed bonelessly to her knees. Raising only her eyes within a head grown impossibly heavy, she peered up at Foxglove looming above her, his ecstatic face and wide-spread arms upraised to the heavens. The vastly intensified coruscation now wreathed his entire body, until a contemptuous flick of his wrists sent it sweeping out in an omnidirectional expansion that ended with the duo encased within a yards-wide bubble of shimmering power. The faery grunted in satisfaction.

“Truly I could use a good pipe… but no, business must ever come first. Table-turning time, methinks!

“Where shall we start…?”

He stepped over the stricken girl to face the Water’s Shadow full-on.

“…aha!”

Laurn halted perhaps fifteen yards short of the ghostly figures, restraining Beidon via a grasped elbow. “Stop. Something’s wrong,” she hissed.

Intent, he made to step forward anyway. “Yes, you don’t sa-”

“No, dolt,” She retrieved him with an agonizing yank, “Something’s wrong.”

Beidon began to protest – that was Emlie, right in front of them! – but the words trailed off, impeded by an abruptly thick tongue and quivering edge-set teeth… unmissable hints that something here was indeed abruptly and badly off.

The arm that Laurn had grabbed tingled strangely. Checking it, he could see the hairs covering it standing up on end, with gooseflesh quickly following. Looking back up, he found himself blinking rapidly in confusion - the faery ointment visions had grown suddenly shimmery and indistinct, as if vibrating. A matching deep-throated hum arose, half-heard, half-felt in the bones, throbbing up from the ground beneath his feet. He shifted his weight nervously against its mounting intensity.

The loggers on the weir walkway felt it too. A moment before they’d been absorbed in hurling jibes and rude come-ons at the woman and the boy; now, they strumbled about and stared fearfully down at the stream coursing under their feet. Following their lead, Beidon spied strange sharp-edged ripples racing across its surface in time with every bone-rattling throb.

Laurn had no intention of waiting for the mounting phenomena to reach their unknown apotheosis – her face contorted into a distillation of purest rage, and: “Got you, bastard!” She jabbed her slings forward viciously. The catches clacked in response… a bare instant after Beidon knocked the weapon askew.

The waxy shot flew wide of the target... only to nevertheless glance off of the angled edge of some sort of unseen obstruction. The sizzle-hiss instant of impact jolted the barrier into split-second visibility, revealing it to the anointed eye as a blurry glassine dome enveloping the forms of the Feysiders. The deflected spheres arced off into the woods behind the stream. They detonated against the trees in sprays of sparks. Laurn flashed Beidon a look that could smelt lead, while the loggers, startled by the pyrotechnics, began a hasty abandonment of the dam... as it turned out, just in time.

The burgeoning hum cut out, sharply. There was an instant’s dreadful silence, broken only by a cough or two. Then all hell broke loose.

The rear face of the invisible dome, the section facing upstream, suddenly ERUPTED outward. Visible again by dint of the matter it displaced, its explosive expansion pushed it into and through the weir and out into the dammed up pond beyond. It plowed water, mud, and weir-wreckage in a concave uphill-flowing wave that exploded up and back, practically topping the upslope trees before tumbling down behind them.

In the wake of the tumult, Beidon was left gawping at the bared riverbed stones and flopping stream-trout. He strained to glimpse the water-wall of the restrained Logwash where it lurked beyond the tree line, acting every bit the gobsmacked yokel. It took Laurn to restore sense to him in singularly urgent fashion: by smacking the back of his head, shoving him forward, and shouting, “Fool, RUN!!!”

“As appetizers go,” chortled the faery, “I can only deem that… delicious!”

He turned back to Emlie: “Rose, I take back everything I said about you… well, the preponderance anyway.”

He took her hand, and gently tugged the insensate girl to her feet to her feet. “And now methinks, for an intermezzo, a stroll. Let us promenade!” He led her across the empty depression which moments before had held the Water’s Shadow.

Lifting her heavy head, Emlie strained to spot the interdicted Shadow writhing and piling at the distant forward edge of the faery’s enchantment. Behind them, meanwhile, their pursuers’ eye-lights were peering about frantically. They’d grown as wide as Emlie imagined her own would be had she only the strength or the clarity left to be taken aback. Even as she watched, though, one of the pair appeared to pull itself together. It bestirred the other, and then both raced forward. She tugged on the faery’s still-shimmering sleeve and pointed.

“Ahh, our pursuers do not give up easily!” He raised a reinforcing hand, fingers spread.

Another pair of black streaks erupted from the lead pursuer and, just as their predecessors a moment ago had, were stymied by Foxglove’s borrowed energies. The streaks rebounded into the stony channel behind, where they burst into malevolent-looking eruptions of night-black motes like anti-sparks. Cackling at the miss, Foxglove skipped up the rising slope, dragging Emlie after.

“Ha, too little too late – we’re across!” and indeed they were, their angled course having carried them out through a far corner of the wide depression wherein Water’s Shadow had laid. “Unlike our straining pursuers! Time for us to… relax. Perhaps digest a bit, eh?”

And true to his suggestion and right in front of an astonished Emlie, Foxglove smiled, closed his ruby eyes with a blissful sigh, allowed his carriage to go slack, and commenced idly buffing his nails on his lapel. “And as for our dear tardies, well-”

A mighty rumble rose from the shadow-mass, accompanied by the burgeoning sense of something vast and unseen rushing-returning unto them. The black whorls of the trees lining the clearing swayed in a vast unfelt breeze.

“-they can do the washing up!”

The grinning faery squeezed his eyes shut tighter and plugged his ears...

The wave overtook them as they picked their way over the slick stones less than halfway across the pond-bed beyond the shattered weir. The pent-up Logwash swept down from the far end in tumult, the accumulation far irresistible to yield to obstruction and far too great for the pond’s low banks to contain. It rumbled down the slope and smashed back through the site of the shattered weir, overwhelmed its curving low bank and ploughed a new course through the center of Once-Were-Trees’ camp clearing. Battered by wreckage and terrain, Beidon and Laurn tumbled head-over-heels, suffering suffocating immersion alternating with apocalyptic glimpses of the deluged camp: logs, machines, screaming men, everything the water-surge overran got swept inexorably away. Beidon even spied a log cabin, foundations ripped away, sailing downhill like an ark. Beyond, scores of men on the periphery of the deluge were clinging to trees, using them for refuge from the flood.

The wavelet-tossed piece of wallboard that clipped his chin just then inspired the thought that their only hope likely lay in doing likewise.

Through all of this, he’d somehow kept a grip on Laurn’s arm given his acute awareness that the huntress couldn’t swim. Not that I can either! But so far at least, the forge-boy’s greater size and mass -and the consequently somewhat lesser battering that he’d perhaps sustained to this point- had allowed him to better keep some occasional semblance of his footing amidst the flood. She’d be swept away unless he acted to preserve her… which he would, in the hope that she might offer some saving insight into the utter madness that had just broken loose all around them. So he held on for dear life, his own as much as hers.

Meanwhile, he fumbled with his other hand for the handle of his forge-hammer. Three times he nearly seized it before the shock of another violent dunking threw him off; on the fourth attempt he managed it. He immediately started swinging the hammer in broad random arcs, leading not with the large flat head but with the clawed rear. He wasn’t choosy as to target – anything anchored would do!

He knew what success would entail – when the shock of impact radiated up his arm, it didn’t telegraph victory so much as a warning to brace himself, fast. He braced himself as the current spun him around, redoubling his grip on Laurn with the one arm while curling the other into an all-over death grip on the hammer handle. A second later he was swept to full arm-extension and treated to another, orders-of-magnitude-greater JOLT.

Beidon now found himself in utter extremis – he’d hooked onto something immobile and kept his grip (barely, via supreme effort of will) only to literally leave himself and his passenger hanging. The floodwaters continued to rush by, dragging at bother their bodies, and no amount of desperate straining by those forge-honed muscles would produce even an inch’s worth of movement agaibst them… Beidon was strung out a bare arm’s length away from salvation, powerless to attain it and rapidly tiring.

Fortunately he didn’t have to wait long for deliverance. Almost immediately he felt Laurn stirring and struggling. Don’t, you madwoman, you’ll drown! Surely she was mad, for she violently shrugged out of his grasp. In the next instant, though, one of her hands clapped down onto his shoulder, while the other snagged his tunic collar. Then both of her feet were digging into his hip, vying mercilessly for purchase. Hands clapped his head; feet scrabbled up his chest, using his ribs for a ladder and his torso as a shield against the merciless current; all four extremities perched momentarily atop his shoulders, bracketing his ears. Those shoulders took the brunt of the exertion powering the prodigious leap that followed, the one that left Beidon busy scrabbling with both hands to restore his loosened grip while Laurn went flying out overhead. His shocked thoughts had barely managed a bewildered Whaa—what is she - when gloved hands shot down from above, looped under his near shoulder, and heaved him up out of the flood.

Beidon shook the water from his eyes and coughed up a good deal more (aided by Laurn, who provided back-thumping assistance with gusto.) Upon recovering he looked around… and was taken aback by the surrounding devastation. The initial flood of the unleashed Logwash was dying down, but its remnant still covered the clearing to a depth of several feet in places… and what the receding waters revealed wasn’t pretty.

Take their immediate environment: the other three walls of the cabin whose gable he and Laurn crouched atop had collapsed, leaving the unsupported roof sloping down into the water. Virtually no other structure in the clearing had fared better. An unmoored outbuilding had smashed a hole clean through the bunkhouse, and crude wooden trestle beds bled from the wound and rode the tide downstream, some with men clinging to their tops. In some places the cabins had been merely flooded out and wrecked; in others only foundation piles remained. Everywhere he looked, he saw only water, splintered ruins, and half-drowned men hauling themselves out of them.

“Forgers, this is-”

“-smashing, absolutely smashing! Rose, we simply MUST do this more often!” Whatever events so stirred Foxglove transpired beyond the limits of Emlie’s sight, but whatever they were had the faery nearly beside himself with glee. He clicked his teeth sharply, smacked his lips, chortled “Can we possibly find a main course that might live up to this for sheer deliciousness?” and cast about behind them with gleeful expectancy.

He finally fixed on something back on the far side of the resurgent Water’s Shadow, close by the point where he’d first diverted it. Numerous small tributaries branched from the great rushing maelstrom of light there, tenuous dead-end light-flows dribbling out from the disheveled main mass in every downhill direction. Most were simple, small leaks. The one on which Foxglove focused was unique, though, both the largest and the most unusual. Rather than following a simple sinuous course, it sharply zagged through an unnatural-looking series of mid-air convolutions like a circle described in jagged stairstep planes. Whatever Sunside structure constrained the water so was likewise hidden from Emlie’s sight, but it evidently met Foxglove’s need, for he grunted in sly-sounding satisfaction.

As she looked on, he pointed his shimmering hand at the tendril and flourished his fingers. The ephemeral rushing sensation recurred…

“You hear that, boy?”

Beidon shook his head. It seemed highly improbable that Laurn had heard anything over the receding water, the creaks of settling wreckage, the groans of waterlogged Treefolk, his grunts and her own exertions as they jointly strained to haul a half-drowned logger up onto the roof… besides, he was too engaged in staring over his shoulder at the high end of the clearing –where Emlie’d been, she was right there, damn it– to spare any attention for Laurn’s phancies. “No. Pull harder.”

Laurn was insistent though. “Idiot. There it is again.”

“I can’t-” …but wait: he could.

Despite his scorn, he too’d heard a momentary whirrrr… accompanied by a flicker of motion caught in the peripheral vision of his preoccupied gaze. Had it been there, just off to the side of Emlie’s point-of-disappearance? Yes, definitely. Whatever active motion he’d sensed was over and done now, but back amidst the still-standing jumble of the gearing tower, the waterwheel was rocking back-and-forth toward quiescence, almost as if it had just-

The wheel exploded into motion.

Is the Logwash flooding again? But no - the stream continued in its ebbing flow through the rent in the dam, leaving the wheel’s sluice channel dry. Besides, no flood short of the primordeal original could account for the madcap motion of the waterwheel, its speed now so great that the great spokes were mere blurs and smoke puffed from the wooden axle puffed smoke from its screeching joints. The gearing tower shook like a tree in a hurricane yet somehow failed to fall to pieces, and the long series of belt-and-gear-bearing wooden armatures emerging from it began to buck and thrash like a lightning-struck snake.

A captivated Beidon watched the impulse cascade down the meandering segment chain, following it as it wrenched positioning stakes free in sequential sprays of turf, losing sight of it as its leading edge disappeared into an outthrust bulge of the fringing woods. His head automatically continued to turn, tracking with the hidden surge, anticipating its reemergence past the obstruction.

And it was only this reflex action that permitted Beidon to see it coming.

“DROP!!!” he shouted, releasing the arm of the half-rescued logger in the same instant that he pitched himself forward off the edge. Laurn displayed superbly honed reflexes despite the utter lack of warning or explanation by rolling sideways down the slope of the roof. The logger on the other hand wore pure puzzlement as his suddenly unsupported body began dropping…. though he managed to appear impressively more thunderstruck as he witnessed something smash into the roof they’d just vacated, something that whizzed and buzzed like an armada of hornets as it pelted the plummeters with a stinging spray of splinters.

Then Beidon was splashing down into waist deep water on his hands and knees, and immediately flipping to his back. He looked to the cabin to find it messily bisected, sidewalls blown out and the severed halves of its roof sinking unsupported into the flood. He craned his neck up over the wreckage, anticipating witnessing the out-of-control bucking and thrashing of the rogue machinery responsible. What he beheld instead was part confounding, part uncanny, and completely terrifying, such that even as he struggled for comprehension he found himself edging backwards in the kind of wary backpedal that was instinctual to those under threat by a dangerous predator. He let out a whispered obscenity.

The cabin’s destroyer finished withdrawing from the rubble, its movement distinctly controlled. It hung poised over its handiwork, swinging its ‘head’ back and forth as if surveying for prospective prey. At that moment the logger, perhaps stumbling while rising to his feet, produced an errant splash. The head swivelled sharply in the direction of the sound. Beidon was forced by this inarguable evidence of his senses to accept the impossible: the articulated armature and eight-foot-wide circular blade of the Great Saw had somehow been imbued by the power surge with an independent vitality, along with an undeniable and predatory intelligence.

The Saw’s foremost segments reared up snakelike, logger harnesses empty and controls unmanned. The saw-head wambled side to side in a disquietingly animalistic gesture, as if hesitating between multiple helpless prey. Like the waterwheel, it smoked and shivered under speeds and stresses well in excess of anything its engineers could have imagined it sustaining, yet remained uncannily intact. The blade itself was mesmerizing, glinting and gleaming at its core, translucent at its deadly edge. Beidon could see flashes of his face reflected in it, could stare into his own terrified eyes.

Beidon elected not to wait on its decision – wrenching himself away, he flipped belly down again and scrabbled for all he was worth. Immediately, as if he’d broken a spell, he heard the keening song of the blade’s plunging approach. Hauling at submerged stumps for boosted speed, kicking against the clinging mud of the bottom, he responded to the breath of the thing on his back with a desperate downhill lunge and gritted his teeth, awaiting the inevitable. There was a massive splash followed by a roil of turbulence as the plunging saw passed in between his legs. A high falsetto yelp escaped his lips (one he prayed the Redeemers was drowned out by the saw-cacaphony) even as he was lifted on a surge of saw-propelled water that he rode steeple-fingered and stiff-bodied for all he was worth.

Once he’d attained what he hoped was an out-of-reach distance, Beidon resumed his feet and turned back toward the Saw. He discovered it rising back up out of the stream, palpably petulant, like some impossible giant water snake. What he did not see any sign of, he realized, was Laurn... but he did spot the soggy logger. Obviously blithely uncomprehending of the saw’s supernatural affliction, the man had clamored up out of the morass and now stood facing the possessed machine at a distance that might well have been amply safe had the condition been one of mere mechanical malfunction… but was which was woefully, fatally inadequate in the face of the murderous supernatural. Beidon’s croak of a warning arrived far too late. The saw pulled back, tesnsed, then snapped its whole length tautly forward in a lightning-fast action that was far less mechanical movement than it was fencer’s lunge. The blade’s whir momentarily became a stomach-turning low-pitched shearing sound as it swept past. In its wake, the logger stood quivering for a single hesitant moment. Then he bent slowly backward, as if to take stock of a tall stand of timber… and just kept going, tilting back from a grisly notch that gaped at his midsection, until the feller of trees himself sickeningly toppling “timber”.

Beidon’s eyes squeezed involuntarily shut against the grisly stump… only to be snapped back open in the face of a resounding battle cry and drawn to a burst of sudden motion. Laurn was surging explosively up and out of the watery wreckage of the cabin’s shattered midsection. She came charging toward him up the steep incline of the broken-backed roof’s nearer half and lunged from its apex… straight toward the overextended arc of the saw armature!

Her target registered her approach and began coiling ‘round to intercept, but the incomplete action only added to the faery hunter’s momentum. Arms outstretched, she flew across the narrowed gap and caught onto the foremost joint of the power train, the “neck” directly behind the blade segment. The armature reacted by bucking like a bronco, but Laurn swung her legs up into the tangle of the empty control harness, locked them, and held fast. It swung wildly back and forth (incidentally shearing thrsough a spotter’s post and sending two clinging spotters toppling into the drink) and plunged down underwater… but when it withdrew, Laurn still hung from it. In fact, she took advantage of the abuse, using one particularly strong undulation to swing from inverted dangle to rightside-up straddle. In the next moment she made further headway, inching slowly and painfully forward toward the blade mount.

Sensing this, the armature made a rapid sideways-jigging change in direction. Laurn lost her leg-lock and toppled sideways, clinging with hands-and-feet against the torque. The motion terminated explosively as the Saw plowed into the side wall of another cabin and thrust itself in two segments deep. Bodies immediately exploded out of the doorway and windows, previously sheltering Treefolk diving for safety, followed closely by the nauseating shearing sound and an accompanying ejection of body parts - a dire fate for stragglers, or so Beidon guiltily caught himself hoping, given the alternative. Surely Laurn wasn’t...?

Then the Saw’s neck was withdrawing from the hole... without Laurn on it! Beidon was ready to scream in despair before the Sawblade itself emerged, carrying with it his companion now clinging precariously to its lower fork via a single hand! The huntress drew a club with her free hand and used it in a series of heaving overhead swings. She landed several solid blows, but none cracked the fork’s wood-and-iron framework to impact the delicate belts and gearing within.

Feeble though the assult was, the Great Saw reacted to it as if stung. It snapped up into a stiff columnal vertical with sufficient violence to dislodge Laurn; she slid down past several armature segments before jolting to an abrupt halt with an agonized grimace and a bellowed curse. For the first time Beidon saw a panicked reaction from the hardy huntress: she lurched repeatedly against her one-armed dangle, flailing ineffectually at her engaged arm with her free one. The forge boy belatedly realized that her bracer had caught on a protrusion of the armature, trapping her.

Her opponent didn’t stint to take advantage of the mishap. It bent forward again with an ensorcelled limberness that far exceeded its design tolerances. The terminal segments of the arm curled inward and down, like a crooking finger. Wood creaked and cracked, gears screamed in protest, but the armature held together and the saw kept rotating as it doubled under itself. Laurn dangled in its path, caught dead-to-rights… ‘til the terminal second, when she suddenly wrenched herself sideways, every muscle on her frame popping taut with the effort. Her free-hanging body bent into an arch that cleared the blade by a bare hair’s breadth. The thwarted Saw reversed motion, pulled back, paused a second, then darted back in from another angle. Laurn flexed into another taut-muscled dodge, missing the blade to its opposite side. Her athleticism was inspired… but her gritted teeth, glazed eyes, and sheathing sheen of sweat suggested that it was taking a steep and rapid toll. It was a matter of seconds before she would inevitably falter and the blade find its mark.

Beidon, meanwhile, had approached back out into the flood, heedless of his own peril. He’d been literally treading water during the entire chain of events, too captivated to remember even his own inability to swim as he stared up in awe at Laurn’s exertions. Now the realization that his supremely capable companion hung in utter extremis shocked him sharply back to himself. What in the Refuse Heap am I doing?? He shook his head… and plunged immediately hair deep into the flood.

This time, however, he didn’t panic (ironic, given that the circumstances were inarguably far more conducive.) Instead he waited for his sturdy legs to touch bottom, crouched, then kicked off in his intended direction of travel. Two gasping lunges of that sort brough him up to a swath of shallows; three more to another, then on to another. In between he hauled himself furiously forward with heavily muscled arms, ignoring the wavelets smacking against his face, aiming not for Laurn or the Saw blade but rather for the point where the rearing armature met the ground.

In short order he was climbing out of the stream via the expedient of the gantry-like construct. He drew his hammer and began pounding for all he was worth on the section rising up before him. His blows dented struts and cracked spars, but apparently injured nothing critical.

Overhead, Laurn dodged yet another time, not so swiftly as before. The blade grazed her across the hip, severing her girdle and eliciting a yelp of pain. She was clearly one more assault away from destruction.

Beidon stared helplessly. He couldn’t bear to watch. His head drooped, weighted down by his ineffectiveness, gaze drifting down the armature’s complex assembly of concertinaing struts to downcast rest at his feet… at… his…

The pieces and connections fell into place like components of a forge-wrought mechanism, inspiration striking like a physical shock, and Beidon unhesitatingly transmuted it into similarly impactful action. Instead of another pointless hammerblow, he used the tool for a thrust, jabbing it into the crux of a strut hinge just as it collapsed forward to facilitate the Saw’s fatal curling motion. The thick steel head wedged the joint partially open, causing the entire counter-articulated forward length of the Saw armature to seize up. The rotating blade jolted to a quivering halt less than a foot away from Laurn’s bare midriff.

Beidon huffed out the breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. He’d done it! Flush with pride at having actually made a difference in this insane encounter, the forge-boy looked up at his companion in anticipation of receiving her gratitude. Laurn was still in a single piece… a scowling single piece that was gesturing emphatically at his handiwork. What-? Turning back to it, he heard a panoply of increasingly emphatic creaks and cracks being emitted by the straining armature. With each noise, the forge hammer scraped sideways an infinitesimal amount, bringing the joint a tiny bit closer to shut, the Saw a tiny bit closer to Laurn’s exposed flesh. The huntress was exerting herself again, this time hunching forward with lifted legs so as to bend her midsection back and buy herself a few more inches, a few more seconds. The unnaturally flexing wood around the hammer cracked sharply, the hammer now held against ejection only by the flimsy dug-in toehold of its twin claws. The failure of his improvisation was clearly imminent. Oh.

The straining Saw abruptly shifted approach, flailing in the opposite direction. As the armature curled up and away the suddenly uncaught hammer was flung free, straight into Beidon’s hands. Then the Saw reversed its direction and began to curl the other way, with nothing to prevent its cutting Laurn in half.

This time Beidon didn’t despair. Not now, not after his burst of insane daring and improbable accomplishment. No, this time he felt only anger… and an utter unwillingness to give in. He was seized by something… further inspiration or crazed fury, he would not afterwards be able to say. Whichever, he was filled with a transcendent certainty. He took two steps forward, turned with his back to the wall and, absurd as the action was, SHOUTED up at the blade: “LEAVE HER ALONE!! DOWN HERE, RUSTBUCKET!!!” Then he hurled his forge-hammer.

He was no shot-putter and his tool was unbalanced for flight; it struck butt-first at the end of a loblike trajectory and glanced pathetically off of the empty side-slung operator’s cage. What it did do, however, was finally get the animated device’s attention. The Great Saw aborted its sure-to-be-lethal downcurve in mid-stroke and quivered uncertainly in place.

“GUESS WHO JUST CAN’T CUT IT??” Beidon winced at the inane attempt at an insult even as he was shouting it. Laurn rolled her eyes. Even the slagging Saw tilted at a quizzical angle, apparently bemused.

Oh ‘Heap, witty repartee is Emlie’s department. Best just stick with what I’m good at. And he rained multiple heavy-workbooted stomps down on the already damaged strut.

That did it. The Saw erupted downward, plunging and stretching after its new attacker, moving so swiftly that it left a dislodged Laurn hanging in the air in its wake. The forge-boy stood his ground, staring down his own onrushing death, luring it forward with his stolid presence. He didn’t falter or panic or flinch away; following Laurn’s earlier example, he stood firm in the face of onrushing annihilation until the very last possible instant before its arrival.

And then he simply dove sideways. The Saw might have tried to arrest its plunge, but it was too much mass moving far too fast… and its opponents were disinclined to give it any chance to. Beidon glimpsed Laurn dropping down from above, driving both legs into the blade-head, using her own weight and momentum to compound its commitment. He was buffeted by the wind of its passage as it roared by overhead-

-to SLAM squarely into the structure behind him, the armature housing its own power train! Two hundred pounds of steel at three hundred RPM bit deep into its own mechanical aorta, snapping wooden bones and severing drive belt conduits of life’s-blood motive force. The great blade recoiled spastically, pelting Beidon with bits of rubber-and-steel viscera and assaulting him with a horrific sound equally suggestive of a catastrophic mechanical failure and a keening death-wail.

The mortally wounded machine rose lurching and quivering against the sky, gathering itself for a final swing - one that Beidon, caught on his back in the open, had scant hope of avoiding. He grit his teeth, the Saw lurched forward… and it was at that instant that some critical bit of armature hardware -fittings goaded by Laurn into repeated self-damaging motions, struts punished by the dreadful impact that Beidon had engineered- finally gave way.

The effect was an immediate cascade of pent-up forces, ruin transmitted up and down the length of the armature by the same ingenius mechanisms that had carried its motive force. Gears seized, belts whipped, axles snapped. Strutwork burst apart, shredded from within by its unleashed innards.

The Great Saw, pulled in one direction by terrible inertia and another by equally potent torque, exploded in mid-air.

Beidon threw up his arms defensively and averted his head. Then he gasped in horror. He’d caught a glimpse of his companion Laurn lying limply atop the ruined operator cage … in the instant before a crushing rain of wreckage including the Great Sawblade itself had covered her. His stomach leapt up into his throat.

Forgers, no.

For a moment, Beidon lay frozen, his recent dynamic certitude drained away by sudden utter exhaustion and the shock of this seeming calamity. But only for a moment. Pig-Iron-Head though he might be, Beidon had never lacked for either heart or industry. He’d never been one to lay about when there was more for him to do, or to quail when there was further opportunity to be useful. He looked to the debris shrouding Laurn and, with a self-disparaging curse, reminded himself that both exhaustion and despair were premature.

Digging deep for a little more energy, he crawled forward on his knees and tore into the newly formed pile. He flung ever-larger armature sections to either side until he found himself gripping the serrated edge of the great blade. Ignoring the pricking of his flesh, he paused for a moment, steeling himself for what he might see underneath. Finally with a deep breath he wrenched it aside… to come face to face with a battered-but-very-much-alive-Laurn, preserved within a small cavity in the debris and glowering up at him. The blade had apparently just missed her in its edge-on impact, then toppled over onto her. She’d been spared the crushing weight by a fortuitous upthrust of metal framework that had braced it. The blade, in turn, had acted as a makeshift roof to fend off the rest of the deadly debris-rain. The huntress’ eyes were dazed and dilated as they focused waveringly on his own.

“Boy…” she gasped, “didn’t… get to tell you before…”

“Yes, Laurn?” he leaned in close, anxious to hear whatever pronouncement she was laboring to get out.

She hefted her club with a quivering arm and, straining, managed to plant the tip under Beidon’s chin. “Don’t… you ever… foul my aim again…” Then she passed out.

“A fine day’s work, if I DO say so myself!” A throaty chuckle ensued, effervescently mirthful.

Emlie groaned… and not just because of the unshakable sensation of utter bone-deep depletion. She gazed down at the tableau of the misty clearing, now inundated with attenuated, meandering tendrils of the diverted Water’s Shadow. The eye-lights were gone, true, the dreadful feeling of pursuit lifted, but something now felt off… felt very, very wrong. And whatever had transpired to evoke that feeling was something she had had some sort of hand in it, however indirectly and unknowingly.

“Oh, you were fairly satisfactory as well,” the faery quipped, misinterpreting. “Now don’t besoil it by acting the glory-hog.”

Laying his hand atop her weary head, he spun it around to face the ascending trail. “Never linger on past accomplishment, Rose. NEW opportunities await!” He strode off, whistling a giddy tune.

And Emlie, with a last, troubled glance over her shoulder, stumbled after.

Next Chapter: 2. Emlie On The Town