In relieving the cave’s overwhelming darkness, Foxglove had blunted the sharp edge of Emlie’s panic... if not the lingering unease borne of its closeness, its eeriness, and the unsettling fact that her strange companion had wrought it out of thin air.

Oh, he’d hinted that some preexisting thing had already been there, just after their exchange of pseudonyms, but his implication had served only to confuse an Emlie already baffled (and more than a little offended) by his behavior. The utterance had come just as the faery lost all apparent interest in her, dropping the conversation in favor of a strange new preoccupation.

His pronouncement-accompanying spread-armed pirouette had suddenly skidded into a wide-eyed (wide-gemmed?) stare targeting a section of the embankment behind them festooned with an arch of enormous toadstools. “Oh my.” He’d leaned in, sniffing houndishly. “My, my, my… what a clever little mud-spawn it is. After all-” and he’d turned back long enough to grant her a conspiratorial wink, “-it isn’t every mortal who would have had the sublime courtesy to loose me at the very threshold of a Thinning!”

Any question Emlie might have had regarding this peculiar pronouncement went unvoiced, as Foxglove had chosen that moment to end the interview altogether. She’d had to scramble out from under his long-legged way as he strode forward toward the embankment while withdrawing an object resembling a quartz crystal from his (now pewter-gray) waistcoat. Palming the crystal in line with his long fingers and murmuring something that might have been “like calls to like”, he’d raised his hands in twin sweeping arcs that took in the whole of the bower-bowl, its earthen innards and its mushroom fringe. His hands had met above his head, palms together cupping the now buzzing crystal… and then they’d performed a brusque vertical slashing gesture.

There’d been a queer tingling verge-of sensation, reminiscent of the gooseflesh raised by a thunderstorm’s ozone-scented first gusts in promise of future thunder… thunder which had indeed come, in the form of a resonant rumbling from deep within the bankside. It was an accompaniment to the impossible: a double row of roots from the toppled tree erupting from the dirt, wriggling with impossible animation, stretching taut, flexing, finally curling inwards and groping back into the gash of their emergence. Emlie could swear that they’d then tugged outwards on the earthen fabric of the bank, just as Beidon’s hands had done with the placket front of his Restday shirt that one time she’d snuck a peek after they’d snuck out of Meeting to go skinny-dipping. Rather than revealing smooth skin underneath, however, the tugging roots had unearthed only a plunging darkness.

Foxglove had started forward. But that terrifying absoluteness had prompted the girl to halt him with a foot-dragging protest that his indicated course, no ‘magic cave’ now but a true yawning cavern mouth, was unnavigably lightless: “I… I won’t be able to see the foot at the end of my leg in there!”

The faery had laughed at that, gaily lamenting the insurmountable limitations with which the gods had saddled poor, poor humankind, and had dismissively made to shove her inside. Emlie’s response had been sharp, covering her panic: “So much as lay a finger on me, sirrah, and you’ll find yourself rolling down that hole!”

Foxglove had paused in his manhandling to consider the girl. And whether moved by something in her wide-eyed gaze or simply tired of dawdling, had finally nodded acquiescence to her need for light. He’d reached past her to pluck a dead branch from the bower’s lip, with which he’d smartly skewered one of the huge mushroom caps. An offhand arcane utterance was all it took to spark the cap aglow with a lambent green light, a foxfire so intense that Emlie had for the first time fully appreciated its old alternate name of ‘faery fire’.

Wielding this ersatz torch, Foxglove had stepped through the opening without further ado. Emlie, with a held breath, had plunged in after.

Foxglove’s near-namesake luminance now revealed an arched passage whose walls initially appeared to be bark. Emlie was immediately struck by the absurd impression that they were walking into the trunk of the toppled tree… but no, for the cramped tunnel rapidly outstretched the depth of the old bole without. But where was this tunnel, then? It had little if any downslope; they should therefore have emerged almost immediately through the mounded back of the embankment. Yet the tunnel stretched on and on, bark walls giving way to dirt, tree roots gnarling around them, then dangling above them, rounded shards of bedrock occasionally interpenetrating. The low dirten arch pressed close around her, the dangling root-tips groped for her hair, the sound of her own nervous panting echoed around her with claustrophobic polyphony… almost as if all wee acting in concert to dissuade Emlie of the wisdom of this whole grand adventure.

The foxfire glimmered between the intervening root-tips, causing a phantasmagoria of intricate shadows to scroll back past her on all sides, above, below... Seeking relief, she cast a glimpse behind her. The portal to the world without was there, yes, but somehow… farther… than it ought to be. The Glazersgush sat remote and silent, the light flicking over it oddly wan and colorless. Had the day become overcast? She turned back to Foxglove intending to ask about it, only to find that he’d moved ahead up the tunnel. She scampered nervously after, only casting another glimpse behind once she’d gained back the lost ground. But this time, the outside world was entirely gone – only undifferentiated passage was visible behind, lengthier by far than she recalled having walked and converging to darkness at the edge of sight. She had little time to brood much on this ominous development, however, for Foxglove just then deigned to again address her:

“Do try not to be embarrassingly overwhelmed by what you’re about to see – should you find yourself succumbing to the Mudsider penchant for awestricken paralysis, kindly remember we’re on a tight time-table!”

The exigencies of keeping pace with the hastening faery precluded thinking up a clever reply to his quip… as did processing the strange terrain they traversed.

The tunnel walls were shifting composition again… what had been a “natural” passage was, by strides, becoming a wrought corridor. They began to pass rough stone blocks embedded in the dirt. As they progressed, these grew more common until there were more blocks than dirt, then stone walls with wide dirt-mortared gaps, then smooth stonework and no visible dirt at all.

An ancient stone archway loomed out of the gloom ahead. Surely Foxglove’s overwhelming sight waited beyond? Nitre dangled in long palid fingers from the arch – Emlie would need to crouch while stepping through. Somehow, Foxglove -despite his prodigious height- neither stooped nor brushed his hatted head against the deposits.

Straightening up on the far side, anticipating spectacle, Emlie found herself in what appeared for all the world to be… a drab subterranean gallery, musty and neglected. A museum basement? A manor storeroom? A wine cellar? Something of that sort. A long, low room, drab and unremarkable, its low roof supported by twin colonnades extending off into the gloom. The rising columns blossomed into arches whose ribs divided the ceiling into numerous shadowy vaults. Their undersides might once have housed ornate archivolts… but if so, time had long since smoothed out the carvings. The rest of stonework was equally unembellished.

Emlie’s shoes puffed up dust as she followed the faery into the chamber. She trudged along behind the faery, searching futilely for any evidence of past or present habitation amidst the grimly cobwebs, finding only silent emptiness under cracked old columns marching off unrelievedly into the gloom.

So focused was she on looking ahead for a break in the monotony that she nearly tripped over one that she’d failed to notice underfoot. She was spared a stumble by Foxglove’s interloping arm – it shot back, seized her shoulder, and steered her into a sidestep, while the other hand pointed out the dust-covered bump she’d been about to tread on. The wind of her close passage dislodged some of that covering, revealing what lay underneath… an antique-looking stone bowl. At Foxglove’s oddly stern urging she stepped carefully around the lonesome artifact.

Though the center aisle after that one encounter remained clear beneath its dusty carpeting, their progress began to reveal increasing detritus within the peripheral arcades. Initial solitary shapes and small clusters gave way to floor-filling collections, more than a few of which glinted hints of precious metals through thick deposits of age-layered grime. Brass and copper, silver and gold and metals less readily identifiable shimmered on helter-skelter floor-piles and artful arrangements gracing stone benches and seats. Their forms suggested plates, bowls, goblets and chalices, boxes and reliquaries, statuary, and other shapes more exotic still.

The foxfirelight began to illuminate draped velvet buntings, gold-accented burgundy arching between the pillar cornices. Once sumptuous, they had faded and rotted to the point where the transitions between the fabric and the spiderweb traceries depending from it could only be guessed at rather than pinpointed. When matching heraldic banners appeared accenting the side walls, they suffered similarly: whether the scenes they had once depicted had been magnificent, frolicsome or terrible, the decay of ages had reduced them to sad gray suggestions, the figures in them to vaguely limned corpses and shadows. In more than one of the vaults, banner or bunting had fallen to drape the treasure underneath like a funeral shroud. The carvings under-edging the arches grew more discernable, more elaborate… at least where they had not fallen into rubbly ruin.

The overall impression was of onetime opulence abandoned long ages past. The dust was omnipresent: the stirred air of their ingress had stirred up innumerable motes, which now hung glinting green, dancing like tiny faeries in the eerie torchlight.

It was a setting that might move a mortal, be it through a twinge of mortality or a rush of avarice. Emlie, however, was too preoccupied to appreciate it. The girl raised in a culture of ever-advancing Progress was inured against disquieting contemplations of passing time. The Lord Mayor’s daughter was unmoved by riches, to her commonplace. And while old trinkets and inscrutable heraldic trappings might have tickled her fancy in another time and in another context, just now they were something she’d had a bellyful-of in the all-too-public ordinary life she was in the very act of fleeing from. Here in flight, she wanted to see living magick, not some fossilized agglomeration of junk!

“Erm… did we take a wrong turn into a cellar? Do we have to cross through it to get to the impressive part?”

“It’s old! Impressively old! Unimaginably-to-you old! Show some respect!” griped the nonplussed Foxglove.

Emlie yawned. Foxglove glared at her. She shrugged.

The faery actually quivered­ – such nonchalance, it seemed, did not sit well with him.

Emlie worked to keep her face blank. The truth of the matter was that her snarkiness was to an uncomfortable degree a veneer over her rising unease. NOT nervousness at her current surroundings, mind — the headstrong girl would never admit to that; rather she was increasingly discomfited by the vagueness of the intent that had brought her to them. Moments before she had made a fateful decision, one that had been fueled nearly entirely by the moment’s heat. She had run from the horrible, from the hated, from the humdrum… that is to say, she had run away.

Here, now, surrounded by a strange procession of ancientry, guided through it en route to ‘Heap-knows-where by a nacre-limned figure for whom the proceeding had suddenly held discomfitingly intense import, Emlie was forced to the beginnings of uneasy re-evaluation. Under cover of her reactionary snark she had begun asking herself an uncomfortable question: what, exactly, am I running toward?

Knowing none of this, Foxglove had meanwhile tried again, his voice becoming almost reverent: “This holy chamber is a Sídhe barrow. It is ages-bedchamber, way-station… a sacred shrine to my ancestors, the Tuatha Dé Danaan …”

“The Old Folk,” breathed Emlie, her interest finally piqued.

“‘Old’ doesn’t begin to cover it!” snapped Foxglove. “The Sídhe were already ancient beyond reckoning when your first filthy forebears first learned to use their arms for something else besides holding their teats up off of the ground!”

Foxglove completely missed the girl’s reaction to his vulgarity - his ruby eyes were occupied with slowly scanning the scene, contemplating the dust and disarray. “Queen Dana’s people were puissant in lore and beautifully terrible of aspect…”

The faery deviated slightly from his path to pass close to a seven-foot-tall relief carved into one of the columns. Emlie blinked at the majesterial figure depicted, an impossibly slender and long-limbed being sporting rings of deep-carven radiating lines for eyes under a tall crown of what could equally easily be branches, fronds or flames. Here, at last, was something interesting! She felt a pang of… something.

But Foxglove pranced up close beside the figure and, striking a provocatively overfamiliar pose while putting on a ridiculously exaggerated imitation of its solemn mien, queried breezily: “…I think I rather favor them in looks, don’t you agree?”

Emlie frowned at this sudden shift into irreverence. If he looked at all like a sculpture, she decided, it was only a particularly garish and vulgar one.

But the inconstant faery had already hopped down and turned to face the statue, and his tone when he resumed was once again solemn: “Once, they strode your mudball worlds as veritable gods, and your kind did them obeisance...” and turning his head, “…as did mine,” he muttered as an aside. “Yet somehow, ages on yet more ages ago, these almighty beings were caused to cede much of the Realm Beyond the Veil to your fur-wearing, muck-dwelling ancestors.” He turned his head and spat back into the tunnel; Emlie had to sidestep hastily. The spittle sizzled slightly when it hit the ground.

He resumed their march into the gloom. “When that happened, the Tuatha retreated into their sídhe mounds, through the Thinnings, Down Below the Earth and Beyond The Sky to lick their wounds, dream their long dreams… and, as you can see, to calcify and rot.” His face hardened. “Why they didn’t just reach out their hands over all of Mudside, and-” Foxglove slammed clenched fist into cupped, outstretched palm, the smack echoing through the chamber. Emlie started at the sound, her movement reminding the faery that he in fact had an audience. Forcing a smile, he reined in his rhetoric.

“Ahem. Who can fathom the minds of the gods, eh? In any case, many lingered an age and more, keeping their miserable toe-hold here and declining either to pass farther on into eternity or to re-stake their rightful claim to Mud— apologies, to Sunside. These were the aes sídhe, the Folk of the Mounds, and the quintesscence of sad decline…” He sighed theatrically. “All, I suppose, out of some misplaced love for your, ah, charming little world, and forbearance to do harm to its delightful inhabitants. And thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh?” He toed something lying in the dust at his feet, unearthing it: a long limb-bone, inhumanly delicate and angular. He shook his head, dismissing his reverie. “-anyway, as you can see, the last of them have departed long since. As should we.”

He kicked aside the relic and strode on, Emlie at his heels.

The double colonnade resumed its slow creep past either side. Gradually the side-walls fell away, replaced by additional rows of columns framing darkness beyond. And everywhere off the central path, stone furnishings and the flagstones between played host to mounded faery treasure. It glinted under the dust of ages, crying out to be grasped, dusted off, returned to light and life. The expected coins and gems, yes, and in faery tale abundance. But also numerous other hoard-objects, many of a more domestic bent if no more practical composition: candlesticks. Censers. Tableware. Casks and vases and hampers. Orphaned sconces and chandeliers. A cavernous storehouse full of wealth that was equal parts fabulous and mundane. On and on the pair walked, and still the expected far wall did not materialize; instead, the side-walls passed beyond sight entirely, lost in unknowable vastness of the chamber. Emlie’s gaze slid over the hoard, unmoved by any of the panoply of treasures it caught fleeting glimpses of. Chests. Lanterns and thuribles. Circlets. Horns and pipes and drums and cymbals. Friezes and statuary- well, now.

Here at last was something that penetrated Emlie’s blasé indifference and caught her jaded eye. For all her avowed disinterest in old relics, despite that she’d stood unmoved by the hoard at throughout their passage through the barrow… this was magick of a sort, this was what she’d come in search of. Dusty, cobwebby, it didn’t matter – the inhuman figures and strange tableaux, so vivid in their detail and pose, did for her what nothing else in the treasure piles had: they viscerally evoked the unfathomably ancient past they hailed from, bringing it back to present life for her. She stopped to stare.

The object in question was a bas-relief executed upon a freestanding nine-foot-tall metal monolith, a tapering brass trapezoid of inlaid forced-perspective stairs hosting a procession of ascending figures, the foremost more-or-less Emlie’s height. The high-crowned, long-limbed subjects bore close resemblance to the carving that Foxglove had posed beside back near the barrow’s entrance. Staring at the figures, Emlie in her mind’s eye saw them processing not as age-spotted metal but as living, moving flesh. She stared at transcendently inhuman faces, groaned inwardly at the unbridgeable distance between herself and those glorious figures. And then one of them was standing forth from the line – a tall faery lord, splendid of face, magnificently attired. His starry stare transfixed her, his smile welcomed, his outstretched hand beckoned. The image was so real, so compelling, that she could scarcely see the tarnished bronze underlying it. She felt the call in earnest now, felt it and was stirred to her core. She found her hand creeping out by inches, reaching, just to stroke a robe hem in passing, or to touch the lord’s brazen hand… so close, their fingertips almost-

“Whatever you do, do NOT play ‘curious human’ and TOUCH any of the relics.” Foxglove offhandedly offered over his shoulder. Emlie snatched her hand back, the spell broken. The freize was a frieze and no more, the vivid semblance of life evaporated. “After all, one as deplorably unmoved by this magnificent collection as you are is clearly unworthy of joining it.”

Foxglove did not elaborate, but the implication cast an ominous pall over the gloomy space. Emlie took a wary step back from the suddenly sinister-seeming carven immortal. When she walked on, it was with her arms held tightly to her sides and her head resolutely fixed forward.

After that, the remainder of the trek through the mound took place in eerie silence and distended, stretched-out time. Step after step echoed through the vastness while producing no observable movement toward the barrow’s indiscernable far end. The absence of progress precluded the accurate gauging of the passage of time.

Worse, Emlie did not feel as if she was spending that time alone. She began to feel a sense of presence, of observation from somewhere out there in the dark by something not malign per se but... inscrutable. Remote. And… intent upon her in a way that she did not find at all welcome. The resultant mortification was just one reason why Emlie walked with her head self-consciously down: fear was another. She longed to identify the feeling’s source but did not dare to scrutinize the darkness for it for fear of attracting further undue attention.

Emlie was not fearful by nature, and the unaccustomed emotion gave rise in turn to a flash of scorn. Your imagination, surely! This place is a mere empty trinket-store, a long-abandoned tomb...

That mental turn of phrase was unfortunate; rather than quiet her misgivings, it sharpened them. Her imagination, already so quick to believe in and embrace the reality of Faery, now called into question any staid expectations of safety she might hold. After all, she had just stepped beyond all her experience and was now in transit toward the utmost unknowable... what guarantee had she that any of her assumptions, rooted after all in the humdrum world she’d left behind, had any real bearing here? The mere trinkets had already proven perilous enough - must the funeral emptiness of this strange place then necessarily preclude its watchfulness or its malignity? Who was to say that a tomb here mightn’t actually house the sort of nightmares that were exclusively the province of an overactive imagination back home?

A large leap of faith, perhaps, but easy enough to believe here, with back-chills descending and necknape hairs rising and the unshakable feeling that something out there was even now marking her passage through its domain! She stole a glance over the wealth to one side, and saw only a forest of stone columns sliding by in green-lit parallax. Who was to say what lurked in the darkness beyond?

Mercifully, changes in the environment finally started hinting at some forward progress. The treasure-heaps lining their path began to shrink, eventually thinning to mere trinket-dustings. The vaulted ceiling-cells overhead had for some time been growing larger and more pronounced… they now climbed high enough that only their arched lowest extents remained visible to Emlie. After a further time, she lost sight of stone altogether, leaving only the tattered banners and buntings and their attendant webs dangling down out of the gloom overhead. They wafted to and fro, though whether on the air stirred by their passage or some more spectral draught, Emlie didn’t care to speculate. It’s as if the barrow were breathing, Emlie wondered before very quickly shutting down that unhelpful line of thought.

The air here was foul, though, whether or not she succumbed to flights of fancy in regards the cause. The dusty dryness of the entranceway had given way to something that was heavy, moist, stale… like the lingering funk of an abandoned abattoir, or the thick-clotted exhalation of a consumption sufferer. The oppressive funk began to weigh on Emlie, hunching her shoulders and reducing her steps to trudges, yet when she glanced up she saw Foxglove skipping down the endless path ahead of her, as carefree as if this were a frolic in the May sunshine.

Determining to match his blitheness, Emlie fumbled in her kidney pouch for her atomizer and handkerchief. Withdrawing them, she discharged the former into the latter and held the dampened cloth up over her nose and mouth. Almost immediately though, her faery guide emitted a gagging noise.

“Gaah, girl, what IS that reek? True though it may be that the Tuatha Dé Danaan are departed, ‘tis no excuse to sully their halls with offal-stink!”

Him too? Have all men no sense of smell?? “This, I’ll have you know, is sweetwater from Aromanton!”

“I care not if it’s the pure juice of love-in-idleness itself! Staunch it, lest the very statues of this place rise in wrath to clear the air of it!”

Mortal or otherwise, men have no taste.

Yet even as Emlie smirked at the thought, she was cramming the perfume back into her pouch. Without it, she gave herself over to the reek and the monotony of empty unrelieved darkness… head down and senses willfully disengaged, she settled into a plodding gait and resigned herself to the long haul.

It was an unknowable age’s worth of walking later that the pillars finally gave way to empty space. The long trudge had lulled Emlie into such complete self-absorption that she registered the transition only in terms of its modest attendant inconveniences, a slight upslope and a slimy dampness slicking the floor. She was otherwise so ignorant of her surroundings that her first real inkling of change was the abrupt arm across her chest arresting her step.

She looked up sharply, readying an indignant complaint that as she glimpsed her circumstances instead emerged as a startled “eep!”: the halted faery had caught her up beside him; both his shoes and her single trailing foot were planted on the very flagstone-lined lip of a tremendous circular pit a halfscore yards wide. Her upraised-in-mid-step lead foot dangled queasily over the void beyond.

“Now, now Rose. Burden though you be on your poor beleaguered guide, we still wouldn’t want you dropping out on us quite so soon...”

The precariously balanced girl worked her mouth but at first no sound emerged. She flapped a hand through the cavernous darkness surrounding them, taking in the gently-sloping hillock of radiating flagstones they stood atop, the rivulets of nacreous muck streaking its downhill slopes, and lastly at the great pit piercing it. Finally she found her voice: “….what is THAT?”

“A hole. Don’t they have those where you hail from?”

Emlie hadn’t been that thrown off. She fixed the faery with a withering sideways glare.

“Oh, very well, hee, you humorless girl… it’s the heart of the barrow, the lynchpin of the Thinning. The Soulwell.”

Foxglove nudged a bit of loose mortar over the lip. It plunged down, down, down into the featureless circular shaft until it was lost to sight. He leaned out after it with an exaggerated cupped-hand-to-ear harkening pose before shrugging theatrically. “You could fritter your brief little lifetime away waiting for the sound of that hitting bottom and yet die unfulfilled.” Then he glanced above him and recoiled, feigning cringing surprise. “Just as likely you’d find your own pretty little head smashed in from above by that selfsame rock!”

Retrieving his mushroom torch from the hand still holding Emlie, he used it to gesture upwards. Straining her eyes, Emlie could just make out the stone ceiling far above… and in its center another opening, a facing mirror image of the well below. Foxglove continued: “This, as they say, is where the magick happens. The spot where the worlds nigh to touching, proximity allowing for observation… and for manipulation!”

He might have spotted incredulity on the girl’s face as she regarded the featureless pit: “Oh doubting Rose, don’t judge a ‘Well by its color! Quiescent though it might in their absence appear, upon a time my mighty ancestors wrought through the Soulwells the most marvelous and absurd of wonders, reaching out through these windows on eternity to make their mark upon the cosmos… why, it’s told that the Sidhe (possessing unlike some others we might mention a sense of humor) once spied within their Soulwells another hapless wayward world, and on a mere lark attempted to keep it, to bind it up into the fraternal entanglement that already holds fast our twain… from twin worlds, to triplets! Just a passing fancy for them! A mighty jape! Such power…” his voice growing momentarily wistful. “Worlds above and worlds below, a Sidhe barrow’s Soulwell is said to pierce them all.”

Then, shaking off reverie, he arched a blade-sharp eyebrow at his companion. “You want to see faery magic, Rose? Experience the Worlds Beyond? Well, this lovely aperture is the express route! Perhaps I held you back unwarrantedly… care to plunge right in?”

The faery suddenly withdrew his arm. Emlie’s weight had lain against it; with it gone she teetered precariously on the brink, arms pinwheeling. Terror… vertigo… overcompensation… she finally tipped away from the lip and plopped unceremoniously down onto her backside on the slimy floor.

“Buh- buh- bastard!” she gasped out. But the faery was already moving on, several strides away and receding.

“Oh, do lighten up, dirtling! After all, ‘pride cometh before a fall’!” And he strolled away around the Soulwell’s rim while chuckling at his own dubious witticisms.

The livid girl was in no hurry to scamper after him. Her ego was bruised (as was, she strongly suspected, her bottom.) She rolled over, levered herself up to a crouch with her back to the hole, and set about reseating a turnshoe that had been knocked askew by her tumble. As she tugged at the stubborn footwear, she grumbled under her breath: “….stupidfaery… thinkshe’ssofunny…I’llshowhimfunny, seehowhelikesit…”

What happened next happened gradually, creeping up on Emlie almost subliminally and unheralded by any telltale shock or sudden surprise.

Her first hint of anything amiss came when, glancing from the shoe to her laboring limbs, she noted with idle interest that all of the tiny hairs on her forearms had begun standing on end. How unusual. Now why should…?

She scratched her head in puzzlement, and in the process discovered that her ears were pricking up, straining at something registered yet until now unnoticed… a sound. It’s a sound. So faint that she might well believe she was imagining it. But the sound grew, gradually encroaching on her awareness to the point where she left off muttering dire imprecations against her faery guide and cocked her head to listen more fully.

Yes… yes. She could hear them for certain now… the bells – the “chimes of the magic cave.” She paused in her adjusting, immobile with fascination.

What back in the bower had been half-perceived, subliminal, potentially mere personal phantasy… was here resolving into an unquestionably real, palpable and swelling noise. Nor was it any longer limited to a mere tinkling, no: behind and beyond those leading chimes, Emlie could now discern a vast background tonescape, from piercingly high tinkles down to bone-jarring basso notes, all chaotically overlapping. The volume of the cacophony was yet low, but rising. And if her ears could be trusted in the face of weird acoustics, then they reported a source that was on the move, its emissions shifting in such a way that their loudening would seem to herald its approach.

Yet for all the sound’s mysteries, the one aspect of it that above all sent a cold finger trailing its way down Emlie’s spine was the definite origin she could ascribe to it… it was coming from down the Soulwell.

Fascination was ebbing now, giving way to distinct unease. A powerful impulse to flee arose in her, a full-body repulsion and revulsion. Irrational panic… or an innate response to the inimical? Foolish girl – don’t be ridiculous.

Nothing? Then was it self-scorn that held her still rooted to the spot despite the powerful urge, or something else? Idiot girl, you’re still here because there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there!

But if that were the case, why was she now fumbling to tug her shoe back into place as fast as humanly possible? Why the refusal –no, the inability– to cast so much as a glance behind her? Fool, there’s NOTHING. Go ahead and look!

Yet her head refused to turn. Behind her, meanwhile, the chiming gained steadily in clarity and imminence… before abruptly surging hugely in both… almost as if its source had crested the rim of the well.

The phantom finger stroked with wild insistence, its touch ice. Emlie’s arms broke out in gooseflesh. She felt something rising up behind her, ascending amidst the wild pealing of bells. The sound spread out, diffused, as if whatever was emitting it was amorphous and flowing and spreading wide now that it was free of the confines of the shaft. Emlie’s hands clutched so tightly at the lip of the turnshoe that she drew blood from her palms. There’s nothing there’s nothing there’s nothing-

An eerie blue radiance fell over her, stretching her shadow across the flagstones. The rising light scintillated as if refracting off of turbulent water, bright enough to wash out the faint green glow from Foxglove’s now distant torch. The light and the clamor –and Emlie’s hysteria– all mounted toward some fevered crescendo. There’s nothing there’s nothing there’s nooo-OH TO THE ‘HEAP WITH THIS!

Willing herself free of whatever strange geas held her immobile, forcibly breaking her own frozen grip on the turnshoe’s lip, the terrified girl lunged forward. In the next instant she was sprinting clockwise around the Soulwell’s periphery, all the while keeping her head resolutely turned away from whatever shined and sang above it (Imustnotlookmustnotlookmustnotlook-) On the far side she broke into a dead sprint forward, and was never certain afterward whether the whooshing breeze she felt in the moment of her dash betokened some unknowable appendage just failing in a grasp at her lowering head…

All she cared about in that moment was the distant scarecrow figure of the strolling faery, and the upraised fungus that she fixated on as if it were a beacon… a beacon that bafflingly appeared below the level of her knees. Baffling... until her sprinting legs began to register a steepening downhill slope. A slope that she unhesitatingly used to aid her dash. Her feet pounded, the gap between them dwindled rapidly, and a final lunging grapple found her clinging desperately to Foxglove’s waist with both arms.

“What’s this, Rose? Overcome at the last by my irresistible allure? I admit that I am unsurprised, but-”

“Shut up! It’s back there! It came up! Out! It wants me! It was making an insane noise! Didn’t you hear it?”

“Oh,” Foxglove daintily disengaged himself, stepping out of the circle of Emlie’s clutching arms on his impossibly long legs. His boot-soles dripped translucent, vaguely luminous muck onto her sleeves. “I’m hearing insane noise, truly.” He resumed picking his way carefully downhill.

Emlie seized the tails of his morning coat and pulled desperately, with the comical result that her planted feet began sliding down the slimy, sloped flagstones as he blithely pulled her along. “NO. The bells. The well! There was something. You truly heard nothing?”

“Nothing.” He tilted his head quizzically and stared down at Rose, his expression full of the wide-eyed innocent curiosity of a child. “Nothing at all.” She turned back to stare in the direction of her flight, missing the dangerous narrowing of rubies that immediately followed. Far above, the last licks of the fungal torch picked out the wetly glimmering curve that was the top of the downhill grade. Was a faintest of blue hazes glinting out its last faint motes in the air above? Or was it, had it all been, her imagination?

Emlie groaned. She turned back to Foxglove to find his eyes crinkled with mirth, and his lips curled up into the most delicate and amiable of sneers. “…of course, that’s neither here nor there. After all, I have not the advantage of the large resonance chamber between your ears, and thus of the aural augmentation that it doubtless affords you.”

It took Emlie a second to puzzle that out. When she did, her face clouded over.

“—why, you—!”

The jangled girl had still been more than-half petrified her strange encounter, as more than a little self-incensed at her own reaction to it. It was the kind of raw, enervated, volatile mood that was highly conducive to hysteria under the slightest additional provocation…

For which an offhand hard-to-puzzle-out insult readily qualified. Emlie shoved the faery in the back, hard.

To her shock, he toppled limply forward. The lack of resistance overbalanced her and sent her toppling downhill behind him. The faery, however, was handling the plunge with a great deal more suavity than she: in a series of movements that were so deft that they seemed stately despite their swiftness, his refined his tumble into a gravity-defying standing somersault that finished with him gliding across the floor in a mantis-like crouch; Emlie by contrast ended up once again in an ungainly sliding heap.

“Express route it is, then!” the faery cackled.

If Emlie intended a reply it was converted to a retch by the gobbeted sheets of slime cast off by her chin as it parted the floor-coating like a ship’s prow through water. Mid-choke, she wondered idly why her chin (and the rest of her) was moving at such a clip. She put out her hands for braking, only to have them also skitter frictionlessly on the slime-slicked floor. She turned her head to one side, and saw the columns whipping by at an angle to the floor whose severe acuteness revealed how steep the downhill slope had become. She turned the other way and beheld Foxglove sliding nimbly in an aerodynamic crouch, his mushroom torch held high like some absurd parasol, his coattails flapping in the wind of his passage and his free hand clamping down his hat against it. A wild grin split his faery face.

“We’re sliding!” she shouted at him.

“Very perceptive!” He too had to shout in order to be heard over the rush of air and the sizzle of spraying mud. “Clearly you’ve no need of any interpretation of mine-”

“Why are we sliding?” Their speed was increasing. She spotted a stone projection up ahead, a poorly set flagstone or column base that rose beside her course. As she passed she tried to snag it, endured the jarring impact but managed to clutch the plinth only long enough to be spun about feet-first before her momentum wrenched her loose again.

“Sluice!” she thought she heard him admonish.

“Sluice yourself, cretin! I was merely-”

“Sluice, ignorant girl! Outflow!” Her uncomprehending glance-around drew an eye-roll from the faery. “Fool, we are the sluice!” He gestured behind them. “All this ectoplasm… veil-piercing magick wells require considerable drainage, you know!” He swept his mushroom ‘round to encompass their whole surroundings.

Following his gesture, Emlie noted with dismay that he was right. What had been merely floor-slicking scum back at the top of the hill was down here accumulating into a shallow but speedy flood. She could see side-walls again, widely spaced at first but converging steadily as they gathered all the Soulwell’s outflow. The narrowing channel also grew increasingly concave, to the point where the curving floor and rising walls merged into what might best be termed a chute… a characterization that did not thrill Emlie at all.

“Stop us!” They had picked up so much speed that they were now traveling faster than a man could run. Indeed, she thought hysterically, forget mere running – wherever it was she was bound, she was now plowing toward it in full-tilt flight.

“Too late for that, girl! What roils within will have its out, eh?”

He looked to his torch, shrugged, and tossed it over his shoulder. Despite its loss, however, he remained visible. Emlie realized that their churning passage was stirring the muck beneath them to agitated luminescence. She glanced upward and back at the lambent, frothy wake stirred up by their passage, then back to fore… whereupon she realized that the wake-glow didn’t account for all of the light she was seeing by. A growing yellow-white highlight limned the forward panorama, at increasing odds with the witchglow of the slime. She attempted a look dead ahead, and was buffeted by windblown ropes of her hair that lashed her face and obscured her vision. Tossing her head to clear them, she saw the light’s origin: a blindingly bright source dead ahead that even as she stared grew from a dazzling pinprick to a discrete half-disk.

“WHAT’S THAT?” she shouted over the wind-howl.

“SLUICE-GATE!” Foxglove retorted.

The bottom of the half-disk rose over the downslope horizon, further resolving into a keyhole-shape. It flared blinding-bright, an opening onto some unknown blazing beyond. The slime-stream vanished cleanly over its lip, no trace visible past it. And girl and faery together were shooting inexorably down the chute towards it along with the rest of the effluent. “WHERE DOES IT LEAD?”

“OUT OF SIGHT AND OUT OF MIND, I SHOULD IMAGINE!”

Emlie might have contested that glib answer had not Foxglove already turned away from her to grit his teeth against the slipstream, the wind tugging his cheeks back into an absurd rictus grin. It was likely immaterial anyway, as the tumult of air and fluid through the confined space was by now producing a roaring rush of sound too formidable for any further shouting to overcome. Yet as Emlie stared, Foxglove threw his head back and counterpointed it with a high keening punctuated by glottal barks… a whoop? A cackle? Madness!

The opening bore down on them. The final tens of yards of tunnel were bathed in light so bright that Emlie was forced to squeeze shut eyes thoroughly adjusted to the dimness of the barrow… or perhaps she did it out of fear of what awaited beyond the radiant opening? Angered by the thought, she wrenched her eyes back open and squinted through her tears. The last few yards were a blur of light and motion, a crescendo of rushing roar… and then she was through, POP, like a cork from a fizz-wine bottle, flying out over… nothing. Vastness and light and void, and oh Forgers she was falling-

tumbling out and down

-until a wrenching jolting HALT brought her up short,
the shock of it sending a thrill of pain lancing down her back and out along her spastically flopping arm. An arcing instant of recoil later came the SMACK of her back hitting hard against an unyielding surface.

Emlie dazedly shook her head, before craning it upwards in the direction from which she dangled. As the impact-evoked stars cleared, her first sight was of three blurry Foxgloves, bald heads bare, each grinning smugly down at her. They wavered, swapped places, then resolved into a single leering faery. He hung at a crazy near-inverted angle across the protruding mouth of the sluice-gate, three spread-eagled grasshopper limbs stretched to their utmost to hook the inside lip of the opening. The fourth extended down and down… impossibly, inhumanly far… down to where its hand had hooked under Emlie’s left shoulder, seizing it in a grip of iron and arresting her plummet. He looked inhuman, insectoid and sinister, yet at that moment he was the most gloriously beautiful thing that Emlie had ever beheld.

“Thank you thank you thank you-” she choked out. Foxglove replied with a companionably lewd wink.

He dangled her over the gulf a moment longer, grinning as if in admiration of his own heroism. Then he gently angled her back and down, guiding her feet to rest on a narrow ledge. Only once the faery had dropped down beside her did Emlie dare take her eyes off him to examine the wall from which their ledge protruded… an activity that elicited a gasp as profound as the one that had accompanied her near-plunge.

Forgers, the sheer size… The ledge that Emlie stood upon was a puny feature, an insignificant blemish marking the tiniest portion of a titantic cliff wall, a craggy colossal marvel whose sidewise extents were lost to a haze of inestimable distance and whose upper reaches soared immeasurably high over Foxglove’s head. Other than the occasional clinging vine or crack-colonizing sapling, the vast vertical expanse was broken only by by the sluice gate they had emerged from and by others like it off in the hazy distance, all of them dribbling thick streams of ectoplasm like iridescent waterfalls. Fearing no vertigo, the impetuous girl leaned forward to follow the falls’ courses. She traced them against the cliffside as they fell, plummeting down through long airy infinities before vanishing into misty depths fathoms down… just like the faery’s tumbling tophat, which she glimpsed even as it dwindled to a speck amidst the clouds below.

Sure that he’d be wroth at the loss, she turned to face Foxglove only to find him oddly preoccupied, his gaze riveted on something out past her head.

“I’m sorry-” she began, but he dismissed her apology with a negligent handwave.

“What is it-?” she tried again, but Foxglove eyes solely for whatever sight was, she now noticed, striking strange glints in the facets of his ruby eyes. His only response was a tiny and uncharacteristically reverent nod in the direction of his gaze.

Frowning, Emlie turned to follow the gesture… and felt her jaw drop.

She had no words at all. No utterance, no thought could do justice to the tableau before her. No human mind, calibrated to the drab colors and mundane impressions of another more staid reality, could hope to fully contain it. It rose out of the mists below, rising up from those utmost depths to a gloriously unbounded horizon. It literally shone, haloed not with one color but with a gamut of radiances that encompassed every shade familiar to Emlie plus strange new hues that defied her mere human vision and mere human understanding. The riotous blaze, circumscribed at its utmost extent by the high arc of a monumental rainbow, was so intense as to be synesthetic: the world-blaze sang to her, an ineffable cacophony, a vast discordant chorus marshalling heart-melting chansons of pure color. By the time Emlie gave up in awestruck bewilderment on counting that boundary rainbow’s colors, her tally had handily exceeded the traditional seven of her experience. Such wonder… yet it was only secondhand reflected glory. Emlie had to see the source of the magick!

By sheer resolve the dauntless girl shifted her attention past the glorious penumbra, seeking within for its wellspring. She willed that shape and form should emerge out of the vague solidity at the glory’s heart … and was rewarded with a revelation exceeding all possible expectation. Out of the glare there coalesced a continental expanse, cloaked in towers and ribbons of mist, revealed in deep cloud holes of startling clarity and in the skypiercing upthrusts of mighty soaring mountains! The exposed terrain was a riot of color, so brilliantly saturated it might arise from endless fields of gemstone. The landscape was at once solid and ephemereal – terrifically sharp and present, even as it wavered under an apparent intervening heat haze despite the high temperate air.

The immensity of that wild vista dwarfed any landscape of her experience, while the spectacle of its varied environments shamed all comparisons into insignificance. Beauty whose sheer extravagance might stop a heart. Mind-numbingly vast, unabsorbably intricate, confoundingly perplexing. This glorious demonstration of grand-scale Nature at its mightiest was as breath-stealingly awesome at first glance… as it was dumbfoundingly peculiar in its infinite details, many of which were, from Emlie’s provincial Sunsider’s perspective, profoundly unnatural.

The majestic mountains… were actually downright absurd in their majesty, as sheer and conical and jagged and perfect as if they had sprung from a child’s wax-stick artwork. They soared from their cloud-cloaked bases to heights surpassing Emlie’s altitude by as much again as hers did the level ground. The unrepentant purples and scarlets of their flanks, the starlight blue of their frosty peaks… they were everything she imagined mountains to be, and nothing like what she knew of their more modest reality.

The billowing mist between the peaks likewise took its cues from imagined ideals. It soared and gyred and piled up into impossibly serried ranks of high cloud towers. Cumulonimbus. Those are cumulonimbus. Emlie had spent long days, Beidon in tow, studying the high white cloudwalls and dark thunderheads crowning the skyfields of her home and researching them afterwards in the Trade College library. Never though had she beheld anvil-clouds so regimented, so discrete, so uniform… and certainly never below her, as she gazed down from on high!

And as for the lower lands visible down between the clouds? They were wild, yes. Beautiful? Of a certainty. But they were also an unfathomable, uncanny, unruly patchwork of wildly dissociated biomes. Each cloud-window opened onto a landscape that bore seemingly neither connection nor kinship to those others adjacent to it. No two contained the same species of bizarre trees, the same types of grass, the same shade of dirt or water. Nor did any interim third show the compromise colors and species of a terrain in transition. The very altitudes of the swatches of revealed ground seemed wildly discontinuous, as did their season: some opened onto the heart of Summer, others onto bare bleached branches and ice-sheen, still others onto transitional landscapes of greenbud or of gold-and-amber swift-tilting from the one towards the other. Not even the daylight was a constant: each of the lands she beheld seemingly basked in the illumination of its own exclusive sky. Here brash and blinding, there oblique and feeble, there again impossibly supplanted by the faint silver-tinged glow of starlight. It was a bewildering gestalt, a mosaic of landscapes seemingly lit by a multitude of dissimilar hidden suns, each patch perhaps hosting its own strange life and harboring its own unknowable secrets.

And its influence was not limited to sight and hearing alone – the revelation touched Emlie’s other senses as well. The high cliffside breezes wafted tantalizing hints of aroma past her nose, then supplanted them with new whiffs equally exotic yet paradoxically opposed. She scented mountain pine followed by sea salt, ripe apples giving way to plains dust, mown grass covering grave-rot. Familiar, evocative odors vied with others indescribably alien. The tantalization of profuse faint bouquets inundated her nose even as the riot of sight and song had overwhelmed her other senses. The breeze caressed her skin sublimely, almost sensually, while occasionally lashing her with needles of spray whipped from the sluice fall. Her flesh dried in the light of the glorious penumbra, its radiance warming as spring sunshine.

The myriad details were captivating. The aggregations were inspiring, stirring, profoundly unsettling. This, clearly, was her destination, the place she’d been running toward… and its totality was staggering beyond possibility of response. So Emlie simply stood there on that high airy perch, eyes wide and soul struck, finally and perfectly speechless.

“It stretches farther than you can hope to discern, deeper and higher than you can imagine,” the whisper from behind framing her captivation, “from the Endless Sea lapping against the barren Far Shore of Lyonesse, to the deathless beaches of Mag Mell; from mighty-battlemented Goirias, to cruel Findias, to gemstone-paved Falias and mist-swaddled Muirias and over all the great fourfold expanse between; from the lightless depths of Annwn to the fabled unattainable spire of Tír na nÓg itself. An endless sprawl of cantrefi like sandgrains upon a beach… like stars dusting the boundless firmament! Brighter far than your dull dim sun, merrier than the jolliest of your human calamities, more lively in its most mundane of quarters than all the sovereign excitements of the most exotic mortal merriment…

“And you, poor insufficient human”, the faery at last taking renewed notice of the girl, “it all lies spread before you, more than your flyspeck mind might possibly register, much less comprehend! But you’ll not let that stop you, will you?” He seemed momentarily cross, bitter at having to share the sacred vista.

“Very well! Spread your arms! Embrace it,” he exulted, doing just that before clapping a consoling hand over the girl’s shoulder, “But do not expect ever to master it! For such as you can no more hope to contain the wonder of it all than you could to… to leap off this ledge and fly freely down to it!” The faery’s upraised hand flapped mockingly, while the hand on her shoulder tensed as if tempted by the thought of a fatal puckish shove; it trembled in the instant before it settled instead on a companionable pat on the back. “Though fortunately,” he amended in an apparent afterthought-attempt at forestalling a panic that Emlie was far too engrossed to have bothered with anyway, “that shall not be required of you at this time. For your humble servant shall guide you gently into its midst even as he shall shelter your awareness from its empyrean excesses. So fear not and tally-ho!” The faery chuckled… then quieted. The girl felt him straighten behind her, solemnly attaining his full unbent height.

“Rose, sweet girl,” his voice swelled, for this once eschewing mockery and inference in favor of the reverent joy of homecoming, “welcome to my home.

“Welcome to Feyside.”

Next Chapter: 9. Beidon Hot On The Trail