On the way to Shroudwood's heart and the nameless city therein, the expedition encounters a revenant.
It is visible even from afar off through the twilight gloom and massed ranks of trees, a corpse-pale hulk lined in desaturated blues (like bruises, like winter skies). Large as a building, it might be confused for an elfstone ruin--but for its lines, fluid and organic as something grown, something born, something alive.
But it is not moving. It waits on the path with all the patience of a thing dead.
A low and liquid song hangs on the edge of hearing, nearly imperceptible beneath the whisper of leaves in wind.
Iskierka, riding Illarion's shoulders and acting as his eyes, gurgles a low noise between warning and excitement. "The Admiral," her Sleeper interprets, his own echoing voice soft. "She is rational, last I am speaking to her. Perhaps she may still be."
It has been weeks since then, he doesn't say. Nor: That they'd come to a rational agreement with the Prince of Thundering, and it had hardly felt a victory.
"An open approach is best. She will know we are here."
Interlude: Admiral Lankhet
It is visible even from afar off through the twilight gloom and massed ranks of trees, a corpse-pale hulk lined in desaturated blues (like bruises, like winter skies). Large as a building, it might be confused for an elfstone ruin--but for its lines, fluid and organic as something grown, something born, something alive.
But it is not moving. It waits on the path with all the patience of a thing dead.
A low and liquid song hangs on the edge of hearing, nearly imperceptible beneath the whisper of leaves in wind.
Iskierka, riding Illarion's shoulders and acting as his eyes, gurgles a low noise between warning and excitement. "The Admiral," her Sleeper interprets, his own echoing voice soft. "She is rational, last I am speaking to her. Perhaps she may still be."
It has been weeks since then, he doesn't say. Nor: That they'd come to a rational agreement with the Prince of Thundering, and it had hardly felt a victory.
"An open approach is best. She will know we are here."