“Via’s tears!” Taru cried as she fell, her shoulder blades pushing out in fiery agony. Her wrist, back and inner thighs burnt from the running of the rope. All her muscles strained as she tried to tuck forward, to safety, and the ripping feeling of her shoulder blades trying to push out from her skin peaked just as her face collided with and scraped down the hard surface of the slope. 

“Tighten your grip,” Coraidh called from below. He sounded, if anything, bored. “In your hand.”

“Can’t!” Taru yelled, continuing to plummet. “Hurts,” she sobbed.

“Twist,” and “wrist” were the only words she heard from his reply, so she tried it, twisting her wrist hard outwards as she tried to grip the rope tighter with the hands it was burning through. 

She stopped suddenly and—“Ow!”—crashed her shoulder into the slope.

“Good. Now tuck your knees and get your feet on the ground. Anyone’d think you’d never rappelled before.”

Taru swung there, neither tucking her knees nor moving her feet. Her shoulder occasionally bumped the slope as she rocked back and forth, concentrating on steadying her breathing.

“Lean back, as well. Hunching your shoulders like that ain’t doing you any favours.”

She glared down between her feet as her vision began to clear. 

He was still very far below her, one side of his tiny face falteringly lit by the green flame of a torch. 

She pulled in a deep breath through her stinging nose until her ribs felt like they might give out. Letting the air out slowly between pursed lips, she tucked her knees, planted her feet on the slope, leant back against the rope (to the tune of an unsettling creak from up above), and pushed until she was standing almost sideways. She looked up to find she had only fallen a few feet. Half her height. 

“Via’s little toe,” she laughed breathlessly, glancing back down at Coraidh. “For what it’s worth, I an’t rappelled before.  Never heard of it before you, just now.”

“Oh, aye?” Coraidh’s half-lit face was shadowy with confusion. “How’d you get round that big city of yours, then?” 

Taru stared at him. “Shude?”

“Aye.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Course.”

“How?”

“Eh? Well, it—… Why aren’t you moving?”

Taru fizzed with anger. “I don’t know how, you dolt!” 

Coraidh coughed a laugh. “Oh, right. Well, your hands’re gonna hurt ‘til you get to me. I can fix them up good and quick once you’re down here, but this descent is gonna be… unpleasant, to say the least.”

“Right.” Taru’s hands were, despite Coraidh’s warnings, entirely numb. “Just tell me what to do.”

“You’re gonna use the opening and closing of your dominant hand to control the speed of your descent.”

Taru nodded and tentatively opened her left hand. Nothing happened except she felt suddenly quite unsafe. “Why am I not moving?”

“You’re not opening your right hand.”

“You said my dominant hand.”

“You’re left-handed?!”

“And what?” she challenged him. 

“A-and… nothing. It’s just, uh, unusual. Isn’t it?”

Taru heard the judgement he’d tried to hide and scowled at the slope. She untangled his instructions in her mind, reorganising them so that they applied to her. Then, she tentatively opened her right hand and let the rope slip slowly through. She fell about a foot before she got control of her own. Once that was done, it was plain seiling all the way down.

“Not bad for a beginner,” Coraidh said as he pushed one of his two lit torches into the slope at the bottom. 

She untangled herself from the rope and looked at her palms, whispering, “Gods,” when she saw the red raw flesh usually hidden by white skin and tough yellow callouses.

“Told you it’d be unpleasant,” Coraidh muttered, waving his other torch through the air between them so that it left a circle of yellow on the insides of Taru’s eyelids. No, not just her eyelids. It was still there when she opened them, hanging in the air.

“What in the weave—?”

Coraidh drew a complex symbol with the torch, then put his hand in the centre and said something she couldn’t understand.

“There you go,” he said afterwards, and Taru shook her head.

“There I… What? What do you mean?”

“I said I’d heal you, didn’t I?”

Taru stared at him, almost not comprehending. Then, she looked down at her hands. Pristine. Peachy. Calloused. No, not calloused. Not anymore. Instead, they were… scaly? She turned them over one at a time and then, swallowing, looked back up at Coraidh, but he was already walking off towards the trees. “I think you made a mistake!” she called after him, running to catch up.

He turned back and, holding a finger to his lips, hissed, “Quiet.” When she reached him, he asked, “What mistake?”

She showed him her hands and he held the torch between them to get a better look. 

Frowning, he moved the torch slowly over her hands, tilting his head from side to side. The pair of them watched how the shallow shadows danced between the grooves.

“See?” she insisted.

Coraidh shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he confessed, drawing back. “But, honest, I wrote the spell just exactly how it’s always writ. I’ve done it two dozen times, at least. It’s never done anything like this.” He looked back at her palms. 

Suddenly uncomfortable, she snatched them away. 

“Tell you what, I’ll take you to the healer when we get back, aye?”

Taru pursed her lips and shrugged sharply, wishing she had pockets to bury her disfigured hands in.

“Come on,” Coraidh said, holding the torch out in front of the pair of them. “You must stay close, now.”

It felt like half an hour went by before the pair reached the first tree. It widened with every step until it had stretched beyond Taru’s expectations. When at last they reached it, Taru counted 22 steps before they were past and the dark line of the water, which she had thought to be only a few feet above her head, was at least 5 times taller than her. 

“Stay close, Aether,” Coraidh whispered sharply, peering into the shadows between the trees as she jogged to catch up. “We won’t need to go very deep. They’re already stirring.”

“What is?”

“Not what,” he said as Taru caught what she imagined might be the light bouncing out from a pair of wide eyes, “who.”

She shifted closer to Coraidh as a twig snapped between the trees.

Coraidh’s attention darted towards the sound as he said, “Sesi are the eldest, most revered alfar in Denlinne,” and, to Taru’s horror, stopped walking.

“Why have we stopped?” she hissed.

“If sesi could harm us, we would already be dead.”

Sesi and sirem were the pronouns used for multiple respected, ancient beings. The use of one of them did not make Taru feel any better. It seemed Coraidh was good at that. “Then what’s stopping sirem?” She tucked herself behind him. She whirled around when she heard whispering behind her. Back to back the pair stood, he with his torch high over their heads, she with her fists lifted as if she knew how to use them. The torch created an arena of green light and Taru watched as one of the eldest slipped a pitch hand into it, fingers grasping at the air. No sooner had it entered than it began to smoke. It whipped back into the shadows, its owner snarling.

“The light,” Coraidh confirmed, his misery plain. “It’s from the weave itself, something sesi’ll have woven between siresif hands often, in the past. Now, though, it hurts sirem.”

She could just about make out siresif shapes in the shadows. Many of sirem were in the trees above, but there was a dome-like appearance to the torchlight, as if it were more matter than energy, and sesi would not step past it. Nor did the torch’s light reach beyond that dome. All she could only see of the eldest were reflecting eyes and a dense mass of shadow against the trees.

“Come,” Coraidh said at last, and Taru tried to ignore the shadows shifting off the path in front of them, and hasty whispers as the eldest moved out of the torch’s way.

The pair went on in silence for some time until, at long last, they reached the river. Coraidh sighed upon seeing the rickety bridge crossing it.

“This won’t hold out much longer,” he said, pushing against the handrail. “And I wouldn’t want to test it, but you can see from here. Look.” He pointed past the bridge. Beyond, about two trees deep, the forest fell invisible behind a curtain of shadow. Taru traced it all the way up into the canopy, searching for its end, but it was as though someone had manifested a wall out of darkness from where the roots disappeared into the earth up to where the branches disappeared into the air. “Beyond that is the deep forest, and in the middle is the Enwoven Grove.”

“But… it’s just… darkness.”

Coraidh huffed a humourless laugh. “It isn’t,” he said. “It seems that way now, but it’s not. Nothing ever is. When you get up close you can see all the brambles and the trees that have been warped and twisted to make it impassable.”

Taru pressed her lips together and tried not to think of all the impassable tangles of pipes she’d squeezed through over the years.

“But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to cross,” Coraidh continued. “The trees are still there, the brambles are still just as sharp.”

“I’m sure there’s a way in,” she heard herself insist. “There always is.”

How Coraidh looked at her then, was a masterpiece of restrained eagerness. “If you can find it,” he said, near vibrating with intensity, “I’ll light it.” 

“I—”

“But not now,” he whispered, visibly forcing himself to relax.

Taru struggled to shrug a non-agreement, but Coraidh was already looking back at the wall of darkness.

“My wife’s twin’s in there. Lady Ethel told you about Bhaltair?”

“She said he’s a dear friend.”

“He? No. They’re an insufferable wretch,” Coraidh bit out. “But they don’t deserve this.” He waved the torch back towards the path they had walked. Taru winced at the chorus of hissing and guttural sounds she was sure were curses. “No one does.”

-~*~-

“Is this because the humans are cutting down the trees?” Taru asked as Coraidh unknotted himself from the rope at the top of the slope, then began to wind it up into the coil it had been when they found it. “Are all siresif ancestor trees gone?”

Coraidh shook his head. “We don’t know about that, but the darkness here and the way the eldest are now… that anger and hatred… it’s no coming from the outside. That’s come from within. The elders have sealed themselves off and, without sirem, the deep forest and everything living near it is being poisoned. And it’s spreading.”

Elders? “Wait, the eldest aren't the elders?” she asked, pointing down to the mass of shadows between the trees.

Coraidh shook his head. “The eldest are alfar, like me. The elders are different. Sesi’re first generation fae, as old as the world itself. Sesi’re the ancestors of all the people in all the alfar villages in Denlinne: Laringden, Lake Dubh, Brackenback… all of us. For sirem to seal themselves away like this… it’s unheard of. It’s… painful.” His voice broke, and Taru decided to ask no more.