The Greywood Wyrm

Hyla walks with a hurried step clutching the boy's hand. She has carried him for an hour, but he is heavy and she is young. He is still half-asleep. The woods are old. They were not always this thick, nor this large. the roots around which Hyla stepsand stumbles, though she does not know it twine and twirl around the bones of ancient men.

All her short life this has been the Greywood. And throughout her life the edge of the wood has intruded further into the village. When she was the boy's age there had been no trees on her father's acre. Now there were saplings 20 paces from the back door.

Hyla had been taught, as all children had, to fear the wood. Though the bark was bright, the woods were dark, dressed in leaves that turned the eaves to night.

And it was into that darkness she walked the boy. There had been questions at first, then complaint. Eventually there was silence and he now looked simply dejected and tired.

I have been watching them for some time. It pleases me when the silence of the forest is broken. The tales men tell of the quiet beneath the trees are all true. The first sapling was planted an eon before the men of the village remember. When humanity was a high and powerful thing. A people to rival my own. There was war. Then there was silence. Now there is the wood.

Hyla has no knowledge of this. There is no learning in her small tribe, which clings to life on what is now the frontier against the gathering quiet. Man no longer fights, but subsists. The tales the elders tell speak no more of heroes, but of sacrifice and the gods of the dark and the deep. There is one tale of the woods. The tale of the Altar. The Seat of the Greywood Wyrm.

Hyla's father knew the tale from his father, who knew knew it from his. None of them had ever made the pilgrimage into the forest depths.

Hyla comes at last to a clearing. I see her. She has tears in her heart but they have not reached her face. She clutches the boy's hand, limp in hers. He is stumbling, eyes downcast. She looks ahead to the far end of my clearing and sees it. An ancient stump, set against the grey darkness of its fellow trees by a rich, brown leaflessness. It could be the root of a mighty oak were it not also dead. Dead but unwithered. Where the roots of the Greywood ashes clutch and cling to the forest floor as though jealous of their moorings, the Altar's roots caress the forest floor as though they were resting upon it, like a great winged thing that might take flight at any moment.

Hyla is transfixed and I know why. The Greywood is relentless. To walk beneath its boughs is to be oppressed by the indifference of time. To see something, even something as dead as the Altar is to be reassured that the world has not stopped or ended. That life and time and change still exist.

Her relief is short-lived. She looks down at the boy who is barely conscious. Now her tears threaten to crest her eyes and spill to the forest floor. I see her mind. He is so young. Stupid in his naiveté. She is almost angry that he should be so happy to let her take him into the Greywood. His trust is infuriating. He's been happy to be lied to all his short life.

Her sudden sob jolts the boy awake and he looks into the face he thinks is his sister's and asks what is wrong. She smiles through her tears and tells him it is nothing.

She picks him up and carries him toward me. The gentle motion combines with his fatigue and drags him deep into sleep. She lays him on the Altar's roots and takes from her pack a bundle of food and, after a moment's hesitation, a small knife hung from a string necklace.

She looks down at him, her face lined with marks that will stay with her forever after this day. She wants to wake him. She wants to explain why he must stay, explain what she's done. She wants his forgiveness.

What she does not want is to take him back with her and that interests me almost enough to want to keep her, too.

When she leaves it is without ceremony. She merely turns and walks away. I hear her hating herself for the fact that, with every step, she feels lighter and lighter.

I watch the sleeping boy a while. It is not a long time before he wakes, stomach growling. With the intelligence of a hungry boy he finds the food quickly enough. He has not noticed that he is alone. I quirk my head slightly and though he cannot see me he mirrors the movement, looking about himself with idle curiosity.

He sets about examining the Altar. He sniffs it and touches it. He breathes open-mouthed and appears transfixed by something even I cannot see.

I have had offerings sent to me before. The tales the Elders tell suggest that the Greywood must be appeased. Whatever lives within has power over it and can be placated. I have never seen the point in dissuading them from the idea. The forces which governed the forest's growth, and decided that new roots would take this year and not that is no province of mine. Through the centuries the village have offered me food, virgins, warriors, even slaves. When they had had such things. Hyla's offering is the first in a century, conjured from a half remembered story which held that the forest could be held back by the gift of a young child.

I considered the boy. I could do as I had with the others. Most of them had simply wandered until they starved, their bones feeding new trees in the deep wood. Others I had seen and let see me. Most of those had died of fright or trying to flee. Still others I ate. My need for food is not an ache which occurs often and is more of an indulgence between centuries. But humans sometimes have character, which can enhances their flavour. None had ever had futures worth the time.

The boy picks at the dead wood despondently. He wonders when Hyla will be back. In his other hand, his half eaten bread is clutched firmly. Hyla and his father have taught him that it is the worst thing in the world to waste food.

He is such a small thing. Weak. He would not even be a mouthful. Then he looks up and without seeing them, looks into my eyes. And I see.

If the boy lives and the Dragon teaches him the secrets long lost to Mankind the world will change. He will grow tall and lean, and learn the tongue of the wolves and the hunt. Great beasts he will slay and with their hides weave a cloak which will let him master the shapes and forms of others. In Dragon's tongue he will spell the destiny of a king. With steel and stone he will leave the edge of the Greywood and the gathering silence.

Rohric, the boy’s father will die, by his son’s hand, for the wild teaches a man wrath. Hyla, Rohric’s daughter and the boy’s mother will die, because wrath will teach him mercy. A man who destroys his house, is destined to destroy that of others. A king with Dragon wisdom cannot but be a conqueror. The dreams of a child mean little when the world is as full and empty as in the wood. He will travel South, and East and West and South again. Wherever the grey trees grow.

At the end of a long life he will stand at the roof of the world and stare, across a thousand leagues back to the Altar of the Greywood Wyrm. To find my eyes staring back at him. As they do now.

I reveal myself to the boy, as tiny as he is, in all my splendour. He gazes upon the great might of a dragon of old, scale and wing and claw. He looks into the eyes which have seen his doom and the birth of the world.

He smiles at me. He proffers to me, in one tiny fist, the other half of his half-eaten loaf.