Page 86 of A Fractured Song

“Hm.” The elf eyed them both shrewdly. “I’ll take you to the Imperator.” He turned on his heel and strode across the clearing, leaving Zev and Marieke to once again hurry behind.

“What was that about?” Zev murmured to Marieke.

“The magic is pooling around you again,” she said. “Not as intensely as in the canyon, but…it’s definitely notable.”

Zev frowned, not sure what to make of that information. “So you can tell someone is a singer, just by the way magic responds under their feet?” The question was as much to deflect attention from him as to actually satisfy curiosity.

Marieke shook her head as they walked. “Not usually. Magic doesn’t normally pool unless the singer is gathering it ready to mold it. At which point, yes, I can absolutely sense active songcraft. It’s just that here, the magic is so intense. Remember how I said earlier that it’s not waiting for me to pull it to me, it’s rushing at me all the time, wanting to travel through me for an outlet? That’s even more the case now, and it seems that elf could sense it, too.” She screwed up her face slightly. “It’s overwhelming.”

“Yes,” Zev agreed. “It is.” He rubbed a hand across his chest absently.

Marieke didn’t miss the gesture. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. No need to distress Marieke with the information that as soon as they went through the “doorway”, the pressure on his chest had increased dramatically. They must be much deeper in the jungle than they had been on the other side.

He cast his eyes around the clearing they were crossing. It wasn’t a huge open circle, like he’d at first assumed. It was more like a band of grassy space curving around a central structure. And it wasn’t naturally occurring, that much was clear. Judging by the section he could see, it was a perfect circle, the outside of it ringed with huge trees, their trunks as smooth and evenly spaced as pillars.

Lanterns bobbed between them at staggered heights, except they didn’t seem to be attached to anything. They were a lot like the glowing orb Marieke had created, but brighter and larger. And their light was the clear white of daylight, not the yellow of a normal lantern. Zev realized that the canopy wasn’t as clear as he’d at first supposed. Branches still arched over their heads, but the white lantern light had fooled him into thinking the sky was open.

The trunks were too neat and perfect to look natural. Certainly nothing like Zev’s orchard. But the structure in the middle of the space made up for it. It wasn’t a building so much as a solid wall of tangled foliage. The branches were crisscrossed so tightly, Zev couldn’t even see through it. The wildness of these trees was a strange juxtaposition to the unnaturally smooth pillar trees. The chaos of a jungle and the order of cultivated trees, each taken to their extremes, and combined together.

He didn’t like it, he decided. Neither felt natural, and the whole thing was unbalanced. Their elf guide led them toward a path that ran straight across the cleared band from the wall ofbranches to the pillar trees. As they turned onto it, Zev saw that there was an archway, under which the branches broke for enough space to make a doorway through to whatever was inside. It was evidently designed for elves, though, so he and Marieke had to bend over to travel through it.

They ducked underneath, edging through a short tunnel to emerge into the proper center of the clearing. For a moment neither spoke, taking in the incredible sight with wide eyes.

“What is this place?” Marieke breathed.

Their elf guide glanced back at them, seeming to take neither pleasure nor offense at their amazement.

“The place of our exile.”

The words were a quip, his voice dry and his face expressionless, but Zev’s eyes didn’t linger on the elf for long. He was too caught up in examining the scene.

He’d thought the trees outside of the clearing huge, but they were nothing to the ones on the inside. These trees stretched way up out of sight, the canopy so high above that he had to squint to see it. Instead of lanterns, there were tiny lights sprinkled across every branch. The specks of brightness were reminiscent of fireflies except the light was a warm green, like yellow sunlight coming through leaves. The whole place was bathed in greenness, such that the very air felt alive. And the floor wasn’t the hazardous underbrush of the rest of the jungle. It was clear ground, much of it covered with grass, although some patches were rocky.

A number of the trees had structures built around them, not of wood as Zev might have expected, but of some kind of red clay. They ringed the tree trunks, most of them boasting multiple levels. These dwellings, if they were dwellings, varied in height, some so far up he couldn’t make out their details, and others almost at ground level. On the closest ones, he could seesmall elves climbing between levels or leaning from a window to watch the passers-by. The amount of interest they attracted as they continued through the settlement supported their understanding that humans didn’t come to this place.

“Look at the roots!”

Marieke’s voice drew Zev’s attention to the ground. To his amazement, the grassy soil was illuminated by branching patterns of light, each strand thin and wispy, but visible if you looked closely enough. He had no doubt Marieke was right that the light mirrored the roots in the ground below it—the placement of the patterns around the trees was certainly consistent with that idea.

“They’re coated with magic,” Marieke commented, the words directed at the elf. “It feels like…I don’t know…a seeking enchantment? It’s not unlike the one I use to assess the nearby terrain.”

The elf gave a grunt that sounded like grudging acknowledgment. “The roots help us identify the right areas for mining.”

“Mining?” Zev repeated the word as he glanced around. Nothing about the area suggested it was a quarry in the usual way. The elf must be speaking of the mysterious practice of mining magic.

His eyes traveled over each of the dwellings, looking for one that was larger or more luxurious than the others. Where would they find this Imperator?

“Wow.” Marieke’s voice brought Zev’s gaze to the ground again.

He raised an eyebrow at the bizarre feature they were walking past. At first glance, he’d thought it was a pond, but on closer inspection, he realized that the hollow in the ground wasn’t filled with water. It was sealedwith a layer of glass. A line of glass even moved out from it like a stationary stream, the surface smooth, but the texture underneath looking fractured and layered as it wound its way around a tree and out of sight. It looked for all the world like a forest spring feeding a stream…except that it was unmoving glass rather than water.

“Surely that’s not naturally occurring,” he murmured to Marieke.

“I don’t think much of this place is naturally occurring,” she replied. “The magic in the air is thicker than the air itself.” She blew air out of the side of her mouth, unsuccessfully attempting to shift a strand of hair that was plastered to her forehead. “And that’s saying something.”

The elf leading them, who had ignored their conversation, came to a stop at the base of a large tree.

---