It's All Hours

Varvale was the name of the forest. Autumn was a dawn rolling over the canopy from the inside and working its way out. A pond lay beneath it. It wore the sky like a mask. Mostly blue, the pale of peace. The underbrush was bearded with leaves, branches, shrubs, dirt, lichen, and moss. The dead stuck out like bits of food in that beard. They’d been camped next to the pond.

Varvale was the name of the Heartwood dragon. Heartwoods were the landscape of the forest. They took that forest’s name. They died when it died. They moved through their forest like thoughts through a mind. Even the wind required their permission. Fire and resin made up heart and blood. Yet they were bound to the ways of life, and had no words in the language of the logger’s metal.

Varvale was the name of a dying hope. She approached the pond from the south. She’d felt death with intention. Not the natural fires of the woods, the feeding of mouths, nor even time passing its waste. Neither the Fae nor the Beastfolk could grip and sicken a place with jaws like human want. Human society was a vexillology of teeth. Flies had not found their victims yet. Insects had a sharp ear for the bell of death, but Varvale was the forest itself.

In the forest and on the water stood a toddler. She was Fae, but though Varvale could see that plainly, something was different. As a creature of the forest, she usually felt Fae keenly. They, too, had a special woodland kinship. Unlike this little girl, however, no Fae who Varvale had met had ever moved atop the water. Not in the waking world. Not upright.

The little girl had iridescent white hair, eyes a colour that changed when you tried to name it, and skin the grey-edged blue of daylit water. “Lake?” she asked. “Pond?” she tried again. This time, she appeared more satisfied, though there was nothing different that Varvale could discern. In a rare state of awe, the Heartwood watched as the Fae toddler crawled about both atop and within the water as though clambering over an invisible staircase.

At first, the dragon stayed in the green-tinted shadows of the canopy. “I’m Ensley,” the toddler said, as though it were an offering. “Please. Give’em back to me.”

Water was welcome in the forest. Of course. But it was not the forest. Like all Heartwoods, Varvale had a core made of the embers of a forest fire that had cleansed a wood of its dead underbrush. There was life in it. Resin flowed in her with a smokiness like blood steaming on snow. But though water made her resin green with strength and new life, it held nothing she could determine. Bloodstains leapt over the language barrier, but the slain couldn’t speak.

“Mom?” Ensley called as her head emerged from the water. She wasn’t standing on the bottom of the pond – that was too deep for her tiny feet to reach from here. One arm leaned upon the liquid stillness before her as though she were sitting at a desk. She looked east upon the shaved nakedness of the forest, just behind a one-thin line of trees. Loggers had been here. One or two of their Timber Corps lay slain about. Beastfolk were far more numerous.

“Dad?” Ensley called.

Only the toddler broke the surface of the pond.

Yet Varvale suspected what this Fae child must mean.

The Heartwood looked sharply to the west. She saw a Beastfolk, but not like the bodies strewn in the shorn forest of the east. Those had been of the Wolf Clan. This one looked to be Boar Clan. He was alone, however; unusual for the Beastfolk. An exile, perhaps?

Varvale resisted the urge to growl, as she was keeping half an eye on the Fae child. Normally, she liked the Beastfolk well enough; they knew to respect the forest. This one bore an axe. And no mere hatchet. Neither for hunting nor duelling, this was a weapon of war. Faint runes glimmered along its broad side. Varvale blinked at that. The runic arts were rare among many peoples, and she’d witnessed it in few people at all. This was the first she’d seen it brandished so openly on her land. That detail took some of the sting away from seeing the looming bite of the axe.

She couldn’t pretend to understand the inner workings of the Beastfolk. For though they were less an enemy to the wood than the humans, they were also less a friend than the Fae. She guessed it was the sight of the slaughtered ones who vaguely resembled himself. That species of heartbreak seemed common to all peoples.

Ensley dug into the water like a distressed dog that had misplaced its buried bone.

Varvale’s heart, though mostly made of fire, creaked like strained wood to hear the toddler’s mounting grief and despair.

From the north came another. Varvale knew a Fae when she saw him, but she did not have this one’s name. He was short and small – even by Fae standards – with silvery hair. His skin was tinged blue as well. Were those bite marks? He was dressed in plant fibres of mismatched colours, which was a tad unusual; most of his people had a palate. His top bared one shoulder and an angular swatch of midriff.

Held in one hand was his bow. The bow itself, she knew, was standard fare: wood and sinew. Yet it was limned with a light unrelated to the sun. Not enough to be a light source, but it bespoke his discipline: this Fae was a Dreamstress. He wove dream into the waking world, with his bow as conduit.

Varvale emerged from the shades of the greenery. Fae slaying Fae was rare, but nothing about this newcomer was normal.

The Beastfolk of the Boar glanced at the Dreamstress, who glanced back. It was the sort of eye-shuffle that most might have dismissed. In a way, they were just as much inside the dragon as they were inside the forest. Primal as the raising of neck hairs, she knew they were working together. That’s why they approached the pond in a pincer movement. Only the east, and back south, were available.

“I can’t stay here,” the toddler said. Clutched tightly to her chest was a fern. It might have been floating loose in the water. No one was sure. “Mom and dad will be worried.”

Varvale spread her vestigial wings. While in tree cover, they allowed her to move like the shadows between the trees or the wind in the shrubs. Not true flight, it was close enough in her own domain.

Vines and scuttling structures like a cross between fungus and bone moved in her chest to reveal a fleshy fire. Her heart. It flashed green. Ensley’s veins became briefly visible as red-limned green before vanishing again.

The newcomers brandished their weapons; they must have believed they were approaching a lone toddler until this mirage of embers and lichen bonded itself to her. So they weren’t hunting the Heartwood dragon, Varvale thought. That was something.

“This child is under my protection,” she declared. She spoke as much to the child as to the warriors.

::There’s no need to fight,:: came the voice of the Dreamstress. He was using mindspeech. Varvale knew it was him the way a walking human knows they have the sun on their back.

“Speak openly,” she said to him aloud. It was strange that he’d tip his hat about his mindspeech so recklessly. Most sleeves longed for a card like that.

The Beastfolk shot the Fae a glower of resentment or mistrust. If the Dreamstress noticed, he gave no sign. Varvale noticed. She knew the two kindreds often gave each other space. Yet this was different.

“I belong to the water,” the toddler said. Her voice was a ringing bubble with the broad softness of youth. “You can’t have it.”

“We’re…uh…not thirsty,” the Beastfolk said. There were none of the oinks or odd high pitches stereotyped to his clan. He had the tusks from the lower jaw, the knobby snout, the beady eyes. But the look of a boar did not make him one. This was a man well-travelled and familiar with fist and growl. Doubt, too, was in his tone. Confusion, perhaps.

Roland, certain at first that he understood the situation and his place in it, began to lose confidence. Though also born to water, his Fae ways didn’t seem the same as the toddler’s. His Beastfolk companion, Breggar, was still…complicated. Despite their working together. Further, the dragon was taking an interest in the toddler unlike any he’d known the Heartwoods to take.

On top of that, Breggar had waded into the water. No explanation. Something of great import was happening between Varvale and Ensley. No explanation. Killing had been done here in the name of claiming trees not yet finished with life. No explanation. He looked back and forth between his tense comrade and the child with the dragon. While the Heartwoods were less dangerous to Fae than other kinds of dragon, the two kindreds generally had nothing to discuss.

Tearing the child away was an efficient strategy for self-destruction. Roland wasn’t stirred to action until Breggar submerged. By the time he joined, he wasn’t able to help much. Breggar freed a body from beneath something that might have been a log.

The pair emerged with one of the vanquished Wolf Clan in tow. How the Beastfolk had known the slain person was down there, Roland couldn’t guess. He was still examining the body while Breggar had turned an ear toward the toddler and the dragon.

“You shall be in my keeping,” Varvale said to the child. She went on: “I shall name y-”

“Ensley,” the toddler said. She whirled about to face Varvale, courageous bluster dying before it could escape her throat. Meekly, she followed, “My name is…Ensley. I am named. It came from the water. It’s mine.”

“No one wants to take your name,” offered the Dreamstress. He was trying to be peaceful, deadly weapons notwithstanding. “My name is Roland.”

“You’re not from my woods,” Ensley said.

“These aren’t your woods,” Roland pointed out.

“Are so!” Ensley said, stomping one foot on the water. It didn’t splash, but folded underneath with a bloop.

“What happened here?” Breggar stepped up. He was careful to avoid the pond and followed its western shore. Whatever he’d gained by retrieving the slain Beastfolk of the Wolf, he kept it to himself. For that matter, the Heartwood could find no obvious sign that the Fae was using his mindspeech toward the one of the Boar Clan.

That could have meant that they weren’t communicating, they had a hidden signal system, or that Breggar was simply not one to show his hand more than he had to. For that matter, the Beastfolk hadn’t offered his name. Varvale assumed this Roland would know it.

Her gaze soon stopped Breggar’s advance. “The best of what you offer together cannot phase me. It would be as fist-fighting the entire forest.”

Roland opened his mouth, but Breggar raised a silencing finger. The Dreamstress took umbrage at that, but only briefly. He seemed oddly distracted. Not the appropriate time for a wandering mind. Varvale wondered if the Fae was entirely well. Breggar went on: “We don’t want a pond. And I haven’t threatened you. I asked what happened. That’s all.”

“Humans,” the dragon bit out.

Breggar’s face twisted in sympathetic disgust.

Ensley started crying. Not out of simple fear or heartbreak, but with the wild abandon uniquely gifted to toddlers by sadistic parent-hating gods.

Breggar stepped farther from the pond and its toddler than he did from the dragon.

Roland rounded the pond on its eastern side, glancing occasionally at the harvested woods beyond the thin boundary to his left. The dragon began walking toward him, untroubled by stepping into the pond. Since the toddler was already giving in to her tears, caution seemed less important. The Heartwood watched the Dreamstress closely.

“I told you to speak openly,” she said.

The Fae child whirled on the adult. “Why weren’t you here!?” she shrieked, starving for someone to blame.

“You should stay with the humans,” Roland said. He tilted his head eastward as he spoke, wholly acknowledging the extent of what he was saying.

“I didn’t hear you right,” Breggar said. It took an outdoor voice because of his position on the other side of the pond. His tone was halfway between statement and question. His great axe lowered as he held it in one hand, feet set and eyes clear.

Varvale shared his doubt. “You are in my care, child. I’ll allow no harm to you.”

Ensley turned to face the Heartwood. “Why me?”

“The humans don’t know about dream-stepping,” Roland said. He stopped trying to approach. “They weren’t after you.”

The toddler ignored him. The dragon cast a single look upon him before regarding Breggar.

The Beastfolk said, “All of the clans have a talent for helping the dream-step. But we can’t pick.” He stopped, at a loss.

Ensley stomped her foot again. “I don’t CARE! Stop…running words! Just tell me why!” Her fists were clenched.

“Humans have a soft spot for children…” Roland started.

Breggar humphed.

“I can’t leave the forest because I am the forest, dear Ensley,” said the dragon.

Breggar had never been one to concern himself much with any kind of dragon. Their ways and reasons were not his problem, and the Boar Clan to which he used to belong had few dealings with them. Roland, in the way of his wandering attention, had picked up tidbits about them over the years. Heartwoods interested him. He related to being both validated and confined by one’s own place and people.

“Give me mom and dad!” Ensley said.

“All of us together could not do that,” Breggar said. He meant to be blunt and pragmatic, but he was an anvil lifting a hammer of sadness. The pond nearly rang with the silence that trailed his words.

“All our kindreds together could not achieve such an end,” Roland said. “We need to stop the humans. They’ll learn from you.”

“They took…they killed…they…they…LOOK!” Ensley said with a throat that felt like marble. She wanted desperately to be angry. To hate. To be carried away on a wave of righteous passion. Even fear would have gotten her moving. All she could do was stand knee-deep in deeper water and smell where the trees had been.

Varvale continued in the water. Ensley turned on her. “I don’t want you protecting me. I want my mom!” She turned about, shouting, “DAD! MOM!”

“What were your last moments before all this?” Roland asked awkwardly.

Ensley looked at him. “I wasn’t born today, you know,” she said haughtily. She was a toddler by Fae reckoning. They lived long if they lived at all.

“But you were born here,” he guessed.

“So?”

“We can stay here a while if it would comfort you,” offered the dragon. Now that she was standing in the water and not surrounded by the woods that were also her being, Roland and Breggar were momentarily speechless. She was more like a spirit with form than a body with a soul.

When surrounded by trees, plants, and the like, she was always a glimpse from the corner of the eye – even when they looked at her directly. Yes, she was a mass, as of plants and fungi, but the others quickly found themselves wondering if they’d seen a free-standing mass or just the collection of lichen scrawled upon tree bark. In the water, she was a cross between woven light and the most elaborate work of long grasses they’d ever seen. A statue of green warp and burning weft, with ember glows upon the underbelly and patches throughout.

“They’re not dead!” Ensley said. Rather than a denial, her tone was incriminating.

“Then they’ve made the dream-step,” Roland said. He tried to smile, to sound happy, but it came off as lop-sided.

“Follow them,” Breggar said.

“The humans are our best bet,” Roland pointed out. His tone was the soft of recent argument, but Breggar did not return the vibe that they knew each other. The Beastfolk was more than a stranger but had a seething indifference toward the Dreamstress.

“The humans are why she’s in this situation,” the Heartwood said.

“They can’t be Underhill,” Ensley said, neck high and spirits low. “They wouldn’t leave me behind.”

“Maybe they’re with the humans, then,” Roland tried.

Breggar glowered. “Enough!”

Roland, taken aback, turned to face the Beastfolk. “If we can convince the hu-”

“Convince!?” Breggar demanded. He held a hand out in the direction of the ravaged forest. “What, they just never thought that other living things are also alive? You’ve seen their haulage caravans. They’re the only people who’ve made weapons that only work on trees. Do you keep your wits in your spare underwear?”

The dragon narrowed her eyes. “Are you two not companions?”

“Yes!” Roland declared.

“No!” Breggar declared.

They glared at each other.

“Beastfolk are friends,” Ensley said. Roland seemed sad. Breggar laughed. The toddler went on, “Why else would they offer up their dreams to help us to Underhill?”

“Are you sure you want the youngling?” Roland asked Varvale.

“Different clans have different…everything,” Breggar said to the Fae child. “Some of us just don’t want to share the forest with you, and helping you leave is faster and easier than killing you.”

The toddler broke into tears.

Roland started looking at the bodies of some of the slain Wolf Clan, looking for signs that Breggar might have been right. But a Dreamstress was trained to bring the influence of dream into reality. Mostly for combat; defending Fae and their (often inscrutable) plans. He couldn’t trace the magics of dream back to Underhill, the homeworld of Faerie. He certainly couldn’t reach that far from the awake or the dead.

“You do not have a way with children,” Varvale admonished Breggar.

“Take her and go back to the sea,” Breggar said to Roland. He looked up at the Heartwood. “Dragons are mighty enough, great Varvale, but they don’t sit in judgement. I’m not here for children. I have enough to fight for, and my axe can only get so big.”

“I sit in judgement of all those who wander my woods,” Varvale said. Her wings shuffled with the resonant danger of an unwelcoming forest.

“Water does not belong to the woods,” Breggar replied. He stepped into the pond up to his knees. From his belt he drew a strange tool.

Roland, meanwhile, had approached the toddler closely enough that he could sit upon the shore of the pond and speak with her as one Fae to another. Leaves, bracken, and other underbrush made a comfy seat for him. She, despite herself, stepped to the edge to meet him. Though he was small by adult standards, he was a grown man. Ensley, by contrast, stood in the water as one who belongs here. At best, being sea Fae on the forest floor, he was a guest. This didn’t appear to trouble him.

Varvale stepped into the pond. Beneath its surface, she was a glittering green suffused with inner flankers. A being of light and vitality with fireflies for blood. Above its surface, she was a dragon made of plants, lichen, and even hints of fungi. Her eyes were amber. Her words were meditative. “You two are the strangest opponents I have ever crossed.”

“Are we opponents?” Roland asked. “I think we’re at least on the same road. Could I ride you sometime? You are the elegance of the forest. It would be an honour.”

“More than an honour. The temerity to even ask…!” Her gaze shot away. “What have you done?”

Breggar had crafted a rune in the water. It was iridescent and shimmered like oil. He was halfway through wading across the pond to join Roland and Ensley as the rune sank to the centre of its floor. “Nothing. Yet.” Was his only response.

Ensley turned to the Heartwood. “Why are they strange?”

Another question with multiple possible interpretations and many answers. Roland saw the talent in that. But he looked at Breggar. “We can’t leave her.”

Varvale said to Ensley, “These are strange times, to bring us all together like this. There is something in that, child.”

“If I kill her, we both die,” Breggar agreed with Roland. Much to his own dismay.

Ensley blinked. Varvale merely nodded, now looming over the child like a tree mid-water.

The Beastfolk knelt before the toddler. “Give me your hand.”

Ensley looked doubtfully at Roland. He said nothing, except in mindspeech. ::If the big lug meant to hurt you, he’d have his axe up. You are as safe as anyone in the forest.::

She gave the man of the Boar Clan her hand.

He traced upon its back three times with the tip of his finger. “Remember this pattern. Draw it, and you’ll return to this pond.”

“Ooo,” Roland said. “Can I see? Show me!”

Breggar ignored him.

“No more kill talk,” Ensley said. She turned to the Heartwood dragon. “No more. Blood is ugly in water.”

Varvale slowly and affectionately lowered her head to the toddler, nuzzling the Fae child with care. “And it does nothing to nurture my plants,” she said. Her eyes lanced with rancour at Breggar. That rune meant she couldn’t just whisk Ensley up and vanish into her wood. Which she’d have done already, if they hadn’t been such a curious pair.

“That’s actually pretty great,” Roland pointed out, utterly unfazed by Breggar’s hostile indifference. “This way she can flee to safety if the humans do decide to trouble her.”

“Didn’t a bunch of your people just get slaughtered here?” Breggar pointed out. “By humans?”

“Maybe?” Roland replied. “They were probably more scattered than anything. Dream-stepping is tricky business. Really, your people took more of a licking.”

“These are not my clan.”

“Those Fae weren’t mine.”

“Fae don’t have clans,” Breggar said, with more than a little exasperation.

“Not the way you think of it,” Roland said with a tone-deaf cheerfulness. “My folk want to take to the sea, not Underhill.”

“Humans hurt the sea,” Ensley said.

That took everyone off guard.

“How do you hurt the sea?” Breggar asked, ever the more practical of the unusual pair.

“We don’t need to get into this right now. There’s a dragon, you know,” Roland said. He looked at the Heartwood and spoke aloud even as Varvale growled. “Right, right, sorry. I forgot. You’d think more people would appreciate mindspeech. So much less disruptive…”

“LESS disruptive?” Breggar exclaimed in disbelief.

Ensley looked up at Varvale. She said nothing and had no mindspeech, but she didn’t need it – even as a toddler.

“What do you remember of the humans?” Varvale asked.

“Shadows shaped like fire,” Ensley said. Roland was the only one who seemed to think that that statement made perfect sense. She turned to him. “Can you tell them? You know. You’re Fae.”

Roland rolled his thoughts around like marbles in his mouth. Then he said, “Imagine having a nightmare. You know it’s the humans – or spiders, or demons, or whatever actually scares you – that are on the edge of things. Maybe they’re in the corner of your eye. Maybe the whole forest is on fire, and you can only make them out between flame tongues and flankers. You know it with the faith of the dreamer. But you can’t actually see them as they are. Like looking behind you because you’re sure you’re being followed, not seeing anyone, and still feeling the hairs on your neck when you continue on your way.”

Heartwood dragons didn’t have hair, of course, but the dragon understood what he was getting at. Breggar scowled, but nodded once. Ensley nodded many times. Her eyes were beginning to dry. “I can go to my parents,” she said. Then she pointed at the Beastfolk. “You’ll take me. Dream-step.”

“I’m not sleepy,” he said. It was still broad daylight, but no one mistook his meaning.

“We can’t run away,” Ensley said, turning again to Roland.

“There are always more humans. And the iron lingers,” Roland said. Breggar’s brow furrowed. Beastfolk and most dragons didn’t feel the bite of human industry the way the Fae did.

Heartwoods knew the taste of iron, though. Varvale’s neck curved as she focussed upon the Fae toddler. “You’ve both reached at fibres of the truth. Killing the humans is not enough.” Breggar’s grip tightened on his axe. His expression took on tactical contours, but the dragon headed him off: “More will come. The humans spread quickly. And unlike insects, rabbits, or mice, they do not find a balance with their landscape. They claim and consume it. Their lands and titles multiply and divide faster than they do. And though any one of us have gifts and powers beyond their wildest hopes of gain…”

“...they are nothing if not masters of war. Or slaves to it,” Roland finished.

Varvale nodded.

“You…you wish to broker peace with them?” Breggar asked the dragon. Not without awe.

“I am my forest,” she replied. “If we slay these loggers, and all loggers to come, there will still be those who revel in poisons. There will be the ones who love fire. There may even be masters of the bite of metal who do not harvest, but reap for the joy of an ending.”

“You’re all talking too much,” the toddler said. “We stay here. Boar man gets sleepy. I go to Mom and Dad.” She pointed at Roland. “You can get the Fae who do all of this,” and she waved dismissively at the dragon.

Varvale’s wrath had roots. It started at the fingers and toes, seeping like sickened sap. Even standing in the water, Ensley was not immune to this. Eyes trembling and mouth widening, she watched the Heartwood helplessly. Breggar’s runes glowed as he approached the left hindquarters of the dragon. Roland stepped past the toddler, bow at the ready, dreamy limning sliding along his weapons and hardening gaze.

Varvale was unconcerned. “A whole forest may drink a pond to the bones of the rain. Honour it and its dragon. None may disrespect me thus.”

“I…I’m sorry…” Ensley murmured, twisting her hands meekly before her.

A wispy breeze over the backs of their necks reminded them that daylight waits for no one.

“Though it is madness,” the dragon said, turning her attention to Breggar, “the bizarre Fae is right: we must treat with the humans…” Her eyes slid to Roland. “...if not befriend them.”

She met Ensley’s eyes.

“No!” Ensley protested.

“We tried it. My…” Breggar took a pained breath. “...former Clan. We tried dealing with the humans, before we fought them. They talked about things we did not understand. Economies. Treaties. They had strange ways of talking about time. They acted like someone else could own their time. They had to earn their coins this way. We fought. We were strong.” He looked at Varvale, Heartwood dragon of their forest. “They said they didn’t want to fight. They spoke of feeding their families.”

“We can teach them a better way,” Varvale said. She watched Roland wander over to a cut tree trunk. She saw him grimace as he touched its shorn edge, lingering with iron like the glitter of poison salt on the tongue.

Ensley slipped into the water and emerged with a coin. “This is time for them?”

“I think so,” Breggar said.

She looked at the dragon. “Do humans dream?”