Look through these eyes into the Wood and wander, searching, searching, searching.
A gate into the Near World. That is what we—it—they—I! That is what I want! That world would be a good place to start again. And this one loves that world, loves that Land that is the only land to him. But he cannot find it. Looking through these eyes, there is only the Wood forever and ever.
The tears are blinding. Why must this soul sorrow? Only in death can there be new life. Why can they never understand? Why must they always—
Crescent Woman.
Long ago, he had called it the Gray Wood. Now it was simply the Wood to him as to all others, for it was not solely gray. All colors and no colors might be found in its ever-shifting deeps. He had learned this very soon upon entering (so long ago it seemed to him, for he could scarcely remember the day), and in learning, he had been afraid.
The young warrior did not fear the Wood now, however, as he moved through its depths. Blood stained his arms and neck, blood not his own. He would wash it off eventually, but for now he wore it as a badge of honor to the memory of the beloved dead.
And the watching eyes of the Wood drew back, trembling.
Few things might frighten him now, this stern-faced warrior whose features may have seemed youthful, save for those bloodstains. Around his neck he wore two cords of rough-woven fibers. On one was strung a stone that gleamed like gold or bronze. It was this that caught the eyes of the Wood and left the warrior with a clear path through the gloom.
But it was the second cord that drew his searching fingers. On it were strung two beads. One was red, painted with the crude image of a panther. The second—this one the warrior touched even now, unconscious and tender—was blue and painted with a white six-petaled flower.
Not far off, he heard the songs of sylphs. Their voices drew him up sharply, and he stood as still as a wildcat poised at the beginning of a hunt, his nose uplifted to catch scents, his head tilted to receive all possible sounds. The sylphs were near and they were singing, which meant they were on their lonely hunt. From the sound of the song, they had caught someone and even now dragged that luckless victim of their love into the deeper Wood.
The warrior would have gone on his way without a second thought. Sylphs, after all, are strange beings with their own customs, and while many might consider them foes, they were no danger to him or his at present. So he would have passed into the shadows and vanished from this story altogether, save that his nose caught a scent that brought him up short.
“Crescent Woman!”
The warrior turned and pursued the sylphs.
They moved in a swirling nexus, creatures of air and invisible beauty, unable to hold on to physical form for more than mere moments. In those moments, one might catch a glimpse of a face neither male nor female, of hair long and streaming, of eyes dark beyond existence, like a storm’s gale. They were huge and they were small, beings of wind and sound.
And they loved mortals with a dangerous love; as the cold moon must love the fiery sun for its heat; as the ever-changing sea must love the stolid shore for its sameness; as a man must love a woman, so the sylphs loved the dirt-bound mortals and called them into their wild games so that they might touch mortal hair, might feel mortal limbs, might hear mortal voices rising in chorus with their own.
To these aerial beings, the most inexplicable and beautiful mystery of all was mortal death. They pulled and pushed their captives in fey patterns only to watch them fall down, exhausted, battered, and, finally, dead.
The warrior had seen it before. He had come upon hosts of sylphs, each one rendered no bigger than a spring morning’s whisper, gathered about the corpse of some luckless mortal, touching its still face with their wisps of fingers and asking one another, “Why does it no longer dance? Why does it no longer sing?”
It was their foolish way. The warrior had long since learned to ignore them.
But he could not ignore the scent of the Crescent Land.
“Come, fickle, fleeting, Fiery Fair,
Come and join our dance!
We’ll run our fingers through your hair;
We’ll dance beyond all thought or care!
Come, and in our wildness share
And leave your life to chance!”
So sang the strange voices of the sylph in their manic but beautiful song. The warrior chased it, following his ears and his nose, and at length he caught glimpses of the sylphs themselves, their faces reminiscent of a man’s but more like a bird’s, or perhaps both at once. When he could see nothing else of them, he could still discern the signs of their passing: the wind-tossed branches, the trembling of the trees. The air became thick in their wake, filling with mist in the sudden stillness so that the warrior became nearly blind in his pursuit.