This creature of wind and whisper held back from its brethren, though never so far as to be totally alone. It had been alone too long, and it never wanted to suffer that yawning closeness of isolation again. Even now, free and airborne though it was, it still felt the bite of iron around its neck, a neck made solid with imprisonment, and it remembered its wind-wild spirit trapped in a Time-tortured form.
Once it had been too curious and too clever. It had ventured out of the Between, lured by the voice of the Death-in-Life. And there, in that world where everything gave way to the decay of moments, hours, and years, the sylph had been made the slave.
“Aad-o Ilmun!” the sylph breathed through the leaves as it moved, following the merry shouts of its brothers and sisters. “I am saved! I am rescued! I will never deal with mortals again.”
They had caught a new one. The lone sylph could tell by the manic laughter, the triumphant songs.
“We have the mortals by their hands,
And so we lead them through our lands!
Oh, laughing, fey, and fair are we
Who spring and sing from tree to tree!
Come and join our dance!”
They were foolish, but they could not help it. Intrigued by the strangeness, they failed to recognize the horror. So the lone sylph hung back. Let them sing and harry the poor mortals. Only let them never learn the terrors of a corporeal body, the horror of a spirit trapped inside a head, the painful beat of a heart! Even now the memory was enough to make the sylph moan.
Then it heard a shout.
“By the Prince of Farthestshore, I—oof!—command you—arrrgh!—to release—ugh!”
Every whisper of the lone sylph’s strange and billowing being sang in response to that voice, which it recognized.
“Savior!” it cried.
Then it plunged forward through the trees, hurtling itself after the congregation of its kindred until it found the mortals clutched at the center of the wild hurricane. The sylphs were not gentle with their new toys but tugged them right off their feet, carrying them through the Wood so swiftly that neither captive could protest, and were indeed hard-pressed to protect their faces from the knifelike branches as they were gusted along. One of the mortals hit a tree trunk, only just putting up an arm in time to protect himself from a severe concussion, then was pulled on around so fast that he could not catch his breath.
“Savior!” cried the lone sylph again.
A horrible, wafting face presented itself before Lionheart’s terror-struck eyes. Both visible and invisible at once, it put out its great, gale-like arms and caught him close to its breast. All breath knocked from his body, Lionheart could not so much as moan when he, with a jolt that certainly must have left his stomach far behind on the woodland floor, was torn from the throng of wind beings and lifted up, up, up, until he thought he would break through the canopy of the forest itself.
But no. Not even a sylph has the courage to climb above the trees in the Between. High in the upper branches, however, the lone sylph was able to bear its mortal burden more easily away from the throng. Lionheart felt his head pillowed on a bosom made of breezes, soft and gentle as a mother where his cheek lay. But the rest of the sylph’s being billowed tumultuously, crashing through the foliage with all the care of a typhoon.
The gates to the Near World from the Wood are not known to all the fey folk. But the sylph had a fair notion where the mortal clasped in its arms might have entered, and it bore him back that way. In this place, a grove of silver-branch trees, the sylph had waited with its brethren, patient as only those who know nothing of Time may be, waiting for mortals to accidentally step over the boundaries separating their world from the Realm Between Worlds.
So the sylph set Lionheart down beneath these ageless trees. Lionheart, numb with roaring and flight, staggered three steps, then fell headlong. The sylph, ever eager to please, reached out and gently righted him on his feet. Once more, Lionheart tried his luck with a pace or two, but his legs failed, and he collapsed again.
All around him stretched the Wilderlands, and he could see no break in the trees’ long shadows. He did not know how close the gate to the Near World stood, for his eyes were untrained. He saw only more Wood.
The sylph bowed over him, touching his forehead.
“Savior,” it said. “Now I have saved you!”
“Wh-what?” Lionheart pushed himself up onto his elbows, spitting dirt and leaves, and gazed once more into that face that was not quite a face. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember?” said the sylph. “I am the poor creature you rescued from the Duke of Shippening.”