“Bigger,” Ben yelled as he looked back over Clark’s shoulder. “It’s getting bigger!”
Alex risked another glance behind as he darted between trees, trying to watch his footing. Branches of trees that had long ago fallen, but never decayed back into the earth, littered the forest floor. Nothing in the Dead Forest was alive, but neither could anything fully decay. Everything was suspended in a perpetual state of rot.
Alex leapt across of swallow pool of stagnant, scum-covered water and found himself grinning. He was no longer able to repress the feeling that had been welling up inside him. He had never heard of a Dead-Tree-Monster. Thanks to his father being the town warlock, Alex had heard of nearly all the dangerous creatures of the Rune Valley. That meant it was entirely possible, in fact, more than likely, he and his friends were being chased by something no one in the entire valley had ever seen, much less been hunted by. A part of him found that notion to be unspeakably exciting. Of course, another part of him found it to be ridiculously moronic. The latter part of his mind was the part insisting on running, not the part insisting on grinning.
“Are you smiling?” Rafael asked, incredulous.
“Well,” Victoria said, “I’m glad to see someone is enjoying themselves.”
“Mom swears she didn’t drop him on his head,” Nina said, “but I don’t believe her.”
“Gorping idiot,” Daphne growled.
Alex couldn’t help it. He grinned wider.
The Dead-Tree-Monster was close now, close enough that twigs and rocks from its body shook loose as it ran, pelting Alex in the back. The growls of Beowulf the beagle grew louder and then suddenly, impossibly loud, as though the small dog had been joined by a mountain-sized mastiff. Then a sound erupted behind them like a thousand trees falling all at once and crashing to the ground.
Alex instinctively looked behind to find the Dead-Tree-Monster was nowhere in sight. He saw no sign of Beowulf, either, although the sound of crashing trees still echoed through the lifeless forest. Alex looked a little too long, his foot catching on a knarred root, sending him sprawling forward head first toward one of the small pools of putrid water scattered throughout the forest. Just as his face was about to dive into the filthy water, he felt himself gliding through the air.
His first, and rather irrational thought, was he had somehow managed to learn to fly as he often did in his astral travels. Then he felt the pressure of his shirt against his chest and realized he was being held in the air. Held by Victoria, who had somehow managed to grab him while he fell. She placed him on his feet, still running. He looked at her and grinned wider than ever.
“Thanks!”
“Not a problem,” Victoria said, smiling back. “I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”
“He’s not big enough,” Nina said from behind Victoria.
“He’d think of something,” Victoria said. “He’s very clever when he wants to be.”
“How about giving us some of that clever, now?” Daphne, looking behind for any sign of the Dead-Tree-Monster.
“Keep running,” Alex said, still smiling.
“See?” Victoria said, “Very clever.”
Even as the sounds of Beowulf’s too-loud roars faded and the noise of clashing trees receded, Alex and the Guild kept running. If there was one thing Alex had learned in all of his adventures, it was that when you started running from something evil, it was best to keep running until you knew you were safe or you had to stop. Their arrival into another clearing forced them to halt and seemed safe at first sight.
Alex skidded to a stop as he entered the large clearing, sucking air deeply and quickly, as much from the harried run as from the sight he saw before him. The clearing of short, dead, brown weeds was the size of a football field and roughly the same shape. In the middle of the clearing sat a large pond, its water still and stagnant, a fetid smell hovering in the windless air. A small island of ash-gray grass rose out of the water in the middle of the pond.
In the center of this island stood a solitary tree. A living tree. A wide trunk of healthy black bark and strong, thick branches stretched up toward the sky, bright green leaves opening upward to catch the rays of a single shaft of light breaking through the slate-colored clouds above.
The Rune Tree.
“Oh, goodness,” Victoria panted as Nina and Daphne slid from the back of her horse half.
“Great Zeus’ something or other,” Daphne said, her mouth hanging open.
“You were right, Brother,” Nina said, beaming with excitement. “We found it.”
“But how do we get to it?” Rafael asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
Alex looked behind and listened, but he could see and hear nothing in the Dead Forest they had run through. No sign of the Dead-Tree-Monster. No hint of Beowulf the beagle. Alex turned back to stare at the tree. Beowulf would catch up with them eventually. A magical tacking-dog should be able to do that much, at least.
“Transportation,” Ben said as Clark lowered him to the ground. “There’s a raft over there.”
Alex looked to where Ben pointed and saw there was, indeed, something that might once have been called a raft, tied with a slender piece of rope to a stump at the edge of the pond.
“Mmmm, are you sure that’s a raft?” Clark said, walking toward the assemblage of logs and branches.
“Whatever it is, I’m not setting foot on it,” Victoria said, her hooves dancing anxiously. “I’d only end up swimming.”
“I don’t think you’d want to swim in this pond,” Rafael said as he cast a stone into it. There was no ripple along the surface of the water. The stone simply disappeared without a sign or sound.
They all stared at the pond in silence for a moment. Alex peered into the murky black water. There was a film of something slick and oil-like along the surface of the pond, but he could not tell what it was and had no inclination to touch it and find out.
Something moved in the shadowy depths of the water. Something white and swift. Then it was near the surface, near enough to almost see, but not quite. Alex leaned a little farther over the edge of the pond. What was that thing? It reminded him of something. Was it a fish? The surface of the water erupted as a slimy white creature with fins and a gaping mouth of razor-sharp teeth burst from the pond and launched itself at Alex’s head.
But, Alex’s head was not where the dead fish had thought it would be. Alex’s head was several feet away from where it had been a moment before. The hungry dead fish fell back to the water and disappeared, again without a ripple or a noise. Alex blinked and realized he could feel a hand holding the back of his shirt. He turned to see that Victoria had pulled him back to safety at the last second. Again.
“For such a clever boy, you don’t seem to learn very fast,” Victoria said with a smile.
“I may make a lot of mistakes,” Alex said with a grin, “but I never make the same mistake twice.” Rafael coughed. “Well, not three times, anyway. Thanks. Again.”
“You’re welcome,” Victoria said. “Again.”
“Right,” Alex said, turning to the others and trying to let his grin widen into something that would seem like confidence rather than insanity, “nobody fall in the pond.”
“I never would have thought of that on my own,” Rafael said, rolling his eyes.
“Here’s the plan,” Alex said, ignoring Rafael’s jibe. “First we need to find some long branches to use as poles for the raft. Then we’ll take the rope from Clark’s backpack and tie it to the raft. Victoria and Clark will stay here. That way if something goes wrong, they can pull the raft back. Fast.”
“Finally, you’re beginning to plan for things going wrong,” Rafael said.
“I always plan for things going wrong,” Alex said, “only it’s never the things I plan for that go wrong.”
“Reassuring as always,” Rafael said.
“That’s the easy part of the plan,” Alex said. “The hard part will be figuring out how to get the Rune Tree to give us the rune we need to finally defeat the Shadow Wraith.”
“Something about that tree doesn’t feel right,” Daphne said, staring across the strange pond.
“How so?” Alex asked. As a half-human and half-dryad wood nymph, Daphne could commune with trees in ways ordinary mages never could.
“It’s too quiet,” Daphne said. “Normally, I feel something from a tree. Get some impression of it.”
“Maybe it’s been surrounded by all these dead trees too long, and forgotten how to talk,” Nina suggested.
“No,” Daphne said. “I feel something alive, but it doesn’t feel like a tree should.”
“We’ll be extra careful then,” Alex said.
“Yes, that always helps,” Rafael said. “Nothing ever goes wrong when we’re
extra
careful.”
“You can stay here with Victoria and Clark if you want,” Alex said to Rafael with a taunting tone.
“What, and miss all the screaming?” Rafael said. “Don’t be silly. The screaming is almost as much fun as the running.”
“Both,” Ben said with nervous laugh. “It’s best when there’s screaming and running.”
“Were all of you dropped on your heads as babies?” Nina asked.
“Let’s get moving,” Alex said, ignoring the others. “We don’t want to get caught the Dead Forest after dark.”
That thought sufficiently motivated them all, and within several minutes, they had scavenged five long and relatively straight branches that looked as if they would remain whole long enough to use as raft poles. Clark rummaged through the oversized backpack of supplies he carried and produced a long length of rope that he tied to the edge of the raft. Shortly after that, Alex, Nina, Ben, Daphne, and Rafael clambered unsteadily onto the raft, holding their poles, as much to steady themselves as to steer the craft.
“Good luck,” Victoria said with a small wave as Alex used his pole to push the raft away from the shore.
“Thanks,” Alex said, waving back at Victoria. It was an odd moment to think about it, but he wished he had kissed her before starting across the pond toward the Rune Tree. It had been nearly two months since that first kiss on the day they had saved the town from the Shadow Wraith, but somehow there had never been a second.
It was not that Alex didn’t want to kiss Victoria. He thought about it all the time. But most of the time they were with the rest of the Guild and it didn’t seem right to kiss her in front of everyone else. Again. And every time he did manage to arrange for them to be alone, he could never quite figure out if she wanted him to kiss her or not. Sometimes the look on her face seemed to say she wanted to be kissed, but then she would start talking about something, rambling in that wonderfully endearing way she had, and he couldn’t figure out how to kiss her when she was talking. If she was talking, she probably didn’t want to be kissed. Right?
So they flirted, or at least they did what Alex hoped was flirting, and they spent most of their time together, although usually surrounded by the rest of the Guild, and Alex tried not to think about the centaur boyfriend she was supposed to have had back in England. She never mentioned him. Was it because she had broken up with him? Or was she still writing him and that was the reason she didn’t want to kiss Alex again? He had tried to bring the subject of the boy centaur up several times, but Victoria always turned the conversation elsewhere. What did that mean? Was she interested in Alex or not? Maybe he should ask her. No. That seemed too easy. It couldn’t be the right thing to do if it was that easy.
The raft shuddered and Alex lurched forward, catching himself from falling into the dead pond with the poll. He turned to see that they had arrived at the small island. He had daydreamed about Victoria the whole way.
“Glad you could join us,” Daphne said, smacking Alex in the back of the head. Alex flinched and frowned.
“Yes, whatever could you have been thinking about?” Rafael said, sarcasm disguised as innocence dripping from his voice.
“Tree,” Ben said stepping from the raft to the dry grass of the island. “Think about the tree.”
“I was,” Alex said, covering his embarrassment by jumping from the raft.
“So what’s the plan, Stan?” Nina said, smiling up at him in a way that let him know she knew exactly what he had been thinking about.
“Simple,” Alex said, setting the pole down on the raft. “Daphne and I will approach the tree and see if we can talk to it. Or something. And you three will stay here as backup in case that doesn’t work so well.”
Surprisingly, no one said anything. Alex couldn’t decide if that was a good omen or a bad one. He turned and started walking the twenty yards to the Rune Tree, Daphne falling in at his side. The shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds touched only the leaves of the tree, giving them a vibrant green hue completely incongruous with the rest of the island and the forest.
“Feel anything yet?” Alex asked in a half-whisper.
“Something,” Daphne said, squinting at the tree. “It feels like it wants something.”
“What could a Rune Tree want?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know,” Daphne said, staring up at the massive tree and brushing a strand of long, black hair from her face. “Normally trees want simple things like sunlight and water. This tree seems hungry for something else.”
“Let’s hope we can figure out what it wants and how to get it to give us the rune we need,” Alex said.
“Assuming it even knows the rune,” Daphne said.
“The Rune Tree is supposed to know all runes,” Alex said. “That’s why they call it the Rune Tree.”
They reached the tree and walked across the edge of its shadow and into its shade. Now that he was closer, Alex could see the tree did not look as healthy as it did from a distance. The bark of the trunk was warped and twisted into shapes that did not resemble runes at all. They almost resembled a face. All of the stories Alex and the Guild had managed of track down spoke of the bark and leaves of the Rune Tree as imprinted with runes. It was said each leaf of the Rune Tree held a different rune. All the runes of the world. If a leaf and its rune were to fall, that rune would cease to function for magic for all time. But, as Alex stared up at the leaves above his head, he saw that, while they were mottled with reddish-brown textures on the undersides, they did not seem to be marked with runes of any kind.