Er, perhaps not. But I'll show you a "snippet" of what I've written today, including bad poetry and anagrams, which are pretty darned hard to write. Well, not so much the bad poetry, and I saved my really tricky anagram for another part.
Without further ado (or editing), here she is:
Tho Weir Creatures do not cast spells to call forth entrances to their Weir Wood, all other Trespassers to their realm must learn from the olde books this art. Be wary lest ye sojourn too long in the Weir Wood, for all these become lost, illusive and unearthly. The Weir Wood will leech life from you, and in time you will become too anemic of this worldliness to ever return. Even the Weir Creatures themselves cannot stay too long there. For tho it be their home, it is an unnatural home, one forged by the hateful Weird himself, and one suited only for such as he.
—Duncan, The Encyclopedia of the Lost
They rode out through Glennys Wood to the Quarry for the second time that night, Teagan and Fawkes and Coenred. Once again they left their horses untethered in the woods beyond the Quarry. Except Glidden. Glidden Teagan brought with her. Then they tramped into the dark woods from which they had earlier heard the echoing grunts and snorts of the fleeing Weir creatures, and then the sudden silence.
“We are here,” announced Coenred. “This,” he pointed to a very narrow grassy clearing that caught the moonlight and shimmered, “is the place that has long been afeared by my people. Its strong currents have pulled wanderers to this place, where they’ve been blessed with visions and healings and miracles, or just as likely been cursed with pains or deceptions or tragedy.” Coenred pointed to the area around an ancient oak, mossy and peppered with toadstools. Abundant hollows imbued a richness and depth on the area. Twisty branches weighted down the trees, bringing their arms closer to the ground like a canopy or an eave.
“It’s a lode point,” Fawkes explained. “A place where several lode lines converge. Lode points harness magical energies from across the globe, making magic seem to spill out at their seams. It’s a magical hot spot, churlish and unpredictable. Cast your spell precisely.”
Teagan took a deep breath and stepped into the lode point. Coenred and Glidden moved in, stopping close behind her, but Fawkes circled the rim of the area, and kept a wary eye on the woods, primed and watching for the attack of a Weir creature. “Rrghh. I don’t like the stillness here.”
Teagan listened, and could hear neither bird nor brook, though she knew a stream lay nearby, audible from both the Quarry and the woods on either side of the lode point.
“Aye. This place seems to swallow sound,” Coenred nodded.
“No doubt sound is carried off into the Weir Wood,” remarked Fawkes. “I can’t hear them coming from out there.” He gestured to Glennys Wood. “And I can’t hear them coming from in here.” He waved his hand about the lode point, past the hollows and the puddles, the towering trees and their reaching limbs. Every rock or tree or hollowed out stump could be an entrance to the Weir Wood. And an exit from it. “We’d best get started.”
Teagan knelt on the soft mossy ground cover and spread out a linen tablecloth in which she had wrapped the magical offerings. She rolled a small jar out of the napkin it was folded inside. She shook out several chunks of ice from a second napkin, and from a third she carefully removed Glidden’s piece of tumbleweed. “We need a bough of live lilac. Bend it over to this linen, and take care not to break it.” Coenred nodded and silently complied.
They were ready. Teagan sighed. Finally she opened Duncan’s book of spells. She began to read the ode. “Lovely woods, Dark is here.” She felt that it was so, more through her senses than her eyes. She began to feel the spell shaping itself. Teagan sank her fingers into the magic, deep in, and balled it up in her palms. She rolled it and turned it, and it began to give off an odor, somewhere between the aroma of almonds and the verdant stink of decomposition. She could see it forming, sense its spherical shape. It sparkled green and indigo.
She nearly lost her focus when she turned her attention to the next line. She recalled the image of the magic and willed it to turn from sparkling to crackling as she read: “Take what once was living fire.” So she took it. She snatched it from the linen, digging her fingers into the clay jar, spreading the ash across the linen, letting the black smear the white threads, painting dancing flame patterns on the nubbly cloth. This ash, tame and smooth and infinitely soft, this ash that had once been fire, hot, wild, untouchable. She made the sphere turn black and gold, like amber flames dancing among all that coal.
Teagan felt ready to move on. She kept her voice steady and her tone sure. Each phrase, each syllable was deliberate, careful, clear. “From the peat a sweetness grew.” She inhaled the fragrance of the lilac, turned the image of it over and inside out in her mind. With her finger she traced the plant from the blossom OR bud (if it closes at night) to the branch and the bark. She made herself know this life given from the earth. She saw how the blooming tree had grown from a sapling, and the sapling from a seed. She felt the graininess of the peat that had nourished that seed. And she thanked it. She smelled it and tasted it and felt its coolness on her skin.
Teagan let that coolness spread into a frigid iciness as she uttered the next line. “As water dies when cold and true,” her voice sang, low and steady. Certain. Teagan saw ice grow like fingers across a pond, crackling and snapping as it heaved and swelled and grew thick. She felt its smoothness and let the sharpness of its pieces prick her skin. An icy fog rose over her body and wafted across the awning, and Teagan let herself feel the shivers that shook Coenred and Fawkes’s bodies.
She stretched out her hands towards Coenred, and he gently placed his willow flute in them. She felt his care and patience while he had crafted and carved it. She felt, as if from memory, the light touch of his lips on the flute’s smoothed surface and the pressure of his breath as he had tested its first tentative notes. “Breath of home, the sweetest shire.” Suddenly the frigid cold was gone, blown away by a fragrant warmth of the hearth at Coenred’s home. She pictured him sitting there with his mother and his nephew and niece. She heard the lilting notes and felt them trickling down on her like soft moth-like steps. And then she thought of her home, of her own panting breath as she ran among the sage and the cactus. She felt the wind pulling against the brittle branches of a tumbleweed, snapping the weak roots out of the ground. Round and round she twirled, tasting dust that dried her mouth and coated her throat and caked her eyes till she could see nothing but pale brown. She was light and free and wild.
Teagan recited these words now without thinking about them, over and over. She tasted the lilac’s honey, the hollow woody stem of the flute, the ash, and the ice. She felt hot and cool and cold and comfortable. She felt the full weight of each line rushing at her one after the other, relentlessly, surging like waves, and when she could bear no more she shouted the two final lines. “Through the teeth of the rood, we come into your wood!”
Several points in the woods, like the points of a compass, shimmered and grew luminescent. Each was an access point to the Weir Wood, and Teagan, Coenred, Glidden, and Fawkes felt a gentle tug to each of them, drawing them into the dangerous forests the Weir inhabited. But one doorway drew them forcefully. Strike. But one opening was not gentle. They felt a forceful yank from the enormous old oak, which had twisted its arms like a cross and opened its hollow like a mouth. “The mouth of the rood,” Coenred whispered. He clasped Teagan’s hand, and with Fawkes and Glidden behind them, they stepped into the cavernous hollow.
*sigh* Competition is healthy. I'm so pleased that it looks like I'll be writing 50,000 words this month. Two more days oughta do it! I'll have the rest of the month to finish my second mystery sock and rejoice.
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