7. Captain Morgana Silversword
Chapter 7
Captain Morgana Silversword
G orlag the outlander and Yorick the bard, whether through bad luck or ineptitude, couldn’t seem to find a single path through the thick underbrush.
The party had finally found a portal to the fae realm, which transported them to a lush meadow in the middle of a dense forest, with seemingly no paths out. It was just the latest in a series of confounding hurdles since the adventurers had been tasked with fetching the legendary Supremacy Sphere so the Queen could prevent it falling into the wrong hands.
“Why would there be a portal here with no paths to it?” Calamity asked.
“There should almost certainly be animal tracks if nothing else,” Thrormir said, but Gorlag shook their head.
“None big enough for even the little guy here.”
“Hey,” Yorick said, smacking the side of Gorlag’s leg, which was as high as he came on the half-orc.
“You want animal tracks,” Gorlag said, “you find them.”
“Maybe I will,” Yorick said, turning his attention back to the perimeter of the meadow.
Morgana took the opportunity to look around at the trees, which looked to be completely wild; there were no straight lines or indications of pruning that might suggest intervention or maintenance. There were pockets of space towards the canopy where branches and leaves seemed to bend out of the way, but they were so high up that Morgana couldn’t imagine what creatures could have reached them. Creatures they would want to encounter, anyway.
“Thrormir, come have a look,” Morgana said, wondering if maybe he could detect any magical influence on the voids. The cleric of Chaius was one of the most useful of her companions, and the most even-tempered. He was also magically adept, like Calamity and Yorick.
But when he examined the space she pointed out, he just shook his head. “They’re not magical.”
“Look how the void continues,” Morgana said as she looked closer, pointing away from the grove. “They’re not just pockets. They’re tunnels.”
“Tunnels for what?” Thrormir asked, but Morgana just shrugged. She pictured all kinds of monsters and beasts, but none that would make a tunnel quite like that, so high up in the trees.
But then she thought about where they were. Maybe there were different beasts in the fae realm that she didn’t know about? Maybe there were…
That’s when it hit her.
“They’re for travel,” she said.
“How are we supposed to travel through those?”
But Morgana just shook her head, because they weren’t meant for them to travel through. They were meant for the people who lived here: the faeries.
They were flight paths. And one of them, she was almost certain, would lead them straight to Thelanoris.