The Broken Druid
By Andrew Birden
Have you ever sat in the branches of a large tree? One of those giants with branches wider than your body? Recall that moment, a child sitting in a tree, resting and staring at and through the other branches. There are a trillion places like that in the Endless Climb.
- Alex Penny, intake interview at Chester Lake ER
Tom’s right hand gripped the vine that stretched upward, and the claws of his right foot dug into the fibrous bark of the part that extended below him. The vine was as thick as his muscled forearm. Black fur, short like that of a mouse, covered his entire body, except for his right leg, which was completely white from his waist to the black claws emerging from the ends of his toes. His raincusi body swayed in a gust of wind. A staff was in a harness on his back.
A larger branch would be better for hiding, he thought. It would also have been better to have prepared his spells like his training usually prompted him to do after resting.
He had an excuse. He’d woken up in a strange hammock with two female raincusi snuggled on either side of him. The party after the grafting ceremony was one of the better ones he’d attended, and he vaguely recalled the pretty young couple approaching him near the mushroom bar with an offer he could not resist. It was not unknown for a druid of the Great Tree to be invited to a tryst after completing a Task. It was a good night, but when he woke this morning, he knew the couple would make a fuss over him if he stayed, and they needed to start moving into the new addition to their tree house. He didn’t want to move furniture, and staying would have been rude and awkward, so he’d extricated himself from the hammock and the arms of the young couple. He managed to reach the landing of the tree house before they woke and so he had headed through the Endless Climb back to the Doorway Pool.
The Blight Beast had caught sight of him soon after that, and he’d been trying to escape for the past hour.
Tom turned his furred head and looked over his shoulder. A flash of speeding darkness caught his eyes through swaying branches. The flash of black expanded in size, coming directly towards him, like ordnance from a cannon. He leaped to the side, releasing his branch, and then flipping between two other nearby branches. In free fall, he fell backwards, looking upwards past his bare feet and flicking tail as he dropped.
He reached for the short staff in the harness on his back. The staff was as long as his arm, and he gripped it to his chest as he fell.
The dark projectile smacked into the branch to which Tom had just clung. The collision cracked the heavy branch, and it splintered. The lower part of the vine dropped from view like a cut rope, leaving the black attacker clinging to the stump. It reminded Tom of the scorched melted bit at the end of a nylon rope.
The predator receded as he fell, but in the brief instant before leaves and branches obscured his view, he saw the teardrop of giant blackness begin to ripple, meaning it was about to launch again rather than search, and that meant the blight beast was still after him.
“Shit,” he muttered in English.
He turned his head to face the direction of his fall, using his tail to rotate himself in the air. He pulled on the ends of the dark wooden stave, which stretched and expanded, flattening in some directions and thinning in others. The two end points touched to form a dark hoop, and the rest of the stave had stretched to form a wider surface to which he clung. The stave became a closed wing, a ring shaped like a child’s paper airplane, or circular paper crown. A platform extending perpendicular to the ring wing. He gripped the leading edge of the glider like a person holding a hoolahoop over their head, and he pulled himself forward, bringing his center of gravity ahead of the ring. The bottom of the wing had become a flexible board that extended from the ring past his chest to his feet. The claws of his toes hooked into the surface at the rear of the vehicle, and he could change its the tail using his body strength and tension.
His staff had become a glider.
His supple muscles and tendons stretched and relaxed as he piloted the glider and manipulated the ring wing with his arms and legs. His clothing, a breechclout and gray tunic, accommodated his arboreal form. The glider tilted forwards and accelerated downwards. The passing wind snapped at the fabric of his breechclout.
He picked up speed as he plummeted.
Above him, the jellied teardrop dangled from the the splintered branch, coalescing and absorbing its mass to create a smooth reflective sphere about the size of a large kickball. It began falling downward, accelerating. Seven glistening appendages emerged from the sphere, thick black tentacles trailing behind as it fell from the broken branch.
Tom glided at a steep angle, traveling like a dart, and flashing through the branches, curving and spiraling downwards. He adjusted his wing minutely, zipping under and over the endless web of smaller tree limbs. He allowed gravity to pull him to a dangerous velocity through the forest canopy.
Yet this forest seemed to have no ground, for Tom fell and fell through the Endless Climb and the ground refused to appear, just revealing more branches coming into his field of view. For Tom, the astonishment of the Great Tree had worn off years ago.
He drew his legs forward, and pulled his arms towards his chest. The ring wing retracted back into itself, becoming smaller around Tom like a lasso. He rotated in the air in near free fall, using the wind to orient his body in a new direction. He threw his arms wide again and the ring wing expanded open, catching the air in the new angle and forcing Tom to veer off in a new direction, a near 90-degree turn.
When the predator’s trajectory cleared the tangle of obscuring branches, it sensed Tom’s new direction. Curved webbing emerged between the seven arms, forming an ominous and misshapen umbrella. The webbing allowed the blight beast to control it’s flight. The creature changed glide angle in response to Tom’s maneuvers, but tended to travel in wider curves, due to its density and smaller wings.
It again smashed into a heavy branch, one that was thicker than a raincusi’s body. The speed and density of the central ball cracked the wood, the sound ringing in the air. It used all seven of its thick tentacles to shove against the branch to bounce off at a more advantageous angle towards its prey.
Tom heard the sound and tried to hide in the brief moment the blight beast would have to look away as it changed direction. He almost wrenched his right arm loose as he grabbed a small branch he was passing. The dark glossy ring wing retracted back into itself in a fraction of a second, the polished surface merging to his right hand to form the wooden stave from which the wing sprang. He swung under the branch, arresting his momentum, to hide beneath some broad leaves forming a soft shaded enclosure. He placed the stave on his back again with easy familiarity, like a sword fighter storing their weapon.
He closed his eyes and willed the black fur of his body to merge with the greenery. But of course, that sort of magic took time, and his one white leg and black fur contrasted with the green and brown of the surroundings.
The blight beast zoomed past the broad leaves, which rustled in the wind, and Tom heard a distant thud as it collided with another branch nearby.
He shook the ache from his arms, then dropped off the leafy branch. He hurtled downwards until he hit his maximum air speed, and then used the stave to spread his ring wing again. He used his wing to angle towards a larger branch. Horizontal, but it was as wide around as the trunk of a giant oak tree.
He dipped and landed on the broad branch, the wing rolling itself up to become the stave which he gripped in his hand like a baton. He crouched briefly before standing and running along the branch as if towards the shoulder of a folktale giant. It angled further downward in the twisty way of branches, and Tom took advantage of gravity, opportune trajectory and his ring wing to leap across inconvenient dips. He used his muscular arms to pull himself upwards when the path of bark and tree limb suddenly steepened.
In general, the branch on which he traveled went downwards until it merged with an even larger branch of the tree. This branch was as wide around as a house, and it stretched in two directions, curling and twisting into the distance. He took the leftward path of this branch downward, rather than the sharp right which angled upwards. The branch was so wide now, it felt like he was running across a mountain ridge formed of wood and bark.
Tom followed the branch, passing points where other branches connected with this wider branch in the endless green forest. The path came to a wall of bark. The sheets of bark were like hardened plywood as wide as tabletops designed by children.
Tom felt relief, for he was almost home. He willed the wing to reform itself into the stave in his hand and placed it in the holster on his back.
This final gargantuan trunk had the diameter of a sports stadium. The trunk shot upwards for distances that Tom still measured in miles. Other branches connected to this huge generally cylindrical surface, eventually fading through the haze of the atmosphere. But even this vast cylinder also twisted and curved in the misty reaches, as if hinting that there existed an even larger joining somewhere beyond.
A hump, or woody burl the size of a barn, formed a shelter about fifty feet away along the enormous wall. From his vantage, Tom could see two of the three doorways he knew lead into the spherical structure. The openings formed tall entrances through the bark of the wall. A set of wooden steps, old and worn, stretched along the trunk from Tom’s branch to the burl, widening to form a flat deck around the burl, like a collar.
He saw movement above the burl in the open air. Two familiar raincusi, piloting ring-shaped wings similar to his own, were gliding towards the platform to land.
“Damn,” Tom whispered to himself. He was later than he thought. Meeting these two was just one of two appointments he had today, and this first one was about to turn dangerous.
Trefan and his apprentice - Neesie, Tom reminded himself - had not seen him yet. They were gliding to a gentle landing at the second of the three entrances to the orgate.
He had to be quiet. He knew the blight beast was backtracking and would follow his trail to this intersection. The only way he could salvage this was to alert the scholars without triggering the predator’s keen senses, and have them all pass through the orgate before the blight beast caught up.
Tom scrambled quick and low towards the burl. He reached the landing that encircled the chin of the orgate shelter like a Victorian collar supporting a noble’s head.
He stayed low, listening for sounds of pursuit.
Nothing. Tom was breathing deeply, trying to calm himself. Just a little more, he thought, if only the scholars moved quickly enough.
He took a deep breath, held it, and peeked around the edge of the wall to the sheltered area within.
The water of the gateway pool was absolutely still. He saw across the comfortable chamber through the openings further along the curved wooden wall. The raincusi scholars were landing.