“Let me go! I will take you to her!” He capitulates almost immediately. Coward. Where is his power?
I release him, expecting a trick, but he turns and leads me through the unnatural trees. I have never trusted forests. They are too easy to lose ones way in with the way they cover the ground, sky, and the horizons, providing a myriad of paths through their endless boughs. I would never find my way back on my own. Perhaps that is what he intends to do, leave me in the depths of the woods forever.
“Don’t get ahead of me too far, goat.”
He turns back, looking over his shoulder. “Afraid, alien?”
“Never.”
Another laugh escapes him. He slows his walk a fraction. He is not trying to lose me, but I know I am lost anyway. I have come through too many veils through which I was never made to travel. I do not know what will be left of me by the end.
I look around, trying to see if there are any landmarks which might guide my way, but this forest is fractal, not natural. There is a repeated sameness running through it from beginning to end and I get the feeling that I have stepped into the true eternal. There is no end to this. It is infinite, and without a guide…
“Lykar?”
He is gone. I do not know how. Perhaps he skipped behind a tree.
I strain my ears, listening for Tres’ song. That is the only thing I can imagine drawing me to safety, but the forest is silent.
“TRES!?”
I call her name, but still there is silence. No birds. No insects. Not even the sound of the wind. This place is unnaturally calm. Nothing grows here. Nothing dies. Nothing changes. Not even me. I have become like everything here, a static thing in a world that cannot move.
A hand bursts through the mossy soil, grips my ankle, and yanks me down roughly through the ground. I fall, catching myself in a dark tunnel, black as coal but lit with the glow of a myriad of tiny worms which crawl intermittently on the craggy surfaces.
Lykar is standing over me, his eyes twinkling. “My realm is not one for the arrogant,” he says. “If you wish to survive, you will show respect.”
“I thought I was already dead?”
“If you wish to remain found, then,” he says. “It is easy to become lost. And those who are lost, may never be found.”
“TRES!”
I call her name again. I feel as though it must be possible for her to hear me. We are linked, inextricably. She would find me, no matter what. I believe that, though I admit, the belief wanes when Lykar snaps his fingers and I am plunged into perfect darkness. In that hollow place, he speaks.
“This is my world,” he explains. “Here, I am king. Tres is my daughter. She was born of my blood. She is not the simple human you imagine her to be, and she cannot be claimed from me. Your death was brave, alien, but it was senseless. I will offer you this: you may serve us. You will never touch her, but you may look upon her, if she chooses to allow it.”
“She will want me, as I want her. She is my woman.”
“She’s not a woman,” he laughs. “I told you already. She’s my daughter. She’s a faun.”
“Faun?”
He clicks his fingers, returning light to the tunnel, and makes a gesture to himself, pointing himself to the lower part of his body.
“So a faun is part animal, part human.”
“No,” he laughs. “A faun is the whole of the half a human is made from.”
“What?”
“Humans are only partial creatures. They know it too, deep down in the pits of their pathetic little souls. They are what happens when you take half a true creature and send it out into the world. They are all flesh, all weakness.”
Before I died for a human, I would have agreed with him.
“She was human when I saw her. No goat legs.”
“Well, she’s half-faun,” he laughs. “The legs don’t translate to the human form very well, she got them from her mother. The mind, she got from me.”
I am considering killing him, but I suspect that which is already dead cannot die. This is going to be difficult for me, as killing people and things is essentially my only skill. But if were to kill him now, there would be no way out, and no way to Tres.
“I will take any deal to find her again.”
“Be careful where desperation leads, alien,” Lykar says, turning and beckoning me after him. We take but three more steps before coming to a door which I strongly suspect would not have been there if I had taken the steps before he approved.
“She is through this door,” he says. “But, be sure before you step through it, that she is truly what you want above all else. You will sacrifice everything if you cross this threshold.”