Cabeswater never had a corporeal existence, yet it always came to be. It was both young and old; still growing and still learning. In its flair, it could only breathe through the wisps of itself and the whispers of its own sense to what it bound.
But Cabeswater couldn't cease to exist. It had neither a beginning nor an end. It simply was and would continue to always just be. And if a Greywaren had pleaded for its mortality, then a Greywaren could plead for its presence once again. After all, it was only in Cabeswater that dreams could become reality.
So when the Greywaren took heed to his castle and gazed up at the sky, he held onto all the things he liked and didn't like about Cabeswater. He manifested his thoughts as to how he might be able to protect it in the future and how he might be able to better its connection with other places of its kind.
Closing his eyes, Ronan Lynch began to dream.
Cabeswater was not a forest, but before its death, it was something that happened to look like one. What the Greywaren wanted was to remake Cabeswater, to fee it back into the ley line, to give it the power from which it once had. He wanted the ordinary Virginia forest along with stretch of the mountain to not be so ordinary. He wanted dreams. He wanted magic.
He got both and he got none.
Ronan stood in a forest, expecting it to be Cabeswater, and for a moment, he enjoyed himself and relished in the missy scent that carried. And then he didn't believe anymore. This wasn't Cabeswater; yet, it was. It was, because he could feel the resonating hum, its ancient melancholy paean as he pressed against it, the soles of his boots sunken into the vegetated duff. It wasn't, because the trees were quiet. They didn't beckon him forth. They didn't reach out for him. He felt like a stranger.
But Ronan followed the quiddity of the forest, or what he could make of it at least. He brushed his fingers along the trunks of the trees he passed, feeling the roughness of the bark and the sleekness of the moss that grew on it. If it were Cabeswater, his Cabeswater, he could have been able to understand every soiled touch, every droplet of water that fell from the leaves, every wisp of wind that blew his way, but nothing spoke to him. But if he strained himself enough, he might have been able to hear something unknown, yet known, to how Cabeswater was before. To him, it was almost as if he'd forgotten its language and was trying to relearn it.
His wandering brought him to a mouth of a cave. It was wide and gaping, embellished with tangled vines and leaves that braided themselves through and through, surrounding the cave's opening. At the same time as he thought that it was such a coincidence to see something so sudden, he also thought that it wasn't.
Ronan stepped inside.
And then he was outside.
He'd expected a cave; a rocky passage of some sort, but he was met with a clearing surrounded by the forest he'd just passed through. The trees reached skyward, their branches grasping for the stars. The ground itself admitted light, where it murmured a soft aqua-tinged glow. He noticed that it was night, but at the same time it wasn't. It wasn't that Ronan could see through the dark, like he'd suddenly acquired night-vision, but it was more to the nature that the darkness itself was seeable and clear-viewed.
And then he found the source of his worries.
An enormous beech tree stood within the clearing, in the midst of the glow. Its bark was smooth and silver-gray. The leaves were a dark green, simple and sparsely-toothed, with small teeth that terminated each wein. There were small, sharply-angled cuts, borne in pairs in soft-spine, four-lobed husks. At the foot of the tree, new budded sprouts were rooted in different locations along the knotted rootstock.
The tree itself was not what had gotten Ronan's attention, but rather the face that was carved into the trunk of the tree. Delicately sculpted, it seemed to protrude as far as the jawline. Unmistakably feminine. Her eyes were closed, looking as if she had been asleep for years. There was something unbelievably elfin about her, the subtle upturn of her nose and angular sharpness of her jaw. She was an integral part of the beech tree that Ronan wasn't sure was possible.
Ronan opened his mouth to say something, but a clicking noise interrupted him. It hissed his name and whispered for him to wake up.
He opened his eyes and a nightmare hung above him.