A/N: I had a nice, long review response forum entry done. Went to post, and then accidently deleted it. The cap on a fairly bad morning. Not feeling all that hot, and I just can't summon the energy to redo those review responses. So, I appreciate all the reviews for last chapter and apologize for the mix up in not getting responses done.
At least we have a new, long chapter.
Chapter Thirteen: In Wide Wind-Home
She's only a child. A good mate to my grandson. If you can hear these words, Telos, come quick. Save my grandson's woman.
Taylor opened her eyes inside her quiet house. She could feel the first, sputtering spirits of the dawn as they fought their never-ending vanguard against the night. And in the back of her mind, the prayer from Orla of Riverbend rang in her mind.
The tanned bear hide blanket slid off her as she sat up in her feather bed in the loft of her home. Within the nestled protections of her glade, no harm could befall her or her people. Even so, she sent her bifrost gaze across the stream to the brick and thatch home that she helped Doji and his good father Shaen build. In fact, Shaen and Nob from White Tree both helped, and in so doing Taylor was able to show them how to fire the bricks, make the quicklime mortar and shape the wood. To learn how to use the tools that she leant them now that her own home was finished.
Within that other home, Morag was already up and nursing her eight-month old daughter, Tayla. Doji was already up building a fire for the day's stew and the bread they could now make with the barley that grew so heartily in Taylor's garden.
Winter came while Taylor traveled back from Winterfell–ice and snow encapsulated the forest for six long months before it broke. Now spring held the world in its gentle embrace. Snow remained in sheltered shadows, but everywhere else new life flourished.
And five days away, in the village of Riverbend, an old woman prayed to Taylor to save her grandson's wife.
She stood and began gathering her travel pack. The dress that Lady Stark had made for her hung nearby, unworn since her return. Instead, she dressed in a loose woolen set of culottes that allowed her to run and move freely, with a long linen shirt that hung almost to her knees over the draw-string undergarments. She occasionally found herself missing stretch fabric.
Over the linen shirt she wore a fitted vest made of the tree bark wool for its sturdiness and warmth.
Her travel kit consisted of Ser Dalard's fine woolen cloak, bleached free of the black dye that marked his Order, wrapped around her sword and her newly crafted weirwood bow. The bow itself bore a host of enchantments that made it difficult for her to ever miss. She didn't have the means to draw dragon fire down with each arrow, but the arrows were magically strengthened, and the bow itself so powerful that one shot was enough to put down an elk.
When she stepped from her house, Flurry padded down from his cave to greet her with a snuffle. "I'm going on a trip today," she said. "Will you come?"
He growled his agreement and butted up against her.
Doji appeared leading a handful of sheep across the wooden bridge that spanned the stream. He brought them to the glade where the higher, more succulent grass grew in the spring sun. He looked up at her and dipped his head. The young man, just now eighteen, was not prone to outbursts of emotion or speech. But she could see his contentment in his heart.
He worked hard to provide for Morag and his daughter, and took pride in doing so. He was exactly where his soul led him to be, and he was beautiful for it.
"You travel?" he asked, seeing her travel pack across her back.
"I've heard prayers from Riverbend. Your brother's woman needs my help."
He nodded, hiding his sudden worry just as he hid his joy. "Then it's good you go. I'll let Morag know and keep watch over your home."
She took the strong young man's shoulder in hand. "I know you will. I'll return in a week or so."
She turned and started walking toward the edge of the glade. When they left the protective magic over her glade, she grinned at Flurry. "Run with me?"
The giant wolf, whose shoulders were taller than her head, grinned at her. Taylor stored her staff over her back with her bow and sword, all hung at a vertical angle to keep from catching the back of her head, and she started jogging.
The earth cushioned her steps, but the spirits within sensed her desire for more. The cushions became trampolines, pushing her forward, and her jog turned into a run, and then into a sprint. Flurry howled joyfully and followed along, easily keeping pace as the two flew through the forest.
River Bend was normally a five-day walk. With the forest driving her steps and reinvigorating her breaths and her body, she reached the animal pens and the godswood on the outskirts of the village in just over four hours–before the sun even reached mid-day.
As she passed by the godswood to pay her respect, she was startled to see a pair of huge, fawn-like eyes staring back down at her from within the red leaves. It was one of the same creatures that she saw on the journey to Winterfell.
At her touch, the tree recognized her. And through the tree, so did the beautiful creature that lived within its foliage. Neither spoke, but the recognition remained.
"Telos?"
Taylor brought her bifrost eyes back down to see Orla staring at her, a pale of water in her aged hands.
"I heard your prayer," Taylor said. "What is the child's name?"
"Adabai, of Two Trees. Bandai stole her at the blot, just after the White Tree people left with you. A good woman. This is her third day of labor. It's a breech birth. The baby won't come."
"I can help," Taylor said. In fact, it was only going to be her second delivery after Tayla. But the Vanir magic she'd absorbed from her mother's Brisingamen was filled with midwife's magic. There was a reason Freya was considered a goddess of fertility among other things.
Orla took the water and then led Taylor down the hill to the village proper. The village was made of seven huts up on stilts that were built over a wide, fertile bend of the river. The stilts helped avoid the seasonal floods, which in turn made the soil on the bend rich with nutrients. The crops were already sprouted from the first spring planting.
They ascended the wooden ladder to the hut where Adabai lay. The one-room hut smelt of sour sweat. Like the hovels of White Tree, Adabai's bed was composed of woolen blankets over leaves on a wooden plank, and was one of seven in the cramped room. Heating came from a clever mud oven built in the near corner.
The girl had an exhausted glaze to her eyes as she stared over a wildly distended belly. Her bright red hair lay plastered against her pale, sallow face. Beside her, the girl's good mother sat with slumped shoulders and a look of defeat about her.
That look changed to hope when she saw Taylor climb up behind Orla. This was Doji's mother. Taylor recognized her immediately. The woman clasped her hands together. "Telos! How are you here?"
"Orla prayed to the godswood," Taylor said. "And I heard. Spread word to your village that Flurry came with me. He's hunting the area, but he'll do no harm to your people if you don't harm him."
Taylor set her travel pack on the floor and sat on the edge of the narrow pallet beside Adabai. The girl was so exhausted she could barely blink.
"Please prepare some broth," Taylor said. "She needs fluid."
"Will they live?" Gaela of Riverbend was the mother of ten. She considered herself blessed because five survived long enough to be named. Her question was not needless worry, but born of harsh experience.
"She will now," Taylor assured the woman. "You were right, the baby is breech. I'll need to turn him."
The girl in question was big-boned, but in a subsistence village, big-boned never translated to fat. And after three days of labor, she had a sallow, exhausted look to her. "I don't understand," the girl said. She didn't cry—exhaustion had robbed her of tears.
"Your son is going to be a handful, Adabai. Already he's where he shouldn't be–upside down and facing the wrong way. I can see him inside your womb. He's ready to be born, Adabai, we just need to guide him out."
Like most of the people of the forest, River Bend was metal poor. They did not have iron or even tin pans. Orla set a clay pot to boil on the mud stove with cracked bones to make a marrow broth.
Taylor, meantime, began gently rubbing Adabai's belly. She sent soothing magic within to calm both mother and child.
Adabai's eyes closed and instantly she fell asleep as the birthing pains eased for the first time in days.
"Let her rest for a little," Taylor said to the others. "As soon as I turn the baby, he'll come."
In this world, birthing was the sole domain of the women. No man would enter the hut until after the birth. But within that context, Taylor was not surprised when other women from the village made their way up the ladder to pay their respects to her, and to check on the mother and child.
After thirty minutes of rest, Taylor gently woke the girl. Adabai blinked up at her, already better just from that little rest. Taylor held the fired clay bowl of bone broth to her lips. "Your son will be born soon," she assured the girl. "Here, take a little for now. You'll need your strength."
She wasn't able to take much, but every sip would help.
"It's time," Taylor announced. "Orla, Gaela, be ready with boiled water and clean linens. I'm going to turn the baby."
The baby was large, even for Adabai's frame. Nutrition was a problem, iron especially, in even the more successful villages. The baby somehow thrived, but at the expense of his mother. Taylor placed her hands on the girl's belly, sensing as well as seeing the shining, blank spirit within. She seized control of that life and of the amniotic fluid that protected it. As she moved her hands, the fetus repositioned itself within.
Adabai gasped at the movement; Orla and Gaela both stared at the babe moving just under the girl's distended belly. First Taylor spun the child, careful to keep it free of its umbilical cord; and then she gently flipped it. The moment the baby was in position, it dropped and Adabai's water broke.
It happened so quickly Adabai dropped her broth and gasped from it.
After so long, the birth flew by. Not even half an hour later, Adabais' very large son was in her arms lustily suckling while Adabai herself was eating flat bread soaked in broth.
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
Despite Adabai's difficulty, she suffered no tearing from the birth. Taylor prepared mildly enchanted teas to get rid of the intestinal parasites that were so prevalent. Even so, harsh experience taught the Free Folk not to celebrate the birth of a child until the tenth day. All too often, infants didn't make even that long. Mothers often didn't either
The communal meal that evening was not a celebration of the babe's live birth, then, but rather a welcoming feast for Taylor herself.
Orla recounted in song how Taylor blasted Kingsblood across Ruddy Hall during the blot, and how the trees welcomed her. Taylor herself sang John Denver and Jim Croce, and made up a story on the spot of the wise old woods witch who listened to the weirwood trees and learned when water was safe to drink, and how long to cook pork or bear meat.
Men come. They smell of blood.
The strange whisper in the back of Taylor's mind startled her into silence. She sat up and turned her bifrost eyes toward the hill where Riverbend kept its animal pens. She saw the raider band moving so silently that, if not for the whisper in her mind, she would never have sensed them coming.
Flurry was still out hunting, though she could feel he was close by and ready to attack.
The raiders emerged from the line of trees on the hill, a band of over seventy people. Most were armed with bows and stone-tipped arrows, stone clubs and spears, but a handful carried steel knives, hatchets or even bits of pilfered armor. They wore cobbled together bits of fur and wool, likely taken from their many raids.
The village elder, Doji's father Garthad, rose to his feet in alarm as the raiders made their way down the hill to surround the villagers.
The leader of the band was a huge man with a thick, curly black beard frosted in white. He was the only one to wear a full mail hauberk that hung to his knees, with an old, pitted sword at his belt. They came cautiously, staring at Taylor's eyes even as they moved to surround the villagers and their campfire.
Bringing up their rear was a skinchanger. Taylor recognized the same hollow-eyed, gaunt man on an ice bear that she saw on the journey to the blot. The arrival of the fourteen-foot-tall bear elicited a few worried moans from the villagers.
"Happy scene here!" The raider chief bellowed the words, eliciting laughter from his fellow raiders. Those raiders spanned the gamut from men to women and even a few pre-teens. It was an entire community dedicated to raiding. "We're going over the Wall. Looking for any who want to join."
"No raiders here," Garthad said. "But we can share a fire and a meal to send you on your way."
Taylor watched in silence, tempted to act but choosing not to. It was a careful balance the Free Folk in the villages had to measure against the Free Folk raider bands. Raiding was a way of life to many–an expression of rage and spite against those who would deny them from the greater world.
Garthad had no desire for any of his people to join the raid, but also wished desperately not to offend the raiders themselves. Feeding seventy raiders even one meal would wipe out what little stores they had through the winter, but he offered it without hesitation as a means of keeping the peace.
With a sinking feeling, though, Taylor knew it wouldn't work the moment the leader of the band turned dark eyes to Taylor. "What about you? I've heard of you. Eyes like that, you're Telos of the Trees. I heard tell you've killed Crows. You'll come raiding with us?"
"I have all I need in the forest," Taylor said.
The man nodded, but it was not a motion of agreement. He glanced at the gaunt, unspeaking skinchanger on his great ice bear. "Heard you had a sword. A nice one, from some Crow highborn shit. If you're not going to raid with it, hand it over and we'll be on our way."
There it is.
She could see his journey in his soul–he and his band had traveled the forest for weeks looking for her, and her alone. They could not find her glade because in their hearts they meant her ill. But with the skinchanger able to extend his soul into more than just one animal, it would only take the eyes of an eagle, or the nose of a bear, to find her when she left her protections.
The sword was an excuse, but in truth the leader, Ogbard, found the very idea of Taylor offensive. That she would speak against human sacrifice. That she would carry a sword and not use it against the Crows. That her hall would be called a holy place.
She represented change to what he believed. He came to kill her for it, and he brought the most powerful skinchanger he knew to help him, just in case she was as powerful as he'd heard.
If I wish to protect the Free Folk, I have to protect all of them. This man is my enemy–his followers don't have to be. With her course set, Taylor stood. "The sword is for the protection of the people of this forest," she declared. "I wield it because I can protect the most people. But if you believe you can protect the Free Folk better, then fight me for it. If you're worthy, you can take the blade. If not, then you and your band leave in peace."
"Fight you?" The man scoffed and motioned to the skin changer. "Vrmir was there at the blot. He saw the magic you used to strike the Kingsblood down. I'm no fool!"
"And yet you stand there demanding of me the same as Kingsblood," Taylor noted. "I struck Kingsblood down because he insulted me. He called me a liar, though I was a guest in his hall. I can see your truth, Ogbard of the Nightrunners, and I can see within your soul what you seek. But so far you've not given insult to me or those who have hosted me today. And so I will grant you a fair fight. Sword to sword, winner takes the blade."
A new thought entered the man's mind; she could see it from the shift of his shoulders. "And the woman."
With a laugh, Taylor summoned her staff from Gaela's and Garthad's hut. Wrapped as it was in her travel pack, it brought the whole pack to her hand. The raider band and villagers alike jumped as the pack flew into Taylor's hand.
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Ogbard. You have to defeat me, first."
He drew his pitted sword as Taylor drew Ser Dalard's finely wrought blade from her pack. She stepped from the fire as both raiders and villagers made room. "I can see your blood lust, Ogbard," she continued. "I know you want me dead. This is your chance. I swear to the weirwoods themselves that I will fight you with arm and blade alone, no magic. In return, before all your people and mine, declare yourself. Will this fight be to first blood, or will it be to the death?"
The man didn't even hesitate. "To the death!" He bull-rushed her with his pitted sword swung overhead for a powerful, clumsy swing.
It was one of the most anticlimactic, clumsy and stupid things she had ever seen in either of her lives. She almost couldn't believe how easy it was to deflect his swing away, spin about, and slash.
Blood spurted as his partially severed head flopped forward against his chest. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut as she severed his spinal cord with one blow. She stared down at the body in growing disbelief, and then looked up at the stunned, silent raiders.
"I'm…. Do any of you actually even know how to use a sword?"
Seventy heads shook almost in unison.
Vrmir the Skinchanger finally acted. He slid off his bear and forced it forward with murder in his heart. With a wave of a hand suddenly doused in Hel wind, Taylor easily pushed the skinchanger's soul out of his animal. Onbear's head snapped back from the spiritual rebound; he fell to the ground and then screamed as the enraged animal, finally free from his enslavement, turned on him.
The surviving raiders staggered away from the sight, until Taylor walked over to the enraged bear. The skinchanger was long dead. She touched the animal's shoulder, which was still taller than her head, and soothed its raging spirit. The animal turned its bloody muzzle to face her.
"You're free, my friend," Taylor said to the beast's spirit. "Go home. No skinchanger will ever control you again, I promise."
The giant animal growled his assent, and then pawed its way back into the forest. The raider stood around the fire, still surrounding the villagers, and stared at her in alarm.
She turned at last to the stunned Free Folk, rangers and villagers alike. "I am Telos of the Trees. The people of this forest are under my protection, and live with my blessings. Raid if you wish, I won't stop you. But while you walk among these trees, you will keep the peace with those who accept me into their hearts. Now, Garthad has offered you food. If you honor him, stay in peace and eat. Or leave."
She settled back down, and watched as the stunned raiders eventually settled down to share a meal.
They would burn their leader's body the next morning according to their customs.
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
"Do you like the red or the green?" Emma asked.
Taylor sat on Emma's bed, watching as her best friend went through her mother's closet. Downstairs, their parents were drinking wine or beer and talking politics or movies or other boring grown-up stuff.
"The red looks funny with your hair."
Emma frowned and spun to face the mirror that hung from the back of her mother's closet door. "It does not!"
"It really does," Taylor assured her. "Try the green. You always look great in green."
"I look like a Christmas tree!"
"Well, it is Christmas," Taylor noted.
Emma snorted and put her mother's dress up. "Not like you'd know. Your parents don't even do Christmas." With a scandalized huff, she added, "Anne says their artists."
Taylor tried not to laugh, both at the scandalized way she whispered it, and the fact she whispered it wrong. "You mean atheist? I don't think so. We have a Christmas Tree and presents."
"Huh. Well, that's what Anne says."
"What is Christmas?" a strange, lyrical voice asked.
Taylor turned to see an odd creature beside her staring intently about the room. She was beautiful, but not in the way Emma was, with her flaming red hair and freckled nose. The creature looked more like a beautiful fawn made human, like out of a cartoon. She had brown, nutty skin dappled just like a deer, with long, sharp ears and large liquid-gold eyes with feline slits rather than human pupils. She was at once utterly alien and yet still oddly familiar.
"It's a holy day," Taylor explained, as if she and the creature were long-established friends. She didn't know why. "Two thousand years before I lived, a man was born who many believe was the son of God, the creator of the universe."
The creature tilted her head. "And your parents did not believe?"
"My parents were gods too. My dad was born hundreds of years before Jesus, and my mother even earlier than that. They just weren't…there. So, they never knew for sure."
The beautiful creature took Taylor's hand. She had long, obsidian-like claws on her three fingered hand. Her thumb claw looked like a dagger. "Show me."
They stood in the back of the cabin in White Mountain National Park. Mother walked among the garden, barefoot and beautiful as was only possible in memory. Taylor must have been a child at the time, because she was actually shorter than the dapple-skinned creature beside her.
As they watched, Freya, Queen of Asgard and Princess of the Vanir, moved through her small domain. Plants bloomed about her feet and a lemon tree blossomed just so she could have citrus for the trout dad brought home from the stream. Dad loved fishing.
A touch of their hands, and suddenly Taylor and her companion stood next to a seemingly endless road on the flat plains of Tunisia. Just past a military checkpoint, her father lifted a Russian-built tank that had to weigh dozens or even hundreds of tons over his head. He did so to prevent a fight with the soldiers nearby.
Another touch, and the two stood on Captain's Hill back in Brockton Bay. The Endbringers had come, drawn to Taylor herself in her divine role as Telos. Leviathan from the sea, Behemoth from the Earth and the Simurgh from the heavens. One killed with water, the other with fire, while the last killed hope itself with a psychic scream that drove people into unspeakable acts. Gods and heroes alike fought the monsters, with Taylor herself fighting the Simurgh, while her father fought Behemoth and the Inuit goddess of the sea, Sedna, held back Leviathan.
"How are you doing this?" Taylor asked as she watched herself fighting in the sky above.
"I do nothing but ask, godling. It is you who show."
Then there was Haevetienn, and the flames of Scion's being as Taylor sought to save her world by killing the dragon beyond the void.
Taylor blinked awake and found herself staring up at the eyes of the creature from her memories. Beyond, the red leaves of the Riverbend Godswood whispered to her in the early morning breeze. Taylor sat up, and past the pens and the edge of the river, saw thin tendrils of smoke rising from the cooking fires of the village.
She must have been drawn to the tree overnight.
The creature scrambled down the tree like a giant, humanoid squirrel until she squatted down right in front of her. The creature's large eyes held a strange, luminescent gleam in the low hours of the early morning. She wore leaves strung with plant fiber about her waist and chest, but the covering looked more decorative than functional.
Taylor thought of the first time she spotted the creatures, on her way to Winterfell to heal young Rickard Stark. They'd hovered on the edge of her sight ever since, whenever she approached a weirwood tree.
"You've been watching me for a long time," Taylor said. "Who are you?"
"I am Leaf Flying In The Wind." Unlike Taylor's vision, the answer didn't come in English. It came in a high-pitched song, almost as if the Chipmonks sang like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The sound of it resonated within Taylor's own magic, which was why she understood it as clearly as if it were a First Language.
No, Taylor realized it was a First Language, just not one of her world. She repeated the name, singing in her much lower voice. Rather than be bothered by the low tone, Leaf actually smiled at her. "The old Greenseer said you would sing our song."
Another creature scampered down the tree. It barely reached Taylor's waist. Though it had the same dappled, nut-brown skin and pointed ears, its large eyes were blue, though still slit like a cat's.
"The godling wakes?" the creature sang.
Taylor understood it to be an interrogatory by the slight minor key at the end. Where a human might intone a question with a higher pitch, these creatures did so with a musical key change.
"The godling loves your song," Taylor sang.
Laughter like a cascade of arpeggios filled the tree as more of the Children appeared. "Dappled Shadow on a Branch did not believe the greenseer," Leaf said. "Perhaps he will now."
Taylor saw twenty of them; they appeared seemingly from the tree itself. They gathered around Taylor clad in leaves or bark. One had taken the white bark of birch and fashioned a clever vest. Another was fingering the woolen vest that Morag had knit for her.
"What do you call yourselves?" Taylor sang the question.
"We are the Singers of Earth and Sky," Leaf said. "The gods called us from the void and gave us form to tend them. But man came and cut down our gods. And then new gods came, and after them the Cold Gods, and our numbers fell. Once we were many, but now we are so few. The gods gave us long lives, but few young. What you see is all that remains."
Leaf's song was an aria; a song of crushing sorrow and loss seen over millennia. Taylor felt again the need to cry tears she no longer had from emotions that human words could never have conveyed. She looked around at the twenty beings, small and yet ancient and wise.
These were the very last of their kind.
"The Greenseer said you were noble," Leaf sang. "But very young still. Even so, you are hope. Would you be our new god, so that we might live?"
In the musical language of the Earthsingers, the question reverberated with meaning. Hope and fear, desperation and loss. And faith, absolute and certain. Taylor went very still and looked at each of them, not just with her mortal sight, but with the power of her crystalline eyes. None of them winced or shied away from the gaze, exposing to her the truth of their souls. She saw creatures of an elder world, elemental and pure in a way humans could not be.
Taylor knew these Earthsingers could have walked into the village below and slaughtered every man, woman and child there, and still be pure to themselves. They were not human, and felt no human ties. What they offered to her they did so as Earthsingers to a new goddess. The beauty of them made her want to weep.
"The world would be empty without your song," she sang to them, one and all. "If you would have me as your god, then I would do all within my power to protect you. From man or demon alike. My godly name is Telos. In the tongue of my father's people, it means a life's final purpose."
"A good name," Leaf sang. "Just as the Greenseer told us. We are the last Singers of the Earth and Sky, whom men have called Children of the Forest. Just as we served the last Greenseer, who was the singer of the gods, so too we will serve you. And we will serve you now by showing you a thing. Come, Telos. Come into the tree."
Taylor followed the Singer, placing her palms against the white, smooth bark of the weirwood tree. Leaf sang a spell that reverberated throughout Taylor's being, but also into the tree itself. A second later, she was gone.
Branch lowered down from above. "Sing the words, Telos-god. You shall see."
Taylor sang the words, imprinted in her mind as only a First Tongue could be. She felt the tree's bark soften under her touch, and then she was inside. What she entered was not just one tree, however.
She stood in a vast network of glowing roots within a void of existence. Leaf and the other Earthsingers were around her, scampering about the roots like squirrels. "Do you wish to see the hungry seas? Follow, and you will see."
Leaf scampered forward on the intertwined roots, and Taylor followed. She found that direction had no meaning–upside down felt no different than downside up; so long as she kept her feet on the roots it felt as if she were walking normally. Nor was the vast, shimmering system of roots two dimensional–they continued above and below.
"I wondered if I would ever see you here," a familiar man's voice said.
The Three-Eyed Raven hung suspended within a ball of tree roots. Unlike the Singers or Taylor herself, he could not move at all. In fact, his very body looked ethereal. She made her way over the branches until she stood near him.
"You are not here in body."
The man smiled wanly. His beard had grown dark and wild, as had his hair. "This is no place for mortal flesh, Telos. There is no air to breathe; nor food to eat. The Singers are beings of spirit as much as flesh; they emerge into the mortal world to eat and breathe when the need strikes, but are safe here. And you…you are a god. Go, you will understand. Just know this–as powerful as you are, the ancient gods of this land will not tolerate the manipulation of time. To do so invites the chaos."
"Exactly as it should be," Taylor agreed. "Even in my own world, the gods of my mother's people let time flow." She looked up and down. "The roots of before and after?"
The Raven studied her with a fond smile. "Just so. My fate is just, Telos. Though I lost the power to act on the world, I've gained answers to questions that have plagued me my whole life. I was never a kind or good man. But it is enough to know a true god walks this world. Go, let my friends show you the truth of the weirwoods."
She went, running the roots with Leaf, Branch and the others, until finally they reached the end of the roots. Leaf knelt down at one of the hundreds of nexus points that connected the system; Taylor knelt with her and touched the point as well. A flood of visual stimuli swept into her mind—cold wind, sea salt and endless sky.
Leaf sang the words; Taylor followed a second later.
In the blink of an eye, she found herself standing just ten feet from the edge of a rocky cliff that looked out over a gray, foreboding ocean. Snow settled lightly among the roots of the soldier pines, barkwood and aspen trees that filled the cliff. Below, she saw a stretch of rocky beach that stretched to the sea.
She sent her vision far out to the south where she spotted the magical barrier of the Wall running into the ocean. A small Night's Watch Castle held the end point; she was surprised to see a structure on the north side of the wall and a few Free Folk there apparently trading.
Focusing slightly closer, she traced a peninsula of rocky hills and heavily forested mountains that stretched nearly twenty miles into the sea, forming a somewhat sheltered Bay. The mountains dropped precipitously down to sea level, where she saw the broken remnants of an abandoned settlement.
"Hardhome?" she asked aloud.
Leaf trilled an audible shrug.
The whole peninsula was filled with ice and snow, held firmly in the grip of winter. But what struck Taylor were the upthrusts of sedimentary rock that formed most of the peninsula. With her bifrost eyes, she could see the banded formations within the rock.
Raw iron ore.