Shadows of Gil'drun

Prologue

Gil'drun has stood for longer than any civilization has kept records. Its silver-barked trees rise like cathedral columns, its bioluminescent fungi light the understory in soft blues and golds, and its canopy holds the sky at a respectful distance. For centuries, it has been treated not merely as a forest but as a living presence — patient, ancient, and possessed of something that functions, in its own way, like memory. But something is wrong. The deeper paths have grown hostile. Wildlife that once kept to the forest's interior now prowls the edge in agitated, directionless fury. Travelers vanish. The herbalists and hunters who make their living along Gil'drun's margins bring back corrupted samples and haunted eyes, and the market town of Varenhold hums with a fear that has not yet found its name. At the heart of the forest, in a clearing of pale petrified trees, an ancient altar has been reawakened. The ritual being worked there is fracturing something fundamental — tearing at the spiritual fabric that has held Gil'drun together since before Telundra's oldest civilizations rose and fell. The forest is not yet dying. But it is wounded, and the wound is spreading. Those who enter Gil'drun now do so for their own reasons. But the forest has a long memory, and it has been waiting — in the way that vast, patient things wait — for someone to come looking.