ARCHIVE ARTIFACT 023: Bri’Tharn Vyr of the Darkwoods

 ARCHIVE ARTIFACT 023: Bri’Tharn Vyr of the Darkwoods

The young sorceress from the Clan of Xymox entered the Darkwoods without banner, escort, or lamp.

That was the first thing I found strange.

The second was that she had chosen to enter them at dusk.

The third was that she had not turned back when the trees began to answer her footsteps.

Her name is not preserved in the surviving account. That may have been by her choosing. The Xymox wanderers are known to wear secrecy the way others wear armor, and the road-trained sorcerers of that clan do not always give their names to strangers, graves, or gods. What remains of her record begins not with her birth, nor her order, nor the cause that sent her north, but with the moment she passed beneath the bent black limbs of the Darkwoods in the four hundred and thirteenth year after the Hammer.

She carried no sword.

She carried no bow.

She carried her hands open at her sides, palms faintly green with held fire.

That was enough.

The Darkwoods were not silent when she entered them. No old forest truly is. But the noises there were wrong. There were no full birdsongs. No clean movement of game through brush. No wind passing honestly from one place to another. The leaves whispered, but never all at once. The trunks groaned, but not from weather. Somewhere high above her, something black-winged shifted from branch to branch, keeping pace with her slow approach.

The young sorceress did not look up.

She had been warned, I think. Or else she had already seen enough of the world to know that fear often asks to be acknowledged before it strikes.

So she denied it that courtesy.

The path she followed was hardly a path at all. It was a seam in the growth, a narrow wound between roots and hanging thorns, marked here and there by stones painted with ash. Some of the stones bore Woodlark signs. Others had been split open from within by shoots of pale fungus. The deeper she walked, the more the forest bent toward her, until the branches overhead made a ribcage and the earth below became a mass of knuckled roots.

Then the crows appeared.

Three at first.

Then five.

Then more than the account could number.

They did not cry out. They settled on low branches, on dead stumps, on the shoulders of leaning trees, their eyes catching a poison-green glimmer from the sorceress’s hands. They watched her as if they had been summoned to witness something formal. Not a hunt. Not an ambush.

A judgment.

It was there, in the black hollow between two ancient trunks, that Bri’Tharn Vyr made herself known.

I write made herself known because the old witch was not waiting in the clearing.

She was the clearing.

At first there was only a great dark shape among the trees, so immense and motionless that the young sorceress must have mistaken it for a dead growth or a shrine woven of rotwood. Then the shape breathed. The bark parted. A face emerged from the black mass, long and ancient, neither wholly human nor wholly beast. Horns curled from the crown of it. Gray hair spilled down in ropes like moss and weathered roots. Beneath the face, a narrow body hung within the vast cloak of the woods, as if some elder woman had been nailed inside a living tree and had learned, over centuries, to command the prison.

But Bri’Tharn Vyr was not imprisoned.

She was entering.

Her arms had already become trees. Her fingers had already split into fingerling branches, thin and crooked and hungry for air. Green fire crawled in the cracks of her bark-skin. The roots at her feet did not merely surround her. They fed into her. They twisted from the soil into the folds of her ragged body and out again, stitching witch to forest, forest to witch, until there was no honest border left between them.

The Woodlarks call such a figure a Transformator.

That word is too small.

Transformation suggests passage from one form into another. Bri’Tharn Vyr did not pass. She possessed. She surrendered and conquered at once. She became the Darkwoods as a flame becomes a house, as sickness becomes blood, as memory becomes a curse.

The young sorceress stopped at the edge of the root circle.

The green light in her hands flared.

The crows leaned closer.

For a long moment neither woman spoke.

The account claims that the first sound was not a word, but laughter. Low. Dry. Coming from the trees before it came from the witch’s mouth. It moved through branch and hollow trunk, through hanging vine and crow-bone nest. By the time Bri’Tharn Vyr’s lips opened, the laughter had already surrounded the young wanderer on every side.

“You have walked far,” the witch said.

The young sorceress answered, “Far enough.”

“Far enough to die?”

“Far enough to stop you.”

A bold answer. Perhaps foolish. Perhaps necessary. Often, in the surviving records of the Dark World, there is little difference between the two.

Bri’Tharn Vyr lowered her head, and the horns above her brow scraped softly against the living limbs around her. The movement sent a tremor through the forest. Branches flexed. Roots lifted. Crows opened their wings but did not fly.

“Stop me,” the witch repeated.

The words came gently. Almost with pity.

The young sorceress raised both hands.

Light gathered around her fingers. It was not clean light. Xymox sorcery seldom is. It came in threads and sparks, green as grave-mist, sharp as broken glass. It gathered in her palms, then along her wrists, then up her arms beneath the sleeves of her traveling robe. The hem of that robe stirred though there was no wind. The mark on her back, black and jagged as a burned handprint, seemed to darken against the pale cloth.

Bri’Tharn Vyr watched the forming spell with interest.

Not fear.

Interest.

That detail troubles me.

The first strike came from below.

A root snapped out of the soil at the sorceress’s feet, quick as a serpent and thick as a man’s wrist. She cut it apart with one hand before it touched her. Green fire flashed. The severed root fell away, hissing sap into the dirt.

Then another came.

Then six.

Then the ground around her broke open.

The young sorceress moved with the skill of one who had survived more roads than years. She did not flee the circle. She stepped through it. She burned what rose before her, ducked what lashed above her, and drove one bright hand down into the root-mass beneath her feet. The whole clearing answered with a shudder. A buried thing screamed. Not a beast. Not a woman. Something between root and nerve.

The crows finally cried out.

Bri’Tharn Vyr smiled.

The expression revealed small teeth set in a face already mottled with bark and lichen. Her body rose higher, not by standing, but by being lifted. The trees themselves pulled her upward. Her cloak opened into hanging black strips like torn shadow. Her branch-fingers spread wide to either side of the clearing, their tips touching trunks, vines, deadfall, crow-perches, and the soil itself.

The Darkwoods moved.

Not in pieces.

As one.

Every tree in the hollow bent toward the young sorceress.

The old witch’s voice came again, but now it did not come from her mouth alone.

“You think combat begins when hands are raised.”

A branch whipped across the sorceress’s shoulder and tore cloth from bone. She staggered, caught herself, and flung fire into the nearest trunk. The bark burst open with green light, but the wound closed at once around the flame, swallowing it.

“You think a body is the thing you must kill.”

The young sorceress turned sharply as Bri’Tharn Vyr’s face appeared in another tree to her left, half-formed, grinning from the bark. Then another face opened to her right. Then another above her. Old eyes in every trunk. Horn-shadow in every branch.

“You came too late for that.”

The young sorceress did not answer.

She lowered her hands.

For a breath, I believe Bri’Tharn Vyr thought the girl had accepted death.

Then the sorceress pressed both palms against her own chest.

The green fire vanished.

The clearing went dark.

Even the crows fell silent.

What followed is difficult to trust, for the surviving account is damaged in this passage and the marks along the page suggest heat, sap, and perhaps blood. The words that remain indicate that the young sorceress did not cast outward. She cast inward. She took the force she had gathered for attack and turned it through herself, through the black mark upon her robe, through whatever hidden rite the Clan of Xymox had buried in her training.

When the light returned, it did not come from her hands.

It came from the ground beneath Bri’Tharn Vyr.

The witch’s smile broke.

Under the root circle, beneath the old growth and the deadfall, something flared in a perfect ring. Not fire. Not lightning. A binding mark. The young wanderer had not been trying to reach the witch.

She had been walking the circle.

Every step since entering the clearing had mattered. Every dodge. Every retreat. Every burned root. Every place her foot had touched the soil had become part of a pattern the old witch had failed to see because she was too vast, too certain, too deeply spread through the wood to understand the danger of a small body moving with purpose.

Bri’Tharn Vyr shrieked.

The sound split bark from twenty trees.

The crows scattered upward in a storm of black wings.

Roots burst from the ground and convulsed like severed limbs. The witch’s branch-arms tore free from the trunks they had entered, ripping strips of living wood with them. Green light climbed through the circle and wrapped around her in hard, burning cords.

The young sorceress stepped forward.

Her robe hung torn from one shoulder. Blood ran down one sleeve. She lifted one hand toward the ancient face suspended in the living dark.

Then the forest answered in kind.

A second shape moved behind her.

Not Bri’Tharn Vyr.

The Darkwoods themselves.

That is the line in the account where certainty ends.

There are those who believe the young sorceress defeated Bri’Tharn Vyr and paid the expected price. There are those who believe the witch allowed herself to be bound long enough to mark the girl, hollow her, and wear her shape beyond the clearing. There are those who say the duel never ended at all, and that both women remain there still, one trying to seal the forest, the other trying to become it completely.

I have seen no body from that place.

I have seen no relic taken from the circle.

But I have seen three later accounts from travelers who passed near the Darkwoods in the years that followed. Each speaks of a pale-robed figure standing at the edge of the trees, back turned, head bowed beneath a faint green halo. Each speaks of an enormous horned face watching from the black canopy above her. Each insists the figure below did not call for help.

She waited.

That, more than any tale of victory or defeat, is why this artifact is preserved.

Not because it shows a battle.

Because it shows the moment before an answer.

A young sorceress with fire in her hands.

An old Woodlark witch with the forest in her bones.

Two powers at the threshold.

And the Darkwoods deciding which one would remain a woman when the fighting was done.

— The Archivist, Cycle 413 A.H.