For a moment he remembered another battle, figures on the ground like ants, the Ben-Elim swooping down upon them, screams drifting up to a young boy on a hillside. He shook his head, scattering the memories like flies, returned to the cairns and their whispers of the Battle of Drassil.

Bleda had heard the tale many times, of how the Ben-Elim’s allies were hard pressed and overwhelmed on the plain by the greater numbers of the Kadoshim’s forces. Led by the black-hearted King Nathair, if Bleda remembered right. A man who rode to battle upon the back of a draig, a fearsome beast that was all but extinct in the Banished Lands now. The Kadoshim had been the first through the portal from the Otherworld, and so had filled the skies, diving down upon the beleaguered allies of the Ben-Elim, a warband from the western realm of Ardan, wherever that was. All Bleda remembered about them was that they were led by a beautiful queen, fair as the sun.

Edana.

The Kadoshim had fallen upon them like a plague, spreading their slaughter. But the Ben-Elim had been close behind, throwing themselves through the portal from the Otherworld, risking all, as Jibril frequently told Bleda and Jin in their lessons, in a desperate bid to save the good people of the Banished Lands. Asroth had been defeated, frozen, the Kadoshim routed, their allies slain or scattered, and so had begun the Age of Lore. The Protectorate of the Ben-Elim.

The reign of the Ben-Elim, whatever they like to call it.

Bleda glanced up at the sky, pale and open now as he moved beyond the reach of the great tree’s canopy, and imagined the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim up above, blotting out the sun, swooping and spiralling in aerial combat. He could almost hear the echo of their battle-cries, their death screams, the explosions of turf as they crashed to the earth in ruin.

It must have been a sight to see.

And then he was through the cairns, the first trees of Forn growing tall either side of the road, thickening as he walked on. The world changed about him in just a few steps, becoming a place of twilight and shadow, of scratching branch, shifting light and rustling leaf. Birds called and insects chittered, wood creaking.

A forest is louder than I ever would have imagined!