And here is this tribe, new hunting grounds found, and everyone so quarrelsome and footsore that they decide to camp. They must replenish their supplies and calm their tempers before continuing their odyssey. They know this place from their past wanderings too. The hunting should be good despite the time of year, despite the weather. And there are certain expected rituals they should perform that help the tribe restate its identity and unity in the face of a harsh season. A delegation of hunters and mystics will go to the place they know as the Clutch of Six, despite there only being three stones there.

This year will be different. Though not unprecedented, perhaps. Who knows what the truth of their stories is, because they change in the telling, no hard lines between them and the actual events of the past. Their tales wheel like birds in the skies of an eternal now, where the passing of seasons is important but the passing of years is not. Except the name, the Clutch of Six, suggests that similar events happened a long time before…

This time, there are again six stones, three showing last year’s faded votive images, three bare. And if the bold hunters walk a certain way, their heads cocked as though trying to stalk the nature of reality itself, they can find a warm place. A place of odd scents, where the snow melts and the familiar bones of the moor are rendered strange, overwritten by the dream of another world. There is meat, too: savoury, fleecy meat standing about as though it has never been hunted.

The first hunters and mystics who passed from their Earth to yours returned as heroes. They birthed a new myth cycle, given all the wonders they saw. Garbled versions of their deeds, renamed for local familiarity, race around the world. The trappings of your world, distorted and mythologized, will be incorporated into the dreams of theirs.

And something else will enter their world. Someone else. A human named Elsinore Mallory, familiarly known as Mal.

10.

Cold, but not the killing kind of cold. Not that place of ice and fissures, but still damned cold for July. They were in the forest again, or at its verge, looking out towards the River Thames, which took up the moonlight like a length of silver cloth. Above them, the stars were fierce and brave, standing proud in the dark fabric of the sky without the glower of the city to obscure them. Lee sat down heavily.

Looking seawards down the length of the river, she could see the bowl of the Thames Valley turned the colour of ash by the moon, with the darkness of the forest looming above it, a barbarian invader never quite arriving to plunder. Here and there were what seemed to be clumps of bushes. But then her eyes picked up restless movement, and she realized there were big animals out there, some kneeling, some standing.

“I’m sorry.”