Arduinna watches as he puts his harp away - so delicately and carefully, as if it were a child, she decides - and follows him with her eyes as he rises to his feet. "One would think," she says slowly, "that you have never seen rotting wood before. Very well then, bard. Follow, if you would."
Without another word Arduinna leaps to the air, and where once there was a woman now soars a barn owl the colour of moonlight. Swooping in a slow circle about the mother tree, she waits but a moment before leading Jigano away, further into the Wildwood.
It is some time before she pauses, and when she takes to the ground again and straightens up in her two-legged form, it is with great sorrow and pain upon her face. As though the woods here harm her, somehow. Around them lies a broken glade, the trees and flowers withered, the leaves the colour of ashes. "Like old parchment. Like the life has been sucked out," she whispers.
Sum of all, and by them, driven
To conquer every mountain shown
