BARKING IN Arbornica was a means to communicate. Drums of barkwood were shaped into resonant hollows and beaten to convey messages through the dense forests, carrying many times farther than the most powerful of human voices.
This was the sound which greeted Sister Tinker Merryhop when she found herself amid dim forests of a primeval land. The superstitions that plagued the land were in full swing as the time of year brought celebrations that more resembled acts of appeasement than anything else.
For it was once again the time of the Green Moon.
Green Moon festivals were sometimes so lengthy and frequent that no sooner had one ended than another began. It was an exhausting time for the doomsayers in the Creeper Realm for amid the thickest, most tangled copses in the whole of Arbornica their solemn messages could barely be heard while the people worshipped the mother trees with due reverence and lingering sanctity.
It was a place of sweet aromas, sickly mists and chanting voices.
It was also a place much loved by spiders.
When Serenity hung big and low, as if settled in the treetops, the greenish light flooded through the branches. Anyone gazing up would see the patterned scintillations of a dozen beautifully crafted webs lit by the light of the moon, and upon their woven patterns sat countless spiders silhouetted in Serenity's glow. Moon spiders.
Yet even in this place of deepest despair there were streams of scintillating hope and joy. Young lives, gathering to themselves a defiant future, a determination to find some kind of happiness in the shadows. It was a delight for Sister Tinker Merryhop to trace these threads of brightness, to see how they coalesced, strengthened and parted with renewed vigour as she gazed into a deep pool near where she had arrived. It was a sacred spot and she knew it well.
A touch of a ringed finger and the weavings of mysterious agency revealed themselves to her.
There was one thin, enfeebled little stream of hopefulness wending its way through the darkness with a wavering uncertainty. So slender it was that every moment she expected it to break, to sunder a tender dream and end a wakefulness so full of potential joy. Snuffed out like a candle on the edge of an abyss. Yet somehow, as it wandered among perils unseen, stretched across dangers that threatened, the tiny song that lifted its spirit seemed somehow to keep it going, on and on, until she traced it to a moment of merging with others so that its peril was shared and its strength reinforced by the support of others.
This scattered society of Arbornica, so often plagued with inner conflict, was underneath the surface a thing of incredible resilience. Merryhop smiled and gently rippled the star-speckled surface of the pool so that the firmament danced beneath her fingers. Then she withdrew her hand and grimaced.
'That's quite enough of that,' she said seemingly to herself. Actually she was addressing a half dozen spiders that had decided to tickle her skin with their attention. She brushed them off and pondered her next move, dreaming herself of somewhere else where the song of expectation was loud and blindingly bright and somehow just as precious in its robustness as the delicate filagree of this struggling land.