In the light of only the stars, the dark shape at the top of the hill, choked by twisted woods and clinging vines, could not be made out, but it certainly didn't give Kryssta the impression of a fortress. There were many old towers and strongholds in these lands, some almost whole, some little more than tumbled stones, many of them well known to the Dúnedain who counted their own history to the days when their ancestors were the lords of these lands, who built and dwelled in and defended those very ruins. The mounded hump she climbed towards in the dark might well surround some ancient stones, engraved with the welcome seven-pointed star, but if so, she could see no sign of it. The moon will rise in a few hours, she thought. Perhaps I should wait? But while that would help her see what lie before her, it would help even more any guardians watching for her; and the metallic scent of blood still lingered in her memory, filling her with dread that Haleth's hours were counting down. She pressed on in the dark, slow but steady, and nearly silent.
Surely a spot marked on an orc's map must be guarded, but she caught no scent of any creature on the almost-still air. But the hairs on the back of her neck stood; something was amiss. There was a movement that did not seem right. As she tensed, so, too, did Duin; the river-otter had been running behind her, sniffing from his vantage near the ground and below the bushes, but now he leaped and clawed his way up her hunter's leathers and perched on her shoulder, his near-silent chittering whispered into her ear. The two of them together turned their focus on a stand of thorn-bushes, vaguely suggesting a hedge-wall, but not one that had been cultivated. At least by hands with even a Breeish level of civilized sophistication! They seemed to be shimmying in the wind, save only that there was no wind.
Trees that bend in a wind that touches not the face. There was an old story Kryssta had heard told when she was just a wiry young girl. A story of trees that shambled, shepherds amongst those living things that drank sunlight through sky-turned leaves. But if there are shepherds might there not also be sheep? Suddenly she thought of the tracks she had been following -- as if the feet had not trod on the ground, but tore and thrust into it. Like roots, grasping. These same roots might just as easily tear through stone as through soil. Or, she realized with a gasp, through flesh, rending and tearing orcs as easily as a man might pull petals from a flower.
Whatever fastness lie ahead needed no guards on two feet, when it was ringed by a hedge-wall made of thorny sheepdogs, such guardians as most intruders might stride openly right up towards, as she had herself been about to. But even with the good fortune of being thus forewarned, how might she get beyond them?
