The Pillars Of The World

the flesh gives itself back to the Mother .
    Turning away from the window, she faced the man and woman who had been patiently waiting for her attention.
    They had the feral beauty that was common to the Fae. The woman had dark red hair and woodland eyes—a brown-flecked green. Some of the Fae said eyes that color harkened back to the House of Gaian, a Clan that had disappeared so long ago it was barely even a legend anymore. Whether that was truth or wishful thinking, no one could say any more than they could remember why the House of Gaian had been special—or why it had disappeared.
    The man had black hair and blue eyes that were usually filled with sharp amusement. She saw storms in his eyes now, and sadness in the woman’s.

    “You found nothing,” she said, not bothering to make it a question since their eyes had already answered.
    “We found nothing,” Lyrra replied. “Inspira, Cariden, and I have asked every storyteller and poet we could find. None remember anything that would help us understand why the roads are closing or how to stop it from happening.” She hesitated. “I don’t know if this is related to the information we’ve been seeking, but there was an old poet from another Clan who remembered hearing a fragment of an ancient poem that spoke of the Pillars of the World. But he had been a child when he heard it and could recall nothing else about it.”
    “The Pillars of the World,” Dianna said, forcing herself to remain calm. “Do you know what it means?”
    Lyrra shook her head. “It’s as if we had once known so well what they were, there was no need to explain them, no need to hold onto them with words.”
    Dianna swallowed hope turned bitter. “Then it’s unlikely they have anything to do with what’s happening to us now.” She looked at the man.
    “I found nothing,” Aiden said flatly. “The bards know songs enough about riding the roads and the delights that might be encountered on the other side of the Veil, but nothing that will help us.”
    If the Muse and the Bard can find nothing, who else can we ask ? Dianna wondered. Where else can we look for the answers ?
    None of them mentioned what might have been known to the Clans who had used the shining roads that had connected to the Old Places in the human countries called Arktos and Wolfram—the Clans who had been disappearing, one by one, since she was a little girl.
    Now, the only roads through the Veil were the ones connected to Sylvalan, and those, too, were beginning to close.
    Had warnings gone unheeded all those years, or had they never been sent? Had the Fae whose territories had been connected to the Old Places in those countries been willfully blind to the danger, so sure that whatever had happened to another Clan couldn’t possibly happen to them—or had they kept to their own Clan houses and their own territories because they’d been afraid that it would happen to them? Or had it been that those Clans had always seemed so distant anyway that no one in this part of their world had paid much attention?
    Now the danger was no longer distant, no longer happening to someone else. Now it was devouring their Clans, and they hadn’t been able to find out why—and they hadn’t been able to stop it.
    “I am sorry, Dianna,” Lyrra said softly.
    “My thanks for trying,” Dianna said, turning back to the window.
    A rustle of fabric. Quiet footsteps walking away.
    Only one set of footsteps.
    Looking over her shoulder, she could almost see the swelling anger in Aiden. “Something else?”
    He joined her at the window. “Before coming to the Clan house here, I went down one of the other roads.” His expression was bland, but his eyes ... “I traveled through a couple of villages in the northeastern part of Sylvalan.”

    “And no doubt stopped at the taverns to hear a minstrel or two,” she said, working to give him an indulgent smile that might ease his mood.
    He didn’t smile back. “I listened,” he said curtly.
    And hadn’t liked what he’d heard.
    “The minstrels are singing songs about beings they call wiccanfae.”
    Dianna stiffened at the arrogance of anything else referring to itself as Fae. “And they are?”
    “Wicked fairies. Witches. Creatures who, out of spite, will make a cow dry or a woman barren, who will creep into a house and devour a newborn’s soul so that the mother finds the babe dead in its cradle with no mark upon it. They sometimes steal babies to sacrifice to their