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160 pages, ebook
First published February 27, 2024
“You are to go into the woods again, and recover my children.”*He will kill her family and raze her village if she fails. He is a cruel man who has done such things for far less reason in the past.
Really, the problem was that people believed that there was some kind of . . . door, or gate, or at any rate some visible thing that let you enter the Elmever, and it was thought that this lured children in some way, tempted them with sparkle or song to step through it.There are two kinds of questions that are hard to answer -- more, really, but we start with these two: mysteries and puzzles. It has been pointed out (by Malcolm Gladwell, among others) that these are different things. A puzzle has a right answer. A mystery does not -- it is an unknowable thing. But if you know anything of the history of ideas, you know that sometimes puzzles become mysteries and mysteries puzzles. Sometimes you have to find a different way of knowing. (The history of mathematics is full of examples.)
The truth was much more dangerous, Veris knew. For the world of those others was not at all through a doorway that alerted you to its presence, but was instead adjacent to the real one in a way that could not be perceived by human senses, and that was precisely why people went missing into it. At some point, you took a step, and you were simply there, and you would not see the difference between it and the true woods, and you would never take another step that led you back home.*
The further in she went, the thicker and stranger the light became as it filtered through the leaves; after half an hour it was like syrup where it fell on her hands and the pale sleeve of her sweater, or like the orange sun after a forest fire.
Her fingerprints remained on the cover of the deep-green book as she opened it, running her thumb along the edge of what they had passably mimicked as paper. It felt like the surface of a mushroom. One of the ones, she thought prudently, that you weren't supposed to eat. But grown whole and tome-shaped from the ridged bark of an oak or elm...