On the Matter of the Amentine Wall

From the Private Diary of Archivist Bramwell Corin

I should preface this entry by stating that I am a rational man. I have been a rational man for Forty-two years. I have catalogued magical phenomena of considerable strangeness without once losing my composure entirely, and I intend for this entry to reflect that steadiness of character. I mention this because what follows will not, at first glance, suggest a man in full possession of his composure.

I went for a walk this afternoon.

The Wandering Library has been stationed at the western edge of the Amentine Woodland for four days now, and I have been taking short walks through the trees on my rest breaks, partly because the air here is extraordinary, cold and green-smelling, the kind of air that makes thinking easier, and partly because I needed to stop looking at the Moonlight Circus research before it drove me to distraction. The woodland is old. The trees grow close and tall, their roots breaking the ground in long ridged swells, and there is a quality of quiet here that feels less like absence of sound and more like presence of something else entirely. I find it settling, on the whole. I found it considerably less settling this afternoon.

I have been aware, since our arrival, of the old ruins at the woodland’s northern edge. What remains of the Amentine Farm is not much: stretches of moss-covered wall in varying states of collapse, stone softened by three centuries of weather and the patient insistence of tree roots growing through the mortar. Some sections stand to shoulder height. Others have crumbled to little more than a suggestion of where a building once stood, a low ridge in the earth, a gathering of worked stone amongst the roots. I looked up the farm in the Library’s holdings the evening we arrived. It was once, by all accounts, rather distinguished. Thriving livestock, extensive outbuildings, a family of some regional significance. Now it is mostly trees.

I have walked past the ruins on each of my previous outings without paying them particular attention. They are pleasant in the way that old things are pleasant, a reminder that the world was busy long before any of us arrived in it. Today I stopped. I cannot tell you precisely why. Something in the quality of the light, perhaps, or simply that my feet slowed and I let them.

I was looking at a section of wall that still stands to perhaps ten feet in height, its face thick with moss and the silver tracery of old lichen, when I noticed the hole.

It was not large. The size of a coin, roughly, worn through the stone at a height comfortable for looking through, which I noted with some academic detachment was the exact description recorded in seven separate historical accounts of something I had spent the last fortnight studying. I stood there for a moment, feeling, I will confess, slightly foolish. It was the middle of the afternoon. The light in the Amentine Woodland was clear and pale, the particular thin brightness of a winter’s afternoon with perhaps two hours left before it turned grey.

I looked through the hole.

I will set down what I saw as plainly as I am able.

On the other side of the wall was a woodland in moonlight. Not the Amentine Woodland. A different place entirely, though the trees were of a similar ancient character. The light was silver and sourceless, lying across the ground in pools, catching in the branches overhead and scattering. I could hear music, something in waltz-time, slow and stately and coming from no visible instrument. And in a clearing not thirty feet from where I stood, with my eye pressed against a moss-cold stone and my afternoon rearranging itself entirely around what I was seeing, there were creatures dancing.

They moved in a wide circle through the trees. I could not count them clearly. Their forms shifted in and out of the silver light, but I saw wings, large and unmistakable, feathered in blue and red and gold, and horns curving upward from bowed heads, and the long swaying movement of creatures entirely at ease with the space between earth and sky. They danced with the unhurried gravity of something that has been dancing since before the world learned to count its own years. I could not hear them whisper. But I had the distinct and unshakeable impression that they were whispering nonetheless, that the music was partly theirs, breathed rather than sung.

At the edge of the clearing, between two trees whose roots tangled together at the base like clasped hands, there was a figure standing still.

I will not attempt a description of his face because I did not see his face. He was turned toward the dancers. But in the moment before I pulled back from the hole, something changed in the quality of his stillness, a settling, a deepening, the way a room changes when someone in it becomes aware of you, and I knew with a certainty that had nothing to do with reason that he had always known I was there.

I stepped back.

The moonlight on the other side of the wall went out. The music stopped between one heartbeat and the next. The afternoon reasserted itself around me, pale and ordinary and smelling of cold earth and moss.

I stood in front of the Amentine wall for what I believe was a considerable amount of time. Then I walked back to the Library and made a pot of tea and sat with it until it went cold, which I only mention because I cannot remember the last time, I allowed tea to go cold through simple inattention.

I have been studying the Moonlight Circus for fourteen days. I have read every account I could locate. I have treated each one with the careful scepticism appropriate to phenomena that cannot be independently verified. I have written notes and cross-referenced details and argued with myself about the reliability of witnesses and the tendency of old accounts to accumulate embellishment like barnacles on a hull.

And then I looked through a hole in a wall on a Tuesday afternoon and saw all of it. Exactly as described. In the middle of the Amentine Woodland, three centuries after the farm that built this wall crumbled quietly into the earth.

I have several theories. They are, at present, largely useless.

What I can say is this: the wall exists. The hole exists. Whatever lies beyond it is not governed by the same arrangement of time and light and logic that governs the side I was standing on. And the figure at the edge of the clearing, the god of that place, whatever he is and whatever that word means when applied to something of that age and that particular quality of stillness, was aware of me from the moment I arrived.

Possibly before.

I intend to return tomorrow. I am aware that this is not the decision of a rational man. I am going anyway.

Bramwell Corin Amentine Woodland, late evening, the tea is still cold.