In the Sunset Swamp in the Deepwood there is a hut where Kelly the Hermit lives. Kelly is a strange man with a long winding beard and a long winding staff both entwined with pieces of amber. The Sunset Swamp is full of amber, the trees and magic grow it and it seeps into the landscape, glowing in the sunset. The swamp is also full of bees which feed on the lotuses and swamp orchids that festoon the mud and amber of the swamp. Kelly tends to both the bees and amber, keeping the hives well fed and healthy by treating his bees and dredging up amber from the marshes to decorate the place. And so while he is covered in welts from many bee stings Kelly is happy in his beautiful swamp with amber chimes hanging from the trees and sparkling in the sun, sitting on his porch to the sound of bees.

But all was not well forever in the Sunset Swamp. One day Ghorizog, the tyrannical Water Lord, a giant frog possessing powerful magics moved into the swamp. Kelly was sitting on his porch sipping swamp juice from a bowl when he saw the dark shape moving in the water. He leapt to his spindly feet and waved his staff at it.

“Begone foul creature!” he cried and flung the bowl at it. The bowl sank into the swamp with no effect.

Ghorizog replied in a deep sonorous growl that echoed through the swamp and through the hut. “I claim this swamp for myself, human, go back to the stinking city you crawled out of.”

Kelly just shook his fist and muttered angrily to himself. Then he stalked inside angrily to think of what to do next. In his hut there was a huge block of amber, something that had been there before he’d come, something he’d built his whole hut around. He didn’t know how far down into the mud it went and he didn’t know how old it was or how long it had been sitting there. What he did know was that it made an excellent shiny wall and lit up beautifully in the sunset. He stared into its orange glow and thought hard about what to do next. No one had ever stood up to Ghorizog in the forest. He was feared throughout not just the Sunset Swamp but the entire Deepwood. There wasn’t much Kelly could do about it, he had no magic or powers of his own, only his bees and his amber and even if he could get all the bees to cooperate they wouldn’t be much good against the tyrant’s magic.

So he sat and thought and sipped another bowl of swamp juice and hoped Ghorizog would be kind to him. He wasn’t.

Over the next few days the waters in the swamp began to rise. They flooded Kelly’s hut almost immediately but Kelly didn’t mind. His hut had always leaked and he’d been living in the damp swamp for too long to start caring now. But the bees minded. The hives he’d been keeping on his porch had their lower levels flooded and many bees drowned before he moved them onto his roof. The hut wasn’t built very well and no parts of it were really flat but the roof had the greatest slope of all and Kelly had to make some modifications quickly in order to put the hives up there and there wasn’t a lot of space.

He went back to his porch and stood in the water to shout at the dark shape beneath it once more. “Ghorizog, you’ve gone too far! Stop this at once before you wash away all the hives of all the bees who live in this swamp!”

Ghorizog’s only response was a deep gurgling sound which Kelly soon realised was merely him laughing. Kelly scowled and stalked back inside, there wasn’t much else he could do.

Over the next few days the waters rose higher and the beehives Kelly didn’t tend, the wild ones on trees and stumps in the swamp, began to flood. Kelly tried moving them but they crumbled in his hands and some of the bees attacked him. He was forced to abandon them and watch as clouds of bees rose up from sinking hives. They flew off but so many of them were dead already. He sat on his wet porch and grew sad for there was nothing he could do.

Eventually the night came and with it rains so he retreated inside where he stared up at the huge lump of amber and warmed himself with his little stove which he’d managed to keep dry. The firelight flickered on the amber and he swore he could make out a shape in it, something shadowy and distant that was only really there in the light of the fire, something like the shape of a man.

Kelly went to bed and put the stove out, plunging the room into darkness. The amber sat there, just a cold dark shape, watching him as he drifted off to sleep. In his sleep he was still sitting by the amber and the fire from the stove was brighter than it had ever been before, brighter than it should be. And the amber was glowing, flickering and dancing shapes moved through it in the firelight and the shapes spoke to him. They didn’t use words, just the crackle and roar of the fire, but he understood them anyway, the Thing in the Amber made him understand.

Far away Solurghis, the great apprentice to Ghorizog struck a deal with the Night Fairy. He paid her with many of the riches and much of the gold he’d gathered in his rivers and lakes in exchange for the death of his tyrannical old master. Unbeknownst to Kelly, the Night Fairy flew to his swamp and taunted Ghorizog until he emerged from the waters in all his fury, bringing rains and huge spouts of water against her. She dodged them all and embedded her blade deep in his eye, filling him with a poison she’d harvested from a cockatrice. He wallowed in pain for a while before dying and sinking to the bottom of the swamp. Kelly slept through it all, making deals to save his bees with the Thing in the Amber.

The next day Kelly emerged to see his swamp ruined. In the battle Ghorizog had sprayed water all across the swamp, crushing hives and killing bees everywhere. Kelly raged at him from his porch, waving his staff and ranting and screaming at the shape in the water. The water was murky and it was impossible for him to tell that the great frog was dead already. Instead he simply received no reply and that only made him angrier. So he set about the preparations as he’d been instructed. It took him days but the waters had stopped rising. He took that to mean that Ghorizog was waiting, watching to see what he’d do, something which only made him more paranoid and desperate to finish his work.

He took the driest wood he could find which wasn’t very much and set about carving it. He’d carved his staff and his hut and his beehives and knew something of carving wood, but this was far more finicky than any of those things had been. The basic shape of the body was simple but the face was lumpy and disfigured and the horns were difficult to get right. Toes would have been impossible but luckily he only had to make cloven hooves which weren’t too difficult. Hardest, though, were the hands. He went through many pieces of wood, reducing them all to kindling before he got anything resembling fingers. He tied all the pieces of his model together with string and then tossed it into the stove which was flickering and glowing next to the amber. In the stove the figure burned, all of Kelly’s hard work quickly going up in flames. But the Thing in the Amber wasn’t having that. The shape that looked like a man grew darker, against the glowing stove Kelly could almost see its arms, its legs, its face. It stared into the fire and gave the burning model its blessing. From the realm of Raqos the Fire Lord and into the burning effigy came the fiefling.

It crawled from the stove, dripping embers and ashes all across the wet floor and its eyes blazed with fury. The heat from its body set the water boiling and Kelly yelped in fright, climbing out of the way as fast as he could. Then it dropped into the water and with a terrible hiss that sounded something like a scream the water all billowed away in huge clouds of scalding vapour. Kelly cowered on his bed as his house filled with steam and the fiefling strolled outside, leaving tiny burned footprints in the wet floorboards. The waters of the swamp retreated before it but the trees were still too damp to burn. So it dashed away to find dryer forests.

Kelly cowered in his hut for a long time before eventually peeking out. He saw Ghorizog, now lying in what was left of the swamp waters. One dead eye staring at nothing, the other burst and then blackened with poison. He cheered and danced happily with his staff on his porch, believing what he’d done had saved the swamp. Outside the swamp, the Deepwood burned.

A week later Riley and Buric travelled in silence through a quiet forest. The forest was quiet because all of the ground was blackened with soot and all of the trees had been turned to stone. They didn’t know why the trees were all turned to stone and they couldn’t discuss it because just weeks ago they’d both had their tongues cut out by Edric Elkring, the Knight of Tongues.

Riley watched Buric walk ahead of her sadly. She missed his japes at her, she missed his comments on the state of the world and their place in it. She missed a lot of things. He was trying to teach her to read so that he could teach her to write and then they’d be able to communicate again. But it was hard, so very hard, when neither of them could talk. He would point out an object like a tree or a bird and then write a series of symbols in the ground that she assumed represented it. But there were so many symbols and she couldn’t puzzle out what any individual one meant. So they trudged on in silence.

Buric watched the forest around him and wished he knew why it was suddenly turned to stone. He had spent many hours in this forest and others like it before becoming a knight and navigating it like this was so different. Nothing moved. The wind would howl and all the trees would stay still, they wouldn’t sway or bend or even rustle. It felt too silent and reminded him every minute of the fact that he couldn’t speak anymore. But even more importantly than that he wished he knew what Riley had done before they’d left. She’d come to him unable to tell him anything but had made it clear that they’d needed to leave. She had never been very good at being subtle and her hand gestures were no exception. So he’d done as she’d demanded and followed her out of there and then into the forest where he’d led them away. She wouldn’t tell him what she’d done, wouldn’t even try, but he knew she’d done something. He knew her too well for her to hide that. He knew she was proud of it but also scared. He just wanted to know so he could maybe be of more help than he was now, leading them into a stone forest.

There wasn’t any food in the forest since all the animals were gone so they just had to eat fruits they’d collected from the other part of the forest. They ate in silence and barely looked at each other. It was hard to look at each other now, seeing the starved, scared, outlaws they’d become. They’d been the best of friends once, now they barely seemed to know each other.

The crunching of apples died down and they looked longingly at the fruit on the trees around them, now turned to stone along with everything else. Then they heard something, it was quiet but they weren’t making any noise to drown it out. It was the buzzing of bees. They hadn’t encountered a single animal since they’d entered the stone part of the forest but bees were an animal and bees had honey. They packed up their camp and rushed toward the sound. As they ran the ground grew marshy and soft so they treaded carefully. Luckily the roots of the stone trees were solid footholds for them to step on and the branches provided solid handholds to keep their balance.

Buric was just turning around to gesture the path he’d taken to Riley when his handhold snapped and he stumbled into the mud. He quickly righted himself before he could sink too much but then he looked at the branch in his hand. It wasn’t stone, it was wood. In the dark forest and the quiet swamp they hadn’t noticed but the trees here weren’t stone anymore, they were back in a regular forest.

Buric waved the wooden branch at Riley and grinned, he hadn’t done that in a long time. Riley was less enthused about the return to normalcy of the forest but she was enthused by Buric smiling and waving a broken branch around so she grinned as well. They stumbled on ahead, feeling hopeful for the first time in a while. Then they started to see the amber chimes.

There were so many of them, little pieces of amber strung up in the trees, glowing in the sunlight that filtered down through the canopy. Buric couldn’t help grinning as he brushed through them, watching them swing and sparkle. Riley smiled as well and spun around with them, dancing in the light of the amber. She tripped on a tree root and fell into Buric, sending them both crashing down into the mud. They both laughed for the first time in a long time. It was a choking strangled laugh since they had no tongues but they didn’t care, they laughed anyway as they pushed each other into the mud, the amber jangling and swinging along above them.

Kelly found them there, making their strange laughing noises. The last time someone had intruded on his domain hadn’t gone well so he narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Who is it that walks so brazenly into the Sunset Swamp?” he asked with as much authority as he could muster.

They stopped playing in the mud and stood up to face him, smiles still on their faces. The smiles slowly faded as they realised they had no way of communicating with this strange man. Buric took his broken branch and tried tracing letters in the mud. It was slow and it was perfectly possible that the man couldn’t read, but he had to try something.

Kelly looked at the letters and narrowed his eyes even further. It had been a long time since he’d seen letters but he did in fact know how to read. He mouthed out the words to himself as they were written.

“You’ve lost your tongues eh?” he stroked his beard. “That’s unfortunate. Come with me, I’ll get you cleaned up and we’ll have to see what we can do about those tongues.”

Buric and Riley shrugged at each other and followed the strange man into the swamp. They were both armed and the old man seemed harmless enough but they rested their hands on their weapons just in case. As they walked they saw more and more of the amber chimes in the trees and began to see bees flitting about the place. They soon reached a sloping hut, half sunken into the ground with a few bee hives perched precariously on top of it. Inside there was a flickering firelight even though it was by no means cold outside. There was also a terrible stench that hit them, even worse than that of the regular swamp fumes. They saw the source of the stench quickly, a huge bloated frog, that lay dead in a puddle. They looked at it with disgust.

“Ah yes that there is Ghorizog,” Kelly said, noticing them looking at it. “He brought nothing but death and misery to the swamp so me and my... friend, dealt with him.” He grinned to himself, he had been forming a closer and closer relationship with his friend ever since.

They entered the hut and Riley and Buric were hit with a blast of heat. The stove was blazing far harder than it had any right to blaze and the huge lump of amber in the middle of the room was shining in the firelight.

Kelly strode in proudly, seemingly unaffected by the heat. He tapped the huge lump of amber in the middle of the room and faced them again. “This here’s my friend, the Thing in the Amber. He just might be able to get your voices back.”

Riley and Buric looked at each other, they weren’t hopeful. But nevertheless, feeling worried more for the strange man than themselves they entered and examined the amber. There was something there, some shadow that was flickering in the firelight deep within. Buric shrugged and sat down on a chair that was a little too mouldy for his taste, he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d been thinking about their problem with their voices and there were solutions to it, all they had to do was find someone who could read and write and they could teach Riley. Riley hadn’t seemed very keen on ever going to any towns but now they’d found this strange man, maybe he could help.

Riley, however, found herself staring deep into the amber. She touched it, it was warm, warmer than it had any right to be, and she stared into the shadow.

The strange man watched her intently. “If you sleep here he might speak to you, he’ll tell you what to do.” He was so sure of himself Riley almost believed it. Buric wasn’t swayed, he had met hermits like this before, they were all the same, so desperate for a conversation they’d talk to absolutely anything at all. Still, he supposed there was no harm in sleeping here, they’d have a roof over their heads at least.

So they bunkered down for the night and slept on the mouldy floor. Kelly turned the stove off but the room was still unnaturally warm. Riley fell asleep almost immediately, she was strong but she wasn’t used to the days of trekking through the forest that they’d been doing. Buric didn’t sleep, instead he looked up at the amber and ran his hand along it. He grew curious and eventually stood up, picked one of the many unfinished chimes that were lying about and held that close to the huge amber in the middle of the room. He was no expert on these things but they definitely felt different. The bigger amber was stronger, harder, more like a gemstone than the soft amber. Unable to sleep he sat out on the porch and pondered on these things while he listened to the swamp, revelling in the sounds of nature rather than the grim silence of the stone forest. Little did he know that when Raqos had possessed the Ambermound he’d turned the whole thing into his own jewel, topaz.

Riley and Kelly awoke together in the hut facing the huge lump of amber. It spoke to them in its fiery way and described what they had to do. Kelly grinned at the thought, over the days the Thing in the Amber had been helping him master the bees of his swamp, now it was time to see what he could really do. Riley was less sure, the idea sickened her, but she still preferred it over being unable to speak forever. Buric might not have minded, he could still read and write, but she could do neither of these things and her failure to learn had been making her sadder and sadder on their journeys. She couldn’t live like this, she needed her voice again. So she did everything that was asked of her. She agreed to the deal.

Buric had dozed off in the early hours of the morning so he didn’t notice when a clump of bees buzzed by him and into the hut. He didn’t notice as Riley lay on the bed while Kelly opened her mouth up and using his whittling knife and trembling hands made the necessary modifications. It hurt of course and she had to fight back hard against waves of panic as the bees crawled into her throat, but she managed it.

“Can you speak now?” Kelly asked, his eyes bulging with anticipation.

“Yes,” Riley hissed back, the bees buzzing the words in her throat. As she said it a tear rolled down her cheek. What had she done?