The Wayward Portal
A Strangewoven short story
Aren Stoneleaf had promised the village council a modest repair.
Aven had been present when he said it. She had also watched him pack three lifting jacks, six chisels, two coils of rope, and a device he described as potentially useful.
Now, beneath the mountain, she looked at the device wedged under a fallen slab.
“A modest repair,” she said.
“It was a modest slab when we arrived.”
“It hasn’t grown.”
“My appreciation of it has.”
She held out her hand. He passed her the narrow chisel without looking.
They were twenty-four, born seven minutes apart, and had spent most of those years making things together. Aren was average in height and broad enough that people routinely underestimated how quickly he could move. Aven stood nearly a head taller, with a slender frame that caused equally unfortunate assumptions about how much she could lift.
The last man to offer to carry her tool chest had needed her help putting it down.
Their father’s dwarf and elf ancestry showed differently in each of them. Aren had inherited the heavy shoulders, full beard, and subtly pointed ears. Aven’s ears were more pronounced, her face finer, her limbs longer. Their human mother insisted they had both inherited their grandmother’s stubbornness.
Grandmother insisted it was good judgment exercised against resistance.
The blocked passage had been leaking water into the village’s old supply channel. Nobody knew who had built it. Nobody had used it within living memory. The council wanted the loose masonry secured and the water guided back into its proper course.
So far, the masonry was resisting good judgment.
Aven crouched beside the slab. Behind it, a finger-wide gap breathed cool, damp air.
“There’s open space beyond.”
Aren leaned closer. “And light.”
They looked at each other.
The passage ran straight into the mountain. The nearest valley on the other side lay a day’s walk away.
Aven turned back to the carved border around the opening. Beneath the mineral crust, two concentric bands surrounded a row of shallow sockets.
“This isn’t just a doorway.”
“No,” Aren said. “Doorways generally have the decency to explain themselves.”
They worked another hour, supporting each stone before shifting it. When the slab finally settled onto their bracing, pale light spread across the wet floor.
Beyond the opening stood a forest.
Aren stared.
Aven checked behind them, as though the mountain might have moved while they were busy.
“Well,” she said.
“Your turn to explain.”
They left their heavier equipment beside the braced entrance and stepped through with a lantern, a measuring cord, and their shoulder bags.
The air smelled of rain and leaf mold. Moss softened the rocks. Ferns crowded a narrow stream that emerged beneath the stone threshold.
Aren extinguished the lantern.
“Western slopes?” he asked.
“Possibly.”
Aven knelt beside a cluster of pale, hooked leaves.
“Silverhook. That grows below our spring.”
Aren glanced upstream. “Then the water’s been bringing seed through.”
Some plants bore old woody stems. Whatever this opening was, its smaller leaks had existed for years.
Aven touched a fern farther from the stream. Its leaf arrangement was unfamiliar. Beyond it stood an immense tree with deeply furrowed bark.
She looked from the tree to the silverhook.
Aren followed her gaze.
Neither spoke.
From downhill came a metallic scrape, followed by a man saying something their grandmother would have discouraged at the supper table.
“Local dialect seems familiar,” Aren murmured.
They followed the stream.
The trees opened onto a gravel road. A man in an orange vest stood beside a ditch, levering a tangle of branches away from a round metal pipe beneath the road.
Behind him waited a large blue vehicle.
It had four wheels, glass windows, and no visible animal attached to it.
Aren stopped.
Aven stopped beside him.
His eyes moved to the wheels. Hers went to the enclosed compartment at the front.
They separated, walked around opposite sides, and met near its nose.
The man straightened.
“Can I help you?”
They understood him perfectly.
That was worse than understanding nothing.
He was speaking the language Grandma Rose used at home—the one their mother had taught them alongside the common speech of their valley.
Aren glanced at Aven.
She gave the slightest shake of her head.
Not yet.
“We heard you working,” she said. “Do you need a hand?”
The man looked at their leather vests, their tool bags, and the chisel protruding from Aren’s pocket.
“You folks coming from some festival?”
“We’ve been repairing a passage,” Aren said.
“Right. Well, stay off that edge. It’s soft.”
He returned to his lever.
Aven studied the ditch. Water was collecting above the metal pipe, dragging gravel from beneath the road’s shoulder.
“The roots are caught inside,” she said. “Pulling from here will tighten them against the broken seam.”
The man paused.
Aren crouched a safe distance back. “She’s right. The lower section has dropped.”
“Been asking to get that replaced for two years.”
“Does asking louder help?” Aren said.
“Hasn’t yet.”
Aven was already uncoiling their rope.
Aren held out his hand. She put one end into it.
The man watched them.
“You two do this a lot?”
“Unfortunately,” Aven said.
His name was Daniel Mercer.
He knew where the bank was firm, where the old pipe had split, and which heap of branches could move without taking half the ditch with it. With his knowledge and the twins’ careful work, they cleared enough of the blockage to let the backed-up water drain.
But the flow kept increasing.
Daniel frowned upstream.
“We haven’t had that much rain.”
“There’s been a change at the source,” Aven said.
Aren looked at her.
She looked back.
Daniel wiped his hands on a rag. “Something I ought to know?”
“Probably,” Aren said. “We’re still determining how much.”
Daniel’s eyes lingered on Aven’s ears. Then on Aren’s.
“Those part of the outfits?”
“Mostly part of our heads,” Aren said.
Aven closed her eyes briefly.
Daniel gave a small, uncertain laugh.
He offered them water from bottles in his truck. Aren turned his bottle in his hands, examining the clear material. Aven twisted off her cap, watched him trying to discover the join, and silently traded bottles with him.
“Where exactly are we?” she asked.
“Forest road above Hood Canal. Washington.”
Aren lowered the bottle.
Grandma Rose had a song with Washington in it.
And she had once described a place called Hood Canal while teaching them the word tide. They had thought it was a canal with an extraordinarily ambitious gate system.
Daniel was still talking.
“You lose your trail?”
“Something like that,” Aven said.
Aren studied the truck again.
“That moves by itself?”
Daniel glanced at it. “When it feels like it.”
“Ours do that too,” Aren said.
Aven nudged him.
Daniel’s smile faded as he realized they were serious.
They led him uphill.
At the opening, Daniel stopped so abruptly that gravel slid beneath his boots.
Through the rough stone arch, their lantern illuminated a braced slab and the narrow passage extending into the mountain. Farther back, a ventilation shaft admitted a stripe of sunlight.
On the Washington side, clouds covered the sky.
Daniel stepped left. Then right.
“There used to be a crack here,” he said. “You couldn’t get a hand into it.”
Aven explained what they had done, keeping to what she knew. The carving. The supports. The water that had been finding its way through before the entrance opened.
Daniel listened without interrupting.
Then he took a phone from his pocket and stared at it without doing anything.
“Is someone expecting you?” Aven asked.
“Crew knows where I am.” He put it away. “I’m trying to decide who you call about something like this.”
“We’ve had that difficulty with the council,” Aren said.
Daniel approached the threshold but didn’t cross.
“Where do you live?”
“A valley called Veyr,” Aven said. “With our parents. Our grandmother’s nearby.”
“And people there speak English?”
“Is that what you call it?” Aren asked.
Daniel turned.
“Our grandmother taught our mother,” Aven explained. “We mostly speak it with family.”
“Where’d she learn?”
“Where she grew up. She never liked talking about why she left.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rose.”
Daniel’s face changed, then steadied.
“Common name,” he said quietly.
Aven watched him.
“She calls herself Rose Stoneleaf now. Before that—”
“Mercer,” Aren said. “It’s written inside her old book.”
Water ran between them.
Daniel sat down on a flat rock.
For a while, none of them spoke.
“How old?” he asked at last.
“Sixty-five.”
He pressed his palms together.
“My sister would be sixty-five.”
Daniel had been fifteen when Rose disappeared.
She was twenty, home for a visit, and had gone walking on a trail she knew. People searched. He remembered wet coats filling their kitchen, maps spread across the table, their mother refusing to let anyone put Rose’s room away.
“They found her scarf up here,” he said. “Near a rockfall. Never found anything else.”
Aven sat beside him. Aren remained standing, his hands suddenly without a useful task.
“Does she ever…” Daniel stopped. “Did she mention a brother?”
“Danny,” Aven said.
He looked up.
“She said he could make anything,” she continued. “Except a convincing excuse.”
Daniel let out a breath that caught halfway.
“She has a little wooden bird,” Aren said. “One wing’s shorter. She keeps it wrapped in blue cloth.”
Daniel covered his mouth.
Aven waited.
“I made that,” he said. “Broke the wing carving it. Told her it was turning.”
Aren sat down on Daniel’s other side.
“She still says that.”
Daniel bent forward. The twins stayed with him while the water whispered over the stones.
At last he wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“She’s alive?”
“Yes,” Aven said. “She’ll be feeding the chickens about now. Complaining that they show no appreciation for her schedule.”
He laughed once, shakily.
“That sounds like Rose.”
They wanted to take him straight through.
Then a small stone clicked loose above the arch and dropped into the stream.
Aren stood.
Aven was already examining the carved border.
The reopened crossing had increased the flow. Water was scouring material from beneath one of the old supports. Their braces held the fallen slab, but that was only part of the problem.
“We can bring her here,” Aren told Daniel. “First we make this safe.”
Daniel looked at the opening for a long moment.
“What do you need?”
After checking the supports, the twins crossed back into the passage to trace the old watercourse. Daniel remained on the forest side, holding the lantern where they directed.
Under layers of silt lay a spillway designed to keep the stream away from the threshold. Part of it had been crushed in the collapse.
They cleared it, restored its channel, and reinforced the damaged support. Daniel fetched equipment from his truck and stayed where the twins needed him.
When he brought out a cordless drill, Aren forgot what he was saying.
“Later,” Aven told him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
Daniel’s mouth twitched. For a moment, he looked less exhausted.
By late afternoon, water ran through the cleared spillway instead of beneath the arch. The crossing remained open. The stones held steady under their repeated checks.
It needed more work, and the council would have questions large enough to require additional chairs.
But they could walk through.
Daniel stepped into the mountain passage with one hand against the wall, then looked back at the Washington forest.
Aren asked him to hold the lantern again. He found that easier than deciding what to think.
Aven looked at her brother.
He nodded.
“Come meet our grandmother,” she said.
Rose Stoneleaf was shelling peas when they reached her house.
She sat by an open window, silver hair pinned badly enough to suggest she had done it without consulting a mirror. A little carved bird stood on the sill beside her sewing basket.
Daniel stopped outside the garden gate.
“I need a minute.”
“Of course,” Aven said.
She and Aren went ahead.
Rose looked up.
“You’re late.”
“The repair expanded,” Aren said.
“They generally do.”
Aven pulled a chair close and sat.
Rose’s hands slowed.
“What happened?”
“We opened the passage,” Aven said. “There’s a forest on the other side.”
The bowl tipped in Rose’s lap. She caught it, scattering three peas across the floor.
Aren crouched to pick them up.
“Washington,” he said.
Rose stared at him.
Outside, a hen scratched beneath the window.
“Can you get back?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Aven said. “We secured it. There’s more to do, but yes.”
Rose set the bowl on the table. She missed the center and moved it carefully away from the edge.
“I tried,” she said. “After the collapse. I went back so many times.”
Aven took her hand.
“We know.”
Rose looked toward the wooden bird.
“At first I thought someone would find another way. Then I met your grandfather, and your mother came along, and…” She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to tell her about a place I couldn’t take her to. I kept thinking I’d explain when I had a way back.”
Aren placed the peas beside the bowl.
“We met someone.”
Rose’s fingers tightened around Aven’s.
“A man working on the road,” he continued. “He knew you.”
She looked between them, searching their faces.
Aven spoke gently.
“He says the bird really was turning.”
Rose stood so quickly that her chair struck the wall.
“Danny?”
At the doorway, Daniel made a sound that might have been her name.
She crossed the room. He met her halfway.
For a moment they stared, taking in the years neither had witnessed. Then Rose caught his face between her hands.
“You’ve gone gray.”
Daniel laughed through tears.
“You’re one to talk.”
She pulled him close.
Aren moved the fallen chair out of their way. Aven quietly retrieved the bowl before someone knocked it over.
They stepped out into the garden.
Later, there was supper.
Rose barely ate. She kept asking questions, sometimes beginning another before Daniel had finished answering. Their parents arrived, having received an urgent message that explained almost nothing, and found a stranger at the table with their mother’s eyes.
Introductions took a while.
So did explaining Washington.
There were painful things Daniel had to tell her. Their parents had died years earlier. The old house belonged to someone else. Rose listened with her hand resting on his arm, and nobody tried to hurry her through it.
There were good things too. A wife. Children. A granddaughter who had apparently inherited the family’s talent for inconvenient questions.
Rose wanted their names twice, to be certain she had them right.
When Daniel rose to leave, she stood with him.
“I’ll walk back with you.”
He hesitated.
“Just to the passage,” she said. “Tomorrow, if it’s still safe, I’d like to see the other side.”
“We’ll check it first,” Aven promised.
Rose touched her cheek.
“Thank you.”
Aren picked up the lantern. Aven took their tool bags.
Outside, Daniel looked at the mountain, then at the two people who had wandered into his workday and changed the rest of his life.
“You said this was supposed to be a small job?”
Aven looked at her brother.
Aren sighed.
“A modest repair.”
Rose laughed, and Daniel turned toward the sound. He had not heard it in forty-five years.
They walked together toward the passage, with the lantern swinging between them.
