In the middle of the night, I woke up with a start. Those eyes that had haunted my dreams back in Aletoma were back, only now they were accompanied by deep, burning hunger. I had no idea what to make of it, nor where they might come from, but by now, I was certain that they weren’t just figments of my imagination.

Focusing on the memories from my dream, I managed to conjure up a fragment of that sensation, only now I was fully conscious and in control. Letting the image fill one part of my mind, I spread the other part outwards, trying to see if there was something that caught my attention.

Almost immediately, I noticed a subtle pull to the southwest, not quite in the direction we would ultimately need to go but in a similar one. It wasn’t tremendously powerful but it attracted the fragment of my dream, and the hunger became much, much worse. It was as if there was something starving with my dream and it was now smelling their favourite food, turning them ravenous. The fragment, even if it was only part of a memory, held enough power to cause my stomach to grumble and saliva to gather within my mouth.

Not wanting to have my mind influenced by anything, certainly not by fragments of some weird dream, I pushed it away, forcibly purging it from my mind. I even let some Astral Power run through my mind, carefully mixing Mind and Devouring Darkness magic, simply to make sure to get rid of the traces. Having some other presence, one I didn’t know about, in my mind was incredibly scary.

Lenore and Sigmir were both woken up by my mental activities and Sigmir’s arms instinctively wrapped around me, pulling me close and sheltering me.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice a whisper, just as Lenore was conveying the same question through our connection.

“A nightmare,” I replied to both of them, letting Lenore experience a bit of what I had dreamed. It wasn’t on the same level as the fragment I had conjured up, but it was enough to give her a vague idea.

“Are you alright?” Sigmir asked, her concern immediately palpable. I gave her a gentle smile in response, nuzzling in a little and making myself comfortable.

“It’s one of those things. Nothing actually happened, to my perception at least, but something or someone managed to get an idea into my head, a sensation. That’s incredibly scary,” I admitted, her embrace helping to calm me down.

At the same time, Lenore had I were mentally discussing the event, trying to gather information from the circumstances. We knew that the first time we had that particular type of nightmare, with the serpentine eyes, after Adra crossed the second Divide. That could be a hint or it could be a coincidence. I would have to talk with Adra about her crossing if there was something that she could tell me. If not, it might have to do with the entity behind the Ancient Sapling we had destroyed in the process, or even the sapling itself. There had been a tremendous amount of power involved.

With that as the first hint, Lenore and I began considering the alteration to the nightmare. Before my absence, the eyes had only observed me in my dreams, silent and easily dismissed as strange figments of my imagination. But now, with the manifestation of that hunger, there was something that influenced me, evidence the dream had a power of its own. A power that could directly influence my mind, despite all the wardings I put up to avoid detection and divination.

Given that the most famous thing about Arbotoma was the endless forest spreading all across it and the initial trigger had been the destruction of a tree, there seemed to be a connection. But why something was hungry for trees and, at the same time, interested in influencing my mind was weird. To say nothing of their ability to ignore my magical obfuscation.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Sigmir looked at me a little confused when I reached out and slapped my forehead, a realisation coming to my mind. My magical wardings were all wrapped around me, akin to a cloak. If something was within those wardings, they would do next to nothing.

Reaching into my magical bag, I pulled out an object from almost the bottom of it, one that had accompanied me for almost my entire journey across Mundus. The moment I touched it, I could feel the same sensation of ravenous hunger, the mental and magical activity within the Soul Prison far stronger than it had been when I first ripped it from its fading Guardian. Not only could I feel it, it even tried to push into my mind, sharing it with me. For a moment, I considered lowering my mental defences, to see if communication could be achieved but given the circumstances, I decided against it.

For a few moments, I felt the influence batter against my mind, only to break, the activity within the crystal ebbing as if conserving its strength. That was a little worrying, but at the same time, the simple fact that the activity that had been almost gone when I found the crystal originally was now quite a bit stronger. Maybe I could feed it some more, to the point that communication became possible.

“That seems to be the source,” Lenore muttered, her focus on the Soul Prison.

“The Grandmother told me there’s some incredibly powerful entity bound within, one that was fading,” I reminded Lenore, “Seems like that entity is quite hungry and its favourite food is trees,” I grinned, before focusing on my memories of that fateful night when Adra had crossed the second divide. Sadly, due to the avatar-state we had used, my memories were fragmented and blurry, unavailable even with Lenore’s help.

“We could try feeding it?” Lenore asked, eyeing the countless, massive trees around us.

“We could,” I agreed, following her train of thought. We’d be unable to break the prison unless we managed to harvest an inordinate amount of Life and Energy but maybe we’d be able to satiate a bit of that hunger the entity was projecting outwards. Given that I had already decided to complete the quest of breaking the Soul Prison, helping the being inside should be within my interests.

Leaving the question, how to feed the soul of a monster bound within a magical crystal prison? I somehow doubted that using a spoon would work, especially as I didn’t have a real idea what it would feed on. The hunger was directed towards trees but placing it just against the bark seemed silly.

Shaking my head, I decided to consider it the next day and put the crystalline prison back into the magic bag, putting a layer of warding around the bag and snuggled against Sigmir to get some more sleep.

The next morning, we continued our journey and now, in the light of day, I could get my bearings a little better. The subtle pull south I had noticed wasn’t just from the soul prison, looking at it now, I realised the pull was all around us, the entire forest had a subtle connection to that southern nexus. From the feel of it, I was almost certain it wasn’t the nexus connected to the one in Neyto, there was far too little Ice in the air for that but that it was some sort of magical locus, binding the entire forest together.

With that idea, the hypothesis that the pull was coming from the Elder Tree, the mystical heart of the forest and centre of the entire Elven civilisation wasn’t too far off. I had a vague idea where that tree was, the stories on the forum were good enough for that, and the direction was roughly correct. Given the incredible margin of error when it came to my own position, the vagueness of the feeling and how spare the information was, it was good enough, leading to the idea that the monster in the Soul Prison was interested in that tree, with the same kind of intensity a starving lion would eye an injured gazelle.

During the morning, I did a single feeding experiment, feeling quite silly as I placed the Soul Prison against the bark of a tree, only for nothing to happen. Even the mental and magical activity in the crystal seemed to be a lot lower now, compared to the intense fluctuations during the night.

Putting the matter aside for the day, I joined Sigmir and the others, as we made our way through the forest, following one of the major trade routes. Compared to the Human Empire, the Elven civilisation seemed to be quite interesting, at least from the tales I had heard from the others.