He quickly discovered there was already a path for them to follow. The road they followed inside actually kept going, free of leaves, branches or even standing trees. To each side of the way, he could see felled trunks and cluttered leaves, pushed to keep the soil as free as possible. He could taste their indignation in the air.

  “The trees are angry”, he said to his brother “I can feel it in the air.”

  “You don’t need to be a Gardener to notice that,” his brother snapped back at him.

  Even though they both kept walking in silence after that, the ones behind them did start to strike up conversations here and there. As they walked, five columns naturally took shape, occupying as much space as possible, without stepping outside the path of packed soil.

  While in the beginning they were forced to rely on the feeling of leaves crunching under their feet to know they were getting out of the way, their torches became brighter as they found comfort in numbers, and a bit of confidence in the fact the trees hadn’t attacked them as the lone survivor said usually happened.

  It was hard to say for how long they followed the path, when the Rationalized One seemed to sprout out of the floor, staring slightly to the side. There, laying with a leg in the path and the other in the leaves, stood a dwarven body, perfectly still.

  His armor, just like the other ones, completely absorbed the light, and made it impossible to observe it directly. Only by noticing how there seemed to be a void in mid air, how the floor and leaves in front of it simply didn’t seem to be there, and head and beard floated on top of it, one could perceive the outlines of the body.

  “He’s not dead. But he’s not responsive either.” The Rationalized looked to the Prince and the Advisor, and for the first time they noticed something weird in his eyes. Out there it was almost imperceptible, but in such a dim enviroment, his iris and pupil shone with a bright orange light, far too deep to be simply a reflection of the torches the others were carrying.

  The three figures ahead of the marching columns gathered arounde the paralyzed figure to examine it. His eyes and mouths were open, his beard hung loosely all the way to his knees, his weight all leaning on the leg that laid on the open path, his arms shooting behind as if trying to pull his body away from the cluttered floor.

  Carefully, ready to jump back at any instant, the Prince waved his torch in front of the mole’s face. The fire moved with the dwarf’s breathing, but his eyes showed no reaction to the light. Ever so slowly, the torch was pressed against the beard, the smell of burnt hair quickly filling everyone’s nostril, but it remained just as lifeless as before.

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  “You know, I kinda want to cave in his head, just because,” suddenly, a crack resounded from just outside their field of light, amplified a thousand times by the opressive silence weighting down on everyone. Fast as a startled cat, the Prince jumped back, just as the Advisor’s hand shot forward and pushed him behind, while everyone else pulled out their weapons.

  Tense, heavy seconds dragged on, while they all stared at the source of the sound, waiting for something else to happen. Five breaths, ten, twenty… Only after what seemed like an eternity, someone dared to move again.

  “We should move on. There’s a long way ahead of us.” Talking as if they’d all taken a leisure brake, the Rationalized turned and restarted his resolute walk. This time, however, he made sure to stand inside the light of the torches.

  “Pass on the word,” the Prince loudly proclaimed “let’s keep going. Avoid the mole, make extra sure to stay on the cleaned path,” and then, he muttered to himself “that shit was the clearest ‘no’ I’ve ever got.”

  “Well, what do you know” even in this somber situation, the Advisor still found the words to mock his brother “maybe the trees do talk to you. ‘Quit being such an ass’, they’re saying’.”

  Once again, the whole army started moving, nervously staring at the frozen figure to the side. The torches of those who were passing by it all sputtered and dimed a bit, as if reflecting the unsettledness of their bearers. If someone watched the leaves with some attention, they’d notice how the leaves around the dwarf’s feet seemed to be slowly pushed out of the way, as something reached towards it under the earth.

  It didn’t take long for them to come across a second dwarf, in nearly the same situation as the first one. The difference was mainly the position of one of his feet, the one that would’ve been touching the leaves and felled branches. It was raised in the air, and sprouting from the soil, a single, frail looking root reached upwards and made it’s way inside the mole’s greaves.

  One of the orcs who came just behind them took a sharp breath and said “I know what this is. Hunting Trees. They spread their consciousness and engulf their preys. Flesh minds cannot comprehend those brains. Overwhelmed by the amount of information, their body just stops, their soul lost in a million stimulli it doesn’t know how to deal with. The roots come and end everything, slowly draining away whatever life there once was.”

  Most of those who lived near forests knew something like that. It was one of the reasons most orcs avoided any are dense with trees, they had no way to identify such trees, or to fight back against it, should they ever manage to catalog all of them.

  Legend said, that back when Gardeners roamed the world, those were rare, and frequently convinced not to kill their victims. Nowadays, absolute avoidance was the only kind of protection those people could count with.

  The Prince and the Advisor had both heard about those trees, of course, and they knew just how much of bad news they were. If the Hungry Forest was actually a grand concentration of Hunting Trees, how it seemed to be, they could all fall before ever reaching the other side of the forest.

  The tension, which was already extremely high, got even worse. Through their shared connection, the orcs could all feel the others getting heavier in their minds, and that in turn made them feel worse about the whole deal too. This journey had just got a lot more dangerous than they expected.