A crack of thunder so loud it actually drowned out the mouther’s cries boomed from behind them. Ears ringing, they watched as a crimson light seemingly set the trees before them ablaze. Erik spun to see what new destruction The Lord of the Woods had wrought. The specter that awaited him would have harrowed a lesser soul.
An ethereal being of swirling jasper light stood atop a pool where he was certain a tree had been moments before. The features were difficult to discern, but she was tall, powerfully built, and had a strange crest of hair that blazed like the fires of Muspelheim itself. The spirit pointed damningly down at them, eyes alight with fury. Her mouth opened in a soundless scream that made the entire pool of water at her feet vibrate and dance.
Its mute warning delivered, the crimson warrior dismissively turned her back on them. She set the inferno of her gaze upon the mouther, illuminating the many faces of the Black Goat’s spawn… and the titan that stood before it.
Erik’s eyes widened in shock, then narrowed in recognition. So the god-children had come prepared. Somehow they’d known to set down one of their accursed ‘dungeons’ in advance. This had not been accounted for.
—
The statue in Liv’s hand crumbled to ash as she pulled on the threads that had made up its existence, unraveling it. The burst of energy it released threatened to overwhelm her, making every nerve in her body burn. War drums pounded in her ears, and strange hissing chants echoed in her bones.
‘Iejartiss! Iejartiss! Iejartiss!’
She felt like she was on a pyre, set alight for her sins. Her nerves were overloaded circuits, slowly burning through her skin to the tune of the strange drums. Liv staggered, reaching out blindly towards the tree as the strange word took on a meaning that her pain fogged mind struggled to comprehend.
She had to act fast, that thing, that NIGHTMARE was coming! Slamming her hand into the trunk of the mangrove, she shunted the fire from her veins and twisted the threads of the tree into something new. It took nearly everything she had, statue and all, but she knew she’d succeeded when the gnarled knots near the flared base of the trunk shaped themselves into something of a face, two dark pits flashing to life with an animus all their own.
A sanity-rending howl washed over the island like an incoming tide as the slimy quilt work of faces pierced once more through the misty veil of her dungeon. Screaming in equal parts terror and rage, Liv clenched her eyes shut and instinctively thrust out a warding hand. The boom of thunder that followed nearly knocked her on her backside. The mangrove mimicked her motion, smashing into the gelatinous glutton with enough force to send it rolling obscenely to one side.
She blinked, briefly stunned, before a flare of hope broke through her haze. Wheeling around, she saw the cultists turning to see what the hell had just happened. Liv pointed down at the old man who seemed to run the show.
“Your ugly Cthulhu-worshiping ass is next, mother fucker!!” she roared, trying just as much to psych herself up as psych him out, before balling up her fist and pivoting back towards the greater of the two evils with a furious punch.
—
Logan didn’t have time to be dumbfounded by the wonders happening before his eyes, he wasn’t going to waste a miracle. The crimson light sent collosal shadows across the marshes to the east, as the strangely spider-like tree slashed and flailed away at the abomination. Lunging to the side he thrust his shoulder into the woman’s groin. He’d been lucky, he was the perfect height. It wouldn’t put her down as long, but Logan only needed a moment. As she doubled over he grabbed the crossbow and aimed it at the other armed man.
Her reflexive pull of the trigger put a bolt through his chest. Logan abandoned the now spent weapon in her hands, diving to catch the still-loaded one that the pierced farmer dropped in his shock. He rolled in the dirt, trying to aim for Erik, but the squat young man at his side kicked the weapon and sent the bolt flying afield.
Erik, it seemed, was not a gambling man. Backpedaling westward, he grabbed his son and once again gave a shrill call on that ghastly whistle, pointing at Logan.
—
“What is that thing?”
“Not that! NOT THAT!” “IT’S “PLeeEaSe…”
“I’m still here!” EATING “Get it out!!!”
“-help me…” ME!” “Ski’natok!”
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Liv felt like her head was about to split in two. Every errant glimpse, each perceived utterance of that demonic nightmare made her want nothing more than to return to her safe little hole at the bottom of the pond. But the Mangrove needed her. It had awoken into a horrifying reality mere seconds ago. It knew nothing. Without her guidance, it wouldn’t even know how to fight at all. But directing her guardian meant observing… IT. If the Mangrove suffered from a similar problem, however, it gave no outward sign of it that Liv could identify.
The squalid amalgam gushed back and forth in a foul approximation of eukaryotic motility. Howling pseudopods erupted at impossible angles, plowing tortured victims downward to grasp the earth in their wailing maws. More singular of mind than body, it attempted to seethe around the Mangrove at any opportunity. Liv heard footsteps and risked a glance over her shoulder to see Logan limping as fast as he could toward the children.
She tore her eyes away and back towards the perversion of space, and gasped as the viscus entity baited the Mangrove into a powerful swing and used the opening the slide past it. Now it surged toward Logan, who was unknowingly parroting Liv’s attempts to avoid unnecessarily seeing or hearing the thing.
“Stop it!!” she commanded, and to its credit, the spider-like roots of the Mangrove performed admirably, giving it a shocking amount of agility for a plant. Still, the two titans were neck and neck, and Logan was about to be collateral damage. Flailing in a moment of panic, Liv defaulted to what she knew.
—
Logan was staggering as fast as his wounded leg and bruised ribs would allow, desperate to reach the children. That battle was happening far too close to their hiding spot. He had to get them out of here. He took in the fight mostly via his peripheral vision, struggling to comprehend what he was even looking at. Their savior looked like something akin to a treant, but like none he’d ever heard of before. Low-slung and sprawling, it lacked the vaguely humanoid shape he’d have expected.
With a wooden groan, it swung a mighty limb in an arc, only to whistle through naught but air as the patchwork ooze slipped by. Logan risked turning to look at the thing head-on, a visceral terror seizing him as certain death barreled in his direction. Then the scuttling tree plowed into the horror’s side.
Behind the creatures, he could see the crimson spirit seemingly dancing on the water. Her stance was wide and low, as she swung her shoulders up and to the side, finally turning fully away from him. To his amazement, the pseudo-treant followed suit! Sweeping its trunk down and around it slammed its bulk into the gelatinous being in the closest thing to a shoulder check he could envision for such a thing as a tree.
The red woman slid across the rippling surface, slamming her foot down at a shallow angle toward the feet of an unseen opponent. In that same moment, the mangrove tree used its effective body block to kick half a dozen tapered roots into the ground, THROUGH the flesh of the horror. He couldn’t waste time gawking, who knew how long that would hold?
“RUUUN!! DARLA!! DAGNY!! RUUUN!!”
—
Once a derby girl, always a derby girl. Flat track had never been her schtick, but that J-block had been a thing of beauty.
“Time to test a theory,” she muttered under her breath.
This thing moved in ways that shouldn’t be possible, but she was pretty sure it still had a finite mass, else why would it bother moving around to reach things? It also looked like it needed to stay in one piece, otherwise, it could have split up to get around the Mangrove.
“Pin it down and clobber the fucker!!!”
—
The children were huddled together, screaming in terror, and Logan shuddered to think what it would take to help them move past this night. If they survived that is. Angling his head for a peripheral glance, he saw that the mangrove had turned the gibbering madness into something resembling a pin cushion. Countless roots plunged through blood and viscera, and heavy branches were pummeling down upon the writhing conglomerate in a frenzy. He grabbed the kids, dragging them out of the way, and towards the line of trees on the western shore. He didn’t know if those trees could move too, but he wanted any chance he could get.
The crimson glow illuminated every blow and grapple exchanged in the melee. Kneeling in the crux of another mangrove, he hugged the children to his chest and leaned against the bark to catch his breath. He was about to try to snap the children out of their terrified stupor and get them on their feet when a new sound joined the fracas. A rolling, metallic cackle. Glancing up into the branches of the tree, he spied two great corvids perched above. One leered at the bloody battleground with an interest beyond that of a normal carrion feeder. The other, to his shock, was laughing.
”Excellent indeed, brother! Excellent indeed!”
—
The bestial intellect behind the countless heterogeneous eyes seemed to finally conclude that the interloper had to be dealt with if the desired prey was to be caught. Like a whip at the apex of its arc, the adipose pool changed tactics. A churning, gut-twisting sound bubbled from within. Then one youthful eye clenched in pain as the mouth right in front of the knotted head of the tree stretched obscenely wide. The yellow, viscous bile that it vomited forth caused the Mangrove’s bark to sizzle and blacken.
The Mangrove twisted on its stilted roots, turning the damaged side away from the still-open maw. Whimpering like a sickened child, the mouth began to fold inward. It began to shift through the strange angles of the beyond to re-emerge elsewhere. Scum coated waters flared, waves beating at the shores in warning as the crimson woman silently pointed. The planted roots were slowing the Mangrove down too much to react. The tide looked to be turning in favor of the enemy.
Salvation came in the form of dozens of green tentacles. Vines as thick as a grown man’s arm whipped down from the canopy of the defender, snaring the gaping upper jaw as Koosh took advantage of the element of surprise. The Mangrove rolled, its hefty trunk yanking to one side like the mast of a ship in a storm. Wood bowed. Vines creaked. Three beings waited to see who would falter.
The moist ripping of living skin accompanied a brackish eruption of a fluid interior before it was drowned out by the pained squealing of countless mouths. Dangling vines whipped their prize around overhead, reveling voicelessly in a barbarically primal victory. The mangrove twisted, spinning to plant the rest of its roots into the enemy in a predatory display of dominance.
The crimson specter’s teeth were bared in a furious cry as she made a rending motion with her hands. The Mangrove seemingly needed no further prompting. Countless branching limbs drove wooden stakes into the leathery dermis, shredding the ragged wound ever wider. The wrinkled extensions flailed in a cephalopidic bid for survival, only to be batted away by the frenzied symbiotic vines.
—
Logan stared mutely, as whatever spirit it was that haunted this place fell to her knees. The black night seeped back into the area as her body dimmed. In the fading glow, the tree half-heartedly inspected a few errant scraps of offal before tossing them languidly aside. Scarred and broken in many places, it slowly lumbered back into the pool from whence it had come. The settling of its weight into the soft mud sounded almost like a sigh of contentment.
The warm bundle in his arms shifted, and he noticed that the children’s screams had faded at some point into quiet tears. Marla turned to look back over her shoulder towards the dormant pond.
“T-thank you, red lady.”