Chapter 137

Back before Gabriela Carreno had appeared in this world, back in a time that felt oh-so-far-gone nowadays, she had believed in many things—God, the inherent goodness of people, the inherent goodness of herself, and more. Life had stripped away much of that belief, to the point where she wasn’t entirely sure if she still believed in any of those things anymore. But, there was one truth that still remained untouchable in her heart.

Children were everything.

Back when Gabriela was younger, before her romance and marriage, she would have to fight not to roll her eyes when coworkers would say things like “Having kids changes you” and “When you have children, you’ll understand”. It had all seemed so very hackneyed and hyperbolic to her teenaged self. Then, she’d had children, and it had changed her, and she’d understood.

A child was light. A child was wonder. A child was joy. A child was love. A child was everything.

A child was bawling their eyes out right in front of her.

Gabby had many issues on her plate that very moment. Her irreplaceable blade was now gone. She had two unconscious people still hanging limply upon her shoulders. Their mission to reach the summit of Ruresni, harvest some sort of special petals, and then get back down before the Chos could looked to be hanging by a thread. There was a real possibility that, at some point in the future, she was going to explode—the return of the agonizing burning sensation during their escape attempt only lent Blake’s assessment more credibility in Gabriela’s mind. And yet, every one of those issues took a backseat to the fact that a child was in tears and it might be her fault.

Gabriela had never seen Pari truly cry before; she’d barely ever seen the child even be sad for more than a few moments. The sight of her weeping face pierced Gabby like a stake through the heart. Seized by concern, she dumped the others onto the bark—they’d be fine—and quickly knelt before the wailing girl.

“Pari, sweetie, what’s wrong?”

“Gabby-friend lost sword and buzzfriends’ home burned away because Pari was bad!” she blubbered.

“It’s okay, it’s alright,” Gabby quickly assured her. “You’re not bad at all!”

“But Pari lied! Pari not have to pee! Pari only cared about Pari, not friends, and now Gabby-friend’s special thing fell and buzzfriends have no home!”

Somewhat paralyzed by indecision, Gabriela found that she did not know what more she could say to the distraught girl. Her children had not been old enough for her to have experience with this sort of thing. So, instead, she just pulled Pari into a solid embrace, letting the beastkin sob “Pari sorry! Pari sorry!” into her shoulder over and over. Gabriela stroked the child’s hair and told her that everything was alright, but those words felt empty.

Eventually, Gabriela picked Pari up and ventured further away from the branch’s side. Removing her pack, she laid down and let the catgirl sniffle herself to sleep against her shoulder. She felt her eyelids drooping, hours and hours of exertion and stress finally catching up to her. She’d go fetch the others in a minute, she told herself, just after she finished this extra-long blink.

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“Mama, where’d you go?”

“I’m scared!”

“Don’t leave us!”

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Light greeted her when she opened her eyes. A curse formed in her throat, but stopped at her lips when she realized that Pari was still sleeping beside her, face nuzzled deep into Gabby’s left armpit. Ever-so-slowly, she extricated herself, making sure to not to wake the child, and stood up.

It had been that dream, again, sort of.

So many nights, she’d dreamt of what she’d lost, a dream that had been much like tonight’s. The dream had become more intermittent recently, starting when she’d begun her illicit relationship with Chitra, and occurring less and less frequently as time moved on.

To say that Gabriela felt conflicted about this was putting it lightly. On the one hand, fewer nightmares was generally a good thing. On the other, it signified that her flame was sputtering, so to speak. As time passed, all things faded until they were lost, and this was the one thing she was terrified of losing. How long before she wouldn’t be able to clearly remember her children’s faces? Their voices?

This slumber’s nightmare, however, had been different. The words hadn’t sounded like they were coming from an infant’s mouth; the voices speaking had been older, more grown-up, as if they were in their mid-teens—just like they’d been in the vision.

Gabriela shook her head to clear her thoughts. This wasn’t the time to think about that. She looked around.

When she’d gone to sleep the night before, there had been nothing but bare bark around her. Sometime before her waking, a campsite of sorts had popped up. The contents of her pack, or what remained of it at least, had been carefully sorted and laid out nearby, alongside a small pile of broken bark, but the others were nowhere to be seen. Realizing rather belatedly that she’d basically left them unconscious in a crevice, she felt a tad bit guilty, but clearly, they were fine.

Or, one of them was, at least.

“Finally up?”

Gabby turned to find General Bloodflower and Rudra approaching, a semi-pulped meter-long beetle propped up on Rudra’s shoulders. Gabriela let out a quiet breath of relief.

“We got breakfast,” Bloodflower continued. “Now, we just have to figure out how to cook it.”

“Stupid bark won’t burn,” Rudra rumbled, cocking his head towards the broken bark pieces. “Took all my strength to get even that much and it won’t even light.”

“As I said, it would burn if we could get it hot enough, but then we’d just use that heat source as the fire, anyway.”

The Stragman sighed and ran a hand through his thick red-orange hair.

“Now, I believe you owe us some explanations, yes? Or did I just imagine the massive wasp hive and all the supplies that seem to have mysteriously vanished?”

Gabriela glanced towards Pari, who had thankfully yet to wake. “It’s complicated,” she told them. “Let’s go elsewhere and I’ll tell you everything.”

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“What a series of unfortunate events,” Caprakan bemoaned once her story was over. “I was hoping you’d stashed your sword somewhere for safekeeping. To think that it’s lost...”

“The hits just keep coming,” Rudra grumbled. “We’re down to almost nothing. Maybe a meal and a half of food if split between the four of us, and we’re low on water as well—not to mention only one bedroll and all the rest.”

“Wonderful,” Gabby sighed. “At least Pari’s things made it through.”

The Stragman nodded. “True, I speculate that her candles might be our best hope for success anyway. If we could catch my wife with whatever Pari used on us last night, our victory would be nearly assured. What was that?”

“Something wonderful and terrible,” Gabriela answered, a frown creeping onto her face. She had been trying her best to not think about the vision Pari’s weird candle had given her. Her family, whole again, living out normal, happy lives. The sight of her children nearing adulthood, beautiful and healthy, had been almost more than her heart could take.

It had been a momentary slice of bliss, and then it had all vanished like... like smoke. Gabriela didn’t blame Pari for what she’d done, ending that wonderful vision prematurely; she recognized that it had been the right decision. Still, that didn’t make her happy about it.

“Whatever it is, that girl could become the richest person in the world with it if she played her cards right. I know a lot of people who would do just about anything to experience that again after getting their first taste. After what I saw, I almost certainly would. What about you? What did you all see in the smoke?”

Gabby’s mouth drew tight.

“You first,” Rudra said.

“Ha, well, that is only fair, I suppose,” Bloodflower conceded. “I saw my love, smiling and laughing. It was a wonderful thing.”

Gabriela doubted it was as simple as that, but the man seemed unwilling to say more. Three of them looked at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak.

“I saw Tepin, but she was strong and healthy,” Rudra finally said.

“I saw my family,” Gabriela reluctantly told them to finish the set. “I saw my children grown.”

“You have a family?” the Stragman asked, seemingly shocked. “I would not have guessed that the woman known as ‘The Monster’ would have children.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“And those names you kept repeating, those are your children?”

Gabriela scowled. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Of course, of course! I meant no offense. On a different topic, then, I suggest we wake our sleeping member. I wouldn’t bet my health on eating our prize raw any more than I would hazard my life trying to guess which of Pari’s creations will provide us a cooking flame instead of spraying us all with acid.”

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Pari was acting weird. More specifically, she was acting sad and depressed, which was well within the bounds of normal for others but not for the cat-eared giggle factory. She moped about all through their short breakfast, then seemed a shadow of her former self during their long trek back to the main trunk.

The bark on the branch upon which they strode was much the same as the bark everywhere else on the tree, with massive patches of rough and uneven but navigable surface split by the occasional large crack. However, where before the cracks had served as arteries through which they could climb up on the trunk, here they turned into wide, often deep trenches that the party had to leap over.

To be more accurate, Gabby had to carry each of them, one at a time, and leap over the gap. This was just the sort of activity that Pari would usually love. Today, however, Gabriela didn’t hear even a single giggle as they jumped through the air.

With their speed greatly increased by the horizontal nature of their travel, the group made it back to the trunk relatively quickly. They opted to take a short break before they began to head upward and Gabriela’s day became immeasurably worse. Taking the opportunity, she sought out the dour child and sat down beside her. The beastkin glanced at her and then lowered her head and averted her eyes.

“You okay, Pari?” she said after a moment of silence.

“...Yes,” came the eventual and unconvincing reply.

“You’re still upset about last night, aren’t you?”

“...No.”

“Pari, look at me.”

Pari looked away.

“Pari, come now, we need to talk.”

Still, Pari ignored her, wholly committed to her moping.

Gabriela sighed and reached over. Ignoring the surprised yelp, she grabbed Pari by the sides, picked the squirming child up, and deposited the beastkin on her lap so they were face to face.

“Listen... I know you think I’m mad at you, but I’m really not, okay? None of us are.” That last part was a lie, but one she knew Rudra wouldn’t call her out on, at least not right now. “We’re just glad you’re safe.”

“Friends and Ruddy should be mad,” Pari mumbled. “Pari was bad and did bad and broke buzzfriend home and lost sword and— and—”

“Shhh... shhh...” Gabby pushed ahead before the sniffling girl could fully board the tears train. “I want you to listen to me very closely, alright? This is important. Yes, you made a lot of mistakes yesterday, but that’s okay. You’re a child, Pari. Childhood is all about making mistakes; I made a ton of mistakes when I was growing up.”

Memories of her younger years bubbled to the surface, from all the fights she’d gotten into, to the times she’d neglected to study before a test, to the time she’d killed the orphanage’s pet fish by overfeeding it.

“What matters is that you learn from them and grow, understand?”

“But Sofie-sis said that it’s important to think of others, but Pari was only thinking of what Pari wanted and bad things happened because of Pari.”

“People are allowed to be selfish sometimes too, you know—especially young people like you. Sofie’s advice is a good goal, but nobody can be selfless forever. The fact that you care is very good already. A lot of people wouldn’t even feel bad about it.”

“But sword gone! Buzzfriends’ home gone!”

“Well, about that... Would you like to know a secret?”

“Eh?”

Gabriela leaned down next to Pari’s ears, her voice falling to a conspiratorial whisper.

“I hate that sword. It’s clumsy, awkward, and a giant pain to carry around, and it always reminds me of things I would rather not remember. I’m glad it’s not here.”

That last part was only a half-truth—she had a bad feeling it might have come in handy really soon—but still, even she mostly believed it.

“...Really?”

“And your wasp friends flew away before the fire got too bad,” Gabby continued, purposely avoiding any mention of larvae. “They’re building a new, better home right now, I’m sure. Maybe you’ll be able to visit them again in the future.”

“Really?” The girl pulled back and looked up at her, the light in her eyes renewed.

“Absolutely! Now, go grab a snack before we set out again. We have to move fast today.”

Pari hit Gabriela with a smile so bright with joy that it left her momentarily blinded. “Okay!”

Quick as a whip, the beastkin hopped off Gabby’s lap and sprinted towards the others, only to screech to a halt a few steps later. Turning back, she rushed over and wrapped Gabby’s side into a hug, nuzzling her shoulder. “Pari feels better now. Thank you!”

“Friends help friends with their problems. It’s only right.”

Pari gasped as if struck by a sudden revelation. “Yeah!”

And then, she was off like a rocket once again. Despite their current dire situation, Gabriela couldn’t help but join Pari in her good humor.

That smile was everything.

The others, however, did not share in the good vibes. Somewhere in the middle of her chat with Pari, the men had gotten into another argument.

“-have to take risks. With everything else that’s gone wrong, playing it safe will just make us safely lose,” Rudra rumbled.

“I know it’s hard for a log head like you to grasp,” General Bloodflower snorted, “but sometimes, taking the longer route is faster. Is it quicker to run up a hill or climb a ladder?”

“I can go up ladders faster than you think.”

“What’s the issue now?” Gabriela cut in.

“This lummox is unable to see the wisdom in my planned route, despite how clearly better it is.”

“It’s three times as long, at least!”

“What is the route?” Gabby asked.

“It’s simple: we climb to the next branch up and follow that. Do you see how it largely slopes upward?”

He pointed at the nearest massive branch, thicker than twenty city blocks, which emerged from the colossal trunk above and counterclockwise from them. True to his statement, the branch twisted and turned, but generally seemed to rise higher into the sky the further from the tree it went.

“Much further along the branch, there is a leaf which comes within just paces away from a leaf on another branch. We have you throw us up onto the second leaf, and then you jump up to follow. The second branch is that one up there.”

This time, she had a bit more trouble making out what he was indicating. The second branch was so much higher up that she couldn’t tell much from looking at it at this distance.

“That branch is much the opposite, sloping downward, and leads directly to our goal,” he explained. He brought his fingers together to make a triangle, indicating the general shape of his route. “It’s longer, yes, but the speed we will be able to travel will make up the difference and then some.”

“That does sound like a decent idea...” Gabby considered.

“Hey, tell her why you know this,” Rudra butted in angrily. “Don’t leave out why you’re so confident, now.”

Gabby gave the Stragman a curious look.

“Well... this path is the usual path taken by those who climb the Mother Tree,” Caprakan admitted.

“Meaning that it’s the way the Chos went, which means a likely ambush, if not worse,” Rudra added.

“But it also means you know what to expect, right?” Gabby asked.

The Stragman nodded. “Better than any other route, by far.”

“And what other way do you think is better, Rudra?”

“Take the shortest, most direct path. Straight up. Much less distance, no competition.”

Gabby stared at him in disbelief for several moments.

“You’re serious,” she finally concluded. “We have the option to walk on basically solid ground almost all of the rest of the way, and you’d rather free climb?!”

“I think it will be faster. And no fights to worry about.”

“Faster, my butt! We’re taking the branches.”

“But—”

“Let me worry about that muscle-bound woman. We’re taking the branches.”

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Of all the things that Gabriela expected to find thousands of feet up a tree, a forest above another forest was not on the list—especially not one like this. Countless stalks stood in front of her, each a meter thick and more than six meters tall. Dozens of bud-like leaves, each about the length of her forearm, sprouted from each stalk in an alternating pattern reminiscent of kernels on a stalk of wheat.

The pattern made each stalk look almost like a length of braided hair from a distance, but taken as a whole, they combined to look like a giant’s carpet covering this area of the great tree—an uncharacteristically colored one, at that. The leaves and stem started as green near the base, the color matching the green so predominant in Stragma, only to progressively transition to fuchsia as they got higher. The color scheme only further added to the feeling of an alien landscape.

“What in the world?” Rudra muttered.

A gust of wind hit them and rolled onward, sending the stalks waving in the early afternoon light.

“What is this?” Gabby joined in.

“Moss,” Bloodflower told them with a grin.

“W-what?” Rudra sputtered.

“Giant moss,” the Stragman clarified.

“You’re joking,” Gabby replied. “A forest of giant moss, atop a giant tree, higher up than the tallest mountains.”

He grinned with amusement. “Of course.”

The man’s answers strained credulity, but she didn’t have a better explanation. It wasn’t like she knew what moss looked like up close, anyway.

“According to my understanding, this is the last area before we approach our goal. A quick break would be prudent before we push into this mossy jungle ahead.”

Rudra nodded and took their only remaining pack off of his back, sitting down with a sigh of relief. The others joined him, passing around a waterskin and some of their remaining food. After scarfing down her snack, Pari whipped out her candlemaking supplies and retreated to her own little world of freak catgirl chemistry. The others, meanwhile, soaked in the otherworldly ambiance of their surroundings.

Ruresni’s strange and highly localized ecosystems were a sight to behold, the moss forest being just the latest example. The wealth of insects and lizards alone was staggering, from the weird aphid-like attackers, to the bees, to the myriad others they’d passed on their way up.

Luckily, the aggressive aphids were more an exception than a rule; most of the life here either didn’t consider the tiny humanoids big or strong enough to be worth caring about. She had to reluctantly admit that Caprakan’s guidance had helped them from stepping on too many toes, as well.

It all felt a little wasted on her, to be honest. Somebody like Sofie would doubtless appreciate the sights here better than she could. Then again, maybe Sofie wouldn’t be too fond of all the bugs, massive or otherwise. Chitra, on the other hand... She’d surely get a kick out of this place, and she’d somehow make it all the way up here without a single speck getting on whatever alluring dress she’d have on, too. The thought of her scantily clad friend sashaying up the side of Ruresni, climbing... How high up even were they now?

“Very,” Rudra rumbled when she voiced the question aloud. “We’re well above the clouds. Perhaps even twenty kilometers.”

“Isn’t that higher than Mount Everest?” she wondered, taking a deep breath and feeling the thick, heavy air rush in and out of her lungs. “Shouldn’t the air be so thin that we couldn’t breathe up here? And shouldn’t we be freezing to death? It’s as hot and humid as the forest floor.”

“You can thank Ruresni for that,” the general told her. “Even the air itself is altered by her mighty presence.”

Gabriela wasn’t sure exactly how much ‘altering’, and to what capacity, was actually going on here, but she wasn’t about to argue about a glowing tree taller than the tallest mountain on Earth. It was as good an explanation as any, she supposed.

Another gust swept through, carrying with it a whiff of smoke. Though only present for a moment, it reminded her to check on the fourth member of the party, who had been suspiciously quiet for the last few minutes.

The girl seemed to spend every free moment on candles these last few days, but Gabriela understood. The bonanza of materials Pari was getting her hands on every day was the equivalent of an ordinary child being let loose inside the world’s greatest toy store.

Gabriela wasn’t quite sure why, but the beastkin had taken to setting up her apparatus further from the others recently. Perhaps it was simply for their safety, or maybe she just didn’t want to be distracted. Approaching the child, who sat hunched over her equipment with a look of intense concentration, she found the latter more likely.

Pari glanced up and noticed her approach before quickly looking back down and biting her lip. A single, solitary, barely audible snicker made it to Gabriela’s ears. Her instincts, finely honed by months of experience with the girl, immediately began blaring alarms of warning and caution. The little devil was up to something.

“Pari? What are you up to?” she asked, her voice laced with the sort of no-nonsense suspicion that only a parent can manage.

“N-nothing,” came the entirely unconvincing reply, further betrayed by the soft ‘hee’ that leaked from her tightly drawn lips.

“Pari, I know you love a good prank,” she began, looking around for some sort of sign as to the nature of the ruffian’s mischief and finding nothing, “but this isn’t the time or place for—”

Gabby had thought she was ready for anything the tiny miscreant could throw at her; that wary confidence lasted a mere six steps. On the seventh, she found herself completely unprepared when the front half of her right foot—fully bare, her footwear having fallen to pieces before the end of the second day of climbing—refused to rise from the bark upon which she stepped.

Suddenly off-balance, she tried to reposition her left foot to compensate, only to find it stuck fast as well. Arms windmilling, Gabby twisted uncontrollably and fell forward and to the right as gravity took hold. She felt her right ankle bend further than it was meant to and her left knee twist in ways it shouldn’t, pain lancing through both legs as she landed on her bare right knee—the bottom of her pant legs having not made it past the fourth day.

Still, momentum wasn’t done with her just yet. It sent her upper body toppling forward, and she instinctively stuck her bare right forearm out to catch her fall before the whole right side of her torso hit the bark.

Pari giggled.

“Pari!”

Folded into an anatomically incorrect human pretzel, Gabby pushed through the pain—she’d had much worse—and went to push herself up, only to find that her knee and arm were also stuck. The sight of her ineffectual attempts to free herself sent Pari’s giggling into overdrive.

“Pari! This isn’t funny!”

Gabriela’s outburst only brought forth even more mirth, and she thought she heard soft laughter coming from the others behind her, too. Traitors! Adults had to stand together in solidarity against the tyranny of chemistry genius children!

“Pari use buzzfriend honey to make super duper sticky candle!” the girl explained, bright-eyed.

“That’s wonderful, sweetie,” Gabriela ground out through gritted teeth as she frantically tugged against the bark to no avail, “but you have a way to unglue me, right?”

Pari cocked her head to the side. “No? Pari not have ingredients here for unsticking.”

“PARI! How am I supposed to get up, then?”

“Nya? Pari see Gabby-friend break bark many times?”

Gabriela let out a groan and took a deep breath. Closing her eyes, she repeated the mantra to herself.

Children were everything.

Children were everything.

Children were everything.

Even when they superglued you to the ground.

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“I don’t know what you’re so miffed about,” Bloodflower chuckled.

“Shut it.”

“No, really, you make that look work.”

“Shut. It.”

Gabby swept a moss stalk to the side with her right arm, only for it to catch on the half-meter-long, jagged chunk of bark still glued to her forearm.

It turned out that Ruresni’s bark was strong enough that even she had trouble breaking it when her strength wasn’t boosted by the adrenaline of abject terror or battle. The awkward position she’d found herself stuck in hadn’t helped her get good leverage, either. Still, in the end, she’d managed to free herself... Mostly. She’d managed to rip apart almost all of the bark using every drop of her normal strength and both of her hands. The one bit remaining was the piece on her arm that she just couldn’t get enough leverage to rip off.

There were other options, of course. Given enough time to bash it against something hard enough—some more bark would do just fine—she could probably break the rest of it off, but she didn’t have that time. Then, there was always self-maiming; if the bark and the glue were too strong, perhaps the flesh on the other end could be removed and reformed.

With Rudra holding the other end of the bark, it wouldn’t even be hard to accomplish. Still, Gabriela didn’t ever want to become used to hurting herself just for the sake of convenience. She wasn’t that desperate—not yet, anyway, though the future wasn’t looking too bright.

It was just one thing after another from the moment she’d left Wroetin. What would happen next, she wondered? Maybe a horde of dragons was going to appear and gobble them up. Maybe a giant lumberjack would show up and chop the tree down. Maybe she’d make it to the summit, only to find the flower petals she was supposed to harvest and bring back all eaten by giant caterpillars. Maybe—

Maybe she’d end up separated from the others. She couldn’t hear the steps of her companions anymore. Spinning around, Gabriela found herself alone amongst the stalks. Her blood ran cold.

“Hey!” she yelled. “Where are you?”

She strained her ears but heard nothing but the wind.

“Pari! Rudra! Bloodflower! Anybody!”

No answer.

But wait! From somewhere seemingly close in this jungle of moss, back towards where she’d come, was that the rustle of people slowly pushing through? She rushed back, simultaneously worried and annoyed.

A handful of seconds of retreat later, she heard more rustling, now just a few meters away. Was this just another one of Pari’s pranks or Bloodflower’s jests?

“Come on, everybody, this isn’t funny!” Gabby called, pushing her way through the overgrown living carpet. “We have to stay together, or—”

She didn’t notice the club until it had already smashed into her torso with the weight of a cargo ship, the heavy blunt weapon rendering her flesh to paste and nearly breaking her in two. Instead, the force launched her into the air like a hanging slider shooting off a power hitter’s bat. As she flew faster than a bullet, the bark on her right arm caught a nearby stalk, the collision cutting her speed slightly while sending her spinning like a drunken top.

Even as she whirled through the air, her reforming torso feeling like it was ready to puke, she managed to notice just how close to the edge she’d wandered without realizing it—just a few hundred meters.

When she crashed down at last, plowing through three stalks on the border of the forest before coming to a merciful halt not more than twenty meters from the start of a steep slope to open air. She let out a relieved breath. The bark she’d been cursing all this time had ended up saving her. Had it not slowed her down a fraction... No, better not to think about it.

Springing to her feet, Gabriela rushed back into the moss, traversing it in great leaps and bounds now that she didn’t need to make sure the others were keeping up with her. It didn’t take long to find her attacker; the club’s swing and Gabriela’s successive exit had cleared out a small patch of moss stalks that were easy to spot from the air.

“Tch.” The Chos spat to the side. “Figures. Maybe it’s better this way, anyway.” She hefted her overgrown stick onto one shoulder and strode forward. “I don’t know what you did to make Caprakan join you, but I’m going to make you pay for it a thousand times over.”

Palebane lashed out in a flash, her club coming from the right. Gabriela crouched down as fast as she could, barely making it beneath the arc of Palebane’s warclub as it swept overhead, the air shuddering as it passed by just millimeters from her skull.

Gabby went to charge forward, but before she could even manage a step, the club’s enormous momentum suddenly vanished as if the Stragman was clutching a drinking straw in her meaty hand rather than a hunk of wood weighing hundreds, if not thousands, of kilograms. Before Gabby could react, the overgrown tree branch reversed course, crunching through her arm and shoulder and sending her ragdolling off of and through the mossy jungle.

Gabriela spat out a piece of moss—which tasted strangely like broccoli—and used the few seconds she had before the Chos caught up to her to reconstitute her shattered and crushed body. While she did that, her mind tried its best to come up with the best way out of this mess.

This situation was a problem she had not faced before. Almost the entirety of her training and fighting strategy had revolved around using her sword to destroy most threats and her healing to absorb—or “tank”, as Blake liked to put it—what she couldn’t cut in time.

It had been a highly successful strategy, but her circumstances conspired to render it worthless now. Her sword was gone, lost to her for the foreseeable future, and while she could certainly survive the crushing blows of the Chos’s gnarled cudgel, its incredible hitting power meant she would get flung into the next timezone every time she failed to dodge.

If she could get close enough to get even a hand on her opponent, the fight would be over, but how was she supposed to do that? The way the Chos swung her club defied physics—literally, if what she’d been told was correct—and made every strike hard to predict. Not for the first time, she wished that her powers made her not just stronger, but tougher as well.

In some respects, they did. Lifting a city block required incredible toughness to keep from being crushed, the absurd weight snapping her tendons, splintering her bones, etc. Yet, even while in the middle of lifting that city block and handling the titanic forces in play, any blade, club, or bullet could wreak havoc on her all the same. She'd never figured out why that was, but she had never been the inquisitive sort.

Perhaps if she could build up enough speed, she could strike so fast that Palebane wouldn’t be able to react in time, but this cursed overgrown carpet of moss they were stuck in meant she had no room—not to mention that the bark still stuck to her arm would catch on the stalks as she went, throwing her off balance.

She glanced at the bark again, the beginning of an idea forming in her mind. Though blocking that monster of a club could feel like stopping a freight train—and with the way the Stragman’s powers worked, she basically was—she’d managed to block it many times in the last fight with her sword. Could the bark work the same way? Its placement on the outside of her forearm was fairly close to that of a one-handed shield.

There was only one way to find out.

Gabriela darted toward the towering woman, who’d been approaching her with a cold fury. Palebane’s arm snapped out, her movements precise and economical. The club arced diagonally down and towards her right side, and Gabby threw her bark-glued arm in the way, setting her feet to take the pressure of the blow.

CRACK!

Wood and bark collided to mixed results. On the plus side, though the blow felt like it was going to tear her forearm off, both the bark and her arm held. On the other side, this time it was her feet that failed to hold—or, more accurately, the soft ground of this moss-filled place could not withstand the force. She skidded backward several meters, her feet leaving twin trenches in the springy floor, until her left shoulder suddenly clipped a stalk. The next thing she knew, she was rolling to a halt.

Gabby sprang back back up, wary of a follow-up attack, but Palebane was just slowly walking in her direction, the beastkin woman simply stared bloody murder her way. Somehow, Gabby found the quiet Chos even more intimidating than the usual brash Chos.

The approaching Stragman leader cut a terrifying figure. A good half a meter taller, she had advantages in weight and reach, but Gabby knew that her real advantage came from her weapon. Without that club, the musclebound warrior would be harmless to her. But how could Gabby separate the weapon and the weapon master?

Sadly, she couldn’t think of any way other than ‘just grab it’, which was as easy to say as it was hard to do. Perhaps if she could just knock the woman over, even for a split second... even just getting her off-balance might be enough...

Plans were not really her forte; she found her success through chaos and forcing the issue with brute strength. The last time they’d fought, it had been on a flat arena with few stone pillars—a clean, orderly, structured place. Now, they were battling in one of the most chaotic environments she’d ever fought in. They strode upon uneven, lumpy, and slightly mushy ground that squished with every step, while an unruly mess of moss stalks grew all around them, twisting and turning every which way. If she didn’t have a concrete plan, her surroundings at least would help her stir the pot a little.

Gabriela shot forward in a flash, snaking around the stalks. The Chos came to a stop, weapon ready. As soon as Gabby got within range, the club swung around to intercept. Gabriela was already going low, taking advantage of the soft, slightly slippery ground to slide headfirst beneath the blow and aim for the Chos’s legs.

With a grace that nobody that size should rightly possess, Palebane pirouetted aside, avoiding Gabriela’s reach by a couple of centimeters at most. Undeterred, Gabby planted her hands in the ground, using her momentum to flip forward and back onto her feet. She kept moving forward, barely avoiding the sweeping follow-up attack, and kicked off of a nearby stalk to change direction.

Like a pinball shot from a cannon, she caromed crazily about, bouncing off of stalks and the forest floor as randomly as she could. Moving so fast that most anybody would see her as little more than a blur, she kept it up for a few moments before finally redirecting herself inward.

As expected, the Stragman warrior was already turning, club arcing to intervene, so when she did, Gabriela threw both handfuls of mushy, slimy moss jungle floor, which she’d grabbed when she’d flipped upright after her slide, right at the Chos’s face.

Palebane swayed to the side, managing to avoid one of the two clumps, but the other caught her right across the face, splattering it with slime and mossy goodness. Quick as a whip, Gabby leapt to the side, careened off one nearby stalk, then four meters up another, and then finally launched herself straight for the Stragman’s exposed back.

Gabby wasn’t in a position to land a particularly vicious blow, but that was alright. At the speed she was moving, all she had to do was collide with her assailant’s broad, exposed back, knocking them both to the ground and turning this fight into a grappling match that Gabby was sure to win.

It was too late now. With the speed Gabby was traveling and her positional advantage, not even the Chos could swing her club fast enough to cover the full hundred and eighty degrees needed to intercept her. Which was probably why the Chos didn’t swing her club around to bash her like it was an oversized baseball bat.

Instead, she did something Gabriela did not see coming. She swung her arm back, like a bowler winding up to throw, and buried the knob at the bottom of her club into Gabby’s solar plexus with the power of a speeding double-decker bus.

Eyes wide, Gabriela coughed as the strike flung her straight up into the air.

“Did you think I was like you, riding on nothing but a special weapon and raw power?” the Chos asked, wiping the muck from her eyes. She stepped aside and drew her warclub up behind her head as Gabriela, now a good ten meters high, began to experience gravity once more.

“I’m nothing like you, worm!” she hollered as Gabriela fell within her reach. “I know how to fight!”

The club slammed down, chasing the falling Gabby like a giant flyswatter to swat her from the air. At the last moment, Gabriela managed to twist just enough to get her bark-covered arm between the rest of her before it slammed into her, hammering her straight down into the ground so hard that she found herself half-buried in the spongy moss floor. The only reason she ended up merely ‘half’ buried was because the moss wasn’t deep enough. She could feel the rough bark beneath that layer scraping against her skin.

Stuck on her side, her body largely broken, Gabriela barely had time to think before the club came down on her a second time, smashing directly into the center of Gabby’s bark shield with a deafening WHAM!

“You dare to come into my home!?” she cried, pulling back for another blow.

WHAM!

“You dare to try to steal my people!?”

WHAM!

“You dare to mess with my husband!?”

WHAM!

Gabriela tried to move, but doing so meant trying to push off of one arm while every second it was like she was being stomped on by Mount Everest.

“Did.”

WHAM!

“You.”

WHAM!

“Really.”

WHAM!

“Think.”

WHAM!

“You.”

WHAM!

“Could.”

WHAM!

“Hold.”

WHAM!

“Back.”

WHAM!

“My.”

WHAM!

“Fury.”

WHAM!

“With.”

WHAM!

“Some.”

WHAM!

“Fucking.”

WHAM!

“BARK?!”

WHAM!

WHAM!

WHAM!

The blows rained down with such ferocity that Gabriela began to hear their booming echoes between the strikes, the syncopated aftershocks to the original earthquakes.

WHAM!

BOOM!

WHAM!

BOOM!

WHAM!

BOOM!

Though the Chos’s rain of terror showed no sign of ending, Gabriela didn’t give up. She kept trying to rise, to wiggle free, to find some way out of this, but every time she tried, it was like a million elephants were landing right on her. All she could do was keep her arm raised, the bark still shielding most of her body. If she let that arm fall, she’d end up being turned halfway to paste and whacked all the way to Drayhadal before she could reform.

What other options did she have? If only she hadn’t made that promise to Bloodflower, things would be simpler.

WHAM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

WHAM!

CRACK!

BOOM!

At last, Gabby’s improvised shield gave up the ghost. Bits of bark sprayed everywhere as the chunk exploded into a hundred tiny pieces, leaving Gabby’s arm covered only by a small patchwork of little chips that would not protect her from what she was up against.

“HRAAAH!” the Chos roared, rearing back and swinging her weapon down with brutal finality, putting everything she had into this one last, triumphant strike.

But, Gabriela almost didn’t hear it, nor did she really notice her newly unburdened limb. Instead, she was busy processing something that had quickly become much more clear.

Those secondary crashes that she’d thought were echoes of the Chos’s attacks were something else, the steady rhythm of something she’d heard not too long ago. Those were the sounds of explosions from one of Pari’s Roman Candles.

The others were still out there, fighting. Pari was fighting—fighting against people who might very well might be trying to murder her! She was fighting for her life, and what was Gabriela doing instead of running off to save her? Lying on the ground like a worthless lump! She’d fought Blake’s robot armies! She’d fight a bloody dragon! Couldn’t she do better than this?!

The image of the girl’s body lying on the tavern floor, rainbow blood running from her, flashed through her mind.

No.

No!

Gabby could not let anything happen to Pari. She would not let anything happen to Pari. Never again!

The club came crashing down like a meteor packing enough power to send Gabriela the way of the dinosaurs. She put her hand up.

WHAM!

The force of the impact sent out a shockwave strong enough to blast the surrounding ground cover to bits, filling the air with minute flecks of green and purple. And yet, when the air cleared, there Gabriela lay, propped up on her left elbow, her right hand palming the end of the great club, wisps of crimson leaking from quickly vanishing cracks running down her hand and arm.

“What?!” the Chos gasped, staring in wide-eyed shock.

“Tantrum’s over,” Gabriela growled. She pushed herself up with her left arm enough to get one knee under her, then rose to her feet, her right hand still grasping the club tight.

Thanks to the Chos lightening the club after impact, keeping the weapon up was now a trivial task. The larger woman tugged furiously, trying to pull it free, but Gabriela’s grip would not be overcome.

“How?!” the Stragman leader snapped. “You never showed such resilience before!”

“Well, this time, I have a reason to care.”

With a quick two-handed yank, she ripped the oversized tree branch from her opponent’s grasp and sent a swift kick into the Chos’s gut, doubling her over.

Palebane fell to one knee, gasping, wheezing, and clutching her stomach with one hand. And yet, when she managed to get a hold of herself enough to raise her head, she looked at Gabby not with pain but with outrage, like she’d just been slapped across the face.

“You held back on me?!” she hissed, as if the very idea was the gravest of sins.

Gabby stared down at the Stragman ruler and realized just how pathetic she really was. Without her weapon, Akhustal Palebane was as threatening to Gabriela as a well-stuffed pillow. She was little more than an oversized lump of anger and grievance whining and bleating impotently about disrespect and honor and other crap, and Gabby was just so utterly done with her and all of it.

“I gave you what you deserved, nothing more,” she told her.

Without another word, Gabriela pivoted around, reared back, and hurled the Chos’s weapon as far away as she could manage. She didn’t quite have an idea of which direction she faced, but with luck, the club would be joining her sword on the forest floor soon enough. She turned back again to Palebane, her hands balling into fists.

“Without your little stick, you’re nothing. This is over.”

Gabriela took a step forward... and nearly fell on her face for the second time that day when her back foot refused to move. When she regained her balance enough to spare a glance down, she found a tendril of wood emerging from the ground through the mossy bed and quickly winding up her leg. Checking her front foot, she found a second, shorter tendril already up to her ankle, while the first was not just past her knee.

Gabby strained against the snares to no avail. Though the vine-like tendrils were as thick as her pinky finger at most, they were made of Ruresni, and while she could destroy the mighty tree’s bark with enough force, the actual wood was a different story.

“Hello, my dearest,” said a familiar voice from off to the side.

Leaning confidently against a nearby stalk was Caprakan Bloodflower wearing a face of grim concentration, one arm held up, palm out towards Gabriela.

“Wha—! Bloodflower! You snake!” Gabriela snarled, straining impotent against her living shackles as they wound around her shoulders and began to circle her neck.

The general ignored her, which only made her angrier. What a fool she'd been to listen to him at all! She’d known he was suspicious. She’d known something wasn’t quite right about everything involving him. And yet, she had let him into the party. She’d taken his ample guidance as they ascended. Just how much of their delays had he engineered through bad directions alone?

Having fully looped around her neck, the wooden vines’ growth came to a halt, and Bloodflower’s arm fell and he let out a weary sigh. “Glad I made it in time. Took longer than I’d planned to get away from that musclebound oaf and insane little girl, but it looks like it all worked out.”

“You’ve always been one to arrive fashionably late, my little berry,” Palebane cooed.

Caprakan smirked. “You know it. Already got your petals and on your way back down?”

“Of course. Hid them away somewhere safe, just in case.”

“Smart and wise. That’s why I love you so.”

They stepped toward each other and, before Gabby could mentally prepare herself, swept each other into a loving embrace, their lips meeting right in front of her eyes in a passionate kiss.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Great. Pari—and Rudra, she supposed—were out there somewhere, potentially hurt or worse after being backstabbed by this fiery-haired creep, and she couldn’t do a thing about it. Now, to top it all off, she got to watch two of her least favorite people make out right in front of her.

With disturbing seriousness, she began to contemplate what would happen if she were to thrust her head forward hard enough that the unbending wood circling her neck would decapitate her. Would she reform still in the cage? Or would her body rejoin the head, free and ready to dispense payback? But then, just as she was about to start putting that question to the test, she noticed something that made her pause.

“Did you miss me?” Caprakan said once their lips parted. He reached up with his hands to cup her cheeks.

“All I could think about this whole time was you, Caprakan,” Akhustal confessed. “I just kept imagining all the ways that woman might have twisted your tail. But, that doesn’t matter now. You’re safe with me, my little wruelit.”

“And I thank you, my dearest, but there’s just one problem.” He lithely slipped out of her grasp, stepping away. “Nobody forced me to do anything. This is my choice, of my own free will.”

“Caprakan?! What—” the Chos began, alarmed and confused. Her voice was cut off by the sudden tightening of a wooden tendril that had slowly snaked around her throat unnoticed while they kissed. More vines, which had been stealthily creeping up around her legs, swiftly tightened as well, locking her in place just like Gabriela. Quickly they grew to wrap her entire body, imprisoning her in a Chos-shaped cage of indestructible wood.

Akhustal Palebane struggled much like Gabriela had, and found herself just as powerless. On her face, Gabriela saw an expression of profound betrayal, the sort of deep hurt that no amount of words alone could ever fully heal. The cord around her neck loosened slightly, enough for her to breathe and speak, and she began to rage.

“Caprakan, you little sack of milloc shit! How could you do this to me?! After everything we’ve been through, after everything I sacrificed—”

Gabriela tuned her out the moment her husband turned to Gabby and the cords locking her down went loose. She twisted her way out of her bindings and gave the man a steely glare. “Where are the others? If something happened to Pari, I swear, I’ll—”

“She’s fine! They’re both fine,” he rushed out. “We should get going. This way.”

Gabby grunted her assent, and she followed as they strode across the small battlefield of mowed moss stalks her fight had created. Just before they pushed into the green and blue jungle, Bloodflower paused and turned back to his partner. Red-faced and almost frothing at the mouth in her anger, Palebane continued yelling obscenities and all manner of vitriol as Caprakan blew her a kiss before turning back around and pushing past the stalks.

“You’re going to have to lead the way,” he said. “I used up most of my strength between handling her and her team members.”

Indeed, Gabriela could hear the exhaustion in his voice.

“I actually thought you’d turned on us for a while there,” she admitted.

“Had to sell it, you know? And I thought you were going to kill her.”

“I had half a mind to,” she confessed. “I know part of the deal was to not kill her, but that word means nothing compared to Pari’s safety. Remember that.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. For the deal means nothing if we lose, anyhow. That stunt I just pulled buys us an extra half a day, at most. The wood will recede after a few hours.”

“Wait, but her club doesn’t come undone, or that cell.”

Caprakan sighed dramatically. “Why is it so hard for all of you to get it through your skulls? I swear I have to explain it to one of you every other day now.”

“Because I’ve had your handiwork crush my skull to bits on several occasions, probably.”

“...Fair enough. Wood from the Mother Tree is incredibly resistant to change. If you grow and shape it quickly, like I did just now, it will start to return to its original form after a few hours. By tomorrow, you’d never know it had been altered in the first place. Things like the items you mentioned have to be molded over the course of months, usually by a whole team of people. You have to grow it very slowly, and then hold it in its final shape for many days. Only after a long time will the wood eventually begin to regard its new shape as its ‘original’ shape, so it won’t try to revert to its previous shape anymore.”

“Okay, I guess that makes sense for stuff that’s still part of Ruresni itself. Can’t you just use your powers to separate a chunk of wood from the tree and then shape it however you want?”

“If it were so easy, everybody would have something made from her wood, but no. The wood still resists, even when removed from the tree.”

“How?”

“Simple. It’s still alive. Wood from the Mother Tree lives on even when taken away from her great body. We have the oldest known trinket ever made from her wood back at our home. It’s said to be over seven hundred years old, and the wood still lives. I’ve grown it myself, just to see.”

“Why doesn’t it die?”

“Nobody knows. It is just one more mystery surrounding Ruresni. But we can talk more about that after we’ve found the others.”

“Right. Let’s pick up the pace.”

She began pushing forward harder, making less effort to move stalks out of the way and just breaking them down if it was easier.

They continued for another few minutes in relative silence before Gabriela spoke up again.

“You know she’s going to murder you, right?” she asked.

“Only if I’m lucky,” he replied.

----------------------------------------

“—and then wiggly man went all flippity-floppity and dodged all of Pari’s booms and then Cappy-friend catch beard man’s ankle and—”

“So, what really happened?” Gabby asked Bloodflower.

Having met up with the others maybe half an hour ago, the group continued to push through the moss jungle. Gabriela had taken to leaping straight up every so often to make sure they didn’t go off-course, and from what she could see, they still had hours more to go.

“She has the right of it, basically,” Caprakan told her. “My honey’s teammates got the jump on us, initially. I did my best, but every Hono is well aware of my capabilities and my weaknesses. Our moody friend did just about what you’d expect. Our petite companion, however, posed a problem they might have thought themselves ready for, but as you know, few are truly ready for what the little whirlwind has in store for them. My countrymen are not fiends and were reluctant to tie up such a bright and seemingly harmless child. Once she had her candle out and lit, it was already too late. Rudra and I took care of the rest.”

“Sounds like we got lucky.”

“In a sense. We might not have needed luck if a certain lump of muscle had done much of anything outside of holding one down and helping tie the rope.”

“Stuff it,” Rudra grumbled. The man had been sullen since she’d rejoined them, and seemed to be in no mood to talk.

His mood, of course, meant little in the face of Pari’s excitable mood.

“Hey, hey, why Ruddy not fight?”

‘Ruddy’ didn’t answer her with anything more than an annoyed look, so Gabriela chimed in.

“It goes against his beliefs.”

“But Ruddy fight bugs just fine?”

“He doesn’t fight people.”

Pari scoffed. “That stupid.”

Rudra came to a halt and let out a sigh. Gabriela tensed, readying herself to stop the man from doing anything drastic, but he just clenched his hands into fists, took a deep breath through his nose, and then unballed his fists.

“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand, kid,” he growled.

“Grandfather said person who won’t fight is called coward.”

Turning around, Rudra stared the child down with his single eye. “And what does your vaunted grandfather know of cowardice, girl?”

Meeting his heated gaze, Pari puffed up, either from pride for her scaled guardian and his greatness or from outrage that Rudra would dare question the person she revered so deeply. “Grandfather knows lots and lots! Grandfather super strong and smart!”

The large man laughed, though Gabriela could hear no humor in it. He squatted low, but even so, he still had to look down to maintain eye contact.

“Tell me, child, what does your strong and smart grandfather believe in? What ideal does he hold deep inside?” He tapped his chest twice with one of his gigantic hands.

“What Ruddy mean? Pari not understand. Grandfather is grandfather!”

“Every person is really a big messy clump of feelings and connections and urges all wiggling around. But likes and hatreds come and go; relationships morph from one thing to another over time. If you want to know what a person truly is, you have to ask... what are you willing to die for? No, not just ‘die for’, because death is easy; death is escape. What truth are you willing to suffer for? The answer to that question is the diamond found deep in the center of that misshapen clump. It is the foundation that everything else builds off of.

“The truth in my core is that harming others is wrong and that all of us should strive to build a world that reduces suffering instead of one that thrives on it. I hold onto this truth because I know it is right. I believe it because I know it is just. If I were to fight, I would be adding suffering into the world, and that would betray the truth that I claim to hold in my heart.

“The thing is, most people don’t actually have convictions—they just think they do. Any person can have convictions when things are easy. It’s when those convictions get in the way that the real truth comes out. If you are not willing to be true to a belief until the end, no matter how much it hurts or how bad it gets—if you are willing to throw that conviction aside the moment it becomes a burden—then you never actually believed it at all, did you?

“As a wonderful person I knew once said to me, ‘True beliefs are the things you stand by even when you have every reason not to.’ Those are all that define you. Everything else is but a thin coat of paint.

“My pacifism has brought me nothing but pain since I came to this world. I know well the suffering that waits down the path I chose, and yet, every single day, I wake up and choose to stride down it again, and again, and again. It’s easy to talk about courage and cowards when you’re strong, girl. What do the strong have to fear in a world where they get to make the rules? Courage has nothing to do with being willing to fight and kill other people. No, real courage is staying true to yourself even though it makes you weak, no matter how hard the world tries to make you throw yourself away.

“I have the courage to hold my truth in my heart and never let it go, no matter the hurt that will come my way. What about you, girl? Can you say the same? Can your dear old grandfather?”

“...Pari not know...”

“What about the rest of you?” he asked, standing up and turning to the others, glowering disdainfully. “Don’t think I haven’t seen the way you look at me when you think I won’t see it. You might disagree with my choice, but at least I made one. What are your truths, hm? Or, are you so cowardly that you can’t even choose a conviction, let alone live by it?”

Gabby opened her mouth, ready to unleash a quick retort, and... found that words were surprisingly hard to come by.

Pari tugged on Rudra’s sleeve. “People fight lots every day. Why Ruddy not super mad?”

Rudra sighed, the sort of tired sigh of a parent worn to exhaustion by chronically misbehaving children. “I am, Pari. I’m furious all the time. I’ve just grown used to it by now.” He turned back around and pushed a moss stalk aside. “Let’s move.”

Gabriela followed mutely, that question still simmering in her mind. It wasn’t until much later that she realized that Caprakan had never answered Rudra’s question, either.

----------------------------------------

It was with great relief that Gabby pushed aside the final stalk and stepped out into more barren terrain at last. She stopped a few paces out of the moss jungle and let herself take a long, deep breath.

“And here we arrive at the final stretch,” Bloodflower said from behind her. “Funnily enough, it should be the easiest part of this whole ordeal—”

Gabby hummed in agreement as she gazed out at the terrain ahead. As the Stragman had said, this did, in fact, seem like the easiest portion of their climb. From here on, the branch they strode upon was little more than a straight path with a moderate incline going right to the top of the tree.

Outside of a few giant shelf mushrooms that basically formed natural walls, there wasn’t much to get in their way. Even the bark seemed smoother than normal, with some noticeable grooves running this way and that along the branch.

“—as long as we avoid Alu’khan, I suppose,” he finished, mischief in his voice.

“Sorry, what was that last part?”

He smirked. “A great winged serpent who patrols the top of the trunk.”

Stragmans had their own Quetzalcoatl?

“How great are we talking here?”

“I jest, I jest,” he chuckled. “Alu’khan is merely a beast of legend, a lesser god among some of the less popular sects. If a serpent like that truly lived up here, my honey or others would have run across it by now.”

“Knowing my luck, it’s been hidden away, sleeping for the last ten thousand years,” she grumbled.

“All the more reason to get in and out as quickly as possible,” Rudra stated, coming up to join them. “Let’s push on.”

They pushed on.

For a while, nothing went wrong, which only served to increase Gabriela’s paranoia. This was too easy. Then, true to form, something finally went wrong, though not in the way Gabby expected. They hadn’t even made it more than two-thirds of the way to the trunk when Gabriela heard Rudra shout her name.

“Something’s wrong with the kid,” he called from down the slope.

Gabby practically leapt down the hill and skidded to a stop near them. Her blood ran cold when she saw Pari spasming in his arms, her eyes vacant and foam leaking from her mouth. The girl’s chest rose and fell in violent, uneven spurts as her tail lashed wildly every which way.

“What happened?!”

“Not sure. She was breathing strangely for a bit, but I thought she was just huffing from the effort of climbing this incline with her little legs. Then, she just fell over all of a sudden.”

Gabriela pulled the twitching child into her arms as the child’s body shook. “Pari, what’s wrong, sweetie?! Come back! Talk to me! Pari! Please!”

The beastkin’s body stiffened all at once, her eyes rolling back into her head. Her lips moved and it seemed like she was whispering something, but Gabby couldn’t hear it. Gabby leaned in as much as she could, getting her ear right near the girl’s mouth in time to barely make out two words before the tiny form in her arms went limp.

“...so...stinky...”

“Get me her bag, quick!” Gabby demanded.

Rudra brought the sack to her in a flash, and she immediately put Pari down and dug in with both hands. A moment later, she pulled out a handful of the sticky, pliable wax that Pari preferred to use in her experiments.

“Sorry, sweetie,” she said as much for her own benefit as Pari’s. Without hesitation, she pulled two smaller pieces out of the wax mound and unceremoniously smushed them as deep into Pari’s nostrils as she could. Then, to make sure, she did it again.

“What was that for?” Rudra asked.

“Something is overwhelming her senses. Hopefully, this will stop that.”

“You serious?”

“Her sense of smell is absurd. Haven’t you seen her sniffing things all the time?”

“Well, yeah, but I just thought that was because she was weird.”

Gabby shot him a warning glare.

“The smells on this stupid tree are so powerful they’re messing with her. Like before, with the flowers. They just smelled like nice flowers to me, but the scent alone made her high. I don’t even smell anything right now, but whatever it is, it’s too much for her to handle.”

“And you think that stuffing wax up her nose will stop that?”

“It’s the best idea I could come up with, alright? Like putting cotton or bits of cloth in your ears.”

Pari let out a tiny groan and stirred. Her eyelids fluttered and she tried to inhale, only for the wax to catch her by surprise. Her eyes and mouth shot open, she took a heaving, gasping breath. Gabby pulled the catgirl into a comforting embrace.

Pari wrapped her arms around Gabby’s neck, clinging to her like a drowning sailor clutching a board floating atop a stormy ocean, coughing and wheezing while her body trembled. All the while, Gabby held her close, stroking her soft hair and whispering calming platitudes. It took a little while, but eventually, Pari calmed down.

“Are you alright now, Pari?” Gabby asked.

Pari nodded, though she looked puzzled. “Pari’s nose can’t breathe?”

Gabby reached out and stopped the girl from sticking a finger up her nostril. Quickly, she explained what had happened and what she’d done to try to fix it.

“Is the stinky smell still bothering you?”

Pari nodded again. “Smell still super stinky, but Gabby-friend help lots! Pari not feel sick anymore.”

Gabriela had to suppress a chuckle over how Pari’s voice changed when she was plugged up. “What was it like? Was it like the flowers?”

Pari shook her head. “This smell strong. Very, very, super stronger than flower smell. Wax makes smell weaker, though. Now, close to flower pollen strong.”

Gabby frowned. “Is it getting stronger the further we climb?”

“Uh-huh. Smell come from up.” Pari pointed directly up the slope. “Pari okay for now.”

“Alright, tell me if it gets unbearable again, okay?”

“Okay!”

For a little while, Gabby carried the little girl, letting her recover some more before she eventually got too squirmy and wanted to walk on her own. As they got near the top, Pari ended up having to stop and make some sort of mixture between a thin candle and an incense stick, which she immediately lit and began to huff. It struck Gabby as a rather drastic measure, but the girl knew better, and it seemed to work.

Gabriela had spent many a moment during this whole escapade imagining what their destination would look like, but no amount of imagination had prepared her for what they found when they reached the top.

The peak of Ruresni’s trunk was shaped like a shallow bowl, with the ground sloping gently down from the edge before leveling out to form a seemingly endless rolling meadows filled with beautiful flowers glowing blue in the night. Gabriela had envisioned something like tulips in her mind, but instead, the blossoms resembled sunflowers as tall as a man, each with a large papery bulb like those of the Chinese lantern flower sticking out where the center seeds would be.

The flowers glowed from top to bottom, with the petals noticeably brighter than the body, but the central lantern glowed most of all. The massive field of these shining flowers, swaying gently in the breeze, surrounded by the glow of the tree from all around them... it all had a very peaceful and mystical ambiance, like she was looking at some sort of heavenly realm where mortals were not supposed to tread.

Gabby was entranced.

“It is said that, once we die and our souls return to the Mother Tree, we are reborn as acunai flowers upon this field,” General Bloodflower said softly, almost reverently.

“I... yeah,” she managed to mutter.

“A shame we can’t stay long. Let us collect our prize.”

The four of them headed down into the meadow.

“Does it matter which ones we harvest?” Rudra asked, pulling a flower down to inspect the sunburst of petals.

“No, any one is as good as the rest,” Caprakan told them.

“Let’s get to it, then.”

Rudra unslung their one remaining pack and pulled out the special bag they’d been given at the start of the challenge. Made of a thin, rubbery membrane, the sack was smooth to the point where it seemed to have a sheen and seemed to be made from some sort of oversized animal’s stomach or bladder or something rather than being sewn or woven. As he inspected the half-meter long and wide bag, he suddenly scowled.

“What’s this?”

He turned the sack around for them to see. At first, Gabby didn’t see anything, but closer inspection revealed several tiny burn holes dotting the rubbery material.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Caprakan sighed.

“Why, is it going to rip open if we fill it?” Gabby wondered.

“No, it should be alright in that regard. The skin is stretchy and tough, and the petals are large enough that they won’t fall out even if the holes stretch wider. The problem is that we needed a bag like this to keep the smell locked away as we travel back down. Animals will get attracted to the scent.”

“Can we fix it somehow? Sew it shut?”

“Sew it with what needle and what material?” He shook his head. “It wouldn’t keep the smell in regardless. The reason this is made from kravak lung is because air can’t escape through it. Unless we could seal it shut somehow...”

As one, then three of them looked over towards Pari. The jittery, nose-plugged, incense-huffing child was busy stuffing all manner of flower parts into metal containers.

“Pari could seal with candle,” the girl told them after they explained the problem, “but Pari not make candle while Pari not smell good. Pari need wax out first.”

“I guess we need to just deal with it until we get down to the moss and have her fix it then,” Gabby proposed.

“It’s not like we’ve been free from animal attacks so far,” Rudra pointed out.

Caprakan nodded. “Even so, I think our best move would be to have Gabriela wear the bag at all times. That way, if any creatures attack, they’ll focus on her and not the rest of us.”

“Fine, that works,” Gabby agreed.

“Wear it on your front so you can protect it,” Rudra suggested. He smirked just for a moment. “Like a fanny pack.”

“Don’t make me punch you.”

Together, the three of them harvested enough flower petals that Gabby looked pregnant with octuplets by the end. Then, reluctant as she was to turn back, they had to go. Gabby took one last moment to gaze upon the placid, quiet beauty before she walked over the lip and stepped out onto the wide branch headed down.

----------------------------------------

“We need to take a rest,” Gabriela insisted.

“We can’t afford to stop so soon,” Caprakan argued. “They’re surely almost all the way down the lower branch, if not back to the trunk already. That means they’ll be on the ground in another two days. Our best hope is to push onward as fast as we can manage.”

“I know, but I need to help Pari get the wax out of her nose now that we’re far enough down the branch. She can’t stay like this forever.”

“Quickly, then. I don’t want to stay still with the petals, either.”

Gabby jogged over to Pari, who was lagging behind. The girl seemed worn down. Perhaps it was a side effect of her alchemical solutions to the last few days’ problems? Or maybe it was her short legs making her have to work harder to keep up? Or maybe it was the wax in her nose making it harder for her to breathe? Or maybe—

“Pari thirsty.”

Gabby zipped over to Rudra and grabbed the group’s last remaining waterskin before zipping right back in a flash to Pari’s side.

“Make sure to drink before you get thirsty, Pari. It’s important to stay hydrated.”

Pari nodded between gulps.

“Now, it should be about time to get that wax out, right?”

“Pari trying, but wax sticky.”

“Maybe I can help dig it out?”

The child seemed less than enthused by that idea. “Pari try harder first. Pari tell Gabby-friend when—”

Something heavy barreled into Gabby’s side, bowling her over. Before she could even process what was going on, she felt something press down on her torso and the petal bag, holding her on her back against the ground.

The inside of a mouth more than a meter wide seemed to open up out of thin air, hundreds of wide triangular teeth designed for gripping and ripping glinting in the glow of the night. Gabby twisted and tried to fend off the incoming teeth with her left hand, only for them to bite down hard on that arm and tear it right off.

The pain swept the confusion from her mind, letting habits formed by months and months of battle finally kick in. She lashed out with her right arm, full of fury and smoke, and felt her hand stab into flesh she couldn’t see, and her hand grabbed what felt like some sort of pliable tube. The mouth opened to let out a pained screech, and the pressure on her chest lightened somewhat.

Gabby pulled. Purple blood sprayed from a floating hole in the air as her arm emerged clutching a piece of a pipe-sized artery. The unseeable creature reared back, letting her roll away and jump to her feet. Thinking quickly, she swung the petal bag around to her back like a backpack and sprinted forward.

Thanks to the blood spraying out with each heartbeat, she could make out the vague outline of a four-clawed foot, three in the front and one sticking out backward, large enough to wrap around her torso. Attached to that foot was a scaled leg as thick as she was, leading up to... thin air. The blood didn’t make up much past the leg outside of a few drops, but it was enough to point her in the right direction, and that was all she needed.

“Let’s see how you like it,” she muttered as she flashed forward and wrapped her arms around the creature’s leg. Not surprisingly, it did not like having its leg ripped off very much at all.

More violet blood sprayed forth from the beast’s suddenly empty socket, coating her and the now-tan limb which she held. It shrieked again, this time with extra agonized warbling.

Leaping up and grabbing its lower jaw, Gabby clung on as it thrashed, eventually pulling herself up and forcing its jaw open with both feet and one hand. Jamming her free hand up through the roof of its mouth, through the bottom of its skull, and into its brain, she quickly swung her limb this way and that, churning brain matter into slurry.

The lizard dropped like rock, dead as a doornail. And that’s what it was, she could now clearly see: a lizard. It most closely resembled a horned lizard from back on Earth, the sort she’d heard could shoot blood from their eyes or something, except it seemed to have some sort of crazy chameleon camouflage ability tacked on.

“What in the world...?” she heard Rudra mutter somewhere behind her.

“What a terrifying hunter! Glad we don’t see those on the forest floor.” Caprakan chuckled. “Or maybe we don’t see them!”

“Gabby-friend! Hey! Gabby-friend!”

Gabby felt tiny hands tugging on her side and tensed. She’d learned her lesson from the giant aphid attack and immediately ignored the others to focus on her kitty-girl beast radar. “What is it, Pari?”

“Gabby-friend look super cool fighting sneak beast! Gabby-friend like rawr! Pow!”

Gabby let out a held breath. “Thanks, sweetie.”

The child no longer sounded stuffed up, and two little trails of wax beneath her nostrils told her what she’d missed. It also told her that Pari could probably smell properly again.

“Pari want sneak beast eyes! Gabby-friend kill other sneak beasts for Pari too? Pari want many eyes!”

Gabriela froze. “...there’s more?!”

“Lots and lots!” the girl proclaimed with a wide-eye smile. She eagerly pointed to Gabriela’s left, back up the hill towards the trunk. Then, to Gabby’s dismay, she continued to hold her arm out, pointer finger engaged, and turned herself in a full circle.

Gabriela straightened up and searched their surroundings, her gaze frantically sweeping across the terrain but finding nothing. A blip flickered on the edge of her vision and Gabby spun to face it, but only found more nothing.

No, not nothing. There was something there, perched atop a vertical shelf fungus about thirty meters away. Gabriela couldn’t quite make it out, but she could just barely see an effect akin to the way air shimmers over a hot road, only far more subtle. Though she couldn’t see the creature’s body, the shimmer created an indistinct outline that she could barely perceive if she focused.

“Pari, get behind me,” she warned.

“Pari help!”

“No, Pari, just—”

A candle flew over her shoulder, clattering to the rough bark ground ten meters away. A moment later, it burst with a loud ‘pop!’, sending out a wave of smoke that covered the whole area in front of her in a haze. Another ‘pop!’ came from behind her, and she coughed as the two fronts of smoke converged over them.

Looking through the clouds reminded Gabriela of particularly smoggy days back in Mexico City. Her vision was cut to a few hundred meters, but she could make out long, four-legged shapes now that she couldn’t before.

One, two, three, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty...

“There’s dozens of them...” Caprakan said, his voice quiet but strained.

Gabby looked behind her and found, to her dismay, that he was looking in the opposite direction that she’d been looking. They were surrounded.

A stone formed in her gut. The odds that she could protect everybody if all these huge lizards attacked at once were not high.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” she said with calm she did not feel. “They’re attracted to the petals, right? I’ll lure them back uphill while you get out of here, then I’ll rejoin you after I’m done.”

“We’re already in their sights,” Rudra replied. “Even if you run, there’s nothing stopping them from making us easy prey.”

“He’s right,” General Bloodflower agreed.

“Then what’s the plan?” she hissed. “Give me something better! They’re going to attack any moment now!”

She could see the foggy outlines of huge lizards slowly getting over their shock, the fight impulse starting to win over the quicker-out-the-gate flight impulse. However, before Caprakan could give her an answer, and before the chameleon horned lizards could swarm them, something else she didn’t predict threw it all out the window.

Normally the glow of the tree seemed to be coming from just about everywhere equally as each leaf added its own light from a different direction. It lent the environment a very alien, uncanny vibe as shadows seemed nearly nonexistent at times and the light never seemed to change no matter how much time passed or which direction you looked.

Now, however, the glow seemed to shift, growing just enough to be noticeable off to Gabriela’s left. Preoccupied with the imminent danger presented by at least a hundred nearly invisible predators, she didn’t notice it at first, but it would have been impossible to miss what happened next.

Gabby didn’t know what to compare the experience to other than standing near a meteor striking earth. Something heavy, bright, and massive—even relative to all the other overgrown plants and animals on this giant tree—crashed down not more than twenty meters in front of her, throwing truckloads of pulverized bark into the air and sending a shockwave through the branch so strong that it sent Gabby flying.

When she managed to stop her tumble and regain her bearings, she gaped at what she saw before her. The impact had blown away all the smoke, giving her a clear view of the biggest fucking snake she’d ever seen or imagined. She’d joked in her head about Stragmans ripping off Quetzalcoatl, but here, right in front of her, was a great beast that had seemingly escaped straight out of myth.

A wall of undulating serpentine muscle fifty meters high filled her view, white scales longer than she was tall, speckled with the occasional bright blue scale, speeding past from left to right at freeway speeds. Its gargantuan mass plowed through the nearly unbreakable bark like it was nothing, which she belatedly realized were probably the wide channels she’d noticed when first arriving at the final stretch. Its body curled up from around the side of the branch, seeming to never end.

The monstrous snake turned away from Gabriela and the others, its head rearing high, poised to strike at some poor sneaky lizards on the other side of its body from them. Now that she could see the head without the smoke in the way, she could make out the wings poking out from its neck—it seemed it truly was a winged serpent. Much smaller than the broad, strong wings found on many depictions of Quetzalcoatl, these appeared almost vestigial, though they did have a gorgeousness to the way the feathers started pure white, only to transition to bright blue near the tips.

The whole snake had a mystical beauty that reminded her of the acunai flower field atop the tree. Unlike the other animals that made Ruresni their home, the snake itself glowed. Its entire body had a soft but visible azure aura, while its blue scales and its massive eyes shone with a more powerful glow like stars in the sky. Gabby found it mesmerizing.

She wasn’t the only one.

“Alu’khan... It’s real after all...” Caprakan gasped with wonder.

Then, it opened wide, revealing a maw so large that it could swallow a dragon whole with ease, and Gabby came to her senses.

“Gogogogogogogogogo!” she hollered, turning downhill and booking it.

The others needed no encouragement and likewise made tracks. That was when Gabriela realized an important issue: everybody ran at different speeds. Rudra was a large, heavily muscled man and ran like one. He wasn’t slow, exactly, thanks to his impressive height, and he had his impressive super strength to help haul him around, but it felt like most of that strength went towards torque rather than top speed. Caprakan, meanwhile, had little holding him down thanks to his slender build, but he wasn’t the tallest of people and leg length mattered when it came to this sort of thing. Speaking of tiny legs, however, the notable straggler was the tiny child laden with the big, heavy sack of candle supplies. Pari struggled to manage even half the speed of the others.

This wasn’t going to work.

Gabby skidded to a halt and turned back, sprinting at full speed over to the beastkin girl. She lifted her up against her chest, saying, “Hold on just like last time, alright?” Pari, breathing heavy to the point of panting, grunted her understanding and assent.

To make sure she stayed put, Gabby pulled tight the straps on the acunai petal bag on her back, letting them stretch from around her shoulders to the point that she could tie them together, making a sort of makeshift seat belt to hold the child in more snugly. Lastly, she grabbed hold of Pari’s sack with one hand, heaving it over her shoulder.

Taking a split second to glance at the carnage behind them, Gabriela broke into a sweat. In just moments, Alu’khan had turned the area of the lizard ambush into a wasteland of broken fungi and gigantic furrows in nearly indestructible bark.

Debris littered the area in chunks both larger than her body and smaller than her head. Were the bark a concrete grey instead of brown, the place would look more like an urban warzone after a bombing run than a living tree.

The perpetrator of all this destruction—or the perpetrator’s head, at least—rose up several hundred meters into the air, several formerly invisible lizards sliding down its gullet, and turned their way.

A fearful chill ran down her spine, the sort of alarm that she imagined prey felt when they saw a predator ready to strike. She could win against Alu’khan in a battle of attrition, surely—probably—maybe—but there was no way the others would survive if they were anywhere nearby.

Looking right at her, Alu’khan opened its mouth and let out a hiss that seemed to shake reality itself.

Gabby turned and ran. Moving with superhuman speed, she caught up with the others not more than ten seconds later and risked a glance back. The great serpent had cut their lead nearly in half.

This wasn’t going to work. She had no choice but to take drastic measures of the sort that she’d been avoiding this whole journey.

She transferred Pari’s bag to her mouth, biting down in a big wad of the fabric to keep it from slipping out, then she sped over to Rudra. With one smooth motion that was a lot harder than she made it look thanks to the man’s bulk, she grabbed him around his stomach and hoisted him over shoulder much in the same way she’d done in the burning hive.

“Wha—?!” Rudra protested, squirming against her grip.

Gabriela didn’t take the time to argue with him. She was already zipping towards Caprakan.

The Stragman struggled against his sudden hoisting just like his heavier counterpart, but she held tight. Things like working things out took time they did not have; the great serpent and its brobdingnagian maw was already almost right on top of them.

Gabby accelerated as only she could, her ears picking up the grunts of her two shoulder-borne companions and the whump of the hungry beast’s jaws closing just where they’d been a moment ago. Bark blurred beneath her feet as she picked up speed with gravity’s ample assistance.

Luckily, this decline was the smoothest and straightest leg of their journey, though she still had to make some sudden swerves and a few hops to get around some unfortunately placed shelf mushrooms, drawing some more displeased grunts from her male passengers. At least they’d figured out what was going on and stopped struggling quickly enough.

There was just one tiny problem...

The rumble of the great Alu’khan’s pursuit was not quieting nearly as much as she thought it would.

The green and blue stalks of the moss jungle waved at her from up ahead. Gabriela peeked behind her only to find the giant winged serpent alarmingly close behind them. The gap had widened a bit, yes, but at the speed the creature was motoring, it would catch up to them in at most twenty seconds if she were to stop now.

She wanted to scream. Why did this have to happen?! Was it following the scent of the flower petals? There were a billion flower petals up the branch!

The moss forest was upon them now, and stopping was not an option. Neither was just ramming through with Pari acting as a humanoid plow. That left one option.

“Hold on!” she called as she bent low before launching them all into the air to the sound of pained grunts from Rudra and Caprakan.

Gabby tried her best to make her leap as low and long as possible, hoping to soar over as much of the growth in one leap as she could while also not hurting her passengers upon landing, but there was only so much she could do. She barreled into the top third of a stalk, sticking her feet out to cushion the blow. The stalk bent and deformed, absorbing some more of the momentum. It didn’t matter.

Gabriela cringed from the sound of Rudra’s gasp, the sound of a man who’s just been kicked in the gut by a horse. General Bloodflower fared even worse, the contents of his stomach splattering all across her back and side. But Pari’s moan of pain and nails digging into the back of her shoulders distressed her most of all.

“SorrySorrySorrySorry!” she shouted as her superpowered legs threw them through the air a second time, and then a third, and then a fourth. Each time the pained moans got a little louder, the nails digging in just a bit more, and her heart sank even further.

She never should have taken Pari up here. Even though her mission would have failed without Pari, even though Pari had proved indispensable on the way up, she should have done it anyway. She should have tried to find another way. But it was too late now. All she could do was apologize with all her heart as Pari let out an ‘Ah!’ with each jump and each landing.

As they soared above the mossy mess, Gabby checked behind her again and let out a groan. Alu’khan had chosen the ‘crush and flatten everything in your path’ option and was plowing through the oversized moss like it wasn’t even there. They’d gained a lead of perhaps a minute now, but that was hardly anything.

What was their endgame, here? How long was this going to go on? What if Alu’khan kept chasing them all the way down the tree?

Her teammates couldn’t take this punishment for too much longer. Heck, she didn’t know that she could hold onto them for much longer, either. Pari’s sack, especially, was starting to slip a little from the wetness in her mouth. But the snake continued to chase them, and so she kept going.

With one final leap, they landed on the far side of the moss jungle, back where Pari had glued her to the ground what felt like a week ago but had only been merely hours earlier. Alu’khan showed no signs of losing interest, so she kept going, the wind whipping through her hair and roaring in her ears.

Somewhere up ahead grew the leaf that had been their access point to this branch, but getting there wouldn’t be easy. The terrain ahead lacked the primeval mossy overgrowth or benevolent open flatness of the last two areas, instead conforming more to the general norm of other parts of Ruresni. The terrain became far more rough and uneven from a Gabby-sized perspective, making running on it without tripping difficult.

On the Ruresni-sized perspective, the branch as a whole twisted and turned like an absolutely hammered man trying to walk home from a bar, with sudden extreme downward slopes added in for good measure. A smattering of flora and fauna served as extra obstacles, as shown by how she had to quickly juke to the side to barely avoid a strand of spiderweb as thick as her thigh.

The sudden change of direction didn’t go over well with the others. Gabby heard a ‘HUAGH!’ come from Rudra, and her ankle felt a splash of wetness. Her spirit quailed at the thought of the damage she was inflicting, but what more could she do in this situation?

To be on the safe side, Gabby decided to cut her speed just a little so that she could react sooner to surprise impediments. It would be faster in the long run, she told herself.

Her decision paid off almost immediately as not more than a hundred meters later, the ground beneath her feet abruptly fell away, the branch nosediving into a steep slope. Gabby bit back a curse as they free fell nearly ten meters before landing harder than she’d wanted. With a yelp, Pari’s grip faltered and she slid further down Gabby’s torso, her hands clawing at Gabby’s back.

“Pari! Hold on!” Gabby hollered through clenched teeth, panicking hard. She tried to bring them to a stop with just her feet, but the slope was too steep and her feet just slid, the bark tearing off the skin and leaving twin bloody trails behind her. “Just hold on as much as you can!”

They finally skidded to a halt as the gradient leveled out a bit more, and Pari wiggled and scratched her way back up, wrapping her small arms tightly around Gabby’s neck. Gabby took off without even asking if she was good to go; The faint but still present tremors passing beneath her feet told her that every second still mattered.

Gabriela didn’t know how long she ran. It might have been an hour or more, or it might have been merely fifteen minutes, but to her, it felt like an eternity. At long last, however that eternity was coming to a close. Of in the distance, she could see the wide, green-blue shapes of their exit leaf and its companion from the adjacent branch. If they could get off this branch, maybe that blasted serpent would finally give up the chase... right? Perhaps not, but what else could she do but hope?

Soon enough, they were nearly there. Her eyes locked firmly on the end of the leaf, she sprinted across the stem, then across the leaf’s wide surface. As she approached the leaf’s edge, her gaze moved to its companion from the branch beneath, and, for the first time in several days, she gazed out upon Stragma as a whole. The world seemed to open up all around her, the vastness of the land far, far, far below hitting her all at once like a sledgehammer to her skull.

Gabriela stumbled, somehow just barely keeping herself from tumbling off the edge as her joints locked up as if turned to stone.

Everything about Ruresni was huge, and that obviously included the branches. The thing about them was, they were so wide that they looked and felt enough like solid ground for Gabriela’s senses to pretend they were just that. Even the stem on this leaf was nearly a hundred meters wide. This had obscured a terrible truth from her, one she was not ready to suddenly confront without warning.

Climbing up this tree had been hellish torture, to the point that she’d thought she was going to lose her mind at times. Climbing down was many times worse, because climbing down meant looking down. All the time.

The sight made her vision spin, her heart race, her mind go blank. She was frozen stiff, but what minuscule piece of her consciousness that could still reason told her that Alu’khan would have no such issues.

‘Move! Curse you, move!’ she yelled silently at her unresponsive body, but the only movement it seemed capable of doing was trembling in overwhelming terror.

All she had to do was one jump. One leap down. It would only take a step, just a single step, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t. She had to, but she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t—

Something grabbed her by the shoulder and wrestled her back, away from the edge and its terrible view. She tripped and fell, landing on her rear. A large hulking shadow loomed over her, reaching down with one hand to untie the acunai petal bag straps—oh, Rudra; it was just Rudra. When had he gotten off her shoulder?

Freed at last, Pari woozily slid off Gabby’s chest, stumbling to her feet and swaying before sitting down.

“Pari not feel good...” she slurred.

“Me neither,” Rudra said from somewhere behind her. “I can’t move my left arm.”

No third voice joined the conversation.

The mind-scorching view was gone, and slowly her brain was coming back online—too slowly. Her breath still coming in fits and gulps, her whole body still trembling from terror and shock and adrenaline and so many other things, Gabby fought with the irrational part of herself for control. Finally, she managed to turn her head and see Caprakan’s motionless form stuck under her arm. He must have fallen off when she’d tripped. For a split second, she thought him dead, but then she felt her arm atop his torso rise and fall just slightly. That was good, at least.

Wasn’t there something she was forgetting? Something important?

Rudra unceremoniously ripped the sack from her mouth. “Pari, get out a smoke candle, quick!” he said, his voice urgent.

“Smoke... candle?”

“The one from the hive!”

“Hive?”

“The one with Jaya, the... the one with your family inside or something?”

“Happy candle!”

“Hurry! It’s getting closer!”

Oh right, Alu’khan.

“Happy candle, happy candle, happy candle...” Pari dug through her bag with both hands, a sleepy look in her unfocused eyes. After a few long moments, she pulled out a candle and gave it a long sniff. “Heeeeee.... happy candle!”

“Light it, quick!”

Pari leaned over the candle, reaching out with a hand and, after a pause, snapping her fingers. Nothing happened. “Eh?”

Another snap, more nothing.

“Mmnnnnnnn...” she moaned.

“Come on, Pari! Push through! It’s almost here! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

Gabriela shakily push herself to her hands and knees, purposely closing her eyes just in case she were to accidentally get a peek over the ledge again.

Another snap. Another. Another.

“Ah!” Pari finally gasped. “Ah? Give candle!”

Gabriela felt a large hand grab her and roughly pull her to her feet, then shove a small, smooth object into her grasp. She opened her eyes to find a small lit candle in her hands. Off in the distance, a hulking serpent was working along the leaf stem, it’s head nearly onto the leap proper.

“Quick, before it starts working, get this into its mouth,” Rudra demanded.

“B-but...” Her body still felt weak and not fully under her control, her legs shaking just from the act of standing. “I...”

Rudra sighed, stepping in front of her and reached out, his large, strong hand with its long, thick fingers wrapping tight around her throat.

“Sorry about the roughness, but I only have one working arm right now,” he rumbled.

He pivoted, taking a step toward the snake, and hurled her overhand towards their pursuer like some sort of living javelin.

Gabby hurtled though the air like an arrow, the candle held close to her chest in a vise-like grip. Alu’khan saw her coming and opened its mouth, letting out a hissing roar of challenge or maybe anger at having to chase them this far, giving her a nice big target. Except for one thing: the snake seemed to be dipping.

Alu’khan’s great mass leaning more and more on the leaf as it slithered off the branch was slowly bending the leaf down bit by bit. And so it was that, when she reached the giant winged serpent a moment later, she sailed completely over its gaping maw... and tumbled instead right into its left nostril.

Close enough. Besides, wasn’t it proper that with Pari’s candle she use Pari’s proven method?

Gabriela grabbed the soft, slimy inner flesh of Alu’khan’s nose as the creature whipped it head back and forth, trying to dislodge her. Though the flesh was slick, she held on, her other arm winding up and waiting. A moment later, when the candle finally began to belch its mind-altering smoke, she threw it with everything she had, sending it flying deeper into the beast.

The serpent sneezed, creating a massive gust of wind that finally dislodged her, pushing her back out into the open. As she scrabbled against smooth scales, she found herself face to face with the massive predator. It stared at her with its giant glowing eyes, and she stared right back.

Something inside her snapped. Memories of this entire ordeal flashed through her mind—the terrifying free climbing, the disgusting giant aphids trying to drink their juices, Pari running off with giant wasps, having to fight through an entire hive and then run through an inferno, losing all their stuff and her sword, the Chos’s cowardly ambush, and more—and her body felt ablaze with fury. This bloody beast was the final straw.

“KNOCK IT OFF, ALREADY! GO BACK TO BEING A MYTH!”

With every ounce of anger and frustration that she’d built up over the course of this accursed journey into the sky, she kicked it in the snout.

Alu’khan’s head snapped back, it neck slamming into its own body coiling around the leaf stem. It shuddered and let out a agonized wail, but she could tell that for all the pain she’d inflicted, it wasn’t much hurt. By the time Gabby landed on the leaf, it was already rising again, its gaze locked onto her with clear hatred in its eyes.

Gabby braced herself and readied a maximum strength punch. Yes, she didn’t have her weapon, but she’d managed something like this before. All she had to do was hit the snake’s head hard enough that its jaw snapped open, rip out a gigantic fang, and go to town on it. The others were far enough away now... probably... unless their battle caused the leaf to shake and throw the others off...

But just as her doubts were setting in, the snake sneezed again. And again. Its head wobbled, and its gaze lost its hard, predatory edge. To her surprise, its long, giant forked tongue squirted out from its lips and... licked her entire body, almost as a dog would.

Confused and covered is snake drool, Gabby watched as the great winged serpent Alu’khan turned away, the bulk of its body still on the branch pulling the rest of it back. With a long, satisfied hiss, it began to wrap itself around the branch, circling around it over and over as if searching for something.

Well, Gabriela didn’t much care what it was searching for. All that mattered was that it wasn’t searching for them.

By the time she returned to the others, Caprakan had regained consciousness, though he didn’t look like he wanted to get off the ground any time soon. Pari, even in her clearly addled state, did what Pari does and tried to collect as much Alu’khan saliva as she could.

“Ah, our savior returns,” he weakly jibed.

“Are you alright?” Gabby asked.

“Oh, I’ll recover in due time. Don’t worry about me. We should worry about you. I hear you froze on the edge here? That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the trip.”

“Yeah, well, I...”

“It’s fine,” Rudra told them. “I know how to fix this.”

“And how would we do that, my burly friend?”

“It’s simple. We blindfold her and I’ll carry her tied to the pack.”

Gabby swallowed. “You’re joking.”

He was not joking.

A few moments later, once everybody was on their feet and set to depart, Gabby turned back toward the branch they’d come down, and sighed. The last image she saw before Caprakan wrapped the cloth over her eyes was that of an absurdly gigantic white and blue snake, eyes glazed, wrapped around the entire branch and gnawing happily on the end of its tail like a puppy with a chew toy.

----------------------------------------

Almost two days later, the group found themselves back at the trunk, ready to climb down to the lowest layer of branches. From there, they would be halfway down, with the rest of the descent being nothing but trunk.

The trip had taken nearly two days because of the groups many injuries sustained by riding the Gabby Express, wiping out some of the time savings they’d gained fleeing from Alu’khan. The biggest reason she hadn’t simply carried the others everywhere was because she’d been afraid of exactly this sort of outcome.

Rudra had a sprained and dislocated shoulder, multiple broken ribs, and probably some other things he wasn’t telling her. Say what you might about him, the man sure could act tough. After popping his shoulder back into place, he’d climbed like nothing was wrong, not making a single noise of pain.

Besides being knocked unconscious and whatever damage might have come with that, Caprakan had a severely dislocated hip, back pain, and had even lost several teeth. Unlike Rudra, the Stragman had been quite vocal when they’d popped his hip back in place.

In some ways, Pari had suffered the least damage, but at the same time, she was the one Gabby fretted about and blamed herself for the most. A concussion. She’d given the sweet child a concussion. The very thought made Gabby feel ill.

Scyrians were obnoxiously hardy folk, however, and the pair had healed far quicker than most anybody else would. The last half day, they’d been moving about as if nothing had ever happened in the first place, which was a little relieving.

One thing she’d learned during the trip: being toted like a piece of luggage was incredibly demeaning. Gabby couldn’t move. She couldn’t see. All she could do was hang there and think as Rudra and the others descended, hour after hour. It still beat doing it herself.

“So, umm... thanks for this,” she said softly into the dark.

“You thanked me before. No need to keep doing it,” Rudra rumbled from a few feet away.

“Ha, yeah, you’re right...”

There came a pregnant pause.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said a few days back—about true beliefs,” she finally managed to say.

Gabby felt how his whole body stopped for a split second mid-climb before continuing on as if nothing had happened.

“Yeah? Finally have something to say?”

“I don’t know, I just... It really made me think about that sort of thing for the first time in a while. I used to think I knew what I believed in. I was raised Catholic since I first arrived at the orphanage. I did all the things a good Catholic child was supposed to do, and I engraved the Lord’s teachings upon my heart. I remember my neighbor commenting once on how ‘remarkably devout’ I was for somebody my age. Then I ended up here, and all that belief didn’t even last a week. I knew what I was doing when I tossed it all aside, and I did it anyway. And then I’ve spent almost all my time since then avoiding thinking about it. I can’t help but look at myself now and realize that I’m empty. Perhaps I’m the one who should be called a ‘Shell’.”

Rudra snorted. “Is there nothing you have left to believe in, then?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I—” She hesitated, not sure if she should say it. “I shouldn’t.”

“Just say it,” he told her.

“There’s one thing I still hold on to. If I had to put it into words, it would be... ‘children are everything.’”

Rudra went quiet for a long moment.

“Quite the statement from perhaps the world’s single most prolific orphan creator,” he finally said.

“That’s why I didn’t want to say it...” Gabriela replied, her voice hollow. “Do you know what they call me in other places? My nickname, or title?”

“Not really.”

“They call me the Monster. Even the Ubrans called me that while I fought for them.”

“Even your side called you that?”

“Yes.”

“And you let them?”

“Yeah... I could have pushed back. The commanders could have snuffed it out pretty easily if I had asked them to. But I didn’t, because I knew that I am a monster. I condemned this whole world to years of chaos and war for nothing but the possibility of returning to my kids. I chose to damn countless innocent children to lonely lives filled with misery, all just for the chance to see their faces again. I chose that, and there isn’t a better word than ‘monster’ for somebody who would make that decision. But what really gets to me is that, if given that same choice again... I would like to say that I would choose differently now, given everything that I have learned, but... I can’t say that. Not without feeling like I’d be lying. Even now, I’m still the Monster.”

“So, really, it’s not ‘children are everything’, but rather ‘my children are everything’.”

“I... I guess so, yes. But what good does a sentiment like that do in a world without my children? What’s the point of holding that in my heart when I know that I will almost surely never see them again?”

“Then change it in your heart.”

“Sorry?”

“Do you know what I was before I became a pacifist? I was a thug. A hoodlum. I did some low-level crime, fought as a part of a small gang against other local gangs—that sort of thing. I lived a very violent life, and I hurt some people very badly. I don’t think I killed anybody, but with some of the injuries I handed out, I will never be able to say for sure. Would you like to know a secret?”

“Um, sure.”

“When I first became a pacifist, I didn’t believe in pacifism.”

“I don’t understand?”

“I fell in love with a girl who was a pacifist, so I followed what she taught me so I could be around her and so she would like me. I didn’t actually care about those things, I only pretended to. Then, one day, I woke up and realized that it wasn't an act anymore. Those principles I had lived for selfish, shallow reasons had taken root within my spirit without me even knowing, and for some time I had believed in them for their own sake. I saw the good that I had done, and the harm that I had prevented. I saw how much better the world would be if only more people walked the path my lover and I walked. I was a changed man, and the one who had changed me was myself, just by living my truth.

“That’s the real secret I want you to know. Sometimes, if you live a truth, even if it is a hollow, false truth, it can become something more. It can grow into something strong and real, the sort of thing that you would face the weight of the world to uphold. It happened to me, and my leap from lowlife to what I am today was a large one. All you have to do is make it from loving your children to loving all the other children too.”

“I’ve been trying, but even so, I don’t know if I have the right to say or believe that sort of thing after everything I’ve done already.”

“I agree, you’ve done many terrible things—unforgivable things, in my mind—but this isn’t about the past. This is about the future. You cannot change the suffering that you already brought into this world, but you can change the good that you can create from this point on. Others will call you a hypocrite or hate you, but if your truth is solid, their words will be little more than noise.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so, because I have lived it. Now tell me, Gabriela Carreno the Monster, what do you believe, deep in your soul? What is your truth?”

“‘Children are everything.’”

“Your children?”

“All children. They need to be guided. They need to be protected. They need to be loved and cherished.”

“Then take that truth and let it crystallize inside you. Let it be the bedrock that everything else builds on top of. Live by it, and one day you will realize it has transformed you for the better.

“But, this is not something that can work if you half-ass it. You have to commit fully and with everything you have. Tell me, what have you done already?”

“Well, I spend time at an orphanage, helping the people there. And, I have helped some children in trouble, though the trouble was in large part because of what I’ve done, so...”

“Then, about the future. What can you best do now to help as many children in this world as possible.”

“...I can leave.”

“Gabriela, don’t play games with me.”

“No, I’m serious. It’s... I’ll explain later. I promised you that already. Other than that, I don’t really know.”

“Well, you have plenty of time. Think about it. Ask others. You don’t have to chart you own path alone. And when you finally know, tell me.”

“...I’ll try. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

They settled into a few minutes of silence.

“Any chance I’ll be able to take this blindfold off soon?” she finally asked. “It’s all sweaty and sticky.”

“...not for another two hours at least, I’d say.”

Gabriela sighed.

----------------------------------------

By the end of the second day, the group had made an encouraging amount of progress. They’d made it to the lowest layer of branches—which still left the vast majority of the trunk left to go, unfortunately—before two swarms of beetles clashing over territory had forced them to veer off of their branch and onto one of the few broad leaves to be found this far down. Making camp, they settled down to cook, eat, rest, and plan. Now that Pari had repaired the damaged petal bag, they didn’t have to worry anymore about the scent attracting more wildlife to ambush them as they took a break.

“Our best hope is that my honey got delayed on the way down,” General Caprakan explained as they sat around a small candle-born fire, cooking the last of their rations. “While I doubt they’ve had to deal with as much as we have, they should still run into their fair share of obstacles and setbacks. If the Mother Tree were an easy thing to traverse, it wouldn’t make a very good trial, would it?”

They’d set up near the center of the leaf, which stretched out in all directions for hundreds of meters. Gabby could almost be convinced they sat on solid, slightly soft earth if not for the barely perceptible movement beneath her feet that came when the wind blew hard enough. Even that was so subtle that she couldn’t say for certain she wasn’t just imagining it. Still, it was enough to settle her nerves somewhat.

“This is her third time, though,” she pointed out.

“True, but that doesn’t mean she has experienced all this place has to offer. We can only hope.”

“How much further do we have to go before we’re back on solid ground?” Rudra wondered.

Bloodflower stroked his chin for a moment. “About twelve or so leagues, I should think. If we go as fast as we can manage, take some risks, and get lucky, we might be able to do it in two full days, perhaps. Our chances are slim, but they still exist.”

“What about your blimp?” Rudra wondered. “Couldn’t we just ride that down the rest of the way?”

The Stragman shook his head. “That would likely count as outside assistance, which would make us forfeit. Can’t risk it.”

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” Gabby added. “I can’t find the remote control.”

Rudra stiffened at the words. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”

“Exactly what I said. I checked the pack and it’s missing.”

“When’s the last time you saw it?” Bloodflower inquired.

“Before the snake, while we were packing the petals. Was too busy after that to check again until now. It must have fallen out during the chase.”

“But... then how do we get on board?”

Gabby shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll try to find a way, but if we can’t, we’ll just have to go on foot.”

Rudra groaned and laid down, the thought alone enough to tire him out.

Gabby sighed. They were all worn out. Days of pushing herself had combined with the overwhelming stress to fill her with a sort of exhausted restlessness, the sort one might get on hour thirty of an all-nighter but stronger. “I’m going to go look around again,” she said, climbing to her feet.

The night was quiet, with little to hear except the soft padding of her feet upon the leaf and the occasional rush of wind in her ears. In most places in this world, she’d have been able to hear at least the songs of insects, birds, or Scyria’s absurdly diverse and abundant lizards. Things were a bit different here, she supposed, when one bird would be a dozen meters long and likely have a huge territory or something.

Now halfway between the leaf’s center and one of the sides, Gabby glanced back at the others. They are an eclectic bunch, to be sure, but she’s come to respect them through their shared ordeal.

Rudra is reclining like he tends to do when they stop, his large body stretched out and his head tilted towards the single flame. Gabby still finds his attitude and self-imposed limitations to be aggravating, but she can understand the reasons behind it a little more, she supposes. Maybe it was just finally seeing the anger he kept inside that made her connect with him more than before.

She could not deny that he had been the workhorse of the team. When Caprakan was too exhausted, he was there to take up the load. When she fell, he was the most reliable of anchors to stop her. When she couldn’t manage to climb down, he... well, there was no need to revisit that morning’s shame right now.

What mattered was that he was the constant rock keeping the team together, even if he could be rather surly and grumpy most of the time. It still took a little work to overlook the fact that the only reason there needed to be a team in the first place was his blasted stubbornness, but her initial ill will toward the man had largely faded. She respected how upfront he was about his presence with them. The man had a goal and made no effort to disguise it.

Gabby could not say the same about General Caprakan Bloodflower. Even now, she couldn’t quite trust his explanations about his presence with them, nor did she like how interested he seemed in Pari. And then, there was his single requirement as compensation for his participation, the one that Gabriela had agreed to only out of necessity. She couldn’t fully trust somebody who would willingly do something like that to their most precious person...

Still, his knowledge had showed its worth multiple times. What’s more, he’d saved her when the Chos had attacked. If he’d come to betray them, it would have happened then. She also appreciated how he would sometimes erect fences when they’d rest in cracks in the bark. It helped her nerves.

Right now he was hunched down beside Pari, having a quiet discussion with the child who was nodding vigorously. Gabby frowned. She didn’t like the idea of him influencing her in any way. She wanted Pari to stay Pari for as long as the world would allow.

Even now, with the prospect of failure—and a whole heap of regrettable violence to follow—lurking up ahead, the child was all smiles. Gabby wasn’t sure if the catgirl didn’t know why they were climbing this tree, didn’t understand, or just simply didn’t care. Knowing Pari as she did, Gabby supposed it was a mixture of all three.

Despite her promise to not put the girl in danger, she found herself glad to have her along every time she saw that wide, delighted smile. Pari was having the time of her life here, and that was good; at least somebody was having a fun time during this disaster.

And, as much of a pain as the beastkin’s recent antics had been, Gabriela couldn’t avoid the fact that they would have been in heaps of trouble without her there. Gabby had always known that Pari’s strange alchemical abilities were worth acknowledging, but she’d had no idea how varied, useful, and downright powerful they were. Again, her thoughts flashed back to the vision. Could Pari make another candle like that for her? Would it even be right to ask?

Gabriela often struggled to spell out in her mind just what Pari was to her, or what she was to Pari for that matter. The part of her that hated herself would say that Pari was little more than a child-shaped plug she was desperately shoving into the hole that her summoning had ripped out. The fact that Pari was cute, joyous, and lovable did little to quiet that particular voice, largely because she feared it was at least partly correct.

Another part of her envied the child for being able to do what she couldn’t. Not the candles or the being raised by a dragon or any of that—the way she’d remedied the loss of her original family by simply creating a new one. Gabriela wished she had the bravery to do something like that. The closest she’d ever gotten to finding that bravery had been that time in the zeppelin months ago, back when Pari had tried to induct her into the child’s weird idea of sisterhood.

She’d almost gone along with it—almost—but in the end, she hadn’t been able to. She’d felt like joining Pari’s family would mean throwing away her own, for as little sense as that made. She’d worried that to let the door open even a crack would lead to her losing her drive, which had already been faltering. She’d feared it would be the first step towards her being comfortable, and she did not deserve comfort.

It was a small thing, really—just a single word. After Gabby had turned down “sister”, leading Pari to switch over to “friend” instead, the difference in classification had not altered the way the girl treated her in any noticeable way. She basically acted like Gabby was family anyway, just with a different word tacked onto the end of her nickname.

Still, Gabriela knew that if she were to tell Pari that she’d changed her mind, the little catgirl would add her to the family ledger faster than she could whip up a candle. And yet, even now, Gabriela still found herself unable to speak the words.

Gabby was a parent without children while Pari was a child without parents; their needs were well suited for each other. Despite this knowledge, she just couldn’t do it. Maybe that voice in her head was right. Maybe she did view Pari as a way to soothe her pain rather than as a person. That was no way to treat a child. Children were everything.

Gabriela shook those ideas from her head and turned away again. Her thoughts were a mess. She kept walking.

Gabriela approached the side as close as she felt comfortable—about thirty meters from the edge, right where the leaf began to slope downward—and looked down. Even from that distance, she could see enough of the forest floor off in the distance, lit by the mighty tree’s glow, to somewhat digest just how absurdly high they were.

With the weird way information flowed between people in this world, things like measurements worked in a somewhat confounding but functional way: the recipient would get an impression of the measurement, and their mind would convert that to a fairly accurate approximation.

In this case, Gabby’s mind had converted General Bloodflower’s estimate of their elevation to “about twenty-five kilometers”. That alone was enough to make her head spin, but this view was another matter entirely. Even if she wanted to, she wasn’t sure she could get her legs to take another step forward.

It was funny, in a way, how this gave her what she was looking for. She’d wanted to clear her head of all those depressing thoughts, and nothing cleared her head more effectively than sheer terror.

“Gabby-friend!”

A voice cut through, bringing her back to the present. She turned around to find Pari rushing over, a large wooden cup held in front of her with both hands.

“Pari bring Gabby-friend soup meal!”

“Aw, thank you, Pari. That’s so sweet of you.”

She took the cup from the child and took a sip. Thanks to their circumstances, they were nearly out of food and didn’t have the time to scavenge or hunt for more—not that she trusted anything on this blasted tree to be edible, anyway. That meant stretching out what little they had through the time-honored medium of soup.

For what it was, the hot liquid tasted pretty good, if a tad tangier than the other times they’d made it. Perhaps her taste buds were simply so starved for flavor that their standards had fallen to the point that dirt would taste good right now, but she wasn’t going to test that theory.

“Gabby-friend, why Gabby-friend get so scared of being high?”

Gabriela smirked slightly at the wording. Being high was actually the best way for her to not be so scared.

“Didn’t we talk about this a while back?”

“Uh-huh, but Pari not understand then, and Pari still not understand. Why Gabby-friend afraid of thing that cannot hurt Gabby-friend?”

Gabby let out something halfway between a chuckle and a sigh. “I ask myself that more than I’d like to admit,” she confided before gulping down some more soup. Her head felt a bit woozy; perhaps all the stress was finally really getting to her? She must have been more fatigued than she’d thought.

Pari moved closer, arms out for an embrace, only to run face-first into the large bag of acunai petals which Gabby had moved back to her front—she felt it was easier to protect it that way. Gabby pulled the bag around to wear it like a backpack again, just for a moment. Pari darted in immediately and wrapped her into an adorable little hug, pressing her head against Gabby’s chest. Gabby reflexively reached out with her free hand and patted the girl’s soft hair, eliciting a soft purr.

“When Pari was scared of baths, Grandfather made Pari take bath until Pari stopped being scared,” she said from down by Gabby’s torso.

“Oh, if only it was that easy,” Gabby sighed.

“It’s okay!” Gabby heard the sound of a tiny hand making a tiny snap. “Pari help Gabby-friend!”

“No, it’s alright...”

“‘Friends help friends with their problems!’, just like Gabby-friend told Pari!”

The beastkin stepped back a few steps, giving Gabby a wonderful view of her wide, adorable smile. Then she stepped back some more. Then, even more. And then, she waved.

“Soup meal wear off soon. Bye bye!”

Something kicked Gabriela in her lower stomach, throwing her backward and into the air, pressing with great, constant force. She looked down and found a strange candle, wide and short, with its base stuck on her abdomen just below her belly button. A great gout of flame shot out of its top like a rocket, pushing her up and away with greater and greater speed.

What?! How had Pari managed to stick that on her without her noticing?!

Gabby frantically grabbed the rocket candle and pulled, but it did not budge. That super glue from before! Pari had adhered the candle to her skin, meaning there was no way to rip it off without ripping off her skin with it. Instead, Gabby crushed it in her hands, bringing the reaction to a sputtering halt.

It was too late. As she slowly spun in midair, with nothing around to interact with, she caught sight of the leaf’s edge. With utter horror, she realized that she was not going to land back on the leaf... not even close.

There was nothing she could do.

As Gabriela tumbled past the edge, she got one final glimpse of the cheery child still energetically waving as she shrank into the distance, and then there was nothing left between Gabby and solid ground but several dozen kilometers of open air. As she began to plummet, a single thought managed to manifest before her mind devolved into a shrieking pandemonium of panic and terror.

Maybe, just maybe, children were a mistake.