It turned out, Forli hadn’t actually known where the Crone was. But she had known where Thea, the Crone’s eldest daughter was, and she knew that the Crone had entrusted her location—which was nearby—to Thea.

Right now, they were in a very idyllic grove around a small pond, looking at a beautiful willow tree.

“Thea, it’s me! Your sister, Forli! Come out, come out wherever you are!”

Thea stepped from the willow. She was five-foot-ten, thin and graceful, and beyond gorgeous in the dryad fashion, with long deep green leaf hair, honey wood colored skin, and small but perfect breasts, which were clearly visible as Thea was utterly naked.

“What brings you here, Forli?” She asked, her voice almost musical.

Forli nervously tapped her fingers together. “Um, so, Ty thinks he can save Mo—um, save The Crone.”

“That’s not possible for a mortal,” Thea said, but Ty thought she sounded hopeful.

Forli half-turned to Ty, motioning to him. “Well, he has a dungeon core. If Mom becomes his dungeon boss, then she’ll be immortal. And perhaps more seeds of our future sisters will be born from the dungeon. Ty thinks it could happen, and he’s super smart.”

Thea thought for a moment. “Well… I was told not to admit anyone to the Heart of the Forest to see The Crone fifty years ago. But, I have to admit, sister, you tempt me to violate that rule now—a second time, I might add—as that is… potentially wonderful.”

“I think it’ll work. Please, Thea—let’s at least try, okay?”

Thea considered for a few seconds longer, then gave a firm nod. “Very well—If it doesn’t work, The Crone can punish him. But the chance it does is worth the violation. I would want this as well, very much. Let’s be off.”

That easy? Ty thought. He hadn’t even spoken! Thea must have really wanted some chance to save her mother.

Ty had another thought. “Actually, fair Thea, would you be willing to heal me, perhaps? I find myself… perforated.”

Thea chuckled, then reached one willowy arm out, her grace somehow perfect even in that tiny movement, and touched his shoulder. A wave of Wyld magic, of spring, renewal, and new growth, passed through him. His wounds healed, the scabs falling off.

Thea uses regeneration, Rank V on Ty. You receive 8 health per 6 seconds.

It all happened extremely quickly, but Ty was staring at Thea, and he knew his own eyes were huge now. She has to be at least Level Twenty to have a rank V ability! That’s amazing!

She smiled a small, smug smile at him. Then she turned to Forli. “Will you be going to see our progenitor in… that?”

Forli looked down, seeming to realize she was in clothing. “Um, no, sorry Thea,” she said, and reached down and pulled the shift off, revealing her own far larger breasts and the cleft between her legs to Ty. Maybe Thea was far more classically beautiful than Forli, whom Ty had always thought of as the cute type, but something about her stripping in front of him brought attention to her nakedness and sexual appeal in a way that the similarly undressed Thea, who was more obviously a nature spirit, didn’t.

For a moment Ty tried to look away, but given it was half a day to see the Crone he wouldn’t be able to help but looking at his friend. He hadn’t ever thought of Forli that way, despite enjoying her company, but now… well, he just had to make sure he conducted himself properly. Ty firmly believed you shouldn’t be punished for thoughts, and as long as he remained Forli’s perfect friend, nothing else mattered. And he would.

“It’ll be about twelve hours of walking to reach The Crone,” Thea said, turning, her perfect rear exposed as she walked away. Forli hurried after Thea, the shorter dryad’s curves bouncing as she walked.

It’s going to be a great yet terribly frustrating twelve hours, Ty thought to himself as he eyed the two sets of buttocks on display.

***

Finally, closer to fourteen hours later—when Ty was exhausted far past the point of anything more than the vaguest appreciation of the female beauty around him—the three broke out from the latest path they were travelling.

They entered into the Heart of the Forest, a huge glade. It was a couple hundred feet across, with most of it shielded from the sky by a single great tree, its gnarled branches thrust into the sky. The tree was truly massive, a couple hundred feet tall and spread widely across the heavens. Dappled light came down through the thick leaf canopy, and there were patches of moss on the few stones in the glade, giving it an ancient feel. A few bees and butterflies flitted about, and the air felt tranquil.

About twenty dryads, most similar in appearance to Thea—green leaves for hair, slightly brown woodgrain skin, but still utterly beautiful and utterly naked—lounged around the grove. At the far end, near a large pond, sat the target of his expedition—the Crone herself.

She was sitting on a moss-covered rock, her feet in the water of the pond. Ty had heard she was over ten thousand years old, and she looked it. The dryad was probably ten feet tall standing, but she sat hunched over. Her limbs, even though wood, appeared shriveled. White moss hung down around her head and face, and the wood that was her skin was wrinkly like old human skin but cracked in places like untreated wood as well.

Thea stepped in front of Ty, bowing almost double facing The Crone. “I brought visitors, progenitor. I know you bade me not to, but please, hear them out.”

“Welcome to my home,” the Crone rasped out, her voice cracking branches and the speech of a very old woman mixed together. She didn’t gesture much as she spoke, only shifting slightly on her rock. “And welcome to our heart, my youngest.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Ty bowed deeply, hand over heart, in the Averian fashion. “Thank you for having me, progenitor. I am deeply honored and privileged to be allowed into your home and your presence, and to be able to present my proposal that you become my dungeon boss and live forever.”

Forli bowed as well next to him, but The Crone ignored her after the initial welcome.

The Crone gave a raspy chuckle. “You’re smooth, aren’t you, Tywyndyll? And polite. Not like the Wyld magic I represent at all, are you?”

“I…?” What? “Um… yes, I’m polite? But why does that make me unlike your magic?”

“Nature is never polite. It might be eating your face, it might be a subtle dance of tree, flower, and bee. It might be invisible, a stalking panther ready to pounce. But never polite.”

“I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. Should I be rude?”

How did I get into this bizarre conversation?

The Crone fidgeted on her stone again, as if she were shifting a weight on her shoulder. “Where did you learn this politeness, and why do you use it?”

Ty hadn’t really considered it, but, in the face of questioning by a near-god, gave it some honest thought.

“I use it because it’s the most likely to get me what I want without getting me in trouble. I guess I learned it from my father, one of the very few things he taught me.”

“Don’t care for your father much, do you, youngling?”

“He was a slaver and a rapist,” Ty said. And human. Who gave me up after getting us tossed from his wealthy house. He’s why I have no place I belong.

“True, for as far as it goes. Does it mean nothing, then, that your father turned from the path he knew his whole life, from wealth, power, and prestige, to set your mother free? That he gave up his power and control over others, his luxury, and turned to the path of good without being forced to it?”

“How… How do you know that?”

“I hear things, youngling. Like how the new kingdom you’ve joined has itself a human seneschal. Your father. But enough of that—answer my question.”

“Of course it means something. But his actions had consequences.”

“Hmm…” the Crone said, staring at him with her nearly empty eye sockets. The silence stretched uncomfortably.

Ty was sick of discussing his father. “Wouldn’t you rather talk about my proposal? To become a dungeon boss?”

She gave a sigh of long suffering. “Mayhap. But on the other branch, perhaps knowing whose garden I will plant myself in forever is a worthwhile way to pass time. If I become your dungeon boss, I have no say anymore. You choose the rooms of the dungeon—all I can do is advise you. Plus I can choose to reveal, or not reveal, the secret paths to power that are unique to the dungeon I will form. It’s a very small tool with which to accomplish my goals. I’m not sure I want to take that path, and learning about you will make my decision easier.”

“I understood the alternative was dying,” Ty said cautiously, noting that the dryads were all slowly making their way closer to him. He was a hundred percent positive that the Crone could kill him fine without help, but still, them closing ranks felt… sinister, somehow.

Ty ignored the dryads moving closer and continued. “When your daughter Forli and I were friends in Cliff Pass together, she told me that you were almost at the end of your time on this world, and I read that a dungeon boss is immortal.”

“Yes. I have very little time left. A few decades at most, a few years more likely. My power has, finally, faded from this world.”

Ty spread his hands, still eyeing the dryads approaching through the glade. “Well, then.”

The Crone gave a raspy laugh that turned into a cough. “Well, what, youngling? You think I’m afraid to die, to leave this world? That a chance at immortality is an unbeatable argument for me to join you and serve you?”

Ty felt his face heat. He had thought that.

The Crone gave another raspy laugh. “I like that the current batch of elves are a bit more honest. Or at least their cheeks are. But know, youngling, that you’ve got a frog’s position. I took, and lost, multiple progenitor lovers before the Dark God Cyr even started his big hoorah.”

Big hoorah? Ty thought wryly. The cataclysm was a big hoorah?

“I saw the earliest stripling high elves of Averia when they were first fumbling together a city. When I saw them, I rejoiced, you hear? I rejoiced because I had also seen the rise of the Old Ones and their depravity before the elves. I saw those blighters build the undercity of Calasti, the city that is now but a layer that the current ruins rest on.”

Okay, yeah, you’re super old. It’s genuinely impressive, but—

The Crone wasn’t done. “I have seen twenty-eight progenitors of the forest rise, nineteen whose very names are now lost. And in the forest of Averia alone, I have seen six dark progenitors rise and I was involved in putting all of them down.”

She paused in her tirade for a moment, and Ty politely waited. “I’m tired. Tired to my very roots. I’m ready to give up this toil and accept that I failed in my attempt to rise to the next stage. Of all the beings like me whom I’ve ever heard of, whether they take the name proto-god, progenitor, abomination, herald, or some other silly title, all failed or ascended in less than half the time I have managed to just stay me.”

The sheer depth of time and experience that the Crone had experienced was shocking to Ty, and he just bowed again, hand over heart.

The Crone coughed, a longer series, and Ty wondered what could be stuck in her throat, or if this was just some metamagical representation of her failing nature.

Then she jabbed her sharp, branch-like finger in his direction again. “So it behooves you, youngling, to answer my question. Did your father redeem himself by giving up his wealth and power to set your mother free? Because if you don’t answer, or if I think you lied, I will happily choose to be done with it all.”

Ty really didn’t want to talk about it, but the Crone had made clear that if he refused to answer, his whole plan would fall apart. He didn’t have another boss monster in mind if she turned the offer down.

And the dryads had all gathered very close in the dark glade. Some merely had to reach their hands out to grab him.

Even Forli was clutching her limbs to herself, looking at her sisters with wide eyes and biting her lip.

Up close, they all appeared slightly different—different-colored wood skin or eyes, and hair that might have been vines, or moss, or hanging leaves. Ty suspected that they’d come from different trees, some magical, some mundane.

He tried not to notice their slightly different, um, womanly parts, either.

They all had a hard cast to their features that made that a bit easier than it normally would be for Ty. He figured he better answer the Crone for his personal safety as well. “It’s hard to come back from such a thing, but I’ll accept that perhaps he did redeem himself. While my mother will never love him, she does feel that he is morally clean, and she was the wronged party. But it was arrogance that made him conceive the terrible plan in the first place, and it was arrogance that caused him to decide for me and my sister that we would grow up poor with my mother when she left him, and to strip from us the chance to be scions of House Orsini. He could have kept us in the divorce—he had all the power. Then we would have been heirs to seats in its ruling structure. So even if he redeemed himself of the one act, even his redemption requires redemption.”

The Crone took a moment to answer. “House Orsini is a pack of jackals, run by those who deal with the Blood Tribes of the orcs and a hundred different slavers. Every member of its council is evil. And the land your family comes from, the city Steelport, is a filthy human hive built on breaking the land as well as war against others. Would you rather have been one of them, youngling?”

“I could have reformed them, if I’d inherited a council seat, like I should have.”

The Crone laughed. “I would be curious to see if you would have reformed them, or if you’d have been corrupted, youngling. Very, very few have the moral fortitude to spurn the seat they sit on. But I judge you have answered honestly, at least.”

“You’ll join me, then?”

“Hmm…” the Crone said, pondering. “Honest is not the same as well. But you’re young, and you do seem to try for the good…”

Ty waited, his breath held, for her answer, praying to a whole host of gods that his own answer had been good enough.