Mag and I wandered aimlessly for a while. Eventually, branching off from the main path, we saw a short, narrow path that led to a small clearing. It was very late now, and we decided this dry patch of dirt was as good a resting place as any.
As we entered the clearing, we saw the words “SAFE ZONE” written in the dirt in large letters. And, indeed, this place was safe. Throughout the night, several araknor passed by on the main path but paid us no attention. Some of them even looked straight at us, but it was like we were invisible.
As we rested, Mag and I explained to each other how we had gotten here. I told her how I found the Emerson RPG cartridge among her NES games (she swore she had never seen it in her life) and how I had been taken hostage by hundreds of butterflies.
Mag said she had been asleep when she heard me screaming for help in her dreams. “I woke up, and something felt seriously wrong. Everything was still and silent. The clock wasn’t even ticking, and the fridge wasn’t humming or anything. I went downstairs to check on you, but you were frozen like everything else and covered in glitter. I tried to shake you awake, and as soon as I touched you, I was in these woods, watching you get attacked by those spiders.”
We talked at length about what this place might be. Mag was a lot smarter than me, so she did most of the talking. She agreed that everything felt way too real to be a dream. Also, although I had gotten here through a video game console, we concluded that this was definitely not just some super-high-tech virtual reality game. Mag was also certain we weren’t dead. She said if we were dead, we’d know it.
“But what other explanation could there possibly be?” I asked.
“There are probably trillions of other explanations our brains can’t even comprehend. There’s a lot about time and space we don’t understand.” She went on about the space-time continuum, the theory of relativity, wormholes, and other things she had read about in her science books.
Wormholes sounded like the only thing I had any chance in hell of understanding, so I asked her to explain those in more detail. She did, but they were a lot more complicated than they sounded, and I didn’t grasp any of what she said.
Ultimately, Mag concluded that we had been transported to a world that was in a different dimension from our own. She said that kind of thing happens all the time but that we’re not biologically equipped to perceive it in most cases.
Her postulations and suppositions went on for some time. Amid the long words and complicated concepts, I surrendered to exhaustion and fell asleep.
I awoke feeling much more refreshed than I expected. I was no longer cold or wet, nor was I lying on the cold ground I had fallen asleep on; instead, I lay upon a bright purple mushroom softer than any bed on Earth.
The whole forest had transformed overnight. The trees weren’t blue or crying or grumbling anymore. They were now all the same brilliant shade of yellow that my friend had been when he passed away, and the morning sun beamed through them as if some god were smiling upon us. The apple trees now bore fruit, and I suddenly savored the scent of pine and dirt that I had despised so much the night before.
Mag woke up shortly after me. The change of scenery disoriented her momentarily. “Where are we now? A Bob Ross painting?” she asked. “I’m definitely not complaining. I’m just confused.”
“I think we’re in the same forest,” I said. “Look here: ‘SAFE ZONE’ is still in the same spot in the same writing.”
“Oh, Sherlock Holmes over here,” Mag said, hopping off her pink mushroom-bed. “Right, then. Let’s go explore.”
I found her eagerness inappropriate. Before falling asleep the previous night, I had hoped to wake up back at Mag’s house as inexplicably as I had arrived in this forest. Kind of like how when your computer randomly stops working and then fixes itself when you shut it off and turn it back on. Since that hadn’t happened, I was now deeply concerned that we might be trapped in this dimension forever.
“How can you be so chipper right now?” I asked.
“Because it’s fucking cool that we’re in another dimension. This is a once-in-a-lifetime situation we’ve found ourselves in. Actually, it’s more like once in a billion lifetimes. Plus, since time is frozen in our dimension, we’re in no rush. We might as well enjoy ourselves. We might forget about all this when we return to Earth.”
“If we return to Earth,” I said.
“Either way, we need to explore.”
“But what about the araknor?”
“We’ll be fine. Even though this forest and everything in it is definitely real, we can still think of it as a VR game. And there’s not a game we can’t beat. We just have to find the exit and beat up some spiders along the way.”
“That’s easier said than done.”
“Yeah, well so’s pretty much everything when you think about it. Besides, even if we die in this world, our physical bodies are still on Earth, so we’ll probably just wake up back at my house. It will feel like this was all a dream. If we even remember it.”
I frowned. “You don’t know that for sure. There’s a lot worse that could happen if we die. Trillions of worse things. Things we don’t even understand.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know... Wormholes?”
Mag raised a confused eyebrow at me. “How do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just feel like we shouldn’t take any chances. Not until we know the consequences of dying in this dimension.”
“What do you propose we do, then? Just lie here and wait for death? Besides, you saw me take out that araknor last night. I can handle ’em.” To prove her point, Mag did some roundhouse kicks to the air, but I wasn’t impressed, and I folded my arms across my chest to let her know so.
But she was insistent. “Oh, come on! We’ll be fine! If we can beat Battletoads, we can get out of this forest. The only way we won’t get out is if we stay put.”
Mag was right. To stay put was to guarantee that we’d be stuck in this dimension, so I agreed to go exploring with her.
We spent the morning roaming the forest trails and searching for anything that might indicate how to get back to Earth. We came across no araknor, though we occasionally heard them wreaking havoc on the trees off in the distance. Now that the forest was yellow, the trees laughed when they were chopped down as if it tickled to be killed. I’m unsure whether that was more or less disturbing than the groaning of the blue trees.
After a time, we were greeted by an apple tree that lived just off the side of the path. “Hello, Emerson!” she said pleasantly, waving her leaves at us. “Hi, Mag!”
“Hello!” I said, equally pleasantly but also a little confused. I wondered how this tree knew my name.
“You’re probably wondering how I know your name,” the tree said. “We all know about you. After all, Emerson, you ended our despair.”
“Sorry, I did what now?” I said. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”
“Here, have an apple while I explain.” With its lower branches, the tree plucked two fragrant, bright red apples from itself and handed them to us. My apple was delicious. I could have eaten ten of them, even though I wasn’t hungry. I should have been hungry, I realized, but I guessed you didn’t need food to survive in this dimension. I wondered how many problems would be solved on Earth if we had the same system. Probably just the one (i.e., world hunger). Everything else would probably still suck.
“Your story has been passed along to all of us by the winds,” the tree began. “According to the winds, you took the time to listen to the problems of a young sapling. Your compassion relieved his depression, thus turning his leaves from blue into the regal yellow color that surrounds you now.
“After this sapling uprooted himself and consequently died, the wind carried his leaves, his golden tears along with them, throughout the forest. These joyful tears soaked into the ground and were taken up by our roots. Overnight, the happy magic of these tears spread to our leaves and into our souls. We are now back to our jolly old selves, to the way we were before the araknor invaded.”
“Wow,” I said through my last bite of apple. “So, he didn’t die in vain after all.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Indeed, he did not,” the tree said. “In fact, you might even say he died in vein, as his golden tears now course through us like blood courses through your veins.”
I pointed out that her pun didn’t quite work unless she wrote it down. She said she couldn’t write it down because she was a tree, in case I hadn’t noticed, and maybe I should write it down, then. “Write a whole novel, if you’re so smart,” she sneered. I said maybe I would someday. Then she’d see.
“Anyway,” the tree continued, “it is imperative that the araknor are exterminated before they destroy this forest. Alas, naturally, we trees cannot fight them ourselves. We require the assistance of rootless beings such as yourselves.
“Various rootless beings have dropped in on us at random, just as you have, but they don’t last long. The only one who has been able to ward off the araknor with any success is the knight who’s been wandering around here of late. He seems to have a will of steel, that one.
“However, the winds have recently carried a warning to us. The Mother Araknor has become aware of this knight and is plotting to get rid of him. She has been doing nothing but laying eggs for the last several months. She plans to release thousands of offspring all at once and launch a full-scale attack. And she intends to do so very soon.
“I’ve observed this knight in battle, and I suspect he could take on a dozen araknor at once, but not many more. He will be trounced once the Mother Araknor’s eggs hatch. And, once he is defeated, it won’t take long for the araknor to overrun this forest. If that happens, we won’t merely be sad. We’ll be extinct.
“Therefore, I implore you to join forces with this knight and thwart the Mother Araknor before her eggs hatch. According to the winds, if you can slay her, all of her children will die along with her, and the forest will be saved. If you do us this favor, we will happily offer you the Knowledge Bracelet, an ancient treasure that gives its possessor great knowledge of this world but which the Mother Araknor has stolen from us.”
Mag and I accepted the mission. After that sapling had sacrificed himself for me, it felt like the right thing to do. At least that’s what most people would say. But they’d be sort of lying. Sure, part of the reason I wanted to hunt down the Mother Araknor was to avenge my friend, but that was only about ten percent of it. Mostly, I hoped the Knowledge Bracelet would contain the knowledge of how Mag and I could get back to Earth.
The tree explained that the apples we had eaten contained a map of the forest, which we could now see simply by wishing to see it. And it really was that easy: The instant I wished it, a semi-transparent map of the forest appeared in my vision.
Desolation Woods was the size of a large city and was made up of a mind-bogglingly complex network of pathways that formed not only your standard four-way intersections but also points where five or eight or ten paths converged. A black spider icon in the northeastern quadrant of the forest indicated the location of the Mother Araknor’s Lair, and an exit point lay just beyond it. I inspected the map for other exits. There were none.
“Do you know where we can find this knight?” Mag asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” the tree said. “I haven’t seen him for several days. However, the araknor’s numbers have continued to dwindle, so I know he is still out there somewhere.”
As a final piece of advice, the tree told us to check our maps regularly, owing to the forest’s defense mechanism. “The forest uses illusionary tricks to stop the araknor from tearing it down. For example, when you think you’re going one way, you might actually be going in a different direction. Or, when you reach a certain crossroads, you might get transported to a nearly identical crossroads elsewhere in the forest without realizing it.
“However, your map will always tell you where you are with perfect accuracy. Even with your maps, though, you will need incredible luck to reach the Mother Araknor’s Lair in time.”
“Can’t we just ask the trees which way to go when we get to a crossroads?” I asked.
The tree said we couldn’t, for the illusions changed “with each rising sun.” I don’t know why, but it really annoyed me how she said that. She could have just said “every day,” but I guess she wanted to sound poetic or whatever. Her point was that the trees would know as little as we did about what paths would take us where.
Mag and I thanked the tree for her help and ventured off to find the Mother Araknor’s Lair—and hopefully encounter the nameless knight along the way.
The forest was every bit as perplexing as we had been warned. We wandered all day and hadn’t gotten anywhere near the lair by the time the sun had set. The main problem was that there was no path connecting this part of the forest to the northeastern region. We would have to get lucky and find a magic crossroads that teleported us there. This would be no easy task, as there were several hundred crossroads in this forest. And, since they changed every day, it could easily take weeks to find the Mother Araknor.
“There’s no way we’re ever getting to that lair,” Mag eventually said, frustrated. “There’s no way to keep track of where we’re going, even with a map. There’s no pattern to the transportations and no clues. This is worse than playing the original Zelda without a walkthrough.”
“At least the map has helped us avoid the araknor so far,” I pointed out. This was true. The locations of araknor were indicated by red dots on our maps, a very useful feature indeed.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t do us any good if we can’t get to the lair,” Mag snapped.
I could sympathize with Mag’s frustration. We couldn’t even find our way to a safe zone to rest our legs for a while, never mind the lair. And, even if we could find the lair, how the crap were we going to defeat the Mother Araknor? We had been avoiding that conversation. Maybe we could defeat it with the knight’s help, but there had been no sign of him.
The situation was hopeless, I realized. But then that thought reminded me of a book I read where the main character got a fantastic idea just when all hope seemed lost. The moral of the story was that something about hopelessness makes for great brainstorming. If I were to lose all hope, maybe a solution would come to me.
I stopped and stood there for some time, observing my map and losing my hope. Then, wondrously, the puzzle of the forest unraveled itself in my mind, and the way to the northeastern quadrant was suddenly clear. In the dead center of the forest was the only intersection where twelve paths converged, forming a clock-like pattern. Somehow, I knew we needed to get to this clock, which we were currently just to the north of.
And which way would we go when we got there? Well, the intersections on the map formed a grid of sorts, and I noticed the tree that gave us our maps lived at the eighth intersection over from the left and the fortieth down from the top of this grid. That’s 8:40, I reasoned, and at 8:40, the hour and minute hands on a clock both point to the 8. That couldn’t be a coincidence. So, we’d head south from here to the clock intersection, and when we got there, we’d go down the eight o’clock path.
This line of reasoning also fit with that whole “rising sun” thing the tree had said. It hadn’t been a piece of pretentious poetry. It was a clue. It had been an odd thing to say, but the tree had phrased it like that so we’d take note of it. She was counting on one of us to deduce that time was the ticket, and I had just done it. (She couldn’t spell it out for us in case any araknor had been listening in.)
“I’ve solved it,” I announced. “I’m pretty sure we go south from here.”
I said this with enough confidence that Mag followed me without hesitation. Or maybe she was just tired from all the walking. Either way, it was a nice feeling to say something and have someone agree, no questions asked. That kind of thing almost never happens to me.
And for good reason, I suppose. We hadn’t taken eight steps along my eight o’clock path when my map indicated we had been transported to a dead end in the southwestern part of the forest, almost as far away as possible from the Mother Araknor’s Lair.
“Oh, it wasn’t a clock after all!” I groaned.
“What wasn’t a clock?” Mag asked. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh, I thought the map had a clock on it,” I said. Mag gave me a quizzical look, so I explained my masterpiece of stupidity to her. When I finished, she frowned and said that, no, there hadn’t been any clocks on the map. Anywhere. Ever.
I observed my map again. The only way we could go was blocked by a cluster of six red dots moving quickly toward us.
In a panic, I scanned the area for clocks, still clinging onto hope that they were somehow part of the solution. I would have made do with a pocket watch if I had to. An hourglass. A sundial. Anything. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish with such an object had I spotted one, but it didn’t matter, as this area was devoid of all variety of timekeeping devices.
Looks like my time has run out, I thought. Despite the danger I was in, I was quite pleased that one of my final thoughts had also been by far my cleverest. I was so pleased, in fact, that I resolved not to think of anything else so that it would be my very last thought, a cognitive swan song of sorts. But then I got that song “Clocks” by Coldplay stuck in my head. So, once again, I had been robbed of a shred of happiness—and, once again, Coldplay had somehow played a role in it.
I didn’t want to end my life being angry at Coldplay, though (who knows what terrible consequences await you in the afterlife for that?), so I closed my eyes and imagined all the clocks I had ever seen throughout my life. This was my go-to strategy for disassociating from my problems back then; the fact that clocks were already on my mind was just a coincidence.
The first of the six araknor had reached us now. It leaped at me, but Mag caught it in mid-air with a vicious spin kick. She told me to stay back and let her fight. I was happy to obey, as I didn’t have her fighting skills. If I tried to fight, I’d be more of a hindrance than anything, like Kiddie Kong in Donkey Kong Country 3. At least that’s what I told myself to rationalize my cowardly behavior. Also, I’d like to point out that I did throw a rock at this first araknor while it was still down from Mag’s kick, and I hit it in the leg. So I’d done my part.
Mag defended herself well against the one araknor with her strikes, but then the other five showed up, and the six of them surrounded us.
Mag surveyed the situation. She knew she wouldn’t be able to beat them all. “We have to make a run for it,” she said. Now that all six araknor were here, the pathway was no longer blocked. If we could outrun them, we might be okay.
Mag counted us down. “Three… Two… One… Now!” And we took off. Two of the araknor dove at me, but I did a somersault to dodge them, and they collided. Mag had also evaded the beasts and was running down the path to freedom ahead of me (she was noticeably faster than I was).
Just as I thought we were going to make it, one of the araknor took me down from behind. It hissed and sprayed its frothy venom on me, which burned a hole through my shirt and seared the skin on my back. I made a sound I didn’t know I was capable of, something between a scream and the sound a boiling kettle makes.
I could sense the araknor was about to bite me, but before it could, Mag punted it off my body.
“You shouldn’t have come back for me,” I said. “Now you’re gonna die, too.”
“I don’t care. I’m not letting you die. Not again.”
The araknor now attacked us both. Mag got on top of me and shielded me with her body as the other araknor jumped onto her. Her grip on me was unrelenting as the araknor hissed and spit and tore into her flesh. Between her heartbreaking screams, she swore she wouldn’t let me die, but I knew there was no way she could keep that promise. Her grip on me was weakening fast, and soon, her body went limp.