"Call it the ultimate weapon,

the greatest of virtues.

What separates humanity

from the rest of the Grand Cosmos?

Boundless curiosity."

-quote from the ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Manifesto

The wind is whistling with fervor. Colossal.

We jump low fences, swimming through mud with dirty hands. We raise and slip. We raise again. The stifled stomps on squishy earth and the wind sing violent sounds together.

Grey rocks everywhere, and marble and wood. Crosses. Plates. Arches. Stone beds and flowers. I see statues of upside down angels, with wings of led, crying into the earth as they fall. The wood of the trees is strangling the air with angry, crooked branches.

These bastards want us not in flesh and and bones. Severed bounds of ours with life is what these bastards want. These bastards are out to get us. These bastards rain with blood. They have weapons and lasers and many great weapons. They have barracks and hidden bases. Bombs in houses and homes, control of the masses and exploitation of the world; plans they have.

I look up and see the moon, crescent and milky, like a malefic smile. The stars are bats flying on the night sky. I see them dancing and running and jumping.

It's almost midnight.

I hear whispers in the night, and visions I see after the impact between eyelids and knuckles.

I pull Faharic close to me. Tell him I do, that he go ahead and leave me be as I am to be. I hand him the satchel, for long way there's ahead and together we can't.

On the petals hoar-frost, 2 agents under the mahogany moon. Full moon it is, and there are no stars to be seen. Evaded a full month ago, the 2 agents forced to run forever. Heart ceases my rush, hit the mud when I fall precisely.

Faharic helps me up.

Lean against a taller chestnut. Branches torn and leaves forming curtains, hard like walls and risen around themselves guiding the gusts of air. All trees around me look like this, their crowns intertwined in a great maze. They guide and flee away what air rolls between them, and in the distance i hear a dog bark turn into how and back into bark. It's coming.

What I hear. Noise of steps betrayed by dry leaves. Miserly the 3, patrolling bastards. Like cowards, patrolling through the deep woods.

My shoes I take off.

I catch the first one covertly. Against his head, bashes sounding like the thump on dusty earth. Arms mine crackling through neck his. Hands in splinters, bones making evil sounds. His vertebrae clenched all.

Screams of Faharic booming through the air, traveling at great speeds. The tree maze bows over and twists around, sound guiding to my ears; terrified. Petrified. Stand I and before me 2 individuals. Catch them I do, with my eyes in their hands and there are penknives in the dark. Blood glistening in strange lights. Back at the moon i stare and can hear it in my head, echoing the howl of dog that's nowhere to be seen with them. But he is here. I cannot wait to meet him.

In the middle of us all, a great hole in the forest. In hole in it's middle I glance, and see light falling down in petals and sparkles. Gentle the light falls, and slow and lethargic. A rose there is. A single, 1 great and red. Bloody flower, on a great vine stretching in the middle of the hole. Thorns.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

And on the men too, I see thorns. Impaling with dirty sounds, crispy skin. Blood gushes out. Like geysers, forever and never ending, blood gushing out of the holes as the individuals do run around. They do run around. The bastards run around now, never stopping, blood gushing out of their holes. More and more people like them.

The rose, close and next to I rest. I stare into it, vines I see with my 2 eyes. I don't feel pain. No anger or no sadness. Emotionless I lay, and no pain still. Staring into the rose, as i hear. Sounds of mush, sounds of tearing and spilling. Sounds like watermelon and minced meat, squeezed and mixed non-stop. Yet I still don't feel. Just staring.

In end I lay down, back mine resting under which the light falls.

The dog finally appears, sitting in my lap with torn and gauged eyes. Black holes, bloody eclipses in his face. From the satchel he appears, Faharic dead.

In the peak of silence, I start to see, and watch I do the remembrance of pain. Repeating in my head. They found what should've been left unfound.

2 agents.

Found secrets and ended up with regrets.

*

"After a trip which lasted 13 days and 13 nights, I finally come about the place I was looking for. A great hill formation, in the form of a ring, about 500 meters tall, symmetrical and even. In the middle a great vale filled to the brim with thick woods.

I spotted weird formations and shapes like walls and fans in the trees crowns, as if shaved and cut by a gardener. Some of them were red, and from atop this hill the forest looked like a giant rose bush. Probably why the Styttur named it The Garden of Roses.

After I descended i started heading towards the middle of the forest, in which I spotted a hole. As I made my way through, I kept seeing what looked like humans aimlessly walking around with holes in their bodies, from which blood was splurting out like a hose. It never seemed to stop, as if they were a bottomless pool of blood. The Styttur called them "pria Ber Darah" which means "men that bleed". I saw one with his head severed, and blood was gushing out like a flame or a volcano. It was quite the beautiful sight, that man.

The blood coloring the trees might be what gives them their color.

I saw maybe some dozen men on my way there. There should be hundreds, maybe a couple of thousands in total painting the garden in total. Just an estimate.

I finally found the middle, a tall and strong vine growing out of the ground, with a single flower sitting atop it's head like a crown. A giant red rose, maybe the size of a horse, with hundreds of thousands of petals.

At the bottom of it, a man was sitting down on the ground, his back leaning against the vine. His eyes looked to be gauged out, for in their stead stood just 2 dark holes with blood dried all around them. In his lap lied sleeping a dog, it's eyes looking just as the man's.

I knew both the dog and the man were alive, for they raised their heads to look at me when I stepped out the dark of the Garden. Could they actually see me? That I don't know.

On my way here i had spotted 2 Styttur in what looked like researcher armor, and even spotted a tall, old earthly man; his beard and hair were white. From his feudal clothing and the blazons tattooed on his face, i could tell this man was the germanic Eruditu from the 12th century i had read about. Heinrich Fritzlar. He made great discoveries in the field of botanic alchemy and poisons, and wrote about some findings from his dreams. He disappeared mysteriously.

My first question for the man sitting down was why those people as scholars, and perhaps many other, were in the conditions they were in, but I was spared. My second question was the generic "what happened here."

The dog got up and sat next to the vine. From one of it's thorns, something like wood extended, and finally formed a large plank. The dog grabbed it in it's jaws and brought it over to the man sitting down. He started scribbling with a bloody finger on the plank, never taking his empty eyes from me. When he was done, the dog brought me the wooden plate, then went and sat back in the man's lap, and both went back to the sleep-like state in which i found them.

On the plank were smudged weird glyphs and letters. Using what i could find in the archives of the Styttur about this world, documents from their attempted occupation, i managed to decipher it after 4 months. What you read above was the rough translation of it.

From what I could make of it, it's a retelling of events from the Styttur's attempted invasion of this world. Is the man laying down the one recalling them, or is he just a vessel for the vine to pass a message to me? This I haven't figured out.

The Styttur retreated from this world 5 700 years ago.

Their documents say that "The Garden of Roses" was the reason for them leaving."

-an excerpt from Nemandi Besti's "Archives, Discoveries and Principles",

vol. 7 "The Styttur"

Chapter title "Garden of Roses"