The dark tree line grew nearer with each frantic step. Rochelle kept her eyes on the forest as she ran, pulling Brittle with her. Chaos erupted at their backs. Brittle glanced over his shoulder in time to see the front half of the stone jailhouse collapse in the distance. Villagers poured out of the dark alleyways behind them like floodwater between fissures, heading for the woods. Many still carried their pitchforks and torches. Brittle couldn’t tell whether he and Rochelle were being pursued or if the villagers were simply fleeing in the same direction. From their panic-stricken faces, he suspected most of the villagers didn’t know either.
An arrow bounced off the trunk of a dark pine as Brittle and Rochelle reached the edge of the forest, providing a definitive answer to Brittle’s lingering question. They were definitely being pursued. As Brittle slipped between the shaggy trees, wincing as their needle-laden boughs ripped at his antlers, he heard the bray of eager hunting dogs fill the air. Not just being chased, he concluded with a grim gulp, but hunted.
“Come on, Brittle,” Rochelle panted. “Keep up.”
Unfortunately, a bog log beast’s legs weren’t made to run. Brittle did the best he could, lifting each leaden foot, putting it down, lifting the other, and putting it down, over and over and over again, but it wasn’t enough. His legs were too short to outrun grown men and their dogs. Their pursuers were gaining ground. The bone-chilling bray of the hunting hounds echoed throughout the dark woods, growing nauseatingly louder with each feeble step Brittle took.
Brittle let go of Rochelle’s hand. “Go without me. You’re faster that way. You can make it.”
“Are you crazy? No!” Rochelle seized his wrist and continued to pull. “I’m not leaving you.”
Brittle was about to deliver a list of all the reasons why she should, when the forest floor slid out from beneath their feet. Rochelle screamed as she and Brittle fell, tumbling through a bed of moss and horsetail ferns until they rolled to a stop. While the moss helped cushion the landing, it wasn’t a gentle fall by any means. Brittle eased upright with a groan, hollow bones creaking, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
In the time it took to go from running, to falling, to rolling to a complete stop, the world had gone topsy-turvy. The ground thrummed as if it were a pair of giant hummingbird wings. Its seismic vibrations traveled up Brittle’s body and filled the inside of his hollow chest while orbs of dazzling blue light lanced past overhead like lantern bugs caught in a tornado. Brittle’s stomach churned as lines of shaggy trees swept past.
The flurry of rapid movement made his head swim. He tried to focus on something static, but everything was doing the exact opposite of what it normally did. Rochelle and Brittle huddled together, too disoriented to move, whilst the rest of the forest rearranged itself in front of them. In a mere matter of minutes, everything Brittle had thought he knew about stable ecosystems uprooted itself before his very eyes.
The ground moved too. In the wrong direction of everything else, naturally, pulling him and Rochelle with it.
“Oh goodness me, I found you!” A familiar white glow popped up from a migrating shrub several yards away. They parted ways, with the glowing onion moving hastily in Brittle’s direction and the dogwood in the other.
Rochelle screamed.
“It’s okay.” Brittle tried to calm her. Amidst the whoosh and whirl of the migrating forest, he could still hear the howling bray of dogs. They were further away than before, probably running in confused circles, but there wasn’t any sense in giving them a sound to follow. “It’s just Sprig. They’re a friend.”
Rochelle’s dark eyes were the size of dinner plates. At the very least, she’d stopped screaming. Her voice emerged as a hoarse whisper instead. “You have the strangest friends.”
“Come on now, mustn’t dally,” Sprig said, urging them to their feet. “Zabel is doing what she can, but she won’t be able to hold it for long.”
Brittle appeared to have better command of his legs than Rochelle did. He helped her stand and then caught her a split second later when the disorientating rearrangement of the landscape caused her to lose her footing again. “Zabel?” Brittle repeated, steadying Rochelle against him. “She left her soul tree?”
“That she did, stick lad,” Sprig said grimly. “Hurry on now, follow me. My final order is to assist you to safety.”
It was easier said than done. While Sprig tottered along unaffected by the rearranging forest, said ease did not extend to Brittle and Rochelle. They tripped and stumbled after the sentient onion, barely able to keep their balance as the wilderness moved around them in a nauseating swirl of glowing blue lights, shaggy trees, and shifting rocks. Eventually Sprig got tired of watching them flounder and took each by the hand and walked between them. The going got significantly easier after that.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Brittle could feel the forest magic pulsing through the senion’s grip. It was warm and fuzzy and filled his soul like hot soup on a cold day. It also smelled overpoweringly of onion, but Brittle didn’t mind that.
Sprig led them deeper into the shifting forest. Either the trees were thicker here, or they’d reached the extent of Zabel’s magic because the dancing orbs of blue light faded behind them, rendering the surrounding wilderness suffocating dark. Sprig’s body still glowed, but the effect was like trying to light the entire night sky with a single candle. Brittle couldn’t see more than a few feet away. Even so, he swore the trees had gone still again.
Sprig’s careful steps slowed to a standstill with a muffled whimper.
“Sprig?” Brittle said. The fuzzy warmth thrumming across his bark hide started to fade.
“I just felt it,” Sprig said. “Zabel’s last breath. It’s over now.”
“I’m so sorry, Sprig.”
The bioluminescent onion took a deep breath and puffed out their chest before starting off again. “She did what she could. It’s up to us now. We’ve got to make sure you and those seedlings reach safety.”
Rochelle had stopped questioning her sanity some time ago. Still, she could not help but raise her weary eyebrows over the top of Sprig at Brittle. “Seedlings?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s really not that long. Not once you get past the part where you and that other feller kept screaming and running away.” Sprig gleefully launched into a biased retelling of how they met. They’d barely got past the ‘completely unwarranted screaming and running’ part when the bone-chilling bay of a hunting hound rang out in the distance. The responding barks and howls from the rest of the pack shifted in their direction, growing noticeably closer.
Sprig quickened their pace. “Change of plans.”
Brittle patiently awaited Sprig’s masterplan. And then he waited, and waited, and waited some more. As far as he could tell, they were still just running, which didn’t seem all that different from what they were doing before, albeit a little more urgently now that Zabel was gone, perhaps. “Well?” Brittle prompted. “What is it? What’s the new plan?”
“God question, stumpy. I’ll let you know when I have one.”
Brittle’s ensuing protest was cut off by Rochelle who uttered a single word between frantic gasps for air. “Water.”
“Now’s not the time to stop for a drink, lass,” Sprig said.
“For the dogs!”
“That’s mighty kind of you to think of their welfare at a time like this, but it does defeat the purpose of–”
“To escape the dogs, Sprig!” Rochelle cried.
Sprig considered Rochelle’s response as they ran. At least that’s what Brittle assumed they were doing, right up until the senion opened their big mouth. “You didn’t have to yell at me, miss. I can hear perfectly fine.”
Brittle threw his head back with a groan. “Sprig.”
“Got feelings too, you know.”
“Sprig!” Brittle and Rochelle chorused together.
“Yep, yep, yep, feel sorry for myself later. Got it.” Sprig altered course without warning, talking themself through Rochelle’s idea until it resembled something along the lines of a plan. “We’ve got to get you two to running water. Rodrick’s hounds don’t do well in water. They’ll lose the scent. Yes, that’s it!”
Under Sprig’s guidance, the trio cleared the suffocating stretch of forest in record time. Brittle smelled the water before he saw it. Sprig drove them headlong into a button bush and popped out the other side seemingly unperturbed by the gnarled branches that ripped and clawed at anything that dared pass through. “There’s the stream.” Sprig released their hands, sending the pair stumbling into the fast moving water with a push. “You two go on now. Follow the stream. It’ll take you all the way clear of the forest to the lower mountains.”
Brittle steadied himself against the ice cold current, noting the senion hadn’t moved from the embankment to join them. “What about you?”
“Somebody’s gotta stay back and run the dogs in circles.”
Brittle didn’t like this portion of the plan. “What if they catch you?”
He’d never seen an onion smile before. It wasn’t pleasant. Sprig’s mouth curled around the edges, backlit by their luminous white glow, looking far more sinister than a talking vegetable had any right to. “I never said who was doing the chasing, lil stump.”
“Oh.” Maybe splitting up wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.
“Frankly, they should be more concerned if I catch them.”
“Okay then. Time to get going.” Rochelle, having reached her limit for absurdity for the night, possibly a lifetime, seized Brittle by the hand and assumed the lead once more. Aided by the current, she moved quickly through the knee-deep water, calling over her shoulder, “It was nice to meet you. Granddad says to never thank a forest sprite, so I guess I’ll just stick with that then.”
“That counts as thanking me, but I won’t hold it against you. Us senions aren’t big on magical debts and obligations.” Sprig paused, listening to the obnoxious bray of the hunting dogs as they drew ever closer. They rubbed their root hands together, muttering under their breath, “We are sticklers for revenge though.”
Brittle slipped and slid over the slime-covered river rock beneath the water’s surface. He watched, dread churning within his hollow bones, as the grinning onion standing along the bank slowly disappeared from sight.
Gloom swept in, shrouding the pair in darkness as they moved along the fast flowing stream. The constant burble and churn of the current deafened the sounds of the forest behind them. Old habits kicked in and Brittle found himself whispering another prayer. “Blessed be the Great Maker. For She who stubs Her toe grants strength to those with heartwood thick and true. Wherever we may wander, She hobbles too…”