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They’d been walking for less than an hour when he started to notice subtle differences in the forest around them. As they drew deeper, the trees grew gradually taller, thicker, more imposing, each a mighty titan. Sunlight filtered to the forest floor in thin streams from the dense canopy high above, bathing the forest in an ethereal twilight.
The forest felt as a dream, fantastical and illusory. Mushrooms of various shapes and sizes grew in the gloomy shadows of thick, fallen branches; some short and stout with thick, bulbous tops, others rising to knee height, tall and spindly with narrow, pointed caps. The tall mushrooms had bright red, blue, and yellow tops in polka-dot patterns, splotches, and swirling, snaking patterns that evaded description.
There were others still, those of middling height with large, flat tops and intricate patterns of multicolored circles that ranged in thickness. They emitted a slight glow, illuminating the dark patches they inhabited. Slugs, snails, ants, spiders, and beetles scurried between the mushrooms, some climbing up their stalks, under the logs, and between the rotting, fallen leaves that coated that part of the floor. The trees in this part of the forest were so large that their fallen logs and branches were nearly impassible obstacles, creating large dark, wet recesses for the mushrooms to thrive.
Rocks, dirt, leaves, and bushes comprised the lush underbrush of the forest.
It was fairly easy to navigate save for where they were impeded by the fallen logs and thick roots that now rose two to sometimes even three feet high from the base of the giant trees around them. The air was cool but not unpleasantly so. a gentle breeze touched their skin and rustled the leaves high above, the trees seeming to come alive, voices whispering to them as they passed.
Ryan and Logan walked in an awed silence, humbled by the grand, enchanting forest. It was a majestic place, entrancing, and enthralling, it coaxed them deeper and deeper, luring them into its mysterious, unknown depths.
Logan was admiring a squirrel-like creature, though it was far too large—it looked more the size of a cat or a small dog with a poofy brown tale and an angular head that held perfectly still while it clung to bark at least a hundred feet above—when a cracking noise to his right returned his gaze swiftly to the ground.
He and Ryan instinctively crouched, wary of the first potential encounter in the new territory.
Fifty or sixty feet away, standing regally in a small clearing illuminated by a patch of unimpeded sunlight, was a large, beautiful elk-like animal. Its tawny brown coat was long and lustrous, its chest and stomach a brilliant white.
Peculiar to the watchers were long, billowing streams of bright, verdant green vines adjoined to clumps of equally striking leaves that wrapped loosely around the animal's torso to lie upon its back.
Their origin was the most striking feature of all; the stringy vines of leaves were tied, or rather, grew from the deer’s huge antlers. The antlers were stunning, wide and full, the tines extended outwards several feet from the animal’s skull; it must’ve had a span of ten, no twelve or more feet. The animal was huge, its torso and neck thick and its legs lean and muscular.
The antlers themselves, even more than the strange, flowing vines that grew from their base, demanded the pair’s attention. They must’ve been bone, but they were unlike anything he’d ever seen. For one, they were almost translucent, a cloudy crystalline material that glowed with an internal white light. They looked carved, imbued with intricate spiraling line patterns that started where the antlers protruded from the head and continued along their entirety, looping, and curling around the crystalline horns.
The patterns were illuminated by the antlers’ interior light, shining brightly, beautifully.
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Brightwood Deer | Level 7
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Susie said, her voice low and reverent. The deer, though he was amazed that it was a deer being so large, turned its head away from them, looking at something they couldn’t see.
“It’s… beautiful. Those antlers must be worth a fortune,” Ryan whispered, cautious not to be detected by the animal.
“It’s a Brightwood Deer, level seven. That’s more than double anything we’ve seen so far. We need to be careful,” he responded, not taking his eyes off of the deer.
“Can you hit it from here? You’d have to kill it with your first shot.”
The deer took a few slow, graceful steps forward, tilted its nose upwards, and sniffed, as if searching for something. The air seemed to shimmer around it; more than just the glow from its antlers, the whole area surrounding the deer glittered and danced, like a mirage under the hot sun.
“I can. I know it,” Ryan said confidently.
He knocked one of the long, black-shafted arrows and lifted the bow, pulling the arrow to his cheek. The arrow seemed to crackle with energy in anticipation of its release.
He breathed out, his mind emptying of everything except for his arrow and the deer. He aimed a few inches above the front armpit; the deer wasn’t like any he and Huck had hunted before, but it was still a deer, and he hoped its heart would be in the same place.
He released the arrow, the bowstring cracking as it leapt towards the majestic creature. The arrow flew true and straight, closing the distance to the deer in a blink.
He’d done it!
A smile began to creep onto his face when suddenly, faster than the eye could follow, a vine flashed to intercept the arrow just inches from the animal’s skin. It wrapped around the shaft, snapping the arrow and dropping it on the ground. This seemed to happen without the deer noticing, as only after the arrow was discarded did it turn to look at Logan and Ryan who sat in stunned silence, watching it.
The vines that had hung around its body, some looping around its torso, others flowing in an unseen breeze, raised up menacingly around the deer, pulsing, alert and poised, as if ready to lash out at any moment.
Stolen novel; please report.
The deer exploded in a blur of motion, dashing away from them.
“Let’s go!” Logan shouted, rising to his feet and sprinting after the deer, Ryan close behind.
It moved with frightening speed, bounding several yards every time its hooves struck the earth. Its antlers shone brightly, pulsating a red and pink alert light that left trails in the air like an afterimage as the deer ran.
It was cloaked in a shimmering cloud of light that hung close to its body, extending only a few inches outwards from the skin. The light drifted behind the deer as it ran, flowing behind it with the dancing vines and the streams from its antlers, riding the wake of its tremendous speed as it cut through the air.
Logan and Ryan could barely keep up. They were both impressively fast, Logan felt as if he could keep a four-minute mile pace for hours, but Ryan, though for the moment he kept up with Logan, was tiring quickly.
The deer was gaining distance on them, but the trees ahead were growing denser; it was running straight towards a thick copse of tall, tightly packed trees.
They watched from behind as the deer dashed under a low hanging branch and into the thicket. They lost sight of its retreating shape and hurried after it, following through the opening just a few seconds later.
Logan burst through the shrubbery, Ryan right behind him. Thorny vines and spindly branches cut their skin as they stumbled into a small clearing surrounded on all sides by tall trees that huddled close to each other, forming a looming wall that encircled the space.
Logan slowed to a stop, frozen in place.
A hulking mass rose from a thick tree stump, grasping a club in one gnarled, meaty hand. The gigantic creature stood, towering over the Brightwood Deer that’d had the misfortune to enter its abode.
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Forest Llort | Level 12
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Susie squeaked, terrified.
Its skin was thick and furrowed, a dull grey-blue caked with mud and grime. It wore a loincloth around its barrel-like legs, the leathery material falling just above its knobby knees.
The llort was hideous, a towering, hairless hulk of sinewy muscle; it was bald, and its face was round and misshapen, dominated by a protruding nose and yellow-stained tusks that jutted out over its lips from an underbite jaw.
The deer reared on its hindlegs and screeched, a horrifying, high pitched scream that caused the pair to immediately drop their weapons and clap their hands to their ears, cowering from the sound.
The llort snarled and raised its massive club, a hewn tree imbedded with thick, rusty brown rods, and slammed it downwards. The club smashed into the deer’s neck with a resounding, meaty thwack, and sent its head flying into a nearby wall.
It collided with the stones of the wall, the side of a hidden cave, Logan saw, with a thud; one of the antlers snapping off of the head as that side of the skull shattered against the boulder.
Deep red blood pulsed out of the deer’s neck from the now fallen torso where it lie in the dirt and leaves in great spurts, gushing onto the earth.
Ryan’s heart pounded. He took the bow to his hands from where he’d dropped it at his feet and slowly stalked backwards, keeping his eyes on the monster with the club.
Logan likewise retreated, watching in horror as the llort knelt and effortlessly picked up the deer’s corpse with his free hand.
The brightwood deer was the largest four-legged animal Logan had ever seen, larger than any deer, elk, or bear he’d ever heard of. Nothing on even the most shocking episodes of National Geographic had approached it in size. The llort picked it up casually, the deer’s body ragdolling as it rose through the air.
It raised the deer to its face, opened its mouth, and bit into it, consuming half of the deer’s body with the first bite. It chewed, hot blood pouring down its chin, streaking the grey-blue skin with rivers of deep red. Bones crunched and cracked as the monster's jaws worked.
The llort dropped the club, which hit the ground with a thunderous thud, throwing up a shower of dirt where it landed, and squatted. He tore one of the two remaining legs off of what was once the deer’s body, separating it from the other with a grotesque, wet tearing sound as muscles, tendons, and ligaments ripped apart.
Logan watched the llort eat the leg, taking its time to savor its meal, sucking the meat off the bone.
Behind the llort, Logan noticed a hollow, an alcove of stone with an orange glow that he assumed to be fire coming from within. This was the llort’s home, and they’d stumbled into it. He felt for the Brightwood Deer, but he was immensely glad that it had encountered the monster before he and Ryan had.
Level twelve, he thought with awe. He and Ryan were on the edge of the thicket now, spying on the llort from a distance.
It stood from its squatted position, still holding the last remaining leg in one hand, and scooped up the deer’s head and broken antler in the other. He raised the antlers above his head, admiring them, his grey, blood-soaked lips splitting into a wide, outlandish smile at his prize.
He lumbered into the alcove, ducking under the archway of the opening, the remains of the deer in his grasp.
“What was that thing?” Ryan asked, frightened eyes turning to Logan.
“A Forest Llort, apparently. It’s level twelve,” he said, his voice a whisper.
“Twelve?” Ryan said, his voice rising.
“I’ll mark this spot on the map. It looks like that’s its home, and I only see one entrance. Maybe we can think of a way to kill it and get the antlers for ourselves,” Logan said contemplatively.
“Let’s get out of here for now though, we’ve gone way further than we should’ve.”
The chase had only lasted a handful of minutes, but it’d taken them into a part of the forest far deeper than they’d intended on reaching today. They made their way out of the thicket, careful not to make excess noise that might attract the Forest Llort and started the long journey back to the village.
The trees around them were incredibly tall, each looming several hundreds of feet high and with trunks so thick it’d take Logan multiple minutes to circumnavigate even the thinnest of them. They retraced their steps with extreme caution, following Logan’s map but taking a route parallel to the one they’d entered on; Ryan had said that a hunter in this forest should treat themselves equally as predator and prey, never taking the same route two ways in case they were being followed by unnoticed stalkers in the shadows.
They eyed the eerie, looming trees as they passed, anxious of what may be lurking unseen betwixt dense roots and on the unknowable backside of the trunks.
As the day wore on, less and less sunlight penetrated the canopy, shifting the forest gradually from an enchanted wonderland to an ominous, foreboding wood of danger and mystery. They moved in the open areas between trees, careful not to get too close to their bases; they’d seen the betraying glint of the setting sun’s reflection off of silky, expansive spiderwebs that clung to branches, creating a net several times taller than Logan himself.
These were no ordinary spiderwebs, and no ordinary spiders to spin them. For the several webs they saw and avoided, not once did they see the spider that produced it. That, somehow, filled him with more trepidation than seeing what he was sure were the terrifying creatures themselves. They carried on in silence, though their hearts beat rhapsodies, fleeing the forest like escaped captives in the night.
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Graknul clapped a green, wart covered hand on Jeknar’s exposed neck, lifting him against the curving, tree-root wall. With his other hand he grabbed the snilgob’s chin, long, sharp fingernails digging into the skin of his soft cheeks.
“I told you we should’ve killed those filthy humans first, then hunted it. You never, listen you sniveling-“
He was cut off by a jerk of Jeknar’s head and the bite of short, sharpened black teeth that sunk into his hand.
Graknul shrieked, yanking his hand away. He flung the smaller snilbog across the room, his body colliding with the stout round table they’d carved out of the roots when they’d cut the hideout from the interior of the tree.
His hip crumpled as it struck the hard wood and he remained on the ground where he’d fallen, whimpering.
“I’m sorry,” Jeknar said, voice guttural and shrill, coughing and spitting out Graknul’s greasy maroon blood.
Graknul began stalking towards him.
“They’re humans! We must be wary of humans that come this far into Barr Amar’s realm, you know that’s true! What if one of them was a- a-“
This time it was Jeknar that was cut off by Graknul’s bare foot stomping heel first into his chin, shattering the thin bone.
“We’d have smelled it, you dung eating, qortle-fucking cretin. We could’ve made a gift of the antlers to the General, but now that llort has it,” he said, as he stomped on Jeknar’s head again, crushing his cheekbone.
“Because you were scared of two womb-fresh human runts and wouldn’t throw your spear,” he said, kicking Jeknar’s body in the ribs, leaving bloody holes with his sharpened claw-like toenails.
“Krayznak, Raxar, feed him to Hayde. He hasn’t been eating well enough lately,” Graknul said, spitting on Jeknar’s twitching, crumpled form.
Two thickly muscled snilbogs grunted their understanding and marched forward from where they’d been standing idly by the door. They knelt, the small bones sewn to their tattered leather jerkins rattling, and hefted Jeknar. His corpse was deposited unceremoniously outside the outpost, thick vines pulled back into place over the inconspicuous opening in the roots as the two guards retreated.
Short, crisp clicking noises sounded from high above. Click… click click click…. Click click. Flakes of bark drifted to land in the cold dirt next to Jeknar’s pulverized head. A long, inky shadow reached from above, peeling itself away from the tree, and impaled the snilgob’s torso, lifting its skewered prey easily into its waiting maw of razor-sharp chelicerae.