He moved over to the nearest 'root of all evil' in a crouching walk, attempting to keep his presence out in the open as subtle as possible. Once he arrived at the gnarled and organic appendage, he slowly put the weight of his foot down, wincing in anticipation of some nightmarish reaction. He strained to hear any new disturbance in the terrain as he ever so gently set his weight down on his foot.
Nothing happened.
He didn't hear any reaction and couldn't feel or see the roots moving in response to his weight. Maybe it was just a mindless plant?
That would be a huge relief! Even if it was evil, all he had to do was go in and chop it down at the base…
That's typically how these things go right?
He continued towards the entrance in a crouch, hoping that if he just kept moving the idiocy of what he was doing wouldn’t overwhelm him and lock up his extremities. If there was one thing Tilly could do, it was, move first, and ask questions later. He ignored the weathered and crumbling statues that flanked the approach to the temple and kept moving. Dirt gave way to ancient paving stones, and he found himself before the entrance to the temple.
The ground he walked upon was now covered in layers of roots, and the opening to the desecrated temple yawned before him, choking on the mass of plant matter that filled its bottom third and dived deeper into the complex. Tilly couldn't see any windows, and the roots didn't seem to be coming from any other part of the mountain. Just this one, towering, dark, entrance.
'One way in, one way out... a firefighter favorite.' He mentally quipped as moved into the large entrance, trying to take up as little space as possible.
The light from outside faded the farther in he went and the roots got thicker. He walked for a while until the passageway opened into some sort of large entryway chamber, where none of the light from outside could reach. But to his surprise, Tilly could still see a decent distance in front of him and he looked around trying to discern the source of this new subtle light.
After a while, he realized that the whole interior was covered over with different stones of natural shapes and sizes and the places where they met had no gaps. It seemed like each was fitted uniquely with the ones around it, making the walls and ceiling feel almost like a natural occurrence even though they must have been painstakingly placed by hand. Even though there was no gap, the joint was easy to see because it showed a very faint radiance. The light was subtle, yet the whole of the structure shone with it keeping the interior from feeling dark. But the fact that it had taken Tilly minutes to figure out where the light was coming from gave the whole place an eerie feeling, not to mention what was carpeting the floor.
The first room he came to was still covered in thick roots, which formed a strange sort of depression as the layers lost some of their height and fanned out to spread across the wider footprint, before gathering together again and leading even further into the structure. The walls had unlit torches at regular intervals calling back to a time when the temple wasn't some sort of living nightmare.
As Tilly crept forward, he belatedly drew both hatchets and continued on with a hunched gait. The presence of the place seemed to weigh heavier on his psyche with each step deeper into the structure as if every foot forward was another strike against his chances to make it out again.
'I'm just going to get a look... if I can take this thing out, I will' He repeated to himself for the thousandth time as the space in the temple seemed to stretch, making his progress seem almost comically slow. The next doorway was not as big as the front entrance and the roots had only increased in size crowding the bottom half of the walkway and leaving significantly less room above Tilly's head. While he hadn’t seen so much as a twitch from the roots, he couldn’t shake the malevolent feeling that emanated from them. He couldn't stop picturing them suddenly rearing sinuously up and looping around his extremities.
An eternity of achingly slow steps later, he reached an opening into a natural-looking cavern. Before clearing the doorway he strained one more time to hear even the slightest sound, holding his breath.
Still nothing.
He sighed subvocally and crept forward the last few steps. The same dim light subtly shone from the walls and ceiling of this room, revealing a scene of brutal contest.
At the center of the auditorium-sized room was what seemed to be a simple altar of unhewn stone, with an intense blue flame flickering on its top surface. The flame radiated an electric blue light and flickered wildly, hovering just above the altar. It would have been mesmerizing if it wasn't for what filled the rest of the room. Behind the altar was the source of the seemingly endless, root-like appendages.
It looked like a cross between a tumor and a dead oak tree and it expanded to fill the entire back of the room. Pod-like growths marked each new expansion the tree had made, fanning out from the center trunk in concentric circles. The newest growths were closest to the altar, with rows and rows of pods filling the room as far as Tilly could see in the dim light. Each pod hung from a thick vine that led up into the branches of the tree, like a corpse hanging in a noose.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
These background details filtered in slowly as horrific context to the main contest playing out around the altar. The roots all ran around the altar as if held back by some invisible barrier, but three appendages thicker than any other growth on the tree seemed to be straining toward the flame from different directions. Each one ended in an impossibly sharp point, oozing the same ghastly black substance Tilly had seen plaguing the forest.
Nearer to the walls, far away from the altar were all sorts of creatures in varying states of infection and decay slowly being subsumed by the roots. Tilly saw that many were still breathing, but had entered into some sort of extreme stupor and had each found places to lay against the roots or bark. To his horror, Tilly saw small fresh root growths reaching out and burrowing into the creatures at the places where their bodies touched the tree.
Tilly barely registered his notification icon blinking at him, as he just stood there in shock. His mind reeled at what he was seeing. Torn between immediately fleeing and attempting to do something. He couldn't even imagine where to begin, but someone had to stop this thing from growing any further.
There had been no reaction to his presence so far. Not from the creatures slowly being eaten alive or from the tree itself and he desperately clung to the fact that he had gone unnoticed. Maybe he could do something after all.
He took a deep panic-averting breath and stepped inside, fighting every instinct to flee while trying to come up with some sort of plan. There had to be something he could do to change what seemed to be an inevitable victory this creepy tree and the Corruption it was spreading through the forest.
Could he kill all the creatures it was eating? Would that wake them up? Could he even cut one of these creepy roots with his Strength stat where it was? Tilly hesitated. Each of these ideas seemed to be futile, but he also couldn't face the crushing hopelessness that came with doing nothing in the face of such evil. Maybe he would find some hint of what he was supposed to do if he could make it to the altar.
He took a few more crouched steps into the chamber when he suddenly retched. As he closed the distance to the newest pods, he saw that the bark-like skin covering them was thin, almost transparent. Floating in coffin-sized pods were emaciated humanoid bodies infested with the smaller root feelers. The sight hit Tilly on such a visceral level, that his stomach clenched in rejection, and attempted to empty itself.
All reason left him, strategy forgotten as he lurched into a run at the nearest pod, desperate to free the thing trapped inside or end its nightmare of an existence. The fire at his center roared in approval, and he felt something building within him as he rushed forward, his face drawn in a rictus of pain and terror. Then the root-covered floor in front of the altar started to shift, and a small mountain of patchy infected fur and dirty yellowed claws rose from the ground.
It was a Giant Freaking Bear.
One the size of a minivan, trailing root appendages like power cords hanging from a VCR.
Tilly had never frozen in a fire during his decades-long career. He knew good men and women who had, describing the moment as so overwhelming that all thoughts shut down and you were left blank, unable to do anything but stare. While he understood how that could happen to someone it had never happened to him. No matter the danger, he would always find that his body would move according to his training, and his mind would catch up later.
But this was different. He had never trained on how to fight a giant bear from hell. His body locked up, and his grip on his weapons grew so weak that he was afraid he would drop them. He just stood there, arms out as if welcoming his inevitably grizzly end. But his impending death never came. Well, it was coming, but seemed to be moving at a glacial pace.
The snarl painting its already horrific features seemed to be locked in place as it moved toward Tilly in slow motion. Tilly couldn’t help but watch, mystified at its approach.
Some part of his mind noted that as the bear moved away from the flickering flame, its movements were incrementally speeding up. Then it clicked for Tilly, the roots reaching for the flame were not being blocked by a barrier, they had been immensely slowed. The Flame was slowing time around it to a monumental degree with an effect that grew weaker the father from the altar you were. This immediately sent his mind whirling.
The barrier that the corrupted tree was pushing against, wasn't some kind of force field, it was a time-dilation field. Something about the analytical nature of his conclusions was enough to break through his fear, and he found his hand whipping forward, launching one of his hatchets at the bear's slowly opening maw.
Tilly watched for one more fascinating second, as his weapon slowed on its rotational path, also affected by the time dilation. The sight fully snapped Tilly out of his shock. His NOPE threshold reasserted itself, and he turned and sprinted for the exit.
The journey to the entrance passed by in a blur as a roar of fury washed over him from behind. He didn't know if the time dilation was gradual or had a fixed boundary of effect, but he went ahead and called back his other hatchet as he burst through the entry door.
He immediately slid to a halt, stopping himself before an environment that was completely different from the sunny afternoon he had left behind just a few minutes ago. It was fully dark now and the radius of destruction wrought by the corrupted roots had doubled in size. Not only that but the clearing that had been empty during the day was now filled with different creatures, all showing signs of infection.
Tilly had just a moment to process his increased danger before the dark glazed look that clouded their eyes transformed into bloodshot fury.
“Shit, shit, shit” he stuttered to himself, diving into a roll as several of the closest creatures lunged at him with tooth and claw. He came up from his roll surrounded on all sides, with another furious roar emerging from the entrance behind him, sounding much closer.