Chapter 9

“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

“Well I suppose, they would.” Said Riakon tilting his head quizzically.

Roden's palm met with his nose in what was becoming a frequent mannerism around Riakon.

“No mate, it wasn't a question I was saying, yes to ‘would you like some wine?’”

“Well then just say yes and forget all this bear nonsense.”

“Would you two focus. I think I heard something cacaw.”

The two men straightened, expressions of utmost seriousness plastered across their faces. Roden discreetly cast his spell Immediate Focus and listened intently allowing the magic to power his awareness beyond its normal levels. Roden had come to love the sensation of that spell over his time at Bo's, the fact he remembered to use it here showed that repetition was worth it.

“Guys, something is coming.” the sound of his voice accompanied by the cracking and creaking of branches in the distance.

“Let's move, once we are across the river up there we should be back on the trail that led us to the cave, cacaw."

The water was cold, but thankfully it was only knee deep. However, Roden and Riakon were its only victims as Errrkkkk glided over with ease.

“If you grab him, I'll help you hold him under.”

“I would, but he's a slippery bastard.”

“This shit is so fucking cold.” Quick breaths escaping in ooos and haas

“Could be worse. At least we aren't in a desert.”

After dragging themselves up the small bank, the men set to wringing out their clothes and emptying their boots.

Errrkkkk came gliding down from above his shadow briefly shading their impromptu rest stop.

“We have a problem. I scouted ahead and figured out we are right by our old campsite, the one with our tree friend. You have to see it.” Roden got a sinking feeling. His memory of this situation was bubbling up and while much was different, he knew where this was heading.

Moving with a purpose the three men quickly made it back to the clearing with the large tree and the far end. However, now the tree had multiple large branches broken at various points.

“It looks like she was hit by a bad storm.”

“But none of the other trees have damage…”

“What would do this, cacaw? Hello, Tree? Who did this to you, cacaw?

The bark of the trunk contorted and arranged into a face. Unlike before the face was missing part of its upper right eyebrow as if it had been chopped off by an errant ax swing.

“Please, just go. Hurry.” The voice barely a whisper.

The men exchanged glances.

“We can help you, cacaw. Tell me what happened, cacaw.”

The tree began to shake and shudder.

“No no no, please just go.” This time the voice was more of a cry than anything else.

A horrific cacophony of snapping and cracking was followed by successive booms as something large ripped its way through the trees. The men instinctively put their backs to the tree and readied themselves.

The silhouette was the first thing Roden could make out. It was at least thirty feet tall, whatever it was its head was in the canopy. Except Roden knew better. He knew this creature and he also knew this had the potential to go very wrong.

Two tall oaks came crashing down at the far end of the clearing where the men had entered before. Lumbering over the remains of those oaks was wriggling roots and thick branch-like limbs attached to a massive trunk sporting a face reminiscent of the old man in that famous painting, spectacles and all.

“Daughter! You best not be talking to more strangers now!” the trees voice was deep and as unyielding as its trunk.

"No daddy, no I wasn't. They were just leaving.”

“No daughter of mine will be fraternizing with bipedal filth. Move out the way, I need to teach my daughter a lesson, again.”

“It seems we have gotten ourselves entwined in a family matter. I see no need for us to intervene.” Riakon said dropping his guard.

Looking back at the tree, Errrkkkk addressed the face directly “What do you want, cacaw?”

“Just go.” The words barely a whisper, the eyes of the face clamped shut. Shudders ran through the branches.

With a pained look of defeat, Errrkkkk stood and began to follow his brother in departing. By the time the party had all made it around to the path out, the older Treant had made it over to his daughter.

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“How many times do I have to tell you? When are you gonna learn?” Each question punctuated with the slam of branch on branch. The older Treant used its thick limbs to batter the younger.

“I thought the lesson I gave you after the fruit incident was enough, but if you're going to keep whoring yourself out to every biped that walks through here then I guess I'll just start over with you.”

At the sound of branches breaking, Errrkkkk stopped walking. At the mention of fruit, he flew up and raised his hands to the sky. Chi gathered between his palms in a sphere of pure energy. In the direct sunlight, its size and power began to increase instantly.

“Riakon, I think we're in this one.”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“When he goes, we go. Oh, and if you've got fire, use it.”

It took immense restraint for Errrkkkk to hold back his Soul Sphere, but he knew he needed extra energy, and that only came with time. He gritted his beak against the snapping of the young tree’s branches.

By the time the Sphere was the size of a soccer ball, the young Treant was nearly stripped bare. He steadied himself, hefting the weight of his Soul Sphere onto one of his outstretched arms. With a pivot of wing and shoulder, Errrkkkk launched his Soul Sphere straight toward the elder Treant. The orb ripped into its branches.

In a flash, Treant was left with a gaping hole through part of its trunk and canopy of branches. Riakon and Roden leapt into action. With a blessing from Riakon, and some surprise, Roden was able to land an Ignition Bolt leaving the massive tree folk suffering from his Blaze ability. That left it ripe for Riakon to land a crushing blow with his maul wreathed in fire magic.

The Treant swept a large branch out toward Riakon missing on the first pass, but slamming him on the back swing. Roden raised his hands for another Ignition Bolt. Once the spell was off, he sprinted along the perimeter of trees. He needed to get closer without it seeing him coming.

At the impact of Roden's second Ignition Bolt, Riakon thrust his massive hammer high above his head before driving it down into the base of the truck, shattering thick hardened roots into twigs and splinters.

His glory was short-lived as two huge branches crashed into Riakon one after the other. His body lost contact with the ground briefly, but when the Treant withdrew, Riakon was still standing battered and bruised, holding himself up with his maul.

“Yall think yall can tell me what's right! Yall think I ain't handling my daughter right! This is how I handle her!” Reaching out with its two largest branches, he grasped the smaller tree. With a swift yank and a crack, the younger tree folk was snapped off at the root, leaving a rough stump where there once lived a kindly tree.

Roden knew this was going to pass and remembered what it was like to be GM in this situation. Now, it couldn't be more different for him. That tree was the epitome of what it meant to be good-natured. With the old tree focused on Riakon, Roden had his moment.

He threw his hand out as he ran, flames sputtered briefly before erupting into a blazing sword. Roden covered the distance between himself and the Treant in a full sprint. One of the major benefits of his conjured weapon was its lack of weight, impeding his movement. Instead, he was able to be light and fast.

His attack came in the form of a two-handed overhead chop that seared and popped as he lopped off the majority of the branches that served as the tree's left arm. As the Treant flailed about, Riakon tapped into his divine healing ability, Faith Healing.

A warm golden glow radiated out from Riakon as his wounds visibly healed in seconds. The Treant locked onto Riakon. It drew itself up straight with the intent to make Riakon the nail to its hammer. Roden had found himself in the horrific position of only being able to watch as the Treant began its downward journey.

From his perspective, all he could make out was a glint that became a bright orb of energy careening towards the creature's trunk. That concentrated orbs erupted into a trunk rending explosion. In the aftermath of Errrkkkk’s second Soul Sphere, the clearing was covered in splinters and a pile of branches where the base of the trunk had been.

He had had plenty of time to charge it up while Riakon and Roden kept the Treant busy. Errrkkkk was a man on a mission the second his talons touched ground. He immediately began scouring the area as if he had lost something. It didn't take long before he proudly presented a good-sized branch placed in a sack of dirt.

“We will grow them back, cacaw”

For the rest of the day, the men gathered up as much of the Treant wood as possible. There were two reasons for this; first, Errrkkkk wanted to pay respects to their tree friend by making a massive nest using all of their remaining pieces. Second, Errrkkkk wanted to make sure they burned all of the older Treant’s wood, so there was no chance it grew back.

After assigning Riakon and Roden to the latter of the two tasks, Errrkkkk set himself to building the greatest nest possible. Roden could feel how much all of this meant to Errrkkkk. Roden knew what his friend’s motivation was for his actions during their campaign, but here in the moment, things felt different. He waited until the three men were jovially laying in their nests around the massive bonfire that was the old Treant. At this point, he couldn’t help himself. He had to ask.

“Hey Errrkkkk”

“Yeah, cacaw?"

“What made you stop there?”

“Stop where, cacaw?”

Roden rolled his eyes “What made you want to help that tree? They were nice to us and all, but it didn’t seem like our fight until you made it our fight. I’m complaining either, I was ready to throw down too, but I’m curious about your reasoning.”

“Oh, that’s easy, cacaw. My whole life I was raised under the teachings of Era and one of her major lessons is that nature is everything. That we must protect it if we can. In my mind, our tree friend is exactly the type of nature that needs protecting, cacaw.”

“I would agree, but wasn’t that old Treant, nature too?”

“Sure, but that is old nature attempting to suffocate the new. Sometimes, what is old must die in order for the young to flourish. I just wish I had acted faster, cacaw.” a dejected expression flashed across his face at his last words.

“It’ll be okay, mate. You have your piece, and we will grow them back just as you said before.”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t even need to do that if I had stopped them sooner, cacaw.” His hands balled into fists, and Roden could tell there were a lot of emotions going through the birdman.

“If I was stronger, I could have acted sooner. That Treant was so strong I wasn’t sure we could win. That made me hesitate. I shouldn’t have hesitated, cacaw.”

There was a moment of silence among the men. Errrkkkk’s sudden bout of regret filling his voice with anguish at the loss and his perceived mistake. Roden laid there looking up at the stars really taking in this foreign sky for the first time since he came to this world.

The parallels of the situation and his real life were not lost on Roden. In fact, laying as they were reminded him of when he was in college. He and his friends had taken a camping trip up to the national forest.

At night they would lay on their sleeping bags and stare at the stars while high on LSD. Roden was quite thankful that there was no LSD in his current situation. He had little faith in his ability to keep his shit together if his thoughts got away from him during a trip.

While lying there, Roden couldn’t help, but start to think of home. His real home, not the one in Coastall, a port city of this world. For the first time he let his home sickness wash over him. He thought of his wife, Joy.

It had been so long since he had seen her. Up to now he had pushed it all down. He had needed to focus on surviving in this dangerous land, but he felt things were changing.

He had a few levels now and had some real practice under his belt. He was bolstered by the fact they had just beat a full grown Treant. From what he could remember, Treants were high level creatures and that would have most definitely have been a deadly encounter.

To him, it seemed that Errrkkkk was devastated at what had transpired and here he was uplifted by their success to the point where he cracked the door on his longing for home.

Roden could only chuckle at how wild the situation he found himself in truly was, but the thing that tripped him up was the fact he didn’t know how to get home or if he would even be able to get home.

He missed his old life, being in this fantasy world was cool and he could manage the loneliness, but he couldn’t help, but despair at not seeing his wife.

When he thought of her all he could do was smile. They were quite the pair. She was organized, he was sloppy, she was anxious, he was more go with the flow, she was an introverted extrovert, and he was an extroverted introvert.

She was science and hard evidence, he was creativity and interpretation. He openly admitted she made him better. In his mind, it was their differences that made them work so well together. Sure they had their scraps, but that was to be expected when two strong willed people spent so much time together.

Roden could feel the tears begin to well up in his eyes. His chin pulled back involuntarily prompting a single tear to spill over his lashes. He let himself weep for a moment, but he knew he had to reel it back in.

He couldn’t explain his current state to Riakon and Errrkkkk. He didn’t have a wife in this world. He pulled himself back together and sat up. He saw Errrkkkk and Riakon had both fallen asleep.

Roden’s wards were up so they didn’t necessarily need a watch, but they had all agreed they should have one anyway given how big of a fire they were having. Climbing out of his personal nest, Roden stood and took a big stretch.

If he wasn’t careful he would fall asleep too and then who knows if anyone would wake up until morning. He figured he only had a few more hours on his watch anyway. Now on his feet he wandered around their camp a bit, tossing more wood on the fire and peering out into the dark woods.

He still hadn’t gotten used to his ability to see in the dark. It was a mind-boggling thing that seemed so simple. To him the strangeness came from it being part of his biology instead of some kind of technology.

It’s one thing to put on a pair of night vision goggles, here it was a whole different situation to just step outside of the bright light of the fire and peer out into the dark and see as if the moon was at its brightest made all the more unnatural as the sky was overcast with a blanket of dark gray clouds.

While on his walk about the camp, Roden started to feel like there was something he was missing. It was similar to feeling watched, but whatever it was never got close enough to give away even that much. After a few hours Roden woke Errrkkkk and settled himself into his nest.

“Aye Errrkkkk, there might be something far out there. I haven’t seen anything, but I just have this feeling. I don’t know mate, maybe it’s nothing.”

“I’ll keep an eye out, cacaw.”