No. . . Being hunted like I had was no punishment. It couldn't be.

“I don’t believe you,” I yelled, shaking myself against the tacky hold of the web. “Let me go!

The horror hanging in the darkness of the deep forest could not be a Mother. They had sealed my power and kept me imprisoned for all of my life that I could remember, but they were not literal monsters.

“Your believe is Irrelevant. The truth is all that matters. I will give you two of them, listen well. I am Gwyn Ar Temis. The Huntress. The Mother in Green. And, you have nowhere else to run.” The dark green spider said, lowering itself further into my sight. All eight of its eyes shone in the silken dark.

Long black fangs that were as long as my arm came into view. Drops of liquid dripped down from the tips of them and pattered onto the web on either side of me.

Help. . .I need help. I thought, trying and falling to rip myself free. No one can help me.

Where the liquid touched, thin green tendrils of smoke spun up suddenly. The demon wolf had rotted the tree underneath my feet with its bite the same way the serpent had. All the spider had needed was small drops of its venom. My fall the first two times had been much longer and I had not been able to bring myself to my feet fast enough to run.

The third time was different.

“Fuck you!” I shouted, turning my back to the spider and running as fast as my exhausted body could carry me.

I did not make it far.

The spiders skittering steps filled my ears and in the panic that it brought me, I tripped.

I fell back onto the trunk of a fallen tree. One long leg at a time, the monster came creeping out of the darkness. It pinned it's legs over my shoulders and raised itself until its eight eyes were even with my own.

My nails dug into the rotting bark underneath them, desperately trying to find any small amount of space that I could press myself into.

“Do you know what happens now, girl? I’m going to wrap you in my web, sink my fangs into you, and watch you rot.” The spider whispered, its long black fangs twitching a finger tip from my face.

There was nothing I could do to make myself move, but a truth came clear to the front of my mind. I clung to it like I had the tree when the beasts had been at my heels.

“Mother Azza wanted to kill me, but she couldn’t! If you are The Mother in Green, neither can you!” I screamed, covering my face and pressing myself back against the stone.

The spider laughed. “Do I look like Azza, girl? She is much nicer than I am.”

Azza? Nice?

A sound, like a mountain sized mirror cracking, broke through the deep forest. Far above me, the crashing roar of trees beginning to fall echoed down.

At the breaking sound, the spider snapped still with its eyes turned up to the trees.

"Fuck! Why now?” The spider spat, its voice full of sudden anger.

Fingertips broke through the place in the middle of the spiders eyes, splitting its head in half. The black carapace brightened to the same shade of haunting green the moon above had infected the forest above with. Like they were parting a curtain, the hands tore open the hole they had made. The spider split and crumbled to glowing green dust at the feet of a woman.

Her long black hair was tied back into a tight knot. A skin tight black body suit fit her form so tightly that I could see the ripples of muscle over her stomach and the tips of her breasts standing against it. It ended at her shoulders and thighs, revealing the luminous pale skin of her limbs.

I met her eyes.

A swathe of black had been painted from her brow to just below her nose, leaving only her mouth and jaw undarkened. Within the painted shadow, her upturned eyes glared at me with the same shade of green as the dust that mounded around our feet.

She will kill you. I thought to myself. As soon as I our eyes met, I knew that I was being stared down by a predator. Lithe and lethal, every part of her looked like she had been made for violence. From the veins standing faintly blue against her forearms to the long canine teeth that gave the scowl she wore a carnivorous bend, The Mother in Green was terrifying in the most beautiful way.

The breaking sound shook the deep forest again.

"Silkshifter." She said under breath. Green light shone from her palms and flowed up her arms to her shoulders. It formed around her neck and burst into thousands of writhing strands. Like shredded green silk, a cloak of her power draped down over her and she covered her head with its hood.

Goldluster. The memory of Azza's memory sounded in my mind, bringing visions of a golden glove shaped out of The Mother in Brown's will.

“Come, girl. I must reach him.” The Mother in Green said, wrapping her arm around my waist and throwing me over her shoulder.

“Hey! What are you doing?” I shouted, flailing against her grip uselessly.

She did not answer my question and she did not release me. Her arm shaking from my weight, the silk cloak began to move. The uncountable strands writhed and stretched up the arm that held me, forming around each of her fingers and covering her pale skin.

Then, with a rise of her green aura, it expanded to twice it's size and The Mother in Green shook no more.

Sharp talons extending from an arm made of dark green scales curled around me.

The tightness pressed my broken arm against my chest and old pain became hot and new once again.

How did she. . . What I had just witnessed was no glamor. The monstrous arm that had grown from her own was no illusion.

With the sounds of the forest above us breaking, She dropped to the ground and held me in the air. Balancing on her free hand and the balls of her feet, the rest of the cloak writhed over the rest of her body. Her color brightened all around her and then she was gone. The illuminated cloak spun down from the shoulder that held me aloft and twisted down into a wide paw. Green fur, so dark it was almost black, grew over her and she took the shape of a feline terror.

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The wolf, the serpent, the spider. She had not been controlling them, she had been them.

A fallen branch crashed to the forest floor in the distance, bringing a shroud of white web down with it.

“Do not struggle. I will not slow myself for your comfort." I heard The Mother in Green say from somewhere inside the panther.

“Will you please tell me what is happening? Is this part of my punishment?” I begged, letting myself fall limp in her clutches.

She did not answer and gave me no warning of what was to come.

The instance that her transformation was complete, she moved.

By the time my eyes adjusted, she had us whipping through the deep forest so fast that all I could see was a black and white blur. As if it took no more effort than brushing a loose strand of hair away, she leapt from the forest floor and carried us forward in great bounds.

“Schwarz!” She called, her voice the only thing I could hear besides the roar of destruction from above.

A fragment of the night sky that had hung above me not very long ago crashed through the trees in a plume of sparkling dust.

“Schwarz!” She called out again, turning us suddenly and making the shattered piece of sky disappear from my view.

I no longer needed The Mother in Green to answer my questions.

I knew what was happening.

I had lived through something like it before.

The eyes I had been looking through had not been mine. Neither had the body or the talking metal familiar, but there was no doubt in my mind what was happening.

“It's a split! That's what's happing?” I yelled at The Mother in Green.

“Yes! I have to get to him be for it takes us!” She yelled back, her relentless sprint unyielding.

Him?

“Schwarz! Wake up!” She screamed. Her voice was ragged, high, and full of fear.

Whoever the him she was calling for sounded like he was very important to her.

We snapped in a different direction again. The monstrous arm that clutched me broke through a massive branch just as it crashed to the ground. Shimmering dust fill forest and I saw a sliver of the green moon break away into even more out of the corner of my eye.

The Mother in Green threw us straight up into the air and brought me to her chest with her monstrous arm.

“Do not move.” She commanded. The false face of the panther split into uncountable strands of silk and revealing her own. Like thousands of spiders crawling across my skin, I felt her cloak wrap around me and bind me to her.

A sea of white web lay under us.

The Mother in Green swung the monstrous arm out and spun us into a dive.

I was powerless to stop the scream that slipped out of me.

We broke through the web head first.

Darkness.

The smell of dirt and stale air filled my nose.

I clamped my eyes shut and buried my face into The Mother in Green, a nauseous pit making my insides feel cold.

Then, just as quickly as we had started, we stopped.

I felt the cloak crawl back from me and I dropped to the ground.

“Come, girl,” The Mother in Green commanded, taking me by unbroken hand and pulling me to my feet. Down, she led me down a lightless tunnel much too quickly. I couldn’t keep up and stumbled over my own feet once, scraping the skin on top of my toes.

“Schwarz!” She screamed again, eerie green light shining from her cloak and illuminating the tunnel she had taken us to.

A low roar, like the way the ocean tide had sounded in the ocean side memories I had viewed, filled the decrepit place.

The tunnel opened to a cavernous room that covered from end to end with black webs.

A dark shape moved at the back of the room, an unsettling silhouette behind the woven silk.

A wheezing voice that felt like it was speaking directly in my ear spoke and made my skin crawl.

“What is it, girl?”

“A split! We have to be touching to go to the same place. Hurry!” The Mother in Green shouted back.

Is she crying?

The Mother in Green reaching out for the shadow as we ran but could not reach it in time.

Everything changed.

The black webs twisted and warped as they vanishing from my sight. The hard packed dirt under my feet was not there to meet my next stumbling step. A wash of black, brown, and green spun before my eyes.

I fell into the wash, losing any sense of where I was or what was happening.

“Don’t let go, girl!” The Mother in Green screamed. I could not see her. The grip or her hand had on mine was all that remained.

I couldn’t keep my hand from slipping from her grasp.

“Help me!” I called out to her as I felt her touch vanish and I spun away from the sound of her shouts.

Light.

Sunlight and blue sky all around me.

I was falling.

I was falling down towards a cloud of black smoke that hung heavy in the air below me.

The split had taken me from the decrepit tunnel and dropped me in an unknown sky.

I only realized I was screaming when my throat spiked with pain and I began to cough. The air whipping by my ears was too loud for me to hear anything else.

Like a stone thrown into a lake, I broke through the black smoke and saw what I was falling towards.

Smoke trickled out of a hollow mountain peak like a sputtering candle. All around the base of the mountain lay a desert of dark red sand that glimmered too brightly in the blinding sunlight.

I’m going to die. The thought came clearly without panic or fear. It was a truth, a cold certainty that my life would only be as long as it took me to hit the ground.

Anna. The girl I loved came to my mind and I held her there. From the first moment our eyes had met to the sound of her telling me that she loved me too, I focused on it. She was the last thing I ever wanted to think about.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something falling in the distance.

The Mother in Green spun wildly in the air far out of my reach.

She would not die. She would use her cloak and shift herself into something that could save her from being a broken red stain on the stone below.

I was just a silly little girl with a broken arm.

At least I had woven the little power I did have into the skull for Anna. At least she had something to remember me by.

With the mountain top rising faster and faster to meet me, The Mother in Green’s Aura surrounded her lithe form. She gathered it in her hands and pulled an arm back like she was drawing the string of a bow.

Still falling, she turned herself towards me and let the string loose.

Something hit me, hard.

Just as it had felt before, the sensation of thousands of spiders skittering over my skin ran over me.

Strands of green silk, alight with The Mother in Green’s aura, stretched themselves over my chest and around my neck. Like it was alive, it reached and pulled all around me. Then, a sound I had only heard the spare few times that I had been around Opa thumped in my ears.

I stopped falling.

Dark green wings unfurled from my back and carried me upwards.

The cloak had stopped my death plummet and lifted me into flight.

Green dust fell into the hollow far bellow and struck the surface of some transparent liquid.

The hollow was not hollow, it was a lake.

Where the dust touched, new billows of black smoke erupted into the air.

It was a lake of clear fire.

All I could do was watch as The Mother in Green spiraled down towards it, her power used to save me instead of herself.