Sometime after I had been moved to the manor overlooking Erosette, in one of the countless memories I had lived through, I had seen a creature as large as the serpent only once before.

Whoever’s eyes I had been looking through, I could not remember their name, had not been scared of the sea beast. She had treated it with respect and reverence, even going as far as to heal a wound it had taken. Her partner had not felt the same. She had nearly drowned herself out of fright when she had seen what was swimming towards her.

I found that I had much more in common with the memory maker's partner.

The sound of the serpent's massive body slithering over the giant tree branches was enough to send cold waves of dread washing over me.

Could something that big even feel my small weight landing on top of it? Would it even notice that a weak and injured thing had literally dropped from the sky and landed in its forest?

If there had been anything I could have done to avoid learning the answers to those two questions, I would have.

Climbing back up was not an option. Even if one of my hands wasn’t broken, the next branch was twice my height and too thick for me to wrap my arms around. Dropping down from where I had landed was almost as impossible, but I could do it if I ceased caring about my bones being solid and unbroken.

I had been taken from my bed sometime after Anna and I had fallen asleep. Whoever had taken me had kept asleep while I was moved to the place in the forest above the forest I was in. And, from the moment I had opened my eyes, I had been hunted by beasts with sharp teeth and gnashing maws.

No part of me kneels where I was or what I should do.

Every part of me was worried about Anna.

Once the beasts no longer had me to chase, had they turned their glowing eyes to her? Had they turned their noses to the ground and sniffed out her dew dampened scent? When they found her, had she been able to evade them the way I had?

She cannot hear you. The demon wolf’s words echoed in my mind.

She isn’t here. It’s only me. I thought, almost certain that was true.

The part of me that was not certain, the same part that kept me up at night with thoughts of one of The Mothers ripping me away again, spoke to me.

She is here. Laying somewhere on the ground. Cold and-

I shook my head violently from side to side. No. I will not think that. I cannot think that.

The demon knew about Anna. That was the only way it could have known that the girl I was calling out for could not hear me. She was not wherever I was. That was the only possible reason that she could not hear me.

I reminded myself that I was not in a memory by reaching down and feeling the nicks and cuts along my ankles. I knew I was me. The pain was mine. The thing at the bottom of The Well had not pulled me into myself. If I was in a dream, it was the realest nightmare I had ever had, but I did not think that was it either. The nightmares that I had lived through before had never shared the cold, hard, reality that I found myself in.

That left two explanations for my terrifying situation.

The lich? No. Some part of me knew that was not true. There was no smell of sea salt or sun warmed grass. There was no black mist swirling around me or fields of wildflowers to be seen. None of the signs that had come with the dark entity were present.

The second explanation was beginning to make all too much sense.

The sound of tree limbs cracking and leaves rustling filled the forest and the branch underneath my aching feet began to vibrate.

A dark shape rose into my sight, led by a forked tongue that was as long as I was tall. The tip of the branch below me bent and broke against the head of the rising black serpent.

I knelt behind the part of its body that still shared the branch with me and held my breath.

One massive eye appeared in front of me and the serpent stopped. Its eye was pale and cloudy, like milk had been spilled in it.

It stared directly at me and I stared back at it from the hiding place that it had given me. Motionless except for the occasional flick of its forked tongue, I began to wonder why I was not being bitten and swallowed.

Could something that big even see something as small as I was?

For a length of time that could have been a minute just as easily as it could have been an hour, I looked into the serpent's eye, too scared to move.

Then, without warning, the wood under my feet began to vibrate as the serpent continued its ascension.

I let my breath out all at once and struggled to slow my pounding heart.

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Monster. I thought, thinking of all the times Anna had called me just that. If she truly thought that I was a monster, I had something to show her so she could understand the word better.

Watching the serpent had petrified me. It could have eaten me and I would have been able to do nothing but watch. I had become so focused on it, I did not notice that a different snake had coiled itself up my right leg and around my waist until it squeezed.

“Hey,” I shouted, throwing my bandaged arm down onto the creature in my surprise. “Fuck!”

The pressure it put on my leg buckled my knee and I slipped from the branch with the snake still wrapped around me.

I dug the fingers of my left hand into a patch of moss on the trunk of the tree.

It ripped and tore as I went, not slowing me in the slightest.

The snake hit the mossy top of a lower branch first.

Then, I landed on the snake with a painful thud.

I handled it better than the predator that was wrapped around me. I kicked and struggled against it with reckless abandon, like I had done in my afterglow not long before with the blanket on my bed. It raised its head somewhere around my feet as its coils tightened around my right leg. Its jaw opened and a long high hiss followed.

“Go away!” I screamed and slammed my heel into its nose.

Its head whipped back.

I kicked it again and pushed the coils around my leg off with my free hand.

With one final kick, the snake went sailing off the mossy branch and vanished in the darkness below.

My chest heaving, I slumped back to the moss and tried to catch my breath. If the snake would have wrapped itself around me one more time, I would have been powerless to keep myself from being eaten.

The moment the back of my head touched the green blanket underneath me, the trunk of the tree behind me exploded.

“You must know better than this, girl. You must never rest when you are being hunted.” A voice that I recognized spoke.

It was the same voice the demon wolf had spoken in.

Debris and dust rained down all around me.

I covered my face with my left arm and flattened myself against the mossy branch.

A new monster hung above me.

Its jaws had closed around the tree trunk and broken it. Its smooth scales that were as black as night shone green in the dim moonlight. It was not the same incomprehensible size that the serpent with the cloudy eyes had been, but it was still large enough to darken my face and petrify me.

From where I lay, I could see the head of the new serpent that had nearly bitten me in half. The color of the moss was fading where it had struck, moving inwards towards it white fangs.

A moment later, everything that had been green was transparent, hollow, empty.

A memory of a memory, one of a single transparent leaf, drifted down into my mind.

The yellow mother. She did that same thing to that tree. I thought, remembering the memory.

The serpent unhinged its jaw and slid its arm length fangs from the wood, coiling back and hanging its diamond shaped head in front of me.

Its eyes, glowing green so bright I could not look at them directly, were locked on my little shape.

I had seen them before.

They were the very same eyes that the demon wolf had possessed.

Everything made sense all at once and a laugh that sounded more like a scream echoed out of me. I had been running for so long, I spoke without thinking about what my words would do to me.

“You’re being controlled by a Mother! The Green Mother! This is my punishment, only she didn’t have the common fucking decency to tell me that!” I shouted from my place on the clear mossed branch.

The green glow of its eyes became all that I could see as it withdrew into the darkness that hung within the trees. Silently, waves of different shades of green began to alternate out from its slit shaped pupils.

Smoke, that had rotted the tree away when the beasts had been at my heels, began to billow out of the punctures the serpent had bitten the trunk.

There was only a single crack of the wood to warn me.

The moment after I heard it, the branch broke away and I dropped down into the darkness beneath me.

“Fuck!” I screamed as I fell into a pit of perfect darkness.

The only way I could tell I was moving was by the air whipping against my face. My aura pressed against the broken bones in my right hand, forcing my teeth to clinch from the pain.

A faint iridescent glow shone through my bandages just bright enough for me to see that I was about to hit something.

I broke through it like a cobweb stretching across an open door frame and continued to fall.

My descent slowed.

The light in my palm illuminated the ground I hung above. The moment I realized what I was looking at, I was thrown back upwards.

More times than I could count, the same back and forth was repeated until I finally bounced to a stop.

The wine, soup, and bread that Anna had brought me all the way from The Blue Mother’s Domain went to waste. My stomach emptied itself and left me heaving as I tried to regain my bearings.

Help. I need help.

I went to roll onto my back, but I had to rip my arm away from the tacky surface I had landed on.

The light in my palm gave me small glimpses of a forest choked in white. It was not snow or ash, but silk. Every tree, branch, and vine was wound as far as I could see with spider silk that looked like fog so thick it had clung to what it had settled over.

I tried to lean up to find somewhere to hide or someplace I could run, but the ground held me to itself.

I’m not on the ground.

All around me, I hung within an intricate web that had been woven out of the same silk that covered the bottom of the forest.

I thought of the Demon wolf and how it made its pack mates look like lap dogs.

I thought of the serpent that dwarfed the massive trees it slithered amongst.

“No, no, no, no.” I said to myself, trying desperately to shake my way free of the sticky silk.

I was terrified of spiders, which was a truth I did not understand until that very moment. A life spent mostly in one small room and another that I had never seen any insects in had not given me many opportunities to discover that fear. Being caught in a web that did not give me hopeful feelings as to the size of the slide that made it, did.

From above, eight glowing green eyes opened in slow succession.

“Mothers help me!” I screamed, shaking violently against the web that held me.

The same voice as before, laughed.

“There is no need to shout, girl. I am already here.”