The earth crumbled in a wave as Lisa slid into the gully. She lashed her tail out and drew herself up.
An Imp’s purple body crunched on impact and shot off into the woods with a cloud of magic and blood, but the shadows between the trees still swallowed it whole.
She looked inward, drew on those same essences she fed to her Spark of Life, and redirected them to her elemental spirit, which, in turn, went to her lungs and upper stomach. A bit of mental magic went in as well, the barest hint of a command.
In the gully ahead of her and lined on the edges above, half a dozen humanoids in shades of purple, pink, red, and black prostrated themselves before her.
“Great one!” one wearing a headdress of bones cried out, each word spoken with a different voice like a stitched-together sentence. “We—God willing—you fucking attack! I can help—?”
Her fire incinerated it. The other Imps spat insults, conjured acid, and venom at her, half of which her flames consumed, the rest splattering harmlessly off her scales.
Lisa leaned in with her exhalation, and her own breath blinded her, but she could feel through it as the fire turned corners to chase the Imps down, as if it were alive.
After two seconds, colorful trails of smoke lit up the forest from burnt husks, and she scoffed as she marched on, “I hate it when they learn to speak.”
Wiggle let out a low flute on the back of her neck with a hint of pacifying spores, a verbal shrug. She couldn’t see him. He had to lean on sounds and spores to speak. The lexis was limited, but what it lacked in literary connotations, it made up for in emotional cues.
“Crude speech. Might as well hate parrots.”
“I know a guy who can do the inverse, you know?”
“Love parrots?”
“Mimic birds.” Lisa peeked over the edge of the gully, spotted a burning bush her fire had chased an Imp through, and leaned over to snatch it up.
Its oily wood bent and stretched, and the smoke wafting from it smelled acrid, but she clamped down and ripped a clump of dirt out with it, fanning the flames even as she chewed to refill some of her magic.
After two weeks of Rose’s instruction, she’d whittled her mana down by more than half, its spells cost more, and she regenerated it at a slower pace this far out—thanks only to her regeneration Skills; though they were focused on recycling. She had none to spare.
Instead, she relied on her elemental spirit, which she’d only used to feed her dragon body or control essences for the last few years … She was rusty.
Acid rain pattered off her. She bent her wings back to protect Wiggle and her satchel, spun with the movement, and hurled a mote of fire at the attackers.
The explosion came prematurely, and the flames were a limp and chaotic mess. The Imps fled from it like misfired fireworks. “Uhh … did you see that?”
“Yes?”
“A bat just flew out of nowhere. Intercepted my fireball. It was crazy.”
Wiggle chuckled. “No, I did not see that.”
She opened her mouth, inhaled, and accelerated, claws digging into the dirt walls on either side of the gully as she chased down a scent. It was close.
The mycelium cord wrapped around her neck tightened, and Wiggle held onto her mane as she ran.
Lines of trees like black fences passed them by. The gully opened like a gullet, the soil turning from shadowed brown to black, and weeds with red glowing spots sprouted in cracks.
She slipped inside, made herself small, and kept running without pause in the dragon equivalent of a military crawl.
The underground was dark. Her back leg broke a pit trap—as well as the far wall it was set into. She shook it free of a burning gunk, ran over a pack of cowering hounds without acknowledging them, and stopped only when she reached the first chamber.
“Spacious.”
It looked like a type of karst formation. Black, jagged pillars stretched between the ceiling and floor, and a smoking, inch-high lake on the right flowed into spaces too small for her to squeeze.
The grey wisps of smoke and reflected void on its surface painted a different scene, and Lisa grimaced as an ache clawed its way down her skull.
Two weeks. She was beginning to think she would never get over the memory. Not until she acknowledged her newest Skill, at least.
There came a different pain when she thought of that: guilt.
Look at how much trouble she’d gotten into, how much distress she had caused, by keeping secrets from her family. She knew they loved her, and she did it again. Why?
A gut feeling.
By now, she could suspect it came from the silver essence inside her, but she could keep an eye on it and those essences were idle.
To her, that confirmed her suspicions. [Hold Thought] was a common Skill organizers got from roughly level ten onward, as well as some artists. It let them freeze a moment in thought for later, as well as the entire state of mind around that thought.
Hold a moment in the morning when your brain was fresh and pull it up after a long day of work.
Hold a moment of fleeting inspiration and revisit it when you had the time and tools at hand.
Hold a moment of confidence, when you were on top of things and had all the tools to handle a task, and revisit it to remind yourself. Even during an exam.
Actually freezing a thought acted as a sort of mental reset. If you were struggling with a problem, or in a bad mood, you could use it to take a step back and regain perspective.
It could only catch one moment at a time, though. Lisa had never used the Skill. She had not frozen the chipped thought in the depths of her mind.
She was afraid to touch it. She was pretty sure she could ‘discard’ it if she wished to, to clear up the Skill for use.
Still, she hesitated. If not her … she was pretty sure Ara had put it there. But if it was a message, why had It not spoken to her during the ritual?
One reason she could think of was that her family had been there—
A roar shook the cavern, tearing her from her thoughts. The water rippled, and trails of dirt crumbled off the ceiling.
At the opposite end of the cavern, the throat of a giant ape lit up with a sickly orange glow as it rose from its throne of stone. It unfurled a tentacled arm, barrelled forward, and leaped with enough force to reach a pillar a few meters out, jumped, and bounded from pillar to pillar toward them. Trails of smoke curled from the corners of its mouth.
“Imps with a fire theme,” Lisa said. “I can see why you picked the place.”
Wiggle gave a proud note. “With your project in mind. Rumor has it, Muri destroyed your human body? You haven’t fixed it yet?”
“When? I haven’t had the time. Too busy casting spells,” she grumbled. “I also want to consult someone.”
“The next two spots are in the open.”
She smiled. “Even better. Thanks, Wiggle.”
His feet slipped against her neck, and she felt him deflate. “Don’t call me that.”
The fiendish ape roared as it flew at them, and the hounds barked as their found their spines behind them.
Viglif’s arm extended to catch the beast in mid-air, his fist enlarged to wrap around its broad form, and he whipped it into the stone. Chips of rock jumped as the floor cracked. He brought his fist down once more like a hammer, and reshaped the crater to cover all but its head.
“We’re not here for you,” Lisa said as she ran on.
The ape coughed and sputtered, and roared its frustration in a pillar of flames into the dark.
The ground opened up like a broken well behind the throne. In the corner, a messy stack of damp, half-broken crates and sacks lay piled up. Loot.
Lisa gave it a side-long glance as she climbed into the hole, along its walls, and onto the ceiling of a smaller, more natural cavern below. Slowly, she touched down.
Tunnels branched off in a few directions, and water trickled from the ceiling under the lake, forming a river down one of the furthest ones.
She sniffed, but the scent suffused the air here. It was impossible to tell which was the right way, or which tunnel she could fit into. Wiggle pointed her in the right direction.
Stone slowly transitioned to packed dirt, the walls were lined with thin roots, and the floor with bulbous flowers. When she stepped forward, the first popped like a tulip and released a hazy gas—which set off the next one, and the next, and next, all the way down in a chain reaction.
The gas displaced the air, and the roots began to rapidly eat. It was sweltering hot in the cramped space.
The combination had probably killed whatever the incomplete pile of bones that lay among the flowers had been. Something large with four legs. Hunting the same query as she?
Lisa chased the chain reaction down, stomping on toothy worms writhing between the flowers, and listening to the occasional fun fact Wiggle shared about the lair.
There were a few dozen veins of power at any time in the forest. They pooled and ran dry like the seasons, but places like these always popped up around them. Some stayed and grew long after the vein was gone, becoming places for criminals to hide, adventurers to conquer, monsters to thrive, or homes for the other factions in the forest.
People in her family like Wiggle surveyed them but tried not to interfere unless they had good reason. Rangers of a different sort, she supposed. Her guide today.
As he led her deeper in, a gossamer-thin, iridescent pink light began to flicker and flow on the walls with no apparent source, and Lisa slowed down.
Wild magic hung in the air like a fine mist. Life essence suffused it, creating a plague of patterns where the two touched. Myriad patterns. They pulsed, and reached out, grew and shrank, mutated simultaneously as if dancing to the same beat—the same heartbeat of that great serpent they were all connected to, that breached the surface of an ocean in a dozen places at once.
Where Lisa met the first of those lines, her aura did too—and they sparked. A shower of light sprung from an expanding amber glow in the air. A shadow moved inside of it as if it were a fetus, and twin claws pushed against its membrane, tearing. The claws breached it, nothing more than a skeletal outline made of magic, but they drew in a storm of swirling threads, pink, red, and green, from the tunnel around them. The essences in the air, the dust, and dirt, and pollen wove together and darkened to a sickly purple. Bones branched out from the claws in translucent lines and the threads rushed to weave them into existence, to—
Lisa swatted the half-formed Imp out of the air and ground it into the dirt. Ugh. Who knew what adaptations it would copy from them? She should have taken more precautions to cover her tracks before coming here, but she was on a time crunch.
The magical charge thinned from that one attempt. It didn’t look like it would reach a critical potency anytime soon. Still, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure, and to see if Wiggle had anything to sign, but frowned when she spotted the animal bones again.
“Where did the Imps even come from?”
Imps were born from emotion. She’d seen the piles of loot but no signs of people, nor a cult.
“My working thought is that the demon ape migrated here,” Wiggle signed. “It’s old.”
“That’d do.”
“There is also a person with a magic dagger up ahead.”
“A person …?” Lisa turned and walked a few more steps. Just around the curve, a pile of tattered clothes lay on the floor. Nestled within them, a pile of bones.
Above it, a series of overlapping cocoons snaked up the wall in the shape of a human spine. The bottom ones had already hatched, and slugs with vibrant pink butterfly wings crawled or fluttered around the remains and ate its clothes.
“A corpse,” he clarified.
“Oh.”
Objectively, Lisa knew the pile of loot must have come from somewhere. Whatever beast that pile of bones had belonged to had died down here, too. It was still a sobering sight.
The person’s boots were fused to the dirt, the right one first two steps back, then the left. One of its gloves was fused closer to the center. It still wore the other.
They must have tripped, abandoned their boots, and rolled to the side. They hadn’t gotten back up again.
If they had known any better, they would have known to walk barefoot this far in, or to wear something else. Mundane leather couldn’t defend itself against a fresh vein like this one. Older ones might have been too impure, weak, or stable enough to not be able to affect it.
And unless they’d come here straight from being raised in a magical dead zone, the magic in their bodies would have protected them from passive effects.
“Only one?” Lisa said. “If they were dying, I suppose their emotions could have been strong enough to create the Imps, but …”
But what? She trailed off. What was there to say? She was distracting herself.
“I meant because they might have had other magical equipment,” Wiggle pointed out, “something made from Imps?”
“Oh, that makes sense. Did they— did they have anything we could use to identify them …?”
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“Not that I saw. Let me down?”
She leaned her shoulder toward the ground so he could reach, and Wiggle climbed off and walked ahead. His approach disturbed the butterflies, and they fluttered off.
He caught some in a jar and tilted his head, perplexed. His cap tipped, and he tucked the jar under one arm to sign, “They hadn’t hatched last time I was here. Mine look different.”
Lisa peeked around the corner with furrowed brows, resisting the urge to fidget. “Is it much further?”
He turned, a rotting dagger in hand. Its magic leaked in a wafting purple smoke that formed shapes like drifting leaves. That helped explain the slugs. “One more corner.”
She couldn’t help it. Lisa stared. Which one of her classmates could have survived this?
Micah, maybe. There was a chance his sight or Path would have warned him—if he listened. His curiosity probably would have gotten him killed. The idiot.
Anne, then. She knew better.
The rest of them would have died ignorant, and she’d be to blame for not warning them.
“He was so close.”
But even if this adventurer had made it, what would he have done with an untapped vein? It was like throwing yourself in a grain mill, or into the ocean.
… Or maybe he was a scout, like two of her friends, and he’d never reported back …
Wiggle’s hand appeared in her vision. He waved and drew her attention away to sign, “Come on. You want to hit the other two spots today, don’t you?” He gave a cheerful whistle and tapped the back of his fist against her scales. “Tall order, spoiled brat.”
She made a face, bemused. “I did apologize about the wards. And you said we could do this.”
He waved her off, stashed the dagger and jar in his own satchel, and led the rest of the way on foot.
Lisa spared one last, small prayer for the deceased before she followed him, but his reminder let her mind wander on to happier thoughts waiting back home.
After all, from death came life, and here, life overflowed.
By the end of the tunnel, most of the earth had been transmuted to biomatter. They stepped over soft roots, grass, and flower beds, past hanging fruit, bones, and body parts growing from the walls.
The space was large enough for the ape, she bet, but Lisa had to squeeze. She wrapped a bubble of wind around her that the squirming twigs and hands slid off of.
The exit arch was covered in ivy. As Wiggle approached, its leaves transmuted to mushroom shelves, one by one. The process sped up toward the peak of the arch, and the final ones popped out with puffs of spores.
The vein of power looked like a lake of liquid essences, fractal patterns, and flickering forms.
As if the arch had a curtain, more half-formed Imps tried to push their way past her into the tunnel, and Lisa expanded her bubble to keep them in. They clawed at the wind without finding purchase.
A human head rose from the surface of the lake, wet hair spreading out as if it were fused to the liquid, and it watched her with a pensive stare.
“Hi,” Lisa said.
Surging, the head rose up to its waist, attached to a naked body that dissolved into translucent slime as it tipped back into the vein like a breaching whale. The splash and wave formed chains of algae as they spread out.
Bubbling liquid in a corner shot up in a miniature geyser. Where the steam met the ceiling, it turned into chains of flowers and lichen instead.
Right in front of her, at the ledge where the ground should have met the liquid, a dark puddle of thicker colors bubbled, like paint instead of light. The grass grew pitch black at her feet. An impurity really had infected the vein then. She would leave that untouched. The rest, though?
Lisa slipped her own satchel around, retrieved a bundle of metallic rods, and began to fit them together. A box with holes in it went onto the tip, her new crystal of holding inside.
“I won’t take much,” she promised and didn’t know if she was speaking to Viglif, the Mother, or the vein itself.
There was a heavy debate in her family on which properties they had, or on how to classify them. They certainly didn’t have a spirit—or shouldn’t.
Life essence nurtured the physical more so than the spiritual. It more commonly nurtured the spiritual where it and the physical overlapped, or in order to attain the physical. When it did that here, it created life forms independent from the vein, not as part of it.
And the thing about life essence was, it wasn’t alive. Not really. No divine essences were.
Fire essence, pooled long enough, would eventually create a fire spirit. Quicker the greater the power that you pooled, and considering a few other factors.
Divine essence, no matter how long it was pooled, would do nothing. The same will and authority that animated it kept it from developing independence. Otherwise, it would be like a creature spontaneously growing a second head.
In this forest, her family had seen many creatures suddenly grow second heads.
That was the argument so many used: this was life essence they were talking about. Each of the Six had their own quirks and capabilities. They played by different rules. Would the Mother’s essence really be bound to these?
And even if it did, anomalies were always possible. Exceptions. There was a chance the chaotic essences mixed in with the life essence would stay powerful long enough to gain an independent spirit, which could learn to control the vein as they had their own Sparks of Life.
It was highly unlikely, if it did happen, there would be signs, and even if a spirit grew, there was no guarantee it would be sapient and able or willing to understand them, but …
Maybe some of Micah’s treatment of the Tower essence had rubbed off on her. Lisa tried to radiate gratitude as she dipped the box into the lake.
She extended her will along the rod like a spellcasting wand and activated the crystal within.
Power flowed, currents forming in the lake, and where they moved, the essences were moved to action. More incomplete forms rose and fell. A half-melted bird flew out from the surface, flapped its wings once, and splattered against the far wall. The splatter solidified into an eggshell patch that rapidly calcified when the surface dipped near it, then crumbled off.
“Do you have to finish your project?” Wiggle signed.
“I want to. Why?”
“It’s rare to have permission to take from a vein like this. We could make an amazing wine instead.”
Lisa chuckled and shoved him. He nearly tipped into the lake.
It took her six hours to fly to the second location, despite—or maybe it was better to think because of—all of the roadblocks in her way.
The stretched fabric of the Mother’s forest delayed most trips through it, but flying straight north above the forest wasn’t much quicker thanks to the Springwell.
It sat on the northern reaches of the Overseas continent. Rather than a place where the borders between their worlds were thinnest, the Springwell was practically a portal from the Plane of Seasons. It pumped humid, relatively warm air and magic into their world, and it sat on the border of where otherwise normally the northern polar vortex might have been. And while its winds flowed with the vortex to the east, where it met its winds to the west of the portal, the two threw each other and the weather into chaos.
Far to the north, a mountain range snaked up to and along the edge of their own continent, west to east out into the ocean, forming a volcanic chain where her uncle lived.
As the westwind met the brief eastwind of the portal, they crashed and split off currents northwest toward the North Pole and southwest into the ocean.
The southern ones lost most of their charge as they crossed the ocean and infused it, the islands they passed, and the southern continent that crawled away from the south pole with magic.
Only their barren winds made it back up to the Five Cities, after crossing a second ocean, and having looped halfway around the world.
But the winds that split off toward the North Pole from the Springwell? They formed chaotic storms not even a dragon would want to weather, crossed the shortest part of the ocean, and broke on the mountains, volcanoes, and northernmost coastal nations.
The forest ate much of the weather’s magic that remained, pooling in veins of power, and only the barren headwinds remained to push down on the Five Cities from the north as well.
And on her, slowing down her flight.
If she flew far enough north, over days, she would find the westwind that would eventually crash into the Springwell. It could carry her northeast quicker. And her family actually used it when they wanted to visit her uncle.
But to get that far in the first place? Most of them were too lazy to fly for three days. They’d built short cuts where they needed them most, to cut three days down to two-thirds of one.
Her query was at the southern end of the mountain range, not far from the domain of one of the last Drops of Her Blood that remained on this world.
She saw it in the distance, from above. An unassuming patch of evergreen. It took her a conscious effort of will not to dip down and sail toward it. She thought of her uncle Frey and his lament, but her family had impressed on her long ago: they were not welcome there.
If She ever saw them in person, that incarnation of the Mother had threatened to leave this world.
Lisa didn’t try to understand the whims of Gods. Instead, she looked up and savored the sensation of the wind beneath her wings, of sailing through the open sky, and of Viglif’s enjoyment as she dipped him through the clouds.
He wasn’t a fan of the sun, but he loved the cool shade they found this far up, even if it was still unhealthy, and she loved the grey fields of wool illuminated by sunlight below as she rose above the clouds.
Their query was in a stretch of wetlands that crawled down from the hills below the mountain. In this area, veins of power had pooled during and adapted to the seasonal floods of the area over a century ago, and then adapted again to alter the land and sustain the right conditions for those floods, twisting the natural order of things.
As a result of the stagnation, the southward flow, and the magical depression, veins almost never pooled this far north. Life essence infused the land, but it rarely reached a critical potency to spawn monsters from thin air like the imps. Instead, it mutated. And the land had adapted to force life to pool for it.
It hunted.
“A Compost Tree?” Lisa asked. They sat on a ridge of stone overlooking the flooded woods below.
The landscape looked like the moist trash that got stuck between the wall and dumpsters in the alleyways of Hadica, with some old basil fallen off the edge.
“The seed of one. I asked Faer,” Wiggle signed, “he said it checked enough boxes? There’s a fat one down there.”
“I would have gone with a slime aspect, or flown to the beach for something aquatic if there were none in season. This sounds interesting.”
It was a little more dangerous than their delve into the Imp’s layer. From the smallest frogs, to the overgrown, four-ton crocodiles and snakes, to the insect swarms that lived in undead trees and underground hives, and the creatures that dwelled in and reshaped the earth—every monster wanted to kill them. Despite their size, most had some way of felling titans.
The best thing to do would have been to fly to their destination in a storm of flames and wards, but Lisa wasn’t practiced enough to use her elemental spirit on such a scale, and especially not practiced enough to shield Wiggle while she did it.
She was exhausted, too. She wasn’t a migrating bird, able to fly around the world for days on end. She hadn’t moved her body for years. She’d forgotten how much effort it took.
So instead, she caught her breath and fanned the winds while Viglif did his thing: he released his own storm of poison onto the land. A killing cloud.
Normally, he might have used spores to avoid conflict, by putting monsters to sleep or paralyzing them, but many of the ones here wouldn’t care, especially the ones dwelling in the water or below the earth, and just as she wasn’t confident she could shield him from her spells, neither would he want to unleash a plague onto the forest with her around. Or at all …
She watched the noxious cloud roll out. He was a ranger. “Are you fine going this far? I thought you avoided intervention.”
Wiggle shrugged. Poison gases wafted out from his cap like incense. “It would take burning the place down to make a difference—and even then, it’d pop right back up in half a year.”
“Maybe the natives will do something, if it continues to spread.” Or maybe the Mother would, if it encroached on Her land.
“I doubt they could be rid of it for good.” Wiggle nodded to her, and she held a hand out for him to climb on her back.
Trusting him to keep the gasses off her, she ran, angling her wings to catch the wind, and pushed off to glide over the flooded landscape.
Flocks of birds scattered, and animals scrambled down the trees or ducked below the water as their shadow passed over the land. They scattered, clearing the area for the true monsters to come out.
A thick plague of insects rose from a crumbling tree husk, buzzing toward them. They met the poison cloud beneath her wings and dropped like flies. They didn’t stop, though, and threw more and more bodies at them.
And, after a moment, those fallen bodies rose up again, puppeted by the rest of the swarm.
Other creatures kept their distance, and when Wiggle pointed with a tendril of poison, she saw the first signs of the tree’s roots in the canopy below.
Alders, reptilian creatures like a cross between a cat-sized caterpillar and an octopus, swung from branch to branch in the trees with critters and foodstuffs trapped in their coiled grasp: frogs, insects, birds, fruits, nuts, and bundles of wild grasses.
They were headed in the same direction. The closer she flew, the quicker they raced her to the finish line.
Compost Trees were fetid things of grey wood and thick branches in a sparse crown. Glowing sacs of fluid and coiled shadows hung from those, closest to the trunk, and where the tree met the water, its roots spread like one of their waypoints into a broad cage.
Wooden spikes grew inward. The Alders mounted their bounties on them like shrikes, and stacked a pile of compost around the tree. Fuel for life essence.
The noxious cloud began to disperse as she outpaced it, and Lisa angled herself for her descent—
Something bounced off her side. She glanced back to see a dead bird falling toward the water before it was swarmed by dead locusts.
Another flew up at her. The Alders chucked their food up at her as they raced back to defend their home. One was quicker than the rest, oozing distress as it skittered up the cage and around the trunk.
Slowly, the tree itself came to life. As it moved, it looked more like leather than bark. A crocodile mistaken for a log in a lake. With two branches, it lashed out.
Lisa caught both in her hands and landed with enough force to make the tree groan as it slipped deeper into the flooded earth.
It continued to sink, slowly, as it bore her weight. Its other branches lashed out, slower than the treants she’d fought in the Tower, but weightier. She bent the two she held back, then a third, and fended the others off en masse with her wings as she turned away.
The Alders swung themselves up like mutated monkeys and wailed on her. Her scales were too tough for them to truly hurt, but more and more of them arrived to swarm her.
The locusts had backed off for the moment, but it was only a matter of time before they or another scavenger came to attack whoever was left.
Lisa swept a group into the water, caught and hurled an Alder into the trees, and leaned in to breathe fire over their heads. The flames rolled over the lake and left a trail of stinking vapor, briefly illuminating the arrowhead shadows swimming toward them in the water.
“Wiggle!”
“On it.” Viglif hopped off her back and swung himself into the cage of roots.
Any one of the Alders had the seeds to grow a new tree inside of them, but alone, there was little chance their saplings would thrive.
Instead, the tree nurtured a different kind of seed cluster. When their swarm grew great enough, and the tree was strong enough or too weak, it sent off part of its swarm with one of those seeds to grow new trees elsewhere, like bees.
Far more work went into creating the seed clusters than growing the Alders, so when Wiggle emerged from its bowels with their prize—a bundle of glowing sacs like a fat, ghostly pomegranate jewel—they forgot Lisa and swarmed him like mothers protecting their young.
Lisa had been ready for it. She crushed the first two to reach him against the roots, swept the reinforcements into the water, and leaned in so he could run up her wing.
Turning, Lisa pushed off and took the sky—and fell, as the tree gave out beneath her. She flapped her wings once, squawked in surprise, and crashed into the swamp instead.
A wave of mud shot up around her, and a series of smaller splashes followed as the Alders shot out of the water like arrows and jumped off the tree.
Lisa spun, lashing her wings and tail to keep them off her. Wiggle must have stowed the sample, because he suddenly appearing, leaning over her side to punch them away.
As he handled more and more of the defense, she ran from the tree. Her steps threw up more waves of infested waters, and her feet dug into the soft soil of the swamp.
The locust swarm gathered up and in the distance, an earthy moose the size of her mom slowly rose out of the earth and began to stalk toward them.
“Lisa!” Wiggle urged her.
She hurried, but every step could collapse a pit trap, and the tree line was rapidly approaching. She was out of time.
With a burst of wind, Lisa pushed off and strained her body. Up. Her feet bent a tree’s crown back. She nearly fell into the pines, and huffed and puffed to get the hell away from it all. Urgency lit a fire in her wings.
Wiggle secured himself with mycelium ropes and swung around, throwing Alders off that clung to her, desiccating an approaching swarm, and then her muddy legs.
More shadows chased them through the branches below, but she flew up. Further still. Only when she brushed the distorted space of the forest’s border did she relax and look down.
The Alders, ants from so high, retreated to defend their home. Some were picked off by buzzing clouds. The moose sunk back below the earth, glaring at her.
“They’ll recover, right?” The question surprised her, but she glanced back at Viglif for confirmation.
She didn’t feel guilty per se. More than the Imps, who were bundles of emotion, the Alders were animals at best. Plants at worst. But something about the scene struck a chord.
So much effort, stolen away in a moment. They were helpless to do anything about it.
Wiggle stopped his sweep for a moment to sign, “If not them, then another tree.” Her body was good at fighting diseases and parasites, but it would still be safer to land someplace safe soon and do a more thorough check herself.
In her home, there was always a chance something would go wrong, an unfortunate mutation, a magical plague.
“They were dominating the area,” he added after a moment. “This will be healthy in the long run— Well, as healthy as anything can be here.”
Lisa took a deep breath and looked ahead. It’s too late anyway. And she did need these ingredients. Her parents had forbidden her from using any more than the bare minimum of life essence for her project, but even if they hadn’t, she wasn’t sure she could expend as much as she would have needed on her own. It would set her development back years.
She also wasn’t about to ask one of them for a donation of life essence, and doubted they would supply one even if she did. This was her project. She couldn’t always rely on their gifts.
“Where to?”
“South-east, with the wind,” Wiggle said. The directions were like a balm for her soul. She hadn’t felt this exhausted in … ever. “Loop around home.”