May the land slide into the sea! I’d barely survived my encounter with two frogs, let alone four of them.

True, I now had armour and spellbook, and I better understood the ‘gifts’ the altar and dwarf goddess had bestowed upon me, but I doubted they’d do much to stand up against one of those frogs crashing into me. Or swallowing me whole.

In any other circumstance I’d turn around. Even if I need through this room I could simple build up my arsenal of spells until I was ready to fight them, to win the battle before it began. But time was burning down. Something twisted and stirred in my brain, demanding to be noticed. The tugging in my brain was pointing directly at the corpse. Something else twisted and stirred. Best not to think of that. Act first, then think.

I took a step towards the body. It was there the hob’s knowledge was directing me. The knowledge of what? I dared not think of it.

The frogs eyes, previously fixed on my jack-o’-lanterns, swivelled to face me.

That gave me an idea.

I stopped, and darted my lights past the frogs, bobbing and weaving around their darting tongues. I couldn’t actually move them fast enough to avoid the tongues, but as they were no corporeal, the frogs had no way of knowing that.

I led the frogs on a tantalizing hunt to the corner of the room, slowly following behind them as I did so. They didn’t notice.

Just before the statue, my concentration slipped. I was doing too much at once. Controlling my lights, controlling my limbs. Listening heavily to some thoughts, desperately ignoring others. One of my limbs moved a hair too fast. I was too focused to even notice which one.

The sudden motion attracted one of the frogs’ notice. As one they turned from the lights to stare at me.

Their legs tensed.

I took an involuntary step back. The moment I did so, the tension in their legs eased. I took another step back and they eased further. The frogs continued to watch me warily as I retreated from the room, turning back to my lights only once I’d crossed the threshold.

It was the room then. Their room. Their lair. As long as I wasn’t trespassing they had no quarrel with me.

Could I access the corpse without entering the room? Perhaps if I pushed it towards myself with magic?

But that had the risk of attracting the frogs’ attention. They seemed particularly sensitive to sudden motion. And a sudden force might also have a chance of blowing the corpse apart, which would be messy to say the least.

Fine. An idea was brewing in my head. Complicated. Crazy. Precise. But I was pretty sure I could pull it off. As long as I was prepared. As long as I was careful. As long as I got lucky.

One step at a time, Oswic.

I moved back into the corridor and began unbuckling my belt. I left my waterskins and sword on the floor, along with my dagger and chisel. I took only my hammer and spellbook.

I moved back into the archway, hefting my hammer, getting a feel for its weight. Okay. I could do this. I wasn’t hoopstone champion for nothing. I readied my spellbook, fingers marking the spells I needed.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

In truth, it wasn’t even that difficult. Or rather, it was difficult, but difficult like walking a beam across a chasm. In normal circumstances you could do it every time. But it was the added risk of failure which changed the whole equation.

Breathe in-

If I thought about it any longer I’d not have the courage to do it.

I spun to face directly away from the corpse, angled along the imaginary line leading from it to the archway.

Safe TeleportII

Several seconds later I was standing just behind the corpse, facing the archway. I couldn’t even make out its outline in the dark, but I’d dared not bring my lights back for this. The frogs would have followed.

I threw my hammer towards where I hoped the archway was, then bent while it was mid-flight to scoop up the corpse in my arms.

My new strength still surprised me. The corpse hardly felt like it weighed anything at all. There was less than a second of silence, an instant, fast as thought, and still I felt a prickling on the back of my neck, expecting a frog to crush my skull or devour me whole. I didn’t dare turn around to face them.

The hammer struck.

I focused on the sound, triggering two spells simultaneously.

Transport

Safe Teleport

I staggered when I landed from the sudden loss of weight. I managed to hop over my hammer, which in turn caused me to trip and sprawl across the corpse which had arrived at the same time. My spellbook landed in in heap atop us, cold against my back.

I’d lost all my clothes.

Fortunately, or perhaps horrifyingly, I still managed to avoid touching the corpse with my naked body. Horrifying, because the thing separating us was my clothing and armour. They’d arrived on the corpse.

Ewww. I need to wash them. And then maybe burn them.

First things first. I glanced back into the room. The frogs were staring at me. They’d probably heard my hammer strike the floor. Fortunately, they’d stayed in the corner of the room where my lights were.

I wondered if they’d follow the lights out of the room. I didn’t want to test it.

I turned back to study the corpse by its own (very) dim glow.

My clothing covered most of her – it was clearly a her – but what I could see was strange. I’d noticed she’d felt unusually solid for a corpse, but I hadn’t expected her to completely retain her shape. She filled out my clothes with a woman’s shape. Her flesh hadn’t shrunken or collapsed in on itself. Her eyes were even intact, they hadn’t shrivelled away. What skin was visible hadn’t been eaten at by maggots or turned black with putrefaction. She didn’t even smell bad.

And yet she was clearly rotting. Moss grew all over her. One of her fingers had crumbled away into nothing. Her scalp was just a bed of moss.

I pulled at my clothes to studied her further, giving off more light as I did so. Again I found no signs of decaying flesh. Her abdomen was the strangest of all. It had crumbled in places much like her fingers, but where it hadn’t it looked as smooth and natural as a person at rest.

I found myself checking her pulse, just in case, but there was none. What happened happened to her?

As I tugged off the gloves she’d taken from me it began to grow clear. The skin there was textured, getting steadily rougher from her wrists to the tips of her fingers. Tugging off my shoes confirmed it. Her toes ended in thick brown roots.

She was a hamadryad. A tree nypmph.

That explained it. Hamadryads were made from wood. A very soft, supple, yielding wood, but wood none the less. Which meant...

Which meant I could take my clothes back!

I quickly stripped the body and sorted out my gear. My tunic and pants needed to be shaken out first, but once I got the moss out they were good as new. Better even. Smelled like the forest. Smelled like home.

I finished re-buckling my belt then bent to study the corpse once more.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” I murmured.

Supposedly, she could – nope, don’t think it. Supposedly she could help me with problem. Had the hob though she was still alive or-

Consume her flesh. Drink her blood. Swallow her heart.

I glanced around, sword and spells at the ready. It had sounded like something the Mushroom-King might say, but the tone itself had been nothing like his. More matter of fact than demanding. Nor had it sounded like the voice of the warlock nor the altar nor the whispering of dark magic.

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Consume her flesh. Drink her blood. Swallow her heart.

Again.

I lowered my sword. I recognized it now. It was my own thoughts, buried beneath all the others. My intuition, bolstered by the blessing of the hob. I understood.

To partake of the flesh and blood. To make her heart my own was to become her, and for her to become me. Not in truth, but symbolically. Symbols held power, especially in a place infused with the chaos of dark magic.

Nymphs were the embodiment of nature. As a king serves his people so to did Dryads, being a floral sort of nymph, hold some small dominion over the flora they served. Hamadryads especially were particularly close to the earth.

I wondered what happened to her. Down in the dungeons, so far from the sun. Another prisoner of the warlocks? Or an experiment?

I rested my hand on the pommel of my dagger. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve any of this.

But what could I do?

I drew the dagger. There was ritual and there was desecration. Which was which wasn’t always obvious, but there was ways of telling. When you sought power for yourself, when you forced your will onto the world, when you struggled towards the outcome you wanted rather than the outcome given to you, you were toying with dark magic.

When you acted in harmony with nature, when you brought about its miracles, when you accepted what was given to you, when you submitted to its will, when you allowed yourself to feel pain, that was true magic.

This was dark magic.

My dagger hovered over her, face, chest, arms, stomach, thighs. Each time I tried to lower the tip, to score her flesh, but each time I moved on. To start anywhere was monstrous. Sacrilege.

I was no stranger to butchery. Disembowel, round the ankles, pull off the skin, separate the muscle, etc.

I couldn’t dress her like a rabbit. That was fundamentally wrong. The thought to leave her be never entered my mind, I wouldn’t let it. This had to be done. It was merely a question of how.

I’d make my own ritual. Give her what sacredness I could. Try to bend back towards the path nature had laid, if only a little bit. Dark magic might not be wrong, might be another facet of natural order as the warlock had claimed, but even there I felt there was a right and wrong way of doing things. Otherwise we’d all be cannibals and the world would be awash with blood.

I placed the dagger at the base of her ribcage, beneath her moss covered breast. The breast of a mother, or a lover. Even hamadryads, most alien of the nymphs, were human through and through.

“Wind lift my wings that I do not fall.”

I hadn’t meant to whisper the prayer aloud, but it’d slipped free. I took a deep breath and cut. Cut deep; aiming for her heart.

I was met with sapwood and cork rather than muscle and fat. Brilliant clear sap oozed from the wound rather than blood. Maybe it shouldn’t have helped, but it did. It was more like desecrating a statue than butchering a human.

No.

She was as human as any other. I wouldn’t allow myself that thought. To devalue her dignity was to devalue my own.

My dagger found her rib, a sturdy thing made from heartwood. I traced around and under it until I found her heart. It was shaped like an inverted acorn almost exactly. An ironic simulacra of man’s, of wood rather than flesh.

I cut it free and pulled it from the wound. It was large, the size of my closed fist. Unlike the rest of her body it felt nothing like a human’s flesh and bone. It was harder, smoother, exactly like the nut it resembled.

I raised her heart to my face. Brushed it against my lips.

“Forgive me.”

My newfound strength easily tore through the heart’s shell, but it was delicate enough any normal person could have succeeded. It tasted good. Too good. Like syrup and honey. Like fresh nuts from the tree. Blood and flesh.

I caught myself licking my fingers of some of the sap when I finished. Was that the warlock’s influence? Or the altar? Or the Mushroom-King? Or was that me? Me unaltered, tempted by power and raw hedonism above the dignity of eternal slumber.

Better me than the moss and worms.

The thought made me sick. Why had that come to mind? What was wrong with me? Always trying to find the dark joke in everything. Always trying to run from the moment.

I shook my head clear. Even in failure I was too harsh on myself. Sometimes you needed to run. Self recrimination was another way of avoiding pain. I couldn’t count how many times my master had tried to hammer those words into my brain. The words might have even been true. They were certainly a sign of his own private struggle.

I looked at the dryad’s body once more. Still mostly untouched save for a wound on her left side.

Eat her. Moss and all. Only then will you be free.

The hob’s intuition guiding my thoughts once more. I had work to do.

***

My lights died before I finished, but the frogs left me to my work. I rose, unconsciously placing my hand on my stomach. I could feel her there. Feel me. She was long gone. Feel her power. Unbelievably, I’d somehow eaten an entire other person. It shouldn’t have been possible. My stomach should have ruptured long ago.

Instead, I was suffused with a feeling of oneness. Of rightness. Of attunement with the creative forces of being. Was this how dryads felt all the time? Was I now a dryad? I didn’t feel different. My toes hadn’t turned into roots. My fingers hadn’t begun to sprout leaves.

My mind was a conflicted mess. Remembering raising crumbling flesh to my lips... Each had been worse than the last. Breasts. Genitals. Eyes and lips.

I was a monster.

But this feeling of wholeness which had risen in me had only grown stronger as I’d continued. I didn’t know what to make of it. More than guilt, more than shame, more than disgust at the horrors I’d committed, I felt a feeling of absolute content. Was I acting in accordance with Nature after all? Was this how dryads paid their final respects?

If so, why did couldn’t I get rid of the horrors waiting behind my eyelids? Even the Teleport rune seemed dim by comparison.

Even so, a pressure had eased from my mind. One I hadn’t even realized was there. I felt sturdier. The mycelia patching the hole in my brain remained, the Mushroom-King remained, but he was contained- integrated. Contained held the possibility of escape. Integrated was a better way to think about it. Like bone of the enemy mixed into iron.

I was free!

Free! Only my proximity to the frogs prevented me from yelling in exaltation. I’d not be bound by the warlocks, and I’d not be bound by the Mushroom-King. My mind was mine and mine alone. The warlocks had their claim, but it was weak. A far subtler approach then the Mushroom-King. Suggestions rather than orders.

So I couldn’t trust my thoughts, that was nothing new. It had been years since I’d learned the difference between thinking something, believing it, and it being true. All sorts of funny ideas roamed through the æther. Most of the ones imposed on my mind I ignored. Conscientious minds were particularly susceptible to self-destructive introjects.

I was free. Free and a dryad. That brought with it all whole new bevy of experiences and questions. Though my appearance hadn’t changed (as far as I could tell) my senses had. I could make out the faint traces of bioluminescent moss on the ground, even with my eyes closed. I could sense the Mushroom-King’s mycelia coursing through the floors and walls of the dungeon. Rising up from the cracks in the flag stones. I could sense the life within me. The glowing core of the dryad at the centre of my being.

I could feel something else. Each source of life contained a string, which thrummed with subtle energy. It was a matter of will, I didn’t even need to lift a finger to reach out and pluck it. To bend it to suit my purpose.

The moss flared in the dark. All of its stored energy released at once, still not enough to see by. And somehow I knew, I knew exactly how long the new light would last. I couldn’t words to it – hours or minutes – human metrics were alien to the plant’s senses, but some part of tracked it all the same. Not much longer.

What did that mean? What did it mean to be a dryad? Did I now have some tree to serve? Was I bound to it? Was my life contingent on it’s survival? The hob had said he’d free me from the Mushroom-King, not from involuntary service. If he had tried to cheat me, tried ensnare me once more, I’d find a way out of it. I, Oswic of Blackbridge, Magi of the Sacred order for six long years, would not be bound.

One thing at a time.

Which way led back home?

Home. The sunless room with two rotting frog corpses and a casket of fish.

I couldn’t stay here. The frogs might wander from their room eventually. I held my breath and listened, what had it been? Children’s laughter in the halls?

I had to place my ear nearly flush against the wall to make the noises out at first. They sounded like no children I’d ever heard. Yipping howls. Whines. Cackling. Once I knew what to listen for I could make it out among the moans, screams, and whistling winds of the dungeon, even when I stood in the centre of the hall.

In theory, I could wall securely down the middle of the corridor with confidence as long as kept the balance of sound in both ears. If the laughter grew louder in one and fainting in the other, I could move back in the direction of the faint sound until they equalized again. In practice, I wasn’t sure I had the skill. Perhaps a musician could do it easily, but I was no musician. Singing with the village ‘round the fire and a few tunes on the recorder was the limit of my abilities.

Still, I’d give it a shot. The mercenaries had said the laughter was different in the rooms, though I couldn’t remember how. Hopefully it was obvious.

As it turned out, it was. The first path I chose (the fork to my left) ended in a doorway after less than a minute of cautious stepping. I turned around, hugging the wall to my left so as not accidentally end up back with the frogs.

After another minute of walking the yipping, howling laughter gave way to the laughter of children playing. Girl children. Hadn’t the mercenaries said the something about the sex of the child depending on the size of the room? The hob room hadn’t been small, but outside of my cell and the spike room it was probably the smallest I’d seen. Girl’s laughter for smaller rooms then.

I circled around the room until I found the door on the far side. It was still wedged halfway open as I’d remembered. I squeezed through and pulled it shut behind me. The yipping howls returned.

Where was I now? Another hallway? It had only been a couple of hours since I’d last past by here, but they’d been a very stressful couple hours, so my memory was a little shaky. Shouldn’t the room of footsteps be next? For that matter, why hadn’t I noticed children’s laughter in the room of footsteps? Perhaps you could only hear it when looking for it? Or perhaps I’d been too distracted. It was fairly faint unless my ear was against the wall.

I hit a second door after a couple dozen steps. Right. The tiny antechamber between the two rooms. I’d completely forgot about it.

I pulled the second door shut as well. I sat and took a pull from my waterskin. I didn’t fancy risking the darkened chambers and corridors all the way back to my room. If anything this room was probably safer than my own. Anything trying to open these doors would wake me instantly. Not even the wailing corner had produced such tortured screaming.

I rested my head against the wall. There was severed roots behind the wall here. Probably from when the soldiers had activated the rift. Majestic green lines of life slowly fading away. The world was full of life, even here.

My awareness spread, finding the glowing lights in the dark. Lights which waxed towards brilliance, and others which waned away to nothing. Both were beautiful beyond measure. And there, at my core, filling me with that feeling of wholesome satisfaction, was the most beautiful glow of all. Shining like the sun, but infinitely more pleasant to look at.

Life filled me. Sitting here in the dark, far from home, kidnapped by warlocks, a hand’s breadth from death every moment, with the echoes of screams and demented laughter ringing in my ears, I was content.