To Save a World Ch. 04

In front of him, stretching to about two stories above and on either side as far as the eye can see, was a tangled wall of black, monstrous plants. The sheer sight ingrained the meaning of its name deep into his bones. You'd think words themselves are adequate to express the meaning of a thing -- to fully show you what it is. But this, no words can adequately describe. The sound of the word in your ear, the image it elicits in your mind. All of it was lacking. It has to be felt. Now, staring at the Black Wall, the spirits' hidden place, he understood its meaning deep into his bones.

The place was meant to be avoided. It literally screamed pain to those who would dare to seek what has been hidden away. The spirits declared this particular tangle of the bushes off limits, and they bent the laws of nature in order to let it be known.

It was a jarring sight. There was a clear, distinct line where the normal jungle ended and the monstrosity began. The forest simply clung into their oversized, evil-looking cousins, like gentle little waves of green assailing a dark behemoth of cliff. And the plants. Plant life wasn't supposed to look like that. It was absolutely insane. 'Vines as thick as a grown man's wrist' was not an exaggeration. If anything, it was positively understated. The body of the vines that composed most of the tangle looked like trees themselves, except they weaved and twisted into each other in tight, ominous, unnatural patterns that stretched out towards the sky. It positively bristled with black thorns like the tips of spears, their wickedly sharp edges seeming to flash dangerously in the sunlight. At this point, if Trasnu walked up to him and told him that what he was looking at was like a demon's castle wall, he would absolutely buy it.

The young man released a breath that he had been holding. "Fuck."

"I may be able to do this." Serche spoke up from beside him with a small voice.

"You sound terrified. Not helping, Serche."

"I speak true!" The young woman cleared her throat, and tried again. "I do. I think I can make it. I can hear it too, you know! The sound of the river. It's not far at all. Maybe half a day's walk."

"Half a day's walk through that, expending your magic power every step of the way?"

"Y- yes."

Aaron released a long, slow breath. Lydia, beside him, suddenly clung to the sleeve of his tunic like a lost child. "And how exactly are you going to do this, again?"

Serche looked at him in exasperation. He had asked the same question about half a dozen times already, throughout their walk. "I am a talented Spirit Guide. I possess the power to convince the spirits of growth. Therefore, I can govern the growth of plants, and shape their forms into what I wish. Roughly."

"And how is this going to help us?"

"We go into the run'an. I exert my power to make the plants grow, and at the same time control how they grow to form a pathway for us to walk straight through."

"And if you run out of magic?"

"Then we rest. There is a small likelihood of the plants themselves devouring us."

"What if they do? What if the stories were right, after all? What if we make a path through it, and we run right into a monster?"

"Then we will die."

Aaron exhaled slowly. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, a cold pit of fear lying heavy in his chest.

"Aaron." Serche firmly declared, "We owe you our lives. You are our master. This way is what we believe to be the best, but you do not have to heed our words. Give us your command, and we will find some other way into the river."

The fearful young man turned to her. She was staring at him with a determined expression, her brilliant golden eyes showing a touch of fear, yet the way her pure white coat shone in the ambient light, her regal bearing, seemed to hold no trace of fear at all.

Trasnu was staring at him as well, his grave eyes serious for once. The man was staring at him intensely, waiting for his word, but also, he knew, carefully evaluating him, his actions and his decisions.

Lydia looked at him with eyes of trust that simultaneously comforted him and made his heart beat faster with fear. He would not be able to stand letting those trusting eyes down. He had resolved it, deep within himself, that he would protect her from this world.

"Ah, man. No, let's do it. I'm just being a pussy." Aaron huffed decisively. "Shit. Let's do this."

Serche nodded. Trasnu broke into his signature wide smile, his eyes perhaps holding a touch of pride. Lydia gulped nervously and held his hand.

Aaron didn't know if it was just him, but the forest itself seemed to hold its breath the moment they reached the black tangle of enormous vines. Birdsongs stopped reaching his ears, the noise of insects and critters eerily vanished from the air. Even the rustling of trees and leaves -- a noise Aaron had gotten so used to that he didn't give it a second thought -- now was noticeably absent.

The group stopped at the edge of the run'an, where the forest ended and hell's own garden began. Serche stretched out her hands and did her magic, an ambient, gentle green glow accompanying the sudden rustling of plants. If its appearance didn't hint at it, the sound that it made, like the groan of hardwood straining together -- a sound Aaron associated more with ships and sailing -- certainly would tell anyone how strong these 'vines' are. They slithered, sprouting their dreary looking leaves in several places, and meanwhile the vines moved snake-like together and made way. A dark space appeared from within the depths. It looked wide enough so that two of their group would be able to walk through, shoulder to shoulder, and just deep enough for Aaron to be able to see the end of it, although as soon as he laid eyes on it they began to give way as well.

It looked like a road straight to the very depths of hell.

Wordlessly, the group stepped into the path. Serche walked in front, while Lydia and Aaron followed her, Trasnu bringing up the rear. It was dark, it was unnaturally silent, and everywhere they looked they saw merging, twisting bodies of black-brown vines as big as their arm. The ground was uneven, and when Aaron looked down he discovered that it wasn't the ground at all, but the same tangle of vines as everywhere else.

Serche huffed. Aaron heard the strain in her breathing, could feel the fear and apprehension that she felt as well as if it was his own. Lydia clutched his arm tighter, drawing closer to him as they went further into the tunnel. Soon, it was completely dark.

"Wait," Serche commanded. She stood still for a minute and light blossomed all around them. The trio of spectators marveled at the hovering ball of light in front of them, about as big as a fist, casting yellow-green light around them. Aaron looked around. He expected to feel relief, but the lighting only highlighted their alien surroundings, casting extreme contrasts of magical light and clinging shadows. He didn't voice his concerns, and soon they pressed on.

Every step they took everyone felt their anxiety grow. How long had they been walking? Time and distance were faint memories, hazy concepts at the back of everyone's mind that was nullified by the black, foreboding underworld that they were moving in. The uneven surface of their tunnel's walls painted eerie murals of shadows in their wake.

Serche might have felt like a foreigner back outside. Here she seemed like an enemy. The young woman sensed eyes all around her, the unknown seeming to monitor every move like a predator hunting prey. Her senses were on full alert, but she could smell nothing but stale earth and the muggy scent of plants all around them, could hear nothing but their steps, their breathing, their heartbeats. Her magical senses were useless, as everywhere she looked it was the same blinding aura of ancient magic.

Serche's relative blindness caused her to be wary to the extreme. Her triangle ears stood up on her head, two sharp points of white twitching and swiveling ever so often. Every smell she strained to inspect, every lurking shadow and clinging dark -- but nothing justified the slowly worsening pit of fear in her stomach.

Lydia tried not to bother anyone with her fear. Being the weakest link in the group, she thought that the least she could do was stay silent, and not include anyone in her pointless worries. Literally everyone around her is more capable than she, and she tried to remind herself that she was in safe hands -- that nothing would happen to her so long as she had Aaron and their new comrades.

But the place felt wrong. It seemed like it was pushing them back out, like the air itself was pushing against her. Her foot felt heavier, her body more sluggish, and her insides felt revolted at the sickening aura of their surroundings. As if they were moving through the insides of a giant demon.

The young woman gripped Aaron's arm tighter constantly reassuring herself of his presence.

"Wait," Serche ordered again, "Can we rest for a while? I need to catch my breath."

Wordlessly, the group stopped as one. They stood warily around each other, gawking at their eerie surroundings. Aaron looked back to where they came from, finding what looked like a tunnel of darkness through the earth. He should have gotten used to it by now, but the impossibility. He shook his head ruefully. 'They're not impossibilities anymore, Aaron, not here in... Where?'

Suddenly, a glaring question stood out in his mind.

"Serche, where are we?"

The wolf woman looked at him in surprise. "We're in a place of legend called a run'an. They are regions of the forest that are-"

"No- not that. I mean, I know that already. But in where? What is this place called? The next... City? Or kingdom? What world am I living in right now?"

Serche turned to him in surprise, immediately thinking back to the recent times that they've exchanged information. Now that she's thought about it, Aaron wasn't told anything about their world at all.

"I see," The young woman paused thoughtfully. "I am as much of a foreigner in this place as you are, but I will do my best to answer your questions while we walk.

We are, as I have said before, currently travelling through a run'an, a region of the Great Forest that not many people have documented. I do not know exactly where we are within the Forest, but this fact tells us that we are somewhere deep within, in a place where no human or other Race frequent. My guess is that we are nearing the foot of the Shield Mountains. You recall the Shield Mountains? Yes. My estimate is that we are about a week's walk away from the foot of it. Although I am only guessing. We will have to get our bearings, as soon as we secure all the other necessities."

Serche mused as the group slowly trudged through the ever-expanding tunnel as she unconsciously expended her magical energy. There was so much to explain that she didn't know where to start. How do you go about explaining your reality to someone so far removed from it? And a human, nonetheless! From a different world! She shook her head and continued.

"Anyway, the Great Forest blankets the Shield Mountains. It is aptly named, as there is no other of its kind in the world. None will mistake it for any other. All other forests are but saplings compared to it.

The Forest is located at the border of the continent, blanketing the Shield Mountains and beyond. The Shield, by the way, separates the two halves of the continent. There is only one narrow pass from one part to the next, and on it sits the Gateway City, governed by a joint body of Human and other Races. It is the only place in the land where you can traverse from one continent to the next. Or at least, it should be."

Serche saw the expression on Aaron's face, and before he could say anything she hurriedly added. "The Races got divided because of the Great War. The Race Wars is too long and complicated a topic to discuss right now, so we'll talk about it some other time. Suffice it to say that the Races fought together, with each other, in a war so big that it permanently fractured all of the land.

I say it should be, because the Kin -- the last of the Races to ever leave the Human lands, managed to find a way through the Shield Mountains, by scaling the cliffs where the Shield meets the sea, because our leaders then suspected that human traitors were waiting in ambush on the road to the Gateway. We never went far from where we first set foot on the other side, and so we made our homes near both the Shield and the open sea, but still within the Great Forest. I've thought about it, and I think that it would be pretty easy to spot one of us from the sea, if the humans of this time are as advanced in magic as they seem to be."

The observation seemed to have ended Serche's narrative to a pregnant pause.

"Um," Aaron hesitantly began, wracking his mind for the specific piece of information he was looking for. Maybe it had just slipped his mind... but no, it was never mentioned. "So, what is the continent called?"

"Oh," Serche realized, "Yes. It is called by many things, even before the Age of Awe. But right now the human kingdoms call it Diesia." The wolf woman's ears and tail noticeably flicked in a gesture Aaron though was discomfort. "It means Divided Land."

Aaron was silent as he digested this information. "And what do your people call it?"

Serche looked back, eyes flicking to Aaron and then to Trasnu. "We call it the Fractured Land. Tal'Roina. Other Races call it-"

A thud. It was a while before the pain in Serche's head registered, yet a little more before she realized that she was on her ass in the ground. The side of her head ached sharply, her rump also smarting from the harsh fall.

"Ow," She dazedly muttered in pain, a hand instinctively going to her head.

Everyone was onto her immediately. Lydia touched her arm, projecting calming thoughts, while Aaron inspected her head, although there was little he could do other than make sure she didn't have a concussion and hover around her helplessly. "I'm fine, I'm fine." She assured, "What happened? Are we under attack?"

"You bumped your head into something when you weren't looking. You may want to take a look at this, Shaman."

Serche got up with the two teen's help, and then crowded around Trasnu to inspect what had disturbed their walk. Serche hissed as soon as she laid eyes on it.

"I'd be damned. That's two things I thought I wouldn't see in this lifetime. This old dog's in some adventure, for sure."

"What? What is it? Is it dangerous?" Aaron asked Trasnu, swallowing his nervousness.

"Magic-wrought material. I think it's meant to be a..." Serche reached up, and the vines cleared away from the structure she had struck, revealing it in more detail. "Yes," the shaman breathed, "It's a beam. Which means that this... is a doorway."

The plants edged away and away in a greater circle around their area, enormous dark-green snakes slithering away from them as they grew. Soon the group could see that Serche was right... and wrong.

It was a beam, but it was not a doorway. The closest comparison that Aaron could immediately jump to was something that was probably not in this world -- it looked like a shorter, wider, and more colorful version of Stonehenge.

Aaron was no expert in stones, but even he could tell that this was something not found on his world. The material looked closer to marble in its sheen, but its color was weird. There were swirls of glittering colors on a background of dull white, like ink dropped into oil; morphing and twisting together to form mesmerizing streaks and shapes. Blues, reds, yellows, and everything in between, competed with each other to see who can shine the brightest under Serche's harsh magical light.

The beam that Serche bumped into sat on top of two other solid pillars, each of them about two feet thick, and a little bit more than six feet tall, and their edges were crisp and clean as if they weren't buried on a clusterfuck of monstrous-looking vines. Upon closer inspection, the slabs themselves didn't have any chips and cracks at all, looking as pristine as if they were placed there just yesterday.

The slab lying horizontally on top of the pillars had a single character etched into the stone, right in the center of its length. Aaron could just barely make it out, but it wasn't something that he understood. No surprise there, but the befuddled expression of his companions told him that they also knew nothing of its meaning.

And it wasn't alone. Serche had by now cleared more or less a diameter of at least more than a meter around them, and from that Aaron could see two more of the structures on either side of the one that Serche bumped, each with different characters on the top slab, tilted ever so slightly together and giving the impression that it formed a wide circle around something. They were packed quite tightly, each structure no more than three feet apart from each other.

Alarms had been ringing out in Aaron's head since he had laid eyes on the structure -- a feeling silently shared by the whole group. Deep in their minds, they know that these magical pillars signify something, but the mystery was not something that they could uncover with what they knew now, and time was pressing on. Serche has already expended a lot of her magical energy revealing a greater area than was needed, and although she's rested for a bit everyone could see her breathing deeply, her expression one of strained concentration. If they delayed any longer, Serche might get too exhausted and they'd be trapped where they are until she recovered.

And so they pressed on, ducking a little under the beam-like stone slab on top of the pillars, forward into the unknown.

Looking back, that was the first mistake that they made.

Lydia knew something wasn't right the moment they stepped under the foreboding structure. The sense that something was wrong multiplied by a hundredfold and raised her hackles to upright needles. The sensitive hair of her fur prickled in waves, and her heart beat fast enough so that Serche felt like panting. She began to breathe rapidly, and from experience she knew that it was her body preparing to either run or fight the unknown threat.

"Something is wrong here." She whispered to Aaron. She looked at the young man to find his eyes darting all around, shoulders tense. He nodded silently to her assessment.

Unconsciously, the group began to move faster. That was the second mistake.

Serche was breathing harder now, her magic flowing out of her like water, quickly persuading the already-rich spirits of the plants around them to grow, and to move out of the way while they were at it. The tunnel cleared in front of them rapidly, and they increased their pace to match. They were lightly jogging now, panting in the stale, muggy air of the run'an, wobbling as they traversed increasingly difficult footing.

Trasnu brought up the rear, Lydia and Aaron right behind her as she led from the front.

So again, she was the one who almost died.

There was no warning, none at all. One second she was striding through uneven but solid footing, the next she was pitching forward into thin air. A cry died in her throat. The vines had already parted ahead of her, just as she intended, and what it revealed was black. A pit of unending darkness, stretching down, down, down.

'I'm going to die,' she realized, her whole body driven forwards by momentum, and in the blink of an eye she was floating on nothing, and she knew that she'd feel the drop in her gut and the dread in her heart.

She screamed.