Forest

After stepping down the hill, it didn’t take long for Alice to reach the edge of the forest, her muscles never tiring despite having to wade through the sea of tall grasses that tried to entangle her, her pace never faltering and her breathing barely speeding up as she crossed the gentle undulations that separated her from the cluster of trees, the uneven ground she was stepping on surely hiding countless treasures in the forgotten buildings that laid beneath its surface.

The closer she moved to the trees, Alice noticed, the more the wind abated, with the plants and structures thankfully managing to shield her from the worst of the cold breeze that instead washed over the grassy plains unimpeded, its dry and frigid gusts gradually turning warmer, gentler and more humid as the sheltered climate under the dome affected them, the hotter air and vapor slowly reaching the upper levels of the space and gradually turning colder, droplets of condensation appearing on the crystalline material of the dome and dribbling gently back onto the ground.

A few minutes later, Alice left behind the prairie and finally entered the woods proper, finding herself walking past birches, willows and maples, their dead leaves and twigs covering the ground in a multicolored layer that reminded her of a forest of her own world, the thought incredibly soothing as the dry leaves gently crunched under the chitin soles of her shoes.

Despite the peaceful calmness of the place, however, she didn’t allow herself to lower her guard, her hand always resting on the pommel of the weapon at her waist and her pace slow and careful as not to make excessive noises as she moved through small ferns and the few patches of hard grass that sprouted from under the slowly-rotting leaves.

In her silent advance through the trunks, she was able to ear and spot the different creatures that inhabited the woods, her anxiousness gradually fading as she listened to the tweeting of hidden songbirds between the branches and the chirruping of the small insects they likely feasted upon.

On the white, papery bark of the lithe birches, she observed gleaming beetles use their long and serrated mouth parts to drill deep bores into the pale wood before filling them with their ivory eggs which were promptly stolen and carried away by small troops of ants armed with thin and elongated mandibles that were perfectly designed for reach into those narrow openings.

At one point, while she was being forced to change direction to avoid a large hive of the same bee-like creatures she had recently spotted feasting on the purple cascade of blooms of the wisteria and on the white lilies in the domed building, a thought suddenly popped up in her mind.

It really seems like this ecosystem is actually a somewhat normal one, it’s alien sure, but actually normal. I bet it’s the grasses and trees… they would allow for actually herbivorous creatures and not only horrible carnivorous ones that eat themselves all the time. Much better if you ask me.

Alice had just finished thinking about it when a weird, guttural chicken-y sound echoed in that part of the forest, the noise coming from behind a small cluster of willows, their curtains of leaves hiding what lay beyond.

Within seconds, the young woman had her sharp pick in one hand and the unsheathed knife in the other, her heart hammering in her chest as she slowly and silently advanced towards the source of the noise, ready for a fight.

She couldn’t help but think of the croaking cries of the tadpoles in the fungal forest and the hooting screams of the monkeys on the higher city, her grip tightening on the weapon, hoping that it would have had enough time to refill some of the energy in its core in case the pick didn’t work and she was forced to change its shape.

She didn’t know what horror would be expecting her beyond the trees but it was in her best interest to at least know of its nature and possibly take it down before it attacked her in a worse situation.

She wouldn’t let herself get ambushed like the previous night.

She was thusly extremely surprised when, after poking her head through the willow leaves, instead of a monster she found herself staring at a small gaggle of very plump birds that was busily digging into the ground of a small clearing with their short beaks and taloned feet, their mottled brown plumage melding perfectly with the forest floor.

Behind them, partially sunken into the ground, stood the perfectly intact upper part of a large building, the curved folds of its bow roof making it look like the keel of an inverted ship, mosses, small sprouts and delicate, red flowers completely covering the material it was made of.

She was so shocked by the sight that she couldn’t help but flinch once again when the culprit repeated its weird call, her eyes finally landing on the larger bird that was strutting between the others, its plumage incredibly puffed up as it worked hard to impress the smaller females, revealing a bright red tongue every time it opened its short beak to repeat itself.

The creature was just preparing for another round of its cries when its small yellow eyes suddenly met with her own as she stared open-mouthed at the display, its mating call suddenly dying in its throat with a strangled gurgle that soon turned into a croaking scream of warning, its small posse frantically rushing away from the glade and into the undergrowth, their powerful legs working hard to propel them as far away as possible from her.

“Not so normal, after all,” she chuckled after recovering from the surprise, ignoring the slight trembling in her hand as she sheathed the knife once again, her silent giggling turning into an actual guffaw when she realized that she had been ready to fight to the death with a horny, wild chicken.

A few minutes later, when she finally managed to regain her breath and to calm down her cold-blooded companion—who had been startled by her strange sounds and had attempted to hide under her dress—Alice slowly approached the building, her expression serious once again as she slowly circled around the structure and searched for any way that would lead inside.

One of its sides had been completely sealed off by the slow movement of the ground but, on the opposite side, she soon found a couple of openings that were barely wide enough to let her through and that were clearly the partially-submerged, larger versions of the rounded windows she had gotten used to see in the vertical city.

Inside, after the first few meters of moss-covered dirt that, over the years, had started gradually filling the building, she could see a heavily-inscribed metal floor, the same squiggly lines she had observed throughout the city were now covering the entirety of the surface, a bronze tinge still appearing through the multicolored oxidation of the material.

“Let’s see if I’m lucky,” she muttered under her breath before crawling inside, soon finding herself in a large open room with a ceiling that was tall enough for her to stand up with ease despite the detritus that had been slowly invading the floor.

Her chitin shoes scratched loudly against the etched metal when she started looking around, her own luminescence and the light coming from the two openings enough for her enhanced eyes to see the shapes of numerous metal pedestals and altars that had once been protected by glass cases, most of those now shattered into tiny fragments on the floor, their contents long gone.

She carefully approached one of the few intact ones, observing the ingot that lay in its center, a bluish metal that stood perfectly unchanged under the dirty glass, a few squiggly lines etched on its surface.

A museum… this place was a museum, she finally realized, thinking for just a moment of breaking down the shrine and taking the object for herself before shaking her head and lowering the pick, moving away from the thing that the previous civilization had believed important.

After that, it didn’t take her long to notice the tall door the led out of the room and she immediately started walking in that direction, past the other unopened cases and only briefly staring at the things that had been stored inside; a cracked ball of clouded glass, not unlike those she had seen in the rusted machines in the domed building, a pile of glittering sand, a slab of the yellowy stone that made the walls and houses of the upper city.

Each of those objects was a memory of a past she would never know so Alice simply left them behind, moving out of the room instead and finding herself at the top of a large spiraling staircase, its shape not dissimilar to the one she had descended the previous day.

On the opposite side compared to her, accessible through a wide walkway that ran around the stairwell, lay another entrance that, over the ages, had been blocked by rubble and dirt, the room it lead to similarly filled with roots and detritus.

All other routes blocked and with no intention of turning around so soon, Alice started descending the wide and high steps that led to the three lower floors of the building which, she discovered after a bit of exploring, had been similarly ransacked, nothing remaining apart from glass fragments and empty cases.

Either this place has already been discovered in the past or the people that lived here had the time to leave… I wonder why they did so though.

Unable to find an answer to that mystery, she moved out of yet another pillaged room and kept moving down the shaft until, after descending a dozen or so more steps, she finally found something that really caught her attention.

As she descended and explored the building, Alice had seen a number of empty emplacements that had been etched into the wall, their function unknown to her.

Only after spotting the single remaining ellipsoid that was still stuck in its spot did she finally understand, her hand immediately reaching for the inert object and, after quite a bit of pulling, managing to rip it off with a sharp cling of ringing glass that resonated through the air.

“Oof… I hope nothing heard me.” she whispered to the green snake who had raised its head while she was pulling and was now staring silently at her, its forked tongue tasting the air every few seconds.

After enhancing her ears and listening for a few minutes to check if something had been awakened by the sound, she proceeded to unlatch her bag and slip the ellipsoid inside, promising to check it out the moment she found a safe place to sleep in.

Before that though, it’s time to go deeper. She thought as she finally reached the last flight of stairs, finding herself at the far end of a very wide hall that seemed to take the entirety of the lower floor.

Her attention was immediately focused on the nonsensical sculpture that lay in its center, a strange conglomeration of spheres and planes of different materials that reached the ceiling and extended on it, forming a pattern of interlocking orbs that made it look distinctly organic.

To top it all, while some parts of the structure looked completely intact, others appeared to be crumbling or even rotting, the stone floor covered in an heterogenous layer of detritus that crunched under her feet as she moved through the large room, moving around the sculpture and staring at the large mound of earth that covered what, in the past, would have probably been the main entrance, the roots of the trees above poking from the soil like many pale worms.

The rest of the place was surprisingly empty, with only a few strangely-shaped benches that had been built all around the artwork in the center, their appearance not dissimilar to the chaise longue she had seen in the monkeys’ lair, only made of solid marble instead of that unknown material.

Aside from the main ingress, Alice soon discovered two other openings in the room, two circular entrances that faced each other on the opposite ends of the building and seemed to lead to identical corridors made of glass and metal, a shiver running down her spine when she saw the compacted soil pushing against the transparent material and the few cracks that marred its surface.

“I really hope this isn’t going to be a mistake,” she murmured as she walked through the entrance on the right side of the building, dust and small rocks crackling under her feet as she moved through the passage as quickly and safely as she could, taking slow and deep breaths as her bioluminescence illuminated the curved walls around her and revealed the highway of roots that had enveloped the outside of the tube.

I’m safe, She kept repeating in her mind, there is no way this thing is going to crack right now just because I’m here. Perfectly safe.

She still couldn’t help exhaling a sigh of relief when, a good five minutes later, she finally exited the passage and found herself under a partially collapsed cupola that let the sun shine inside of the structure, allowing the growth of numerous shrubs and small trees through the cracks in the stone floor, numerous climbing plants festooning the walls and the unbroken parts of the cupola, the smell of their small yellow flowers clearing her nostrils from the musty smell that had permeated the underground museum, while a sudden flutter of wings announced the flight of a few robin-like birds she seemed to have disturbed with her unannounced entrance.

The dome she had discovered, however, was only a part of an entirely different building and Alice soon found herself walking past numerous long and wide corridors, peeking through small, crumbling rooms, and often stopping to observe the incredible reliefs that covered most walls, the majority depicting intricate compositions of strange instruments, foreign plants and animals, absurd buildings and, more than anything, lithe creatures with long, winged arms and elongated heads, some of them holding pencil-like objects within their four-fingered hands and others looking up and pointing at the sky.

Definitely not human… are they the ones that created this place? It would definitely explain the steep stairs… they sure like cupolas though.

Now even more curious, she continued exploring, always following the larger paths until she finally found herself in what she was sure was the main room of the building, a huge decagonal building that, however, showed evident signs of destruction.

Deep scorch marks and craters of melted material marred most of the floor while, on the few intact portions, metal shards and fragments of glass crackled and grated under her steps as she walked towards the far end of the atrium and the two massive, clawed feet that had been sculpted in a strange kind of rock that appeared to be covered in shimmering specks of light.

The two extremities were the only things that remained of an enormous statue that had once reached up to the ceiling, the rest turned into a mountain of splintered shards that glowed softly in the darkness.

Where the statue had once stood, however, the wall had seemingly collapsed and revealed a far smaller room that had been hiding behind, a glint of metal reaching her eyes despite the darkness it was enshrouded in.

Unable to contain her nosiness, she carefully moved past the glowing rocks —stopping only to pocket a particularly-glowy, fist-sized one— and then entered the room, finding herself in front of a two-meters tall gate made of the same, unblemished, blue metal that she had spotted under the crystal waterfall, the entire portal covered in the usual squiggly lines of writing but also in numerous symbols that had been carefully inscribed into the surface, her eyes widening in recognition when she found herself staring at a larger symbol that had been etched just beside a thick bar of the same metal that most likely served as a handle.

Heart beating in her chest, she immediately raised her right hand and stared at the golden signet ring on her index finger, its round flat head revealing the relief of an almost identical symbol on its surface, the only difference in the position of a single line between the multiple spheres.

She felt her stomach drop in dismay, groaning loudly when she spotted the small, round depression that had been carved into the metal less than ten centimeters away from the handle.

“Oh come on!” she exclaimed, “for one line? I’m trying anyway.” Her expression turning stubborn as she pulled off the ring and slid it into the opening, her body tensed and ready to bolt when she heard the two surfaces meet with a pling.

For a few seconds, nothing seemed to appear and only after a couple of her heartbeats did something crackle inside of the metal, her hand, still in contact with the ring, suddenly feeling a thin stream of magical energy coursing through the gate, her eyes widening when some of the symbols and lines that had been carved on the door suddenly colored in a teal shade and suffused the dark room in a soft blue glow.

After attempting to both pull and push at the gate and making sure that it wasn’t budging, she sighed and started checking the symbols, trying to see if she could find a meaning or at least a pattern.

Only after more than half-an-hour of mind-numbingly boring inspection did she suddenly see something familiar in one of the small glyphs, excitement returning in her body as she started working to recreate in her mind the shape of the museum she had first explored, her expression turning triumphant when at least a part of the symbol turned out to be identical to the rooms she had walked through.

“It’s a map! Some of it!” she cried out, patting the head of the snake that had started slithering up and down her arms as she worked, “and if this is the museum then this one must be the place I’m in.” she said, pointing at a decagonal symbol to the right, her eyes soon moving to another shape that had been connected to the map of the museum through a line of squiggly symbols, a hexagonal shape that glowed particularly brightly in the dark, beside it, an equally glowing copy of the symbol on her ring.

A determined smile appeared on Alice face as she pulled out the ring and stepped out of the small room, her pace quick as she moved back through the halls and corridors of the ruined building.

She knew where she needed to go.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by RottenTangerine! Thank you for your support!