Chapter 27: The Forest has Eyes. The Forest Has ears. The Forest has...

Rules of survival in the forest of befuddlement:

Do not harm the trees. Fire is forbidden. If you are with allies, NEVER separate. Don’t bother leaving a trail, since it won’t work anyway. Don’t try to draw a map. Don’t bother keeping directions. If you find some source of food or water, remember that leaving it means you will never find it again. Stay calm. Whatever you do, don’t irritate the locals.

If you follow these rules, not only will you escape with your lives, you may even find yourself benefiting from the experience.

-An unknown scholar

As soon as we enter the forest, it’s like we have entered another world. All sound falls away, leaving only an eerie, stifling silence. I find myself holding my breath; somehow loathe to be the one to break the quiet.

By unspoken accord, we move forward. Right now, we couldn’t care less about the potential danger. We just want to get away from the edge of the forest and find somewhere to sleep for a while, everything else be damned.

The grass underfoot is soft, and clear of any leaves or sticks – strange for a forest, some small part of me thinks. But it allows us to continue forwards without a sound. We don’t see much.

Just trees.

Lots. And lots. Of trees.

Every time we round one, I get déjà vu. It hardly feels like we’re getting anywhere. Maybe we aren’t.

The treetops make it impossible to see more than a sliver of the sky above. What little light filters through creates shadows everywhere, constantly shifting and making it difficult to gauge time or direction from the sun.

After a little while we give up on finding any place better and just settle down for the night.

“Fire?” Jakin asks tiredly, breaking the oppressive silence.

The treetops shift, the wind breezes past airily, and nothing seems to have changed. I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Too much greenery, too dangerous.” I shake my head.

Jakin shrugs and lies down with his back to a tree, covering himself with a thick blanket. Boaz just lays where he is, the grass a much softer mattress than usual.

I look to Xiltroth and he nods, indicating that he will take the first watch. Smiling weakly at him, I lie down myself, sleep taking me almost before I close my eyes.

I get woken up after what feels like a few seconds. Stubbornly shaking off my post-sleep stupor, I get up. That never goes away, sadly. You just get used to ignoring it and overcoming it.

Xiltroth nods at me, and curls up beneath a blanket, his soft breathing soon growing regular.

Feeling much better after even a short rest, I take a look around. It’s still light out, and I can’t really remember if it was brighter or darker than this earlier. There are no monster corpses lying around… were there no attacks while I was sleeping?

I would have thought a forest like this would be teeming with wildlife. But as I look closer at the ground, the trunks of trees… I can’t even see a single insect, let alone an animal.

My brows furrow as I look around and notice something stranger still: the trees themselves. Some have dark bark, some have light, some have thin, peeling bark and others are white. I think I can see one of those rainbow eucalyptus trees.

…Impossible. The few of these I recognise, some don’t even grow in this climate! And some trees… don’t some trees prevent grass growing around them? How is there so much grass with so little light?

…Why is the grass so regular in height? Why are there no saplings? Bushes? Fallen trees?

Whatever, magic. Common sense = dead.

Speaking of magic… As I generally do when I have nothing else to do, I start to create a small ball of fire to practice with.

The moment the first wisp of flame appears, I shudder involuntarily, and the flame dissipates.

…What was that!? I quickly scan the perimeter, but there is nothing except the trees, shifting slightly in the breeze.

For a second, it felt like there were a thousand eyes looking at me with intent to kill. It’s lessened a bit now, and I want to think that it’s just my imagination.

My skin breaking out in goosebumps and shivers says otherwise, however.

“Is anyone there?” I call out softly, not wanting to wake my companions.

There is no reply.

I decide against practicing magic for today, and just sit there, keeping a watchful eye out as I shiver.

I sit there for a long while, long past what we would usually call a normal watch. But with my nerves like this, I won’t be able to sleep anyway.

The feeling slowly decreases over time, but I can still tell that there’s something, somewhere, watching me. And it doesn’t like me.

Eventually, I wipe my prickling eyes as the light fades, wake Jakin, take a swig of water and lie down.

When I rise again from a fitful sleep, the feeling is still there. Again a bit less than before, but still there. The others are packing up their blankets, and light is filtering through the treetops again.

“There were no monsters on your watches, either?” I frown.

Jakin looks up. “None.” He grunts. “It be strange indeed.”

“What’s stranger is that there’s no sound. It’s downright unnatural.” Xiltroth grimaces.

I scratch my head. “Well, we should get going.” My stomach growls. “…And be on the lookout for anything edible.”

They nod in agreement. Boaz takes out his compass and looks at it; the needle spins in endless lazy circles. He shakes it, but the needle keeps spinning.

Boaz looks around. “Which way should we go?”

“Doesn’t matter. We don’t know where we are or where we’re going; directions are useless.” Jakin says. “We should mark the trees, so we know where we’ve been, at least.”

“Don’t.” I say, feeling my neck prickling uncomfortably.

They look at me peculiarly, and I don’t blame them. It’s common practice to leave some sort of trail if you aren’t familiar with a forest. Seeking to give an explanation other than ‘Because I feel like something will kill me if we do’, I explain hurriedly, “Everyone before us must have tried that as well, and it obviously didn’t help them, so why bother?”

Jakin shrugs and takes his hand off the hilt of his knife. “Well, it’s not as if we can be more lost than we already are.” He remarks.

We make our way through the trees, not seeing much other than more trees. A willow, a pine, spruce… Mahogany. Definitely not normal... It does smell quite nice, though.

At some point in time, we begin to hear the trickling of water. Excited at the prospect of being able to refill our water bottles, we head towards the sound.

After a minute, Xiltroth hesitantly asks, “Does it sound like the water is getting further away, or is it just me?”

“Maybe? It’s hard to tell.” I scratch my head.

I pay closer attention to it as we walk, and it does seem to be getting slightly softer. “I think you’re right. But how can it be getting further away if we’re going towards the source of the sound?” I shake my head in confusion.

“Forest of befuddlement.” Jakin reminds me sadly.

We try changing direction a few times, but we never seem to get any closer, and the sound soon disappears entirely. Feet heavy with disappointment, we keep walking.

For the umpteenth time, we round the trunk of a tree, and as ever, see yet more trees beyond it.

Then a wolf walks out in front of us. It turns its head towards us, and for a second we just look at each other. By now, we have become completely used to an utter lack of wildlife in the forest, odd though it may be, so when we see the wolf our first reaction is shock, rather than to reach for our weapons.

A moment later we overcome that shock and our hands move towards our respective weapons. The wolf turns towards us and bares its teeth but makes no further movements. Just as I’m about to charge forwards test out my new warhammer on it, Jakin sighs heavily, putting his military pick back onto his belt.

I look over at him, and he shrugs. “There be nowhere for a fire to cook it, even if we kill it. And it doesn’t seem to want to fight, either.” He gestures towards the wolf, who is looking at us warily, but not doing anything in particular.

Glancing over at the wolf, I realise that he’s right. Fighting now would only waste energy in a situation where supplies are already limited. Nodding, I re-holster my weapon. Boaz and Xiltroth shortly follow suite, no doubt realising the same thing.

Seeing us making no other movements towards it, the wolf turns and pads slowly into the forest.

From then on, we occasionally see animals and monsters walking by, and even insects start to pop their heads out of whatever holes they were hiding in and move about their business. Some of them growl at us menacingly while others just keep a wary eye on us, but none of them have attacked us in the last few hours.

We still haven’t found any water or food. We generally carry enough to last us a week, but we usually have the opportunity to supplement that with fresh meat and water from streams, and we haven’t been able to resupply at all in the past three days or so, so that amount will only last us for another two days, maybe three if we’re frugal.

Another hour passes, and we are attacked for the first time. Something large drops from the branches above us, and I barely manage to dodge as its fangs lunge for my face.

A snake! Not only that, it’s scales are changing colour to blend in with the ground beneath it, which is why it had been able to get the drop on us.

Having missed with its attack, it falls heavily to the ground and begins to slither towards us. Sighing to myself, I draw my mace. My warhammer is a bit too unwieldy to use against something like a snake, so I’ll need to use the relatively quicker weapon.

“Watch out, it has friends!” shouts Xiltroth. I glance to the side for a moment, which allows the snake in front of me an unobstructed attack. Darting towards my leg, the snake opens its jaws wide and bites down.

I feel a piercing pain as its fangs crunch through my armour and into my leg underneath.

“Damn!” Cursing in pain, I crouch down and smash it with my mace. Luckily, this monster doesn’t appear to have that tough of a defence, because my mace crushes straight through its scales and into the flesh below.

But it isn’t dead, so I smash it again. And again. It goes limp, that part of its body practically mincemeat.

“Where’d they go?” One of the twins asks behind me.

I send a quick glance around; there’s no monsters in the area, so I turn my attention back to the snake on my boot.

It’s dead as a doornail, but is still stubbornly hanging on. Getting a grip underneath its slimy upper and lower jaws, I pry them apart, wincing as the fangs slide back out of my flesh.

“Woah, you alright there Aaron?” Someone asks behind me.

I start to reply as I turn around. “I’m alri-”

(POV Jakin)

When it lunged at us from the canopy, I was surprised and relieved at the same time. Thing must’ve been a few meters long, and thick as a forearm to boot! Well, maybe as thick as Xiltroth’s forearm. It was all shifty, too – kept changing colours.

But in the end, we’d seen bigger ones, and stronger ones too.

Then others started slithering down the trees, then – I admit – I may have started to panic a mite. But we got ready to face them. It was it bit strange really. They just… sort of waved their heads at us, bared their fangs, like you might expect a snake to do. They didn’t attack.

Then they all vanished. Like… one second they were there, the next they weren’t. They didn’t run away, just… disappeared. Like they’d gone invisible… or were never there in the first place.

Then it hit me: they weren’t. We’d run across a damned illusion beast! I’d never seen one before, and it seems like most others are the same, because stories about them are scarcer than strong beer in Enlux. Damn I miss a good Dwarven brew.

Ehum… once I had that nut cracked, I figured that one of us must’ve killed the real one. Turns out that was Aaron, ‘cause he was standing there with this massive dead snake in front of him.

“Woah, you alright there Aaron?” Boaz asks him, and it’s then I notice there’s blood running down one of his greaves.

Aaron starts to turn, saying, “I’m alri-”, but then he keels over sideways. I rush over and manage to catch him before he hits the ground, and lower him down.

He looks up at me in confusion. “Woah… spinning… not normal. Think, poison?” He mutters.

“Yeh don’t say.” I thumb for his pulse. I find it, but it be abnormally slow. “He’s been poisoned.” I say over my shoulder, before I start to strip off his armour. Boaz and Xiltroth start to help, and soon we have it all off. The bite be on his calf and it be slowly oozing blood. At least blood loss isn’t an immediate issue.

After cleaning out the wound and bandaging it, I get Xiltroth to carry him. Strong though I may be, carrying someone nearly twice my height is no easy feat. Instead, me and Boaz have to carry all of Aaron’s gear between us.

…Why’d yeh have to go and get yourself poisoned, Aaron? This might just be the worst time fer it.

Now we need to get out of this place, soon as possible. Find a healer or an alchemist that can cure him… But we aren’t welcome anywhere now, except maybe Binod… and finding a healer there is harder than finding a diamond in an iron mine.

Even getting out of this blasted place is unlikely, we’re already doing what little we can to make our way out of here… which is wandering around aimlessly in hopes of stumbling out of here.

“I’ll climb a tree, see if I can see anything from topside.” Says Xiltroth, laying Aaron on the ground and scurrying up a nearby trunk. Honestly, that guy… He may be a demon, but sometimes I think he acts more elvish than some elves.

The tree’s branches sway slightly, then become still. A moment later, he slides down the tree again. “Nothing but green in every direction.” He shrugs, picking up Aaron, who promptly vomits on the forest floor. Xiltroth wrinkles his nose and wipes Aaron’s mouth with a bit of scrap cloth.

Boaz sighs. “Well, it was worth a try. We’d better get moving again.”

As we move through the forest, Aaron gets steadily worse, slipping between delirium and unconsciousness and sweating profusely.

We start to hear running water again, off to our right. Having learnt our lesson previously, we don’t deviate from our course – such as it is. To our surprise and delight, the sound grows steadily louder until finally, we see the stream right in front of us.

A deer startles as we approach, disappearing into the forest in an instant. The banks of the stream are dotted with animals and monsters drinking from it; some coming, some going. Some stop and look at us, others give us a brief glance before going back to their drink; a few ignore us entirely.

“Alright lads, let’s go. Keep an eye on those monsters.” I say quietly to Boaz and Xiltroth. They nod in reply, and we walk to the stream. Nearby animals shuffle away nervously as I dip my thumb in the water and give it a lick.

It tastes pure and clean, but then again, I have been drinking out of an old leather bottle. Everything from that tastes like boots.

Still, it tastes good, looks clean, smells… *sniff* smells normal. “Should be good.” Snatching the bottle from my belt, I drain the last vestiges of liquid inside it and dip it into the water, waiting for it to fill up.

Well, no monster attacks… so far, so good. I chug down another few mouthfuls of water before I’m satisfied, and fill it up again.

“We better try getting Aaron to drink some water while we have a ready supply of it.”

Xiltroth nods, laying him down on the grass beside the stream. Aaron looks like he’s sleeping, although the occasional pained look crosses his face. “Lift up his head a bit. Helps it go down.” I instruct, and Xiltroth dutifully follows along.

Through some combination of skill and luck, we haven’t had many injuries before now, and none of them significant ones. Now is as good a time as ever to teach him how to look after someone who can’t look after himself.

“He feels a bit… cold. Is that normal?” Xiltroth asks, making me freeze.

Putting my hand to his forehead, I curse involuntarily. “Damn. No that’s not normal, and it could be very bad. We’ll have to somehow make a fire soon.”

Xiltroth is about to reply when Aaron’s eyes shoot open, startling both of us. His eyes roam about, unfocused. “Fire, no… They hate fire…” He mumbles, seemingly unaware of our presence. Then his eyes widen further, a few bloodshot veins visible at the corners. “Leave me alone!” he shouts suddenly, making me jump in fright, and some animals to flee in panic. “I’m sorry!” His face slackens, returning to sleep.

“What happened? Is everyone alright?” Boaz urgently asks. Having been on the watch for sneaky monsters, he had likely been startled by the sudden shouting.

“We’re fine. Aaron just woke up, started shouting then fell asleep again.” I explain.

“He wants us… to leave him alone?” Xiltroth says uncertainly, tilting his head in confusion.

I frown. “No, I don’t think he was talking to us. ‘They hate fire’, he said. ‘They’. Who could ‘they’ be?” I stroke my beard in contemplation.

“He said ‘I’m sorry’… ‘They hate fire’… Doesn’t Aaron usually practice magic while he’s on watch? Maybe he was using fire magic, and something happened?” Xiltroth ventures.

My brows furrow. “He didn’t mention anything in the morning.”

“But he did seem a bit more… skittish, than usual.” Boaz says slowly. “I think yeh might be right, Xiltroth.”

“So there be something around here that hates fire. We still need to heat up Aaron!” I remind them.

Boaz nods, but Xiltroth looks pensive. “…Do you think this stream goes out of the forest? Because then we could follow it out, right?”

…Maybe, but… “This be the forest of befuddlement, so we can’t be sure it’ll work.”

“But it’s worth a try, right?” He looks at me hopefully.

I groan in frustration, entirely unsure what we should do. “Fine. But wrap Aaron up in some spare blankets before we head out.”

Trees, trees, and more bloody trees! I’m a bloody dwarf, so why am I always in a bloody forest? Next time, I’m making sure we have our backs up against a nice mineshaft, or a dungeon. At least then I could find my way around better. Draw a map of the tunnels, nice and easy. Can you map a bloody forest? NO!

I’m in a foul mood right now, and it’s no wonder. Friend sick and dying, us low on food and tired, and on top of that, we’re lost in THIS, BLOODY-

“BOO!”

WHAT IN THE BLOODY BLAZES!?