Alessi glanced at the distant forest and then at the Molotov-style bottles on our belts. “Well… perhaps these won’t kill the Heart of the forest, but… maybe they could hurt it enough to free some of the misfortunate ones held prisoner by it.”

“If they’re still alive,” I mulled. “We could try to rescue…”

“They are not chimera anymore,” Alessi shook her head. “Not like you or I are… It's been centuries, I doubt that anything is left of them that still resembles us. Chimera can't live that long. I remember the Heart's inner garden... she stretches her victims… unfolds their bodies, drowns the exposed organs in her sap… so that they can be kept alive longer. She treats flesh like… a tree, making living creatures part of herself.”

“Oh,” I gulped. “That sounds… truly monstrous.”

Alessi nodded, tears glittering on the edges of her eyes. “I have to do this. I want to do this. For Relaii Ie. For her family. For my ancestors.”

“For Relaii Ie,” I put my nightcrawler-segmented armored hand atop Alessi’s glittering, mirror-surface glove.

We had taken apart and packed up the glider, carrying it behind us in large backpacks. After about thirty minutes of walking the green, mossy hills ended. We had reached the edge of the Twisted Forest. A wide river of labyrinthine roots was in front of us stretching forward, left and right like a vast, flat ring of unending brown.

“We’re here. Once we step onto these roots… we’ll be inside the forest’s domain,” Alessi said in Ukrainian. We had agreed to talk only in Ukrainian while we were out. I suspected that the forest most likely knew the Tokimorimïtul language thanks to Eunice’s gift of chimera to the Heart of All Folding.

“With a single step, we’ll be deep… inside the forest, lost in an instant.”

“Inside it?” I looked at the distant green forest. “It looks like it would take at least a few hours of walking to get inside though.”

“You’ll see,” Alessi said.

I tied rope between us, climber-style, and then checked all of the knots. I had climbed into plenty of abandoned buildings and deep mines with urbex partners to know the basics of rope climbing and the proper use of knots.

“If you get lost, I’ll find you via our connection,” I said.

“Right. I’ll stay put if we get separated and wait for you.” She nodded.

Alessi and I had spent a few hours playing hide and seek in the waterfall valley before we departed. Eunice did not lie to me - I could find my sister very easily using my Dominion Sapling's connection to her.

I counted down. Alessi grabbed my hand and we slowly stepped forward onto the river of roots, walking in synchronized steps. In another step with a wink, the world suddenly darkened.

“What the freaking hell?” I looked around in bewilderment.

We were surrounded by enormous, mossy, overgrown roots from all sides. There were no clouds, no ring-mountains visible anywhere. The forest was all around us, dim and filled with minute, ghost-like, small dancing lights. I tilted my head upwards. There was nothing but roots there too. Somewhere far, far overhead in between the roots I spotted the green flutter of distant leaves.

“Folding magic,” Alessi said briskly. “The flat ring of roots we stepped on was just a trick, an illusion. The forest uses Folding magic to instantly trap its food within it. A single step can take a chimera forward ten thousand steps in this place. There is no easy way back now.”

I gulped, staring at the dark hollows ahead of us.

“Every path will lead us deeper into the forest,” my silver-haired sister spoke, her voice reverberating from within her thunderbird skull-mask. “Closer and closer to the Goddess of these Woods.”

“Can she hear us? Does she know we’re here?” I asked.

“No,” Alessi shook her head, shuddering ever so slightly. “These roots belong to the younger trees, her children’s children. Eunice had to best the thousand-root Seeds to come to the Heart to speak to her.”

“R-right,” I nodded, looking about nervously.

“Let's keep going. We have to find an open Seed while it’s daylight,” Alessi said. “The ones here, closer to the way in, will be younger and weaker.”

. . .

I glanced left and right as we walked over the endless roots through the Twisted Forest. Its structure was akin to some sort of a fractal, branched tunnels heading into all directions around us. Whatever path we were taking was somehow leading us deeper into darker, greener areas. Everything around us was formed from twisted roots of the Folding Trees, the terrain bizarre and rich in vegetation.

Large waterfalls cascaded from gargantuan caverns formed from hugging roots. As we traversed the bewildering world of roots and lichens, I felt an increasingly unnerving sensation of someone… or perhaps something watching me.

“Al, you said that the Seeds don’t have eyes… Can you check with Relaii Ie again, please? It definitely feels like someone is watching us,” I said.

Alessi froze for a few minutes.

“Oh… you’re right. I didn’t recall enough,” she leaned her mask against me and whispered back to me with a shudder, “Some of the thousand-root Seeds can come here too. I remember them… the elder Seeds DO have eyes… they can use their victims’ eyes to see. They can move during the day too.”

“Thought so,” I whispered back. “Right. It’s time to blend in. Let's go under that root into the ravine over there. We’ll unpack the camo.”

Alessi nodded. She followed me to a mossy ravine filled with greenery. The large roots formed a long hollow that was about the height of three adult chimera. We climbed down and ducked under a thick, wide root. Once we were out of sight, we put down the bags and pulled out our home-made forest-camouflage gear. I had made these camo kits with my sister two years ago, as a way to become nearly-invisible to curious chimera hunters.

I knew that chimera eyes were akin to those of a hawk, able to spot things about thirty kilometers away. However, they had a flaw - chimera watchers were trained to spot colorful, sparkly female chimera who stood out against the Chasm greenery. It was incredibly hard for chimera eyes to focus on an object that was of the same texture and color as the landscape. We had used this exact camo over the years to get away from watchers like Isahcs to get into the waterfall valley for our base-jumping and flying practice.

I went around the ravine, cutting down various plants with my metal, soul-carving knife. The obsidian-steel artifact knife was very sharp, magically reinforced either by Eunice or by one of her monwai.

The arcane blade went right through branches and weeds like they were made from butter.

After a few minutes, I was back with a large bouquet of various leafy branches, which Alessi and I proceeded to decorate ourselves with. The camo gear consisted of long cloaks sewn from a patchwork of dark brown fur and mesh-like netting to which local greenery could be attached. The brown rope netting allowed us to make an environment-blending camouflage ghillie suit akin to those used by snipers and hunters from Earth.

The Twisted forest was damp, dim and cool. There was no sun in this place so we weren’t suffering from overheating. From what I understood, Chimera were somewhat akin to cold-blooded animals and didn’t sweat like people. Come to think of it, I wasn’t even sure what chimera blood even consisted of since I had no microscope to examine it. It could have been some sort of crystalline-organic fluid for all I knew, since Alessi and I could completely Still our blood at a moment’s notice.

When the camo-suits were complete we appeared like two walking bushes, no longer looking like black and white primitive-savage style knights.

When I examined us with my magic-resonance trained eyes I could see mostly green-tinted plant-echoes radiate from us. Perfect. We slowly moved down the ravine and emerged from a crevasse into another section of the Folding forest. Whatever tracking eyes the forest used, mundane or magical, it had completely lost us.

We kept on moving, ascending and descending along the labyrinthine passageways, stopping occasionally to drink some water and or to snack on smoked meat. The forest-caverns became less brown, turning more green.

The ground and walls made from roots became covered in various flowers, many of which I had encountered previously on our ring of the Chasm. It seemed that whatever the Folding forest was - it tolerated other plants, letting them grow on top of itself wherever rot had accumulated in sufficient amounts turning to nutrients.

A tunnel covered in blooming vines led us to a truly gargantuan cavern. I gasped when I saw it. The cavern-space was absolutely extraordinary, mind-bogglingly large. It was big enough to contain glowing Chasm clouds that rolled around ten-kilometer tall trees that functioned akin to enormous columns that held the roof of the cavern.

A river delta divided the bottom of the valley formed from roots of Folding Trees, water sparkling and reflecting the clouds moving overhead.

“Beautiful… but deadly,” Alessi said, pointing towards the river. “Look… the Folding Seeds are open.”

I followed her hand and saw them. Thousands upon thousands of large flowers bloomed around the river, half of their roots buried in water. The large flower petals shined in pearlescent pink, red and purple shades, drawing my eyes to them.

“That’s a lot of flowering Seeds,” I said, squinting at the pearlescent flowers in the distance. Something inside me craved to walk towards the flowers, to look closer at them. I drew my head away, trying to look at something else… anything else. I couldn't stop thinking about how pretty their petals were.

“Damn it… that’s seriously potent visual allure magic,” I muttered. “Florid bastards are getting me through the mask lenses.”

“Yeah, we should avoid large concentrations of them … try to find a straggler in the tunnels around here,” Alessi said, not drawing her eyes from the flowers. She suddenly took a step forward, heading straight for the edge formed from roots. Her other foot moved, hovering in the empty air…

“Al!” I grabbed her by the rope and dragged her back into the tunnel a mere moment before she plummeted into the cloud-covered valley below.

“T-thanks…” she uttered, her hands trembling. “All-mother! I almost walked off the edge!”

“Indeed, that could have gone very badly,” I nodded with a deep exhale trying not to think about the shimmering, ever-so-lovely, perfect-looking petals.

I had been overly reliant on the mask lenses covered in a very thin layer of magic-blocking sand particles. It had clearly nearly failed to block the combined allure of a thousand distant Seeds.

We turned around and found a large hole in the roots leading to a lower level. Alessi and I pulled out little climbing axes made from nightcrawler blades and started our descent. Sure, we could have relied on our own chimera claws to climb down, but the climbing gear made our descent far easier since our backpacks were pretty damn heavy, stuffed with various supplies and the glider.

We had gone down nine levels when we spotted a lonely purple-pink flower sitting by itself in the tunnel. It had five brown roots anchoring it to the ground. I took off my Molotov-covered belt and large backpack and untied the short rope between me and Alessi. Then, I tied the end of the longest rope we had to a solid root and the other to myself, handing my sister the rope coil.

“I’m going in,” I said, pulling out my soul-cutting artifact knife. “If I don’t give the ‘Shave and a Haircut’ signal via rope pulls that everything’s alright in… five hundred heartbeats, pull me back out and Molotov the shit out of that flower.”

Alessi nodded. She tied herself to the tree, actively avoiding looking at the glistening petals of the Folding Seed that sat about forty meters in front of us in the root tunnel.

I looked straight up at the petals and started to walk towards the Folding Seed. My heartbeat intensified. The flower’s perfect, sublime, glistening petals called out to me. I tried to focus on my senses, tried to understand what the Seed’s Allure was doing to me.

A powerful, multi-tier psychic attack slammed against almost all of my senses as I stared at the petals. I heard Pavel’s guitar playing from within the flower. The open maw of the Seed felt welcoming like my late grandfather’s hugs, like sitting by a campfire in the Ukrainian countryside, like the softest couch in the universe that simply waited for me to sit down upon it.

With every step the sensations became stronger, more overwhelming, more real. At least I couldn't smell the damn thing through my mask’s filters. The slick surface of the petals was doing something to my thoughts, making me believe the impossible. That within the purple maw of the beast was a passage back to Earth, a stairwell to heaven, a magic portal back to my workshop filled with all of my precious tools.

“You’re a bad liar, you stupid flower,” I growled at the Seed taking another step towards the monster’s open mouth. “My grandfather is dead and my Earth is beyond your reach…”

All of my friends are waiting for me there, just waiting to surprise me, waiting to listen to my fantastic stories of my four years of adventures in Andross.

My mind wanted to embrace these wonderful lies. My eyes filled with tears at the rising intensity of the temptation. The closer I came to the chimera-sized flower, the more its allure affected my brain, hooking onto, piercing my thoughts with ease. It was as if the thing’s tantalizing offers were like steel skewers that pierced the chicken shish kabobs of my very soul, catching onto my wants, needs, and heart's desires.

I craved, wanted to remember what it was like to be loved by other people, to be accepted, understood and welcomed and praised… to be back home, where things made sense. Where the world wasn’t twisted up by magic. Where there were no bewitching, perfect, captivating flowers that could melt my brain and make me fall in love with it… with her with a mere look.

I loved her… I had always loved her and just didn't know it yet… This seed was perfect for me.

I… belonged to her.

I stepped into her loving embrace and her soft, wonderful pearlescent petals descended down to me and closed all around me, gently drawing me into her eternal embrace.