“Where’d I go wrong, Arun?” Rudra Kapadia slurred to the bartender as he slumped forward on the barstool. He downed his third shot of the night. He wasn’t drunk enough for the occasion, but he’d fix that soon enough.

“What’s the problem now, Rudra?” Arun the bartender replied, refilling Rudra’s shot glass. “Your coworkers disrespecting you at work again?”

“Oh, shut it,” Rudra huffed, before returning to his solemn mood. He ran his fingers through his bushy mustache and sighed. “I turn forty tomorrow. Forty years of living and what do I have to show for it? A mediocre construction job, a single-room apartment, and an empty existence. Sometimes I wonder why I keep going on, when all I get from living is the right to keep living.”

“Oh come now, forty isn’t that old these days. If your life is that empty, do something about it. Maybe try one of those new online matchmaking sites.”

“I tried. I can’t,” Rudra responded, downing the fourth shot with a cough. “It’s just not the same anymore. Not since Jaya left.”

The bartender sighed. “Rudra. Listen to me. You’ve been drinking here for what, almost two decades now, yes? I’m no stranger to your hardships. I remember how inconsolable you were when she first left you. I told you that you needed to move past her then, but you didn’t listen. Then when she hadn’t returned in two years and you finally petitioned for divorce I thought you were finally going to let her go, but no. You’re still like this. She left you eight years ago, Rudra, and you haven’t stopped pining for her ever since. It’s way past time to move on.”

“I can’t just forget her,” Rudra lamented. “She saved me, gave me a path when I had none. If I hadn’t met her I’d... I’d probably be dead by now.”

“Love can do incredible things. But it isn’t infinite.”

“It wasn’t love, though. The love came later. That’s what made her so special. She cared about me like she cared about everybody. Everything she did for me she would have done for anybody else in the same situation. She was... the best person I ever knew. And she was everything to me...”

Rudra stared into his reflection in the counter as Arun poured another shot.

“What do you think it was, Arun? What did I do to lose her?”

“I think it’s a mistake to assume that you did anything wrong. People change. Yours was a love marriage, yes? Sometimes love just runs dry, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What you can do, however, is finally admit to yourself that she isn’t walking back through that door ever again. It’s time to take the next step with your life. If not a partner, then something else. Something to keep you going, so life doesn’t feel so empty anymore.”

“Like what?“

“I don’t know. That’s on you.”

Rudra sat on the barstool and drunkenly argued with the bartender deep into the night before getting kicked out at closing time. Stumbling dejectedly home, he had just enough presence of mind to change into his pajamas before missing the bed entirely and falling unconscious on the floor beside it.

Rudra awoke to the worst hangover of his life as he vomited onto the cold stone floor. His sleep had been plagued with nightmares, more terrible and painful than anything he could remember, not that he usually remembered his dreams. This one on the other hand, a kaleidoscopic fever dream of agony and horror, would likely stay with him until his dying day. Which might just be today, given how his head ached at the moment. Wonderful. The perfect start to his fifth decade on Earth.

Speaking of which... where on Earth was he? He seemed to have ended up in some kind of basement, with what looked to be melted lumps of metal thrown against the walls. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d wandered off somewhere in the middle of the night after drinking too much, but he’d never ended up more than a block from his apartment before. This was a new low.

Staggering to his feet, Rudra made his way around the misshapen metal to a hallway on the other side of the basement. A set of stairs led upwards. As he climbed up, he strained his hearing, searching for familiar sounds. Strange, he couldn’t hear the bustle of the city anywhere. How deep was this place? And how had he gotten himself inside it?

The stairs terminated in a door, one of strange design that he could not recognize off hand. The overall aesthetic reminded him of the kind of doors found in nuclear shelters in movies. A button blinked to the side and he pressed it without even thinking. The door began to open, tilting up like a gull-wing car door, but slowly, as if struggling. Rudra scooted his way under and out as soon as the gap was large enough. It was night. He must have only slept a few hours. He seemed to be in some sort of a small depression. What? This wasn’t New Delhi. This wasn’t a city anywhere! He quickly climbed out of the hole, only to almost fall back in as his legs trembled at the sight before him.

Trees. Trees as far as the eye could see, lit by the bright light of three moons. Rudra stood high up on a slope looking down upon an endless sea of green unlike anything he had ever witnessed. The forest began several hundred meters down the hill and stretched off into the horizon. Far off in the distance, barely visible through the haze, Rudra thought he could see a giant tree, one that must have rivaled Mount Everest in height, seemingly glowing in the night.

Was he hallucinating? Had he, in his drunken state, moved on to more potent substances? Or was this all just an impossible dream? He pinched himself, much much harder than intended, and cried out as the pain coursed through his body. Ow. Okay, not a dream. Still, maybe a drug trip? There were limits to how long those could last, right?

Turning back towards the “basement”, or whatever it was, Rudra’s eyes went wide. He wasn’t on some small slope or hill. No, what he saw before he fell was a mountain range of absurd proportions, one whose smallest peaks reached higher than he’d ever thought possible. He’d been to the Himalayas once on vacation some years ago and marveled at their incredible stature. These mountains laughed at his memories, towering into the night sky like an endless array of jagged, deadly shark’s teeth. It seemed like they could almost touch the moons themselves.

The shock was enough for him to stumble and lose his footing. He fell backwards down the hill, tumbling out of control. Several seconds of rolling down the slope and pinballing off random trees later, Rudra came to rest against the trunk of a particularly thick tree with a crash. The back of his head thwacked against the trunk with concussive force, and he blacked out.

“I’m just shocked he wasn’t eaten by something.”

“Didn’t you notice that all the beasts have fled? It’s not just the ronutepo.”

“That’s true. Do you think he had something to do with it? If those damned elves figured out a way to mess with the migration patterns-”

“Quiet! He’s waking up.”

Rudra groaned, rubbing the back his head with his hand. He could feel a large bump sticking out from the back of his skull where he’d struck the tree. Man, what had he gotten up to last n- Everything came rushing back in one giant wave of memory and he bolted upright, his eyes flying open. His chest hit something, stopping his ascension, and he became fully aware for the first time. Five spears pointed at his chest, just centimeters away. Only the foot of the closest man had kept him from sitting fully upright and impaling himself on the weapons before he even realized they were there.

“Don’t go punching holes in yourself yet, elf,” the man who’d saved him said with a chilling smile. “Not until we’ve pried some answers out of you, at least.”

“Who... what?” Rudra asked, looking about in confusion. He was surrounded by what looked to be over thirty people. More than two thirds of them were carrying some sort of weapon, while the rest had huge packs slung across their backs. All of them, armed or not, eyed him with a hostile suspicion. His eyes were drawn to the animal-like ears and tails sported by the vast majority of the people present. Were those some sort of fashion accessory or something in their culture?

“Back with us now, are you?” the man asked. He seemed to be the leader. “Excellent. Now listen up. One wrong move, one hint that you’re Feeling or Observing, and you’ll have more holes in you than a saccha fruit found by paruna worms. You can start by undoing your transformation.”

Rudra’s head swam as the man gazed at him expectantly. This was too much for the construction assistant foreman to wrap his mind around right away. Processing everything would take time. The man didn’t give him time.

Turning his spear around, the leader brought the butt of his weapon around from the side, striking a painful blow to Rudra’s jaw. Rudra’s head snapped around from the force of the strike. Absentmindedly, he brought his one hand up to his jaw and felt around, to make sure things were still in one piece. The movement caused the other spears to inch closer.

“Don’t ignore me, elf!” the leader snapped, bring the back of his spear around again. Rudra intercepted the weapon with his free hand, grabbing on to the pole as hard as he could. The man’s eyes widened as he tried to pull his weapon back and failed. The other blades shot forward and Rudra reflexively released his grip and both his hands shot up, palms open and facing forward.

“Wait!” he cried. The spears stopped just a hair’s breadth from his body. “Hold on! I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb, Drayhadan. There’s no reason anybody should be here on the western edge of the forest, so far from civilization. I know foul intentions when I smell them.”

“I’m not Drayhadan or whatever you’re saying I am. I don’t even know what that is!”

“Oh? Then how did you get here then, hmm? Are you a Droajan who crossed the Divide, all on his own? Or are you just a Gustilian that got terribly, horribly lost?” Several of the onlookers chuckled.

“Look, I don’t know what any of that is. I just got drunk, and then I went to sleep, and then when I woke up I was in this basement and when I left it I found myself here. That’s all I know.”

“A basement?” The leader laughed. “Here? In the middle of nowhere, as far from a city as you can find on this land? That might be the worst lie I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s true!”

“Oh yeah? Where is it then?”

“It’s right up there,” he insisted, pointing up the slope. “There’s a small depression right over that little ridge. It’s in there.”

“Is it, now?” The leader looked at another man and tilted his head up the slope. “Go check it out.”

The man raced up the slope and over the ridge’s crest, disappearing from view. A few seconds later, he popped back into view and held up his arms like an ‘X’.

“If you’re going to lie, at least make up something that takes more than a few moments to disprove,” the leader mocked. “I’m actually disappointed.”

“No! It’s there, I swear on my life! Look, let me up and I’ll show you.”

The man stared quizzically at Rudra for a few seconds before flipping his weapon back around to the pointy end. “Surround him,” he said to the others, and every person holding a weapon approached him with their blades out, wary and ready to kill. They joined with the people standing at Rudra’s front so that he was completely enclosed by sharp, deadly weapons.

“Get down on the ground, face first,” the man commanded. Rudra obeyed. Two pairs of hands grabbed each of his arms and yanked them roughly behind his back. Ten seconds later, his hands were bound by a thick, rough rope.

“Alright then, show me,” the leader said. “Slowly.”

Together, the entire group slowly climbed the incline up to the small depression where the door to the basement stood. “Look, it’s right in here,” Rudra explained as he took the final steps to the top. “I just woke up in there with no idea how I...”

His voice trailed off as he got his first look at the depression where he’d crawled out just hours ago. The door was gone. Rudra stared at the place where the door at been the night before, completely flummoxed. A rough, craggy rock wall stood where the door once was, with no sign of there having been a door there at any point.

The leader stared at his prisoner, his eyes taking in every square centimeter of Rudra’s disbelieving face. “Stay where you are,” he said, putting his hand one of his subordinate’s shoulder and motioning for her to step back. Together they walked several meters from the rest and began to confer in hushed tones. Rudra was surprised to find that he could pick up their conversation, though just barely.

“What do you think?” the leader asked the woman.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” she replied.

“I don’t either.”

“But... I think he believes it. I can’t detect a single trace of falsehood. His heart is racing but that’s only normal. Same with the breathing. He didn’t tense, didn’t show any sign of deception. I think we need to take him back with us. Talk to him when he’s got a wruelit on him.”

“Take him all the way back? We have no idea what he’s capable of! We don’t have any cuffs with us, so we’d have to have, what, a third of the group guarding him at all times? That would slow us down too much.”

“Not if we cut through the Weald of Lords.”

“Cut through the... are you crazy?! You want to try to take that route with ten Shells?!”

“We need to take him with us. We need answers, as soon we can get them. None of this makes sense. The ronutepos shouldn’t have left here for another half season. And then less than two days later we find him here? Dressed like that? He doesn’t even have any shoes!”

Hearing the woman’s comments, Rudra realized for the first time that he was still dressed in his pajamas. He looked like a doofus.

“He’s related to this somehow. Let’s take him back, give him a real interrogation, and then if he’s lying we kill him. Simple as that.”

Rudra’s breath caught at the sound of those words, the blood draining from his face. The woman stiffened, her triangular animal ears on the top of her head rotating towards the group.

“He can hear us,” she stated.

The leader glared at him and walked back towards him and the twenty others pointing weapons at his body. “What’s your name?”

“Rudra Kapadia.”

“Well, ‘Rudra’, we’re going to go on a little trip together. Do anything even bordering on suspicious and I will put you down myself without hesitation. Any questions?”

“Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

“No.” The man looked about at the many faces staring back at him and clapped once, loudly. “Alright, everybody, listen well! The events of the last two days have changed our mission. We’ve done what we can to warn home, but you all know that messenger birds don’t always make it. Our best option now is to hope that it does and head towards Pholis. But if we want to make it in a timely manner, we’re going to need to take a risk. We’re going to need to pass through the Weald of Lords.”

Several gasps and murmurs sprung up amongst the people gathered. The leader held up his hands for silence. “I know it’s a dangerous place, but we don’t have time to go back around. We can do this. Questions?”

“Why not just go north to Krose?” a voice asked.

“They’ll already be gone by the time we arrive, either from our warning or because the ranutepos will beat us there. Pholis is the correct destination. Anybody else?” Nobody said anything. “Alright then. I want at least six people guarding ‘Rudra’ here at all times. Here’s how we’ll split it up...”

“We need to talk.”

Rudra looked up from the fire to see who had just spoken and saw the woman whom the leader had consulted on the day they’d all first met. Even weeks later, he still didn’t know her name. He didn’t know anybody’s name, to be fair. There seemed to be some sort of standing orders that nobody was allowed to talk to him. Normally this would have driven him up a wall, but so many new things had been thrown at him so far that he didn’t mind it as much as he otherwise would have.

Rudra found this new world, and the forest they’d been hiking through since the day he’d been captured, to be strangely fascinating. The woods teemed with all sorts of life unlike anything he’d ever seen. Brightly-colored birds with four wings flew about. Strange rodents with bizarrely long legs and massive eyes scampered along the branches above. Insects that seemed to have two distinct and equal heads crawled up and down the tree trunks. Even the trees themselves had become strange, slowly getting bigger and bigger as they went deeper into the forest until they were all over four meters wide. For somebody whose only real experience with jungles stemmed from the “urban” variety, it was a lot to get used to.

“What is it?” he asked as the woman sat down beside him, forcing one of the people guarding him to move over. Her face took on a red hue in the firelight, the flickering flames making her neck tattoos seem almost alive. Most people in the group had some sort of neck tattoos. Rudra believed that they were some sort of status symbol, as the leader had the most complex designs on him, while the only people with no markings were the ones who had no weapons. Everybody referred to them as “Shells”.

Shells did all the boring physical labor, setting up the camp, making the fires, cooking, carrying the supplies as they walked, and anything else that the others didn’t seem to feel like doing. Rudra didn’t understand why they obeyed everybody else’s commands so readily. It wasn’t like he saw any joy in them as they worked.

“Tomorrow we will enter the Weald of Lords. The Weald is an incredibly dangerous place, where some of the most powerful beasts in the entire forest live, and we could all die at any time. So here’s the rules while we’re in there. First, no talking unless absolutely necessary. Anything we can do to avoid the attention of one of the monsters in there we need to do. Second, no fires. Out here, fire can ward off a lot of the dangers of the night. In there, it will only serve as a beacon to draw them in. Third, you follow the leader’s orders to the letter at all times. If he says to jump, you jump. If he says to climb, you climb. If he says to run, you run. If we all follow these rules, there’s a good chance we all make it out the other side alive.”

“Okay. None of you talk to me anyway.”

“We still don’t trust you. You’ve been very cooperative since the beginning, and I thank you for that, but I hope you understand that there’s just far too many things wrong with your situation for us to trust you with anything. Especially not in the Weald. I hope you understand.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, once we give you a proper interrogation back home that might change. Depending on what we find.” She paused and changed topics. “How are your clothes holding up?”

“They chafe,” he replied. Before the start of their journey, Rudra had been loaned a set of spare clothes and shoes, as walking barefoot through a heavily-wooded forest in sleepwear was not something worth attempting. Unfortunately Rudra was a very large man, well above-average in height, meaning there was only one group member even close to his stature. The loaned clothing clung to his body like spandex, constantly rubbing in the worst of ways. The shoes weren’t much better. Perhaps two sizes too small, they were a pain to wear and an even greater pain to put on. Still, it was better than walking on bloody, cut feet so he didn’t complain.

There was one other strange thing he’d discovered, though he couldn’t complain about it either. When undressing to change after receiving his replacement outfit, Rudra had discovered that his body was not the one he’d gone to bed with on the eve of his fortieth birthday. Working construction had kept him a very fit individual even as he entered middle age, but his body now was a whole different animal. To put it delicately, he was fucking jacked. Massive muscles flexed under smooth, unblemished skin. Not an ounce of fat could be found anywhere on his body. His physique reminded him of a bodybuilder.

What struck him as strange, besides the whole sudden change of course, was that he hadn’t noticed until removing his clothes. Sure, there was the whole “I’m on a different planet” panic, followed by the “I’m surrounded by spear-wielding natives” deal, but even after that, when he’d had a chance to calm down a little, nothing had felt amiss. His body had just felt normal. It had felt like... him. Still, he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Being ripped felt pretty great.

“We’re almost halfway there. It shouldn’t be too much longer before we can get you better clothes. That’s all for now. Remember what I said.”

“I will.”

Three days later, the sun filtered through the canopy of the Weald of Lords as the group traveled as silently through the area as they could. Rudra had thought that the trees in the last area were large, but he’d been wrong. Every tree in this forest stood tall in defiance of gravity, each trunk at least ten meters in diameter stretching up and up into the sky. No trees on Earth could even approach their majesty. The size change didn’t only apply to foliage; everything here was many times larger than anything he’d seen before. Ant-like insects the size of his thigh. Lizards that would put komodo dragons to shame. And then there were the “Lords” of the Weald of Lords.

Only one such Lord had graced him with its presence so far, and as far as he was concerned that was one too many. As they’d made their way through the forest the day before, Rudra had noticed a strangely-colored tree that had fallen over off in the distance. He hadn’t been the only person to notice, as the leader had immediately given the sign for quiet and they’d moved away as quickly as they could. He’d been confused at first, but as they’d retreated he’d watched as the log flexed and began to slither off somewhere. Only then had he realized that the meters-high object he’d thought was a fallen tree trunk was actually just a small part of a snake hundreds of meters long. What other monsters lurked in this place?

As if to answer his silent question, a sudden low, rumbling roar off in the distance split the silence and everybody froze. A thunderous hiss answered the howl, and suddenly the ground began to tremble as two behemoths began to battle. The sound of breaking wood echoed off the trees as the two Lords fought somewhere out of view. Rudra thanked fortune that they were too far away to even see, but then the crashing grew louder and the ground shook with greater and greater intensity.

“Run!” the group leader cried. The whole group turned and began to hightail it as far away from the tussling giants as they could. Still, the sounds of the fight continued to grow and grow, the earth quaking furiously. Rudra glanced back to see two enormous beings going at each other with everything they had. Some sort of six-legged creature that looked like a mix between a bear and a sloth was struggling with a giant snake, perhaps even the snake they’d seen earlier. The snake had managed to wrap itself around the sloth-bear’s chest and neck and the other animal was fighting desperately to dislodge it, slamming the snake into nearby rocks and trees, pulverizing them.

Thrashing about, the beast rammed its side into another tree. A massive ‘CRACK’ reverberated through the forest as the gargantuan trunk began to topple towards the fleeing group. The world seemed to slow down as Rudra looked back and saw an older Shell trip over an exposed root and fall to the ground, his pack of supplies spilling all over. Before Rudra even realized what he was doing he’d already changed course, sprinting towards the doomed man. The Shell looked up at the descending mass of wood and cried out in terror. Rudra tackled the man and dove with him into a nearby hole in the surrounding root structure. The trunk crashed down onto the ground, flattening the earth beneath it and crushing the huge thick roots of the nearby trees into splinters. Rudra felt a great weight pinning him and the Shell beneath him as the fallen tree pressed down on the pulverized roots and earth all around him. The weight was intense, but they were alive. For now.

The roars of battle slowly faded as the combatants’ fight took them elsewhere, and the scene grew quiet. Soon the Shell’s panicked eyes regained their focus, and he looked at Rudra with an almost accusatory glare.

“Why? Why did you do that? I’m just a Shell.”

“W-what?” That was perhaps the last thing Rudra had expected to hear.

“Now we will both die here, slowly, instead of just me dying quickly.”

“What is wrong with you? I’m sure they’re rushing over to lift this thing off of us right now!”

“For a Shell?” The old man laughed morosely.

Rudra strained his hearing as far as he could, and could just make out a conversation going on on the other side of ten meters of wood.

“What an idiot. Trying to sacrifice himself for a Shell?” He recognized that voice. It was the group leader. “Damn! And we really needed answers from him, too.”

“What if they’re still alive under there?” asked a different voice that he didn’t recognize immediately.

“There’s no way they survived that. And even if they did, look at this thing! There’s no way we could move it, not even with all our Feelers working together. If we had a plant Observer that would be another story, but nobody thought we’d need one on a routine patrol like this. Ugh, what a mess.”

“Shouldn’t we at least try? If the Hidden Fang finds out that we left a Shell to die, we all might be in danger.”

“The Hidden Fang? You’re not actually scared of them, are you? A few Shells too afraid to show their faces, running around in the middle of the night and declaring themselves the protectors of Shells across the country? If they were anything to fear, they wouldn’t be Shells.”

“Hey, my friend’s uncle told him that his coworker beat a Shell into a coma for being disobedient, and then two days later they found the man’s body in his bed, dead, with seventeen stab wounds to the chest. I’m just saying-”

“You don’t know that was the Hidden Fang. That could have been completely unrelated. Maybe he welched on some gambling debts.”

“I don’t know...”

“Hey!” Rudra yelled. “Hey! We’re still alive!”

The leader’s conversation continued unabated.

“HEY!”

They couldn’t hear him. Maybe the woman with the great hearing wasn’t nearby. Rudra decided to try again later. But there was no reason to just lie there and hope.

“Alright, here’s the plan,” he told the man beneath him. “I’ll try to lift up these roots just a little, and you start digging. We’ll dig our way out of here.”

“Do... do you think you can move the roots with the tree pressing down on them like that?”

“It’s worth a shot. I think we got lucky and most of the weight of this thing is pressing down on some rocks or something somewhere else, because this is nowhere near as heavy as it should be. Okay, on three, I’ll lift and you turn over and start digging. Got it?” The man nodded. “Okay, one, two, three!”

Pushing his biceps to their limits, Rudra pushed himself up to his hands and knees. It wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. “Hold on,” he said as the Shell twisted about, “I think I can get you some more room.”

Slowly he bent his right leg so he could push off of it. Then, using that for leverage, did the same with his left so he was in an awkward, hunched squat. He felt a pressure on his back, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. With a grunt, he straightened his legs, pushing the roots up even more. The Shell had stopped any pretense of digging now, instead just staring up at Rudra in shock.

“Come on,” Rudra said as he stuck his hands up by his head and pushed, raising mass of broken wood up over his head. “That should be more than enough for...” His sentence faded away as pieces of root and earth fell around him and the light of the forest washed over him. To his left, Rudra saw the stunned faces of the group leader and his conversation partner, their wide-eyed stares alternating between him and what was above him. He looked up.

His hands weren’t on roots like he’d thought. They were on the tree. The giant, dozen-meter-thick tree. The thing had to weigh two hundred metric tons, at least. Yet he was lifting it. Over his head. It wasn’t even that hard.

Well.

This was different.