Ruth waved his hand in a leisurely fashion, almost disappointed when the glorious curtain of lightning stopped falling. The enormous and brightly flashing energy beams had immediately scoured the earth and the leaves that the spider and the shed had been hidden inside exploded and burst into flame. There had been one shrill screeching noise as a fire-engulfed spider started to take a staggering step away before collapsing and breathing a last breath. It needn’t have bothered because Ruth was already trying to direct the spell in a general arc, doing his best to scythe it across the largest area before it ended.

Trees cracked and split, falling in various directions. Bits of wood exploded outward in large and small bits that flew in every direction, bouncing off trees or embedding deeply in some cases. Trees comprised of both pine and broadleaf quickly burst into crackling flame, and the webbing that had been draped almost carelessly around the whole area burned like short-lived shooting stars that flew in every direction be it up, left, down, or right. Many of those flaming streamers crackled against dry grass or dry leaves on the trees, immediately causing smoke and the tell-tale embers of new fire to be born.

Ruth lowered his hand when the flashing finally stopped, his pupils were narrowly focused and contracted to try and block out the tremendous light that had flared up in front of him. They slowly dilated once more to match the new setting of returned darkness. No, not darkness exactly. The low intimate setting of firelight. The smell of stinking and singed spider hair was slowly replaced by the ever-increasing scent of burned wood. Behind the pleasant aroma came an acrid scent of smoke as the younger and wetter foliage began to catch fire and add a darker smoky stink.

His yellow slitted eyes did not even blink as the fire began to truly gain strength and momentum as the wind began to carry embers into nearby webs and leaf piles. It didn’t take long for the hidden inhabitants of this forest to truly abandon any pretense of secrecy. Spiders abandoned their pits and ran further into the forest, quite often climbing trees in an attempt to remain nearby and hide from the fire, and then escaping from them as their very own webs began to lead the flickering flames back to their hiding spots.

The immortal and deadly text box bounced behind him, trying to remind him of his remaining spell slots, or lack thereof, and probably other information that it deemed vital.

Ruth didn’t move, instead, he closed his eyes and took a long and deep breath. It seemed like it was the first breath of air he had taken since coming to this place. The first free breath that reminded him of what it was like to be a dragon. The air burned and his vision twisted from heat mirages in front of him, and it seemed like the light being cast warmed the front of his flesh like the sun used to warm his scales on his favorite sunning rock. Ash tickled his nose, reminding him of the taste of a lightly scorched meal. The sounds of animals fleeing away from him punctuated by the odd and shrill angry noises as they got in each other's way. Ruth, very momentarily, felt free again.

It was only for a moment.

His stomach growled at him and he looked down at it with the most subtle hint of irritation flashing through his eyes. When he was a dragon he only had to eat once a week. He didn’t even have to eat that much if he had a big meal and didn’t move around much. This body was constantly pestering him with this feeling. Hunger. Perhaps hunger was the only thing that was going to be important to him in the future.

The fire had mostly burned itself out near his feet. The clearing afforded it little purchase other than the grass that he was standing on. The embers had licked forward and burned the grass and then didn’t seem to be able to find the necessary oomph. It had been a wet grass and dirt clearing. The same could not be said for the direction of forest he had set ablaze. It seemed that the jungle of spider webs and fallen leaves had gone on for some distance and the spiders themselves didn’t have the intelligence to try and put out the fire or do anything more than flee in the opposite direction.

Ruth went forward and covered his face with the back of his arm, doing his best to be quick. It was a strange feeling, being vulnerable to flame. A strange feeling that he did not like one wit.

He dragged out the dead spider, affording it a cursory look to make sure that his lightning had done the job, and then stepped on it in several places to put out the small flames that were licking it because it was still burning.

It was truly a hideous thing with eight eyes. Or rather it had once had eight eyes. Most of them had burst like eggs overcooked from their shell as a result of the lightning. It stank, and would have thrown off most creatures with how grotesque of a smoking husk it was.

Ruth was not most creatures. He’d had spider meat before when he was a dragon. This looked like it was overdone to him, but he wasn’t picky. He started salivating and knelt down, trying to break one of the legs to get into the meat within…

The immortal and deadly text hovered behind him, not at all bothered by the sounds of crunching.

↢↦

Tamara watched the flaming forest in front of Ruth and showed much the same expression. Her gaze never-faltering, never-blinking, watching the creatures flee from him and the fire in the opposite direction. Arathan and Tamara had fallen into companionable silence as they watched Ruth start eating the spider. The way he tore at it with both hands and stuffed his face between the joints of the hideous looking creature wasn’t unsettling to these two creatures either.

“Why don’t you go play with his soul shape,” Tamara said at last.

Arathan just cocked her head to the side, raising her body slightly as she got ready to take flight. Earlier she had merely reached out with her soul power to investigate the small thing. Now she intended to leave Tamara and find a soft and safe spot for her body. She knew when Tamara was subtly requesting to be alone. “Arathan loves Tamara.”

“I love you, too.” Tamara scritched under Arathan’s chin and watched the crow disappear into the darkness. Long after Arathan had fled this space, her head didn’t turn away. Making absolutely sure she was alone.

Tamara slowly opened her arms wide and stretched. A violent storm of light pushed from her body, red and golden streaks of energy pulsating wildly in a cyclone around her showing what this space looked like for the first time. A simple box that seemed to be made of some immeasurably queer transparent energy. If it were to be described you might think of it as the size of a vacant lot that one might play in as a child, or a stadium where competitions were held, or even a large parking lot that felt expansive but still had a never-ending feeling. It was somewhat unimportant what the exact dimensions were, you see. It was simply large enough.

Tamara opened her eyes and all the transparent edges of the space; walls, ceiling, and floor, went absolutely opaque. No one would be able to enter or see from the outside now. Within the space, walls began to appear colored in a charming grey color. The centerpiece of the wall she was in front of was still the window, still Ruth.

The peculiarity of the scene began when golden writing began to appear near the window that showed Ruth and his current endeavor to eat a spider whole.

A circle appeared. Inside the circle was the name, Ruth. A larger circle appeared around Ruth and was labeled ‘Wilkeena’s Garden’ and a larger circle around that was labeled ‘Flynn’s World’. More and more circles appeared, lines attaching to other circles that in turn filled in with words, pictures, question marks, and so on. A long map of words and circles that finally covered every inch of wall that Ruth’s window was on.

Tamara looked around again and waved a hand lazily, seemingly pleased. The grey walls, ceiling, and floor all lit up with the same golden writing. It seemed every inch of that space was a relationship map. Tamara stretched again, bracing her arms behind her back as she casually walked around the room looking at all the golden writing. The sheer amount of information about how everything was related to everything else might be enough to drive someone crazy. Perhaps it was a sheer amount of information about how everything was related to everything else, produced by someone crazy?

When at last she had come full circle she smiled at Ruth. “You’ve done well so far. It’s getting a bit easy don’t you think?”

She narrowed her eyes and winked once. A small thread of energy pulsed from her body through the window. Ruth paused for a moment feeling some sort of change. After a long moment, he resumed eating the spider, unfussed by whatever it was that had just sent the hair on the back of his neck rising.

“Be careful. I’m not hiding you anymore.”

↢↦

The Haberdasher chewed on a walnut thoughtfully and finally gave a thought, once again relishing the attention that was being given to him by all the important Mongeese in attendance. It was probably an occasion with the most hats in one room in recent memory.

He steepled his fingers together and cleared his throat after swallowing, “ahem, well if the creature is still following the river he will be reaching the edges of the safe zone of Ten Year Wood. As we all know, it is a perilous place.”

Mother Chaka nodded, and after confirming that she of the largest hats was agreeing, everyone else in attendance began nodding too.

“The wood in that area is fraught with dangers such as the giant lumbering Elkin, the tricky Trapdoor Spiders, and the home and burrow disguising Grabbers. Will you still be sending a large force out after him?” The Haberdasher knew the answer but wanted to rile them up a bit anyway.

It worked, of course.

Mother Chaka stood up, her small black nose wrinkling and her whiskers trembling with righteous and indignant rage. “Death to the Kinslayer! Malika! Take twenty of your cousins with hats and blades and bring me the head of the creature! Take care of each other, but let none stand in your way!”

Malika herself got up from her seated position(the Haberdasher did drag on when he was talking after all) and unsheathed her newly acquired cutlery. She raised it above her head and turned to the room, “with me!”

Mother Chaka sat down with a grim expression as many of the younger Mongeese in attendance with hats followed after her. She and the Haberdasher shared a knowing glance at one another. It was always bad business to send out your kin past the safety areas, but what could be done? Justice must prevail.

The Haberdasher was sharing a knowing glance with her because he thought she was acknowledging this was the most entertaining birthday celebration in ages.

↢↦

Far underneath the dark forest that spread outward in increasingly dangerous rings was a cavern that seemed to have formed naturally around a figure, roots and dirt settled snugly around the creature. The figure itself had not stirred for a long time. A long time, in this case, being years and years. The beautiful female upper-body was naked and might have closely resembled a human if it weren’t for the strangely androgynous face. Long black hair spun down over her shoulders and breasts and instead of one pair of eyes, there were eight eyelids, all tightly closed. Instead of a mouth and a nose, there was simply a line where the head would unhinge to reveal a great many teeth. This creature’s upper body was married to an arachnoid thorax and abdomen where six deadly black blades that served as legs met the dirt beneath them.

Wilkeena was her name, daughter of the god Flynn. The place above where she was resting was her garden. For some time in the past few days she had felt a number of disturbances up above. All the creatures in her garden, when they expired, had their natural mana stolen from their bodies. It fed down into the roots of the forest and, albeit indirectly, to her. The last few days, there had been a number of sudden fluctuations indicating that a great many creatures had lost their lives. This wasn’t an indication of anything amiss really, as that was the purpose of the garden. To grow mana and creatures who had been specifically designed to release their mana back into the domain. They couldn’t, except for the rarest of circumstances, even use their own mana to produce magic. It would have been a waste of resources in Wilkeena’s opinion, so she hadn’t allowed it.

The forests burned, creatures howled and thrashed, blood flowed into the grass. Still, despite the regular frequency of such things Wilkeena was always paying close attention to the details. Intestines and dirt and offal and every other natural occurrence you could think of including storms, clouds, crops, and even the way a particular stick was thrown up in the air and how it landed were portending doom and the utter destruction of the inhabitants of the forest. A wise Mongeese bled from her eyes and thought she had received a divine revelation about the end-bringer. A kinslayer was declared and even now the Mongeese set out for revenge on a path that would mean even more of their kind would be killed. The Haberdasher continued to quietly abduct and experiment on Mongeese in the privacy of his old felled Walnut tree in order to produce the mana necessary to continue his production of magical accessory. The Spiders, the Elkin, and the Grabbers continued to eat whatever was close, even and often each other.

Still, this happened every year so it wasn’t a cause for alarm.

What made her open two of her eyes with a look of quiet speculation was the fact that the mana she was receiving wasn’t as rich as it should have been. Something that didn’t feed magic into the woods was there now. Something that took the mana from the creatures around it and didn’t give it back.

Something that wasn’t born there.

Something that was no longer hidden from her gaze like it had been when she first became aware of the inconsistency.

Wilkeena closed her two eyes again and thought of the intruder, imagining a creature with horns on its head, a tail, wearing a ridiculous robe that looked like it had been cobbled together from reptile scales. A creature that was eating one of her forests denizens and stealing the mana from its marrow. Wilkeena’s mana. It had a faint golden glow around it denoting that it belonged to someone.

Tamara. The image of a fierce three-eyed crow began to slowly turn toward Wilkeena before she cut off the connection.

Wilkeena opened two of her eyes again and considered. Those two eyes narrowed into a furious line. The creature would pay. She hoped it could feel the doom that was closing in on it. Just because she couldn’t act directly didn’t mean that it would live. Tamara may have put her mark on it, but that just meant that Wilkeena couldn’t direct any force to go kill it specifically.

Fortunately, it didn’t matter because the garden itself had already been made aware of this creature. Even now denizens of the garden were turning their eye toward the creature with malevolent and hostile gazes. Some of those looks would begin as curiosity and end in malice. Such was the nature of the garden.

As for Wilkeena? She had only one thought toward Tamara and the creature named Ruth.

Unforgivable.

She hoped the creature cowered in fear knowing what was ahead of it.

↢↦

Ruth sat back on his butt and held the cracked spider leg over his head. A long stringy line of soupy white goo fell into his open mouth. He gulped it down and finally tossed the leg aside.

He belched and laid down, casting a look around at the burning forest in front of him as it continued on its way and then a look behind him to make sure there weren’t any more weird cow eating houses. Then he closed his eyes and did his best to nap lightly. It was the skill of a dragon to sleep when it wanted to sleep and he wasn’t giving that up for anything.

Light snores sounded on the edge of the clearing soon after.