“What kind of a name do you think would work?” Alessi asked, tapping her mask-covered chin.

“Well, she’s going to be our forest-walker and also our storage bag,” I said. “Might as well make it something cute and bag-related.”

“Carri? Sumki…” Alessi mulled, creatively mixing English, Ukrainian and Tokimorimïtul languages. “Meshki… Sacci?”

“Heh, I like Saccy,” I smirked. “Saccy it is!”

The way Alessi said the name reminded me of the resort town of Saky my grandfather took me to when I was twelve. I momentarily closed my eyes and ruminated of our summer vacations in the Crimea peninsula, long ago in my other life. I smiled, recalling how I loved to ride in Dnepr’s sidecar staring out at the stormy waves on the Black Sea, the same choppy, beautiful, azure waves that were depicted by Crimean artist Ivan Aivazovsky in his Romantic paintings a century before I was even born.

“You seem pensive,” Alessi commented.

“It’s a nice name, it reminds me of a nice place I used to visit back on Earth,” I murmured with a soft smile, pulling myself out of my daydream of the past.

. . .

Learning how to walk Saccy on three legs took me several days. She tried to fight my Dominion branches, but I found a fairly simple way to pacify her. I had discovered that using a few drops of the sap didn’t paralyze the Folding Seed, but made her less prone to fighting my control.

Using the soul-cutting knife as the stick and the sap as the carrot, Alessi and I slowly conditioned Saccy into near-complete obedience. After about a week, she stopped resisting my control, letting me walk her around the root-tunnels. Her limb-roots moved very slowly, but were very strong and could be used to climb nearly vertical walls.

It took us a while to convince Saccy to move during the day. She had probably wandered into the tunnels away from the river because the bat-creature inside her had expired. I knew that eventually I would have to feed Saccy paralyzed monsters. I wasn’t looking towards this prospect, but such was the price of being completely safe inside of the Twisted Forest.

I practiced using the three limb-roots, climbing up and down various mossy tunnels, exploring the vast Twisted Forest labyrinth. Many of the tunnels led to the enormous river-valley cavern. We avoided going anywhere near it, because there were far too many Seeds there for us to take down safely.

The valley seemed a truly insurmountable obstacle and I had doubts that we could even pass through it safely. I directed Saccy to go around the damn valley, but we somehow always ended up facing it no matter which path we took. I was starting to suspect that the Twisted Forest shifted paths and tunnels around when we weren’t in them or something. Either way, some kind of dastardly Folding magic was involved and it was limiting our options.

To take down Folding Seeds safely from afar, we used nightcrawler blade-saws to cut a few trees down. When we had gathered enough springy and hard wood, we bound the carved pieces with ropes and assembled a fairly basic, large wooden arbalest. I've made similar, primitive, nail-free arbalests at Renaissance fairs with my friends.

I used the steel knife on the dead bat’s leg-bones to carve several projectile-bolts and filled the hollows with Saccy’s sap. We tested the arbalest’s punching power against Saccy from afar and found it to be a pretty effective weapon against her kind. When the arbalest was thoroughly tested, I mounted it inside of our Folding Seed’s mouth, pointing it outwards.

To be able to aim the arbalest at other Folding Seeds, I had applied a few thin layers of magic-repelling paint on top of Alessi’s mask lens until she could barely see out of it. Even so, the allure had still affected her, stopping her from attacking the Seeds directly. Alessi was only able to aim the arbalest, but not fire it. I was the one to release the trigger by using a rope while not looking at the target. It was a pretty silly system, but it worked great.

The bone-bolts punched through the bark of all of the low-level Folding Seeds we had encountered, disabling their allure. We raided seven paralyzed Seeds in this manner. Inside we found a lot more ossified corpses, from which we carved more bone-bolts. A few of the Seeds contained… living specimens. They were alive, but only by the smallest margins.

These misfortunate Chasm monsters had been inside of the Folding Seeds for a long time. Their bodies were too large to carry out safely, the flesh grotesquely bloated and badly infected with fungi and lesions due to lack of moving.

I killed the poor, sick creatures with the soul-carving knife via a strike to the brain, ending their misery. Upon dissection and examination their crystalline core surrounded by bone tissue was dim, deprived of magic. It seemed that the Seeds were perpetually draining their victims' magical cores. We carried the least sickly-looking bird-thing into Saccy to provide her nutrition so that she could keep moving. It took Saccy only a few days to grow another brain-sucking root. She didn't even try to aim it at us - the feeding root went straight to the paralyzed bird's mouth.

As for our own food, we continued to rely on our smoked steaks and dry berry supplies as the meat of these beasts was in the process of rotting, completely infused with paralyzing sap.

. . .

“Pretty good haul, eh?” I looked at the pile of monster bones and gem-cores that sat in our tent inside of Saccy.

The bone-pile was bound with ropes and staked to the floor so that our haul would not roll all over the place while our Seed moved on uneven terrain. My hands were busy carving yet another bone-bolt.

“Yeah,” Alessi nodded. “I do hope we find a Seed with things that are less… dead. We’re going to run out of smoked meat soon at this rate.”

She glanced through the small opening in front of her to check the way for more Folding flowers.

The floor beneath our feet tilted sideways a little as I directed Saccy to move up through the tunnel ahead of us. Our three-legged flowery steed was walking at an incredible pace of about four kilometers per hour. Alessi had explained that this was most likely because Saccy was very young - the older Seeds could move a lot faster and you could tell the age of a Seed by the number of its roots.

As Saccy turned, circling a tunnel intersection, Alessi froze.

“See something?” I asked.

“Big… pretty flower… we should… go in,” she said, her speech slurring a bit as she was affected by the visual allure.

“Can you tell me where it is? Point the pretty flower out to me with your fingers,” I said.

“Yes,” Alessi nodded, pointing at the target. “It is… right this way. Just... look. She’s… perfect.”

I used Dominion branches inside of Alessi’s body to adjust the arbalest’s aim, opened up Saccy’s petals more and pulled the trigger via a rope-lever. The bone-bolt flew and I heard the familiar whack noise as the bolt punctured one of the petals, sinking into the enemy Folding Seed’s flesh.

“No! Don’t hurt… her!” Alessi yelped.

I quickly put a thick, leather sack over my sister’s face-mask, completely blocking her view of the flower outside.

“I really hate this,” she muttered angrily after a minute. “They keep getting in my head, messing with my thoughts. This one is particularly… strong. It has twenty roots.”

“Twenty?” I whistled. “That’s the biggest one we’ve encountered thus far.”

“Yep. It’s an old one.” Alessi nodded. “The previous oldest one we took down had only eight roots.”

“Should be a big haul then,” I smiled, forcing Saccy to close the petals. When the entrance closed, I got up and reloaded the arbalest.

“I… hope so,” she grumbled. “It might take a lot of bolts to bring it down.”

“You memorized where it is, yeah?” I asked.

“Perfectly.” My sister nodded.

I let Saccy open her maw as Alessi fired another bolt without even looking at the Seed ahead of us. Her nearly-photographic memory was incredibly handy in our Seed-hunt. Thankfully, the Folding Seeds were too stupid to even move away from the line of fire. Perhaps they had never encountered one of their own kind that shot paralyzing bolts at them.

In this manner, we shot a few more bolts at our enemy.

“Check target?” I said.

“Sure,” Alessi replied as I pulled the bag off her head.

“It’s still… active,” she muttered. “Such pretty… lovely petals. We should go to… her.”

I pulled the bag on her head again. Alessi fired another bolt and I closed the entrance and reloaded the arbalest.

“Check again?” I asked, pulling the bag off my sister.

“Target active… oh… oh no! It's… she’s walking towards us!!!” Alessi yelped, her voice slurring. “She… wants us to join her in… eternal embrace… there’s no need to fight her.”

Alessi attempted to stand up, trying to get to the Seed herself. She didn’t get very far as the belts and ropes bolted into Saccy’s floor held her firmly in place.

I shut the entrance. Something bumped hard against Saccy.

I felt it then - an allure far more powerful than anything we had encountered so far. Peace and love permeated, seeped right through Saccy’s flowery gateway.

“Open up. Come out. Be mine,” enchanting pulses of pure, perfect bliss hammered into my brain with whispers of song-like, distinctive words.

This Folding Seed was singing, speaking to me... in Basq?! How could this be?!

“Let me out! I belong to her! Let me loose!” Alessi whined, struggling with the belts binding her.

"I love you. I will always love you from now on and forever," the Seed's song rose another octave. "Blessed heaven awaits the weary, tired pilgrims. Come to me. Come to me and find salvation."

“Shit,” I hissed.

The allure focused on me now, wrapped me in warm embrace of her enchanted song. The feeling of peace and harmony tore through all of my defenses and shields as if they were made from paper.

“Do not resist. Do not attack me. I love you. Be mine, come to me, taste my kisses… little clever one…” the twenty-armed Folding Seed sang not merely with Basq words but with ideas, with the concept of pure, abominably perfect love. “I shall grant you your heart’s desire. I shall parch your thirst. I shall grant you paradise. I shall take you to heaven.”

I could not resist her love.

I could do nothing but open up Saccy’s entrance with my Dominion branches. There was only one inevitable conclusion, one option, one path.

I was hers.

I belonged to her now.

A distant part of my rational mind screamed in panic. We had made a mistake, encountered an enemy far too powerful for us to fight against.

Heaven waited for me.