Compared to the weird, almost cartoonishly happy, world the Forlorn Forest had been during the daytime, when we returned during the night, the forest’s name felt a lot more appropriate.

After our sojourn during the day, we had discussed what we had seen and what it might mean, ultimately coming to the conclusion that things were weird and we needed more information. Hoping that the creatures, as alien and strange as they might be, would be less active during the night, we carefully snuck back under the cover of darkness. The additional benefit of that was that my Concealment was part of my Darkness-Magic and as such was extra effective in the shadows of the night.

Which brought us to the side before us, one that made the name ‘Forlorn Forest’ seem perfectly suited to describe. Where before, there had been busy little critters, bustling around like it was happy hour, it now looked like the graveyard shift at the morgue. Not that I had ever been at a morgue during the graveyard shift, but it was how I imagined it to be. Cold, quiet and incredibly spooky, with nothing but the ghosts of the deceased there to keep one company.

There were a few creatures visible, but they, too, were not of the happy, bustling variety, or even the cartoonishly weird variety like the fungi we had seen during the day. No, they were simply alien monsters, mockeries of living things with malformed limbs, grotesquely large heads and an aura that made Nethersprites feel wholesome.

The first look I took at them, accompanied by the first whiff of their Astral Power, almost made me sick to my stomach and only iron-clad willpower and self-control kept me from noisily vomiting into the dried, dead grass beneath us. For that was another part of the strangeness, where before, the forest had been vibrant, green and alive, it was now withered, grey and seemingly dead.

“Can you tell what is going on?” I quietly asked Adra, not willing to move further into the heart of the forest before we had more information. Adra only quietly shook her head, looking just as spooked and confused as I felt, before stepping up to one of the withered and crippled trees and placing her hand against the trunk. For a moment, I could feel her Astral Power stretch out, before snapping back into her as she staggered away as if hit by a sledgehammer. One of her hands went to her head, clutching it, a pained groan escaped her lips and I noticed a trickle of blood running down her nose and even her eyes started to cry bloody tears.

Rai immediately caught her, holding her in a protective and supportive embrace, while she leaned against him, barely able to remain standing.

“I’ve got you,” he promised her, gently stroking her back. With her in that state, I focused on our concealment, trying to make sure nothing could find us while she was incapacitated, aware that she might have been struck by some sort of warding or some other security measure.

“I’m alright,” she promised after a few moments, pushing herself to stand on her own, but not quite leaving Rai’s embrace. “That wasn’t fun,” she grumbled, looking over to me.

“The trees are…” she paused, struggling to find the right word, “They are wrong, I don’t know how to describe it, they aren’t dead but also not alive. Not undead either, I don’t know,” she mumbled growing rather agitated.

“It’s like they look like trees, smell like trees and even superficially feel like trees but in truth, they are something else. I can’t explain it,” she gestured with her free hand, the blood she had wiped off her face almost glowing in the dark.

Frowning, I looked at the tree through Lenore’s sight, trying to see what she meant. Sadly, when I looked at it, it looked just pretty normal. Sure, the Death-aligned Astral Power was overwhelming but compared to the undead trees we had seen during the day, it wasn’t that extreme. There was still some Life and Vitality within them, nothing that gave me a feeling bad enough to warrant her reaction.

Pushing away my preconceptions, I stepped a little closer to it, fully focusing and trying to find that weirdness. I even stretched out the understanding of my Blood Magic, trying to glean a little more insight and that was when it hit me. Not as bad as it had hit Adra, but bad enough to make me stagger back into Sigmir’s waiting embrace.

“Ugh, I see what you mean,” I groaned, blinking to get rid of the tears swimming in my eyes.

Her earlier words, about being unable to describe what she had seen, made sense to me now, the state of that tree was truly too weird for words. It was as if the fundamentals of magical existence, how the small building blocks of Astral Power, fit together were inverted, or maybe put through a distorting mirror. It still fit together but everything in my mind said it shouldn’t that things were WRONG, in all capital letters. Life was death and death was life, up was right and down was somewhere over there. If it wasn’t localised and internal to those trees, I wasn’t sure we would even be able to exist in that weirdness.

“Should we continue?” Rai asked, clearly disturbed by the state Adra and I were in. If both of us got knocked about, just from investigating what was going on, how could we probe deeper?

“Yes,” I nodded, noticing a frown on Sigmir’s face as I did. “We need more information and I think these creatures aren’t the most perceptive.”

I looked at the strange monsters in the area before us. Despite the actions we had taken and our, if quiet, talking, they simply continued to move about, not caring for us in the slightest.

Carefully, now even more vigilant and paranoid, we continued sneaking from shadow to shadow. Around us, the forest was moving in an eerily quiet manner, the critters silent despite their weird nature, or maybe because of it. I could see one such critter, a rodent of unusual size, its head almost as large as the rest of its body, with an almost skeletally thin tail that stretched five times the length of its body, scurry around. Its movement looked incredibly clumsy, maybe due to the mismatched sizes of its body parts, but despite that clumsy movement, it was swift and silent. Almost as if the clumsiness was a mere distraction.

It took us almost an hour of incredibly slow and careful sneaking to reach the heart of the forest, or at least I was pretty sure that was what we had discovered. The first thing we noticed was the massive tree in the middle, the trunk even thicker than the previous, massive trees we had seen, almost fifteen metres in diameter. We couldn’t see any branches, even my elven eyes, supported by my affinity for Darkness, couldn’t pierce the distance and deep shadows around its trunk.

But what we could see were the strange sprites buzzing around it, quite similar to the Forest Sprites in appearance, only where the Forest Sprites were surrounded by a vibrant, green glow, these sprites were giving off a sickly, purple glow and a smell of rot and decay was in the air, thick enough to make me choke.

As before, we settled in to observe, carefully making sure that the shadows were concealing us. The sprites seemed to perform some strange, elaborate dance but when looking through Lenore’s eyes, I could see that there was a lot more to it.

They weren’t just dancing, each of the Sprites was controlling a strand of magic, weaving it together with the others, the dance a slow but incredibly elaborate ritual. The focal point of that ritual was quite curious, a large, dark rock sticking out of the roots of the massive tree, maybe even embedded into the trunk itself, I couldn’t tell.

Focusing on that rock and looking closely, I could see that it was filled with power, far more than I had ever seen before. It made the Eternal Ice I had created in the past look like something you would use for your drinks, perfectly mundane. I couldn’t even begin to tell just how much power was bound into the rock, but I truly wanted to find out.

That much power, what could I do with that? How much could I change, how far would I be able to push my magic?

I didn’t know, but I was itching to find out, even if the power contained in the rock wasn’t one I had an affinity with, the sheer scope was intoxicating.

But would I be able to control it? Changing the world was one thing, bending it to my will, but destroying it? Wouldn’t that also destroy Sigmir’s world?

The realisation sobered me up quite a bit. allowing me to calm my laboured breathing as I reminded myself of the most important thing. Power was great, but all the power on Mundus was useless if I couldn’t remain with Sigmir.