Just touching to pull the crystal out of my Magic Bag was painful. I could feel it drain the life out of my hand, the sensation similar to countless needles piercing my flesh and travelling along through, up my arm.

I didn’t even try holding it, instead, I dropped it next to me and watched the grass and vegetation start to wither around it. Looking at the crystal directly sent a shiver down my spine, a cold sensation that had nothing to do with the temperature swallowing my body. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if there was another living soul out there, or if I was completely alone in an empty world of eternal, dull emptiness.

“That’s some nasty stuff,” Lenore remarked, her voice shattering the illusion I had been trapped. She spoke softly but out loud, using my voice as she always did. Given our recent use of the Avatar-state, there was no way we’d be able to communicate mentally for a few more hours, not unless we wanted to torture ourselves.

“True,” I agreed, bracing my mind and using the Inspect ability on the crystal, curious what it would give me.

Corrupted Mooncrystal - Unique

The blue box didn’t give me a lot of information, but it was better than nothing. At least we now knew that what we had done was something remarkably rare, to the point that the system classified it as Unique. Just what that meant, I had no idea, but it ultimately wasn’t that important. What was important was the power of Death and Madness radiating from it.

“Think we can control it?” I asked, lacking the confidence to try myself.

Lenore stared at it for a long moment, her feathers ruffling up in something I recognised as discomfort.

“Not easily,” she admitted, her eyes still spellbound by the shiny crystal and the shimmer, deadly light it gave off. A light of madness and solitude, invoking discomfort and visions of a lonely, silent world in anyone gazing upon it.

“We might be able to use it as fuel in some spell if we don’t care for the spell exploding out of our control, but controlling it will be difficult,” she added, breaking her gaze away from the crystal.

“That’s not always a bad thing,” I grinned, “Having the ability to overcharge one of our spells far beyond anything we could do can come in handy, you know? Just think of the glacier-dungeon, without the Eternal Ice, defeating the boss would have been a lot more difficult.”

“Yes, but your very soul got invaded by Ice,” she looked at me and I could feel the solemness in her gaze, “If the same happens with this crystal, there’s going to be nothing left of you, the Death and Madness would utterly consume your soul,” she warned me and I could only nod in acceptance, not quite sure how that would interact with my nature as a Traveller. Perma-character death most likely, so nothing you wanted to play around with.

“I’ll be careful,” I promised her, even as my mind was starting to consider how the Mooncrystal could be used with reasonable safety. What was the use in having a bomb but being unable to use it?

My musings were cut short when I noticed Sigmir shiver in her sleep, wondering if the proximity of the crystal had disturbed her dreams. With a frown on my face, I steeled my mind against the pain and picked it up, quickly dropping it into my Magic Bag, hoping that it would be enough to insulate Simgir from whatever radiation this thing might have.

Once it was dealt with,I started to stroke her hair gently, whispering quiet words of love to her and her sleep soon calmed again. What a nasty piece of work that crystal was.

For a few hours, I was left guarding Sigmir’s sleep, quietly talking to Lenore or simply relaxing, considering the events of the previous day. There was a small part of me that regretted how things had played out, wondering if we could have gone about it differently. Losing Jenn rankled me, not because of whom she had been as an individual or something like that, but because she had been part of my group and she had died. To me, that meant the leader of the group, in this case I, had failed.

How I could have managed to protect her, while also getting the power Adra had needed to cross the second Divide, I had no idea. Maybe there hadn’t been a way, or maybe retreating first, after we had been able to gain access to the Ancient Sapling would have been the right call. Either way, what was done was done and I had a feeling we should try to cut our stay in the human lands as short as possible, given that we had thoroughly pissed off the rebels and the authorities wouldn’t care for us one bit.

Finally, Sigmir’s eyes blinked back open, looking at me with a sleepy, a little dazed expression.

“Hey, love, had a nice rest?” I asked, smiling at her adorably fluffy and sleepy expression. She looked a little like a huge husky, woken from a deep slumber.

“Mhm,” she mumbled, “Where are the others?”

“I sent them hunting a while back, I don’t want to rely on shopping to replenish our supplies. Who knows if the Imperials have somehow got word that a group of four has disturbed the Forlorn Forest, things could get ugly,” I winked at her and she nodded in agreement.

“True, I doubt the local authorities wouldn’t have made contact with those beings. Who knows what agreements and treaties they had in place,” she yawned, before wiping the sleep from her eyes, her head still resting on my lap.

“Doubtful they’d just ignore a place like that. The effort to mess with it likely outweighed the benefits or maybe it was even part of another noble’s efforts, there can be dozens of reasons why it was there. And there could be just as many, if not more, groups that resent us for stirring things up,” I grinned, not terribly worried. At the end of the day, our plan to get to Arbotoma relied on smugglers and similar shady groups, I had even considered asking the rebels for introductions, but that ship had sailed.

“It’ll work out somehow. Things always do, just not always in the way we want them to,” she returned my grin, wiggling around a little to make herself more comfortable.

Before we could get a nice snuggle session in, Adra and Rai returned, a part of me wondering if they had managed to keep track of the clearing, to be able to detect Sigmir’s awakening. A part of me doubted it, but I couldn’t be sure, the timing was too much of a coincidence otherwise.

“We got a good haul,” Adra announced, as she stepped onto the clearing with Rai. “We should be fine for a couple of days, at least in regards to meat. Though you’ll have to check and make sure there’s nothing influencing the meat, I don’t want to have any of the energy swirling around the area enter us through our diet,” she added, looking a bit queasy at the idea.

“So taking it in directly doesn't matter, but you are squeamish to eat it?” Sigmir asked, sounding quite amused at the idea.

“It’s not that,” Adra admitted, “Just, some of the things we’ve seen out there,” she shivered, visibly despite being a few metres away from us, “They are just not right. There’s too much life in the area, some of the monsters have been devouring each other but they just couldn’t die.”

“That doesn’t sound too nice,” I agreed, quite uncomfortable at the idea. The image of two snakes, trying to devour each other's tails, only to constantly regenerate wasn’t a nice one.

“No, really not. Let’s just get away from here, please?” Rai asked and there was agreement all around.

We quickly packed our stuff and started through the forest, carefully concealing us in the shadows. As we travelled, I realised that the others had carefully picked the campsite, as the forest all around us was a lot weirder. The plants were moving around, some of them reaching out with tendril-like branches, grabbing anything that came near them, pulling birds and small game into strangely gaping maws. Some of the insects were just as strange, butterflies with wings of fire, bursting into jets of flame when caught, ants that let out distinct jets of acid, sizzling through wood and causing the wood to burst into flame.

While our concealment was good enough to avoid most creatures, some of them managed to stumble into us by sheer chance. There was no way to deal with the insane monsters, other than to put them down, which we did with prejudice.

The whole situation made me wonder, how did things look outside the forest? Just what had we unleashed?