11 - One Year Prior
writing Willow11 - One Year Prior
FORTY TWO DAYS HENCE
Raaf winced sharply through his teeth as he clutched his foot. We were returning almost empty-handed from foraging and hunting to the burrow we had called home for the past year. Raaf had just tried to kick a stool in anger, but the fact that it was grown out of (and still attached to) the floor slipped his mind. He’d opened up a little more lately, but it only served to make it clearer how much stress he was under. I wasn’t exactly joyous either, but… I had never been much good at expressing emotions in situations like this.
After Raaf calmed down a little, I joined him on the couch. “I get what you meant about becoming dependent on hu-… humans, now.” I hitched a little - I noticed several months ago that I had started thinking of humans as something other, but I wasn’t quite used to it yet. “I didn’t even notice how helpless we were until we had to make do on our own.”
“Ha… Don’t blame yourself. Even I was beginning to forget where we stand.”
Where we stand… The last time we went into town for supplies was almost a year ago, now. One of the adventurers there hassled us for papers and tried to turn us in. Thankfully, Barrel’s haphazard growth made it more like a maze than a city; if there had been right angles and open streets we wouldn’t have been able to get away.
I was pondering our next steps when I heard a voice on the surface. Raaf’s ears perked up - he heard it too. It was a man’s voice, so for a moment I thought… Resting my hand against the soil through a gap in the roots, I probed the area, staying six inches or so beneath the surface. There were three people - the soil muffled their “warmth” somewhat, but I didn’t recognize the color.
“There’s three humanoids,” I whispered. “Strangers.” It took me a while to get used to talking while I was this spread out; drawing my attention back to myself felt a little claustrophobic. “Two of them are lighter, they might be beastfolk.”
Raaf leaned in and looked at the patch of soil intently, though of course he couldn’t really get anything from it. “D’you think they’ve seen the entrance?”
“No, they’re-” As I spoke, the dog turned sharply toward the way into the burrow. “Shit.” I had to find a strategy soon; the strangers were converging quickly on the tree that guarded the ladder. I cursed the design of this place - the holes Paisley left for me to use my Heroic couldn’t have been much bigger without letting too much dirt in, sure, but she didn’t leave a single emergency exit.
“D-do you think you could win? Bury them or something?” Raaf’s voice quivered.
Maybe, but… “I don’t know. Revealing my Heroic could draw way more heat, and if one of them has one too it wouldn’t be pretty.”
THREE HUNDRED FIFTY EIGHT DAYS PRIOR
My friends and I went on a trip to the beach in the fall to try to see the Northern Lights once. It wasn’t a terribly interesting trip - there was too much light to see anything. It was too cold to swim, of course, and at that point I wasn’t out to them, so it would have been more than a little uncomfortable for me regardless. Sitting by the lake now, hearing the sound of the water and feeling the wind in my hair… The aurora that I saw to the north the day I arrived shone brightly, like it did every night. No one ever explained to me what it actually was. Some kind of magic, I assumed. I wished I could bring back pictures, but… Ha… Going back to Earth. Even if there’s a way, Paisley and I are both dead as far as anyone there knows, and with how I look now…
I jumped when Brask sat down to my left. I hadn’t noticed him until he was almost on top of me. “Oh! Uh, Brask, hello!”
Brask avoided eye contact, his face emotionless. “Hello. There’s something I’d like to talk with you about.”
The air felt tense. “…Okay, what about?”
“Alys. The other day, after I met your sister… I had an idea. I think I might be able to find her.”
I blinked. “Oh, that’s good, isn’t it? When do we leave?”
“That’s what I had to tell you. This is something I have to do on my own, and I don’t know how long-”
I went cold. “You’re leaving us alone?” I hadn’t realized until that moment how much I depended on him for my sense of safety. He was the first person here to treat me with any degree of kindness, and he’d saved my life at least ten times…
He hesitated for a moment before rising to his feet. “…You’ve got your sister with you. You’ll get along fine.”
“Wait, wh-what if someone finds out about her? If-” I scrambled to my feet to follow him.
He stopped in his tracks and spoke in a measured voice. “My mind is made up.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could get a word out, a fearful memory came to the fore of my mind. A crack of thunder split the air. I was on my back, in a puddle on the sidewalk, water slowly soaking the dress I found among my mother’s old things. I saw my father, silhouetted by the light from the front door, his back turned after he threw me out in the dead of night…
FORTY TWO DAYS PLUS A FEW MOMENTS HENCE
We crept towards the entrance after gathering our equipment. The dog barked again - I couldn’t help flinching.
“There is a ladder in this tree!” A woman’s voice rang out from above. She was speaking in a formal register, but her accent was all off… I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Raaf and I shared a glance. The only way we were getting out of here was by betting on the two lighter humanoids - if they were beastfolk, and if they were free, we might be able to convince them that we just found this place. And for that plan, the best choice would be…
“Hello?” I shouted at the stranger. “Is someone there?”
They murmured anxiously. After a moment, the same voice spoke up. “Yes, we would like to talk. Might you come out?”
I looked at Raaf. He seemed concerned, but didn’t protest - there wasn’t any other escape route. “Yeah, just a second!”
I led the way up the ladder, with Raaf following close behind. When I could see through the opening in the tree, I could see one of the lighter humanoids, a small elf, dressed in some kind of intricate robe, standing around two meters back.
The elf beckoned. “Greetings!” She was too cheerful. “Might you come out where I can see you?”
…This is a trap. “Where are your friends?”
Her eyes widened for a moment, but her mask quickly fell back into place. “Uh- There are no others, why do you ask?”
Oops. “You must have been talking to someone before. There’s at least one more of you, right?”
“Of course, er-… He’s right there, we’re just trying to be cautious.” She pointed off to my left.
When I poked my head out of the hollow to look, I saw an owl beastfolk holding a club, their face blank. I realized my mistake the second I made it. Suddenly, my instincts shot a bolt of cold through my bones, and before I could react, something strong gripped me around the neck from behind and pulled, hard. I writhed, trying to retreat back into the tree, but it felt like my head was going to pop off. Raaf grabbed onto my legs, shouting after me and trying to stop them from pulling me out, but my feet slipped out of my boots, and they dragged me away. I drew the knife from my belt, but the person that currently had me in a chokehold slapped it out of my hands without a second thought.
“Maintain some distance between her and the trees!” The elf shouted, drawing back as I was shoved to the ground. The dog followed, not doing anything terribly helpful - was it just trained for tracking?
I was facing away from the tree, but I heard the sound of a knife being drawn as Raaf clambered out of the tree. He had the element of surprise, at least… He roared, rapid footfalls approaching me and the burly stranger, but someone tackled him to the ground.
The elf crouched down, studying my face with her brow furrowed. She murmured to herself in a language I didn’t recognize, paused, and shook her head. “No matter. By the third delegate authority of the Duke Elaxalim, I charge you with regicide and place you under arrest.”
THREE HUNDRED FIFTY SEVEN DAYS PRIOR
My back was killing me.
We couldn’t live by Barrel anymore - having Paisley in the guild shack was rolling way more dice than I was comfortable with, and she was getting a little stir-crazy after living in such a small room for a week. We had a close call when we returned home from a walk in the woods to find Kary actually sleeping in the shack for the first time - if Paisley had been there when she arrived, it wouldn’t have been pretty. Not to mention, two unaccompanied beastfolk going into a town crawling with adventurers like this one was attracting a troublesome kind of attention.
It’d be too risky to go out into new territory, but the concavity of this crater (which I had learned was called “Lincoln’s Rest”) was causing us some problems. Paisley would need to use her Heroic for our plan to work; it didn’t emit visible light like mine, but I had no idea how many others had soul-sight like I did, so we needed to find somewhere that didn’t have line-of-sight to any populated areas or thoroughfares. We’d been lugging our things around the forest for the better part of a day trying to find anywhere that would work when we happened upon a divot in the ground, probably formed from something like a cave-in. Paisley knew her height in Earth units, so I finally had a ruler: it was roughly fifteen by five meters, and about two meters deep. My best guess was that it was formed when a hallway from the Old Mountainhome collapsed, but I wasn’t sure if they even went out this far.
“Hey, Paisley?” I pointed to the pit. “Would it be easier to build something in there?” There’s not as much soil in the way, so…
She stroked her chin. “I’d still need to have something above ground to collect sunlight, but maybe that could be the entrance…?” A tree sprouted from the lowest point, growing to full size in seconds while its roots formed something under the surface.
As soon as she started, it felt like I was standing next to a bonfire. Not physically, of course, but the soul-heat pouring off of Paisley was… I shielded my eyes with my hands, even though they weren’t really involved in my soul-sight.
The heat winked out as quickly as it appeared, and Paisley looked at me, befuddled. “Uh, what’s going on?”
I was panting - I knew I wasn’t actually overheating, but as far as my brain stem was concerned, I was burning up. “Hah… I knew an undiluted Heroic would be strong but… Whew, that is ridiculously bright. It’s a good thing we found someplace isolated. Just curious, how hard was that?”
“It, uh, wasn’t? I was just thinking out loud, I guess.” Scary. “Can I keep going?”
“Sure, I’ll just, eh… go over there.” I hid behind a tree, but even through the trunk, it felt like a sauna.
It took a few minutes for Paisley to finish… And she probably could have gone faster. If my experience with the sand castle was anything like this, the main bottleneck was cognitive.
“Lily!” She chuckled. “It’s safe to come out now~!”
I peeked my head around the tree and pouted. “Quit making fun of me…!” I was mostly just playing along, but I was genuinely a little annoyed - standing so close to such a huge discharge of magic wasn’t doing any real damage to me, but it did hurt!
Where there was a divot ten minutes ago, the ground was almost flat, and the only externally visible feature was a large tree with a person-sized opening to a hollow inside. The air thrummed with residual energy. Raaf was still next to Paisley, trying very hard not to seem scared.
“Okay~!” She beckoned, approaching the entrance. “C’mon, I have a job for you, too.”
Paisley took a moment to maneuver through the hole, but Raaf and I fit pretty easily. Below the opening, the rungs of a ladder grew out of the wall, leading down into a foyer. Beyond that, there was…
“Oh, my. I, uh… take it that’s what you want me to deal with?” I had expected it to be a featureless room, maybe with a few items of simple wooden furniture, but it looked just as good as the cabin she made in the forest to the east where she landed, if not better. At least, from what I could see - the floor was blanketed in two feet of dirt, and every surface was dusted with the stuff.
“Yeah, I had to keep it around for the nutrients. Once everything was built, it would have been difficult for me to get it out without messing everything up.” She smirked, ruffling my hair. “I assume our little Avatar will be able to figure something out~?”
I sighed. I felt like I ought to protest, but being teased like this brought back fond memories of old times. “Yeah, yeah.”
FORTY TWO DAYS PLUS A FEW MINUTES HENCE
I tried to catch my breath and formulate a plan. A difficult task, given how hard I was pressed against the ground. From where I was lying, I could see the trail of gnarled, misshapen trees that Paisley left when… It makes sense that they thought someone dangerous lived here.
I suppose that was true until recently, depending on how you look at it.
The one holding me down shifted, attempting to bind my hands. It’s now or never. I was fastest with my Heroic through my hands, but they were occupied at the moment. My boots were off, and my face was touching the ground, though, so I could still use it well enough. I was glad I practiced so much with it - even without my hands, it only took about two seconds for me to blossom out into the nearby earth. The humans startled back, but the owlfolk remained stony. I swept the elf’s legs out from under her to get her to the ground, then projected three pseudopods to capture them and yank the strong one and the owlfolk away from myself and Raaf. The dog barked ineffectually at one of the pseudopods, but didn’t seem hostile to me.
The elf intoned a spell - the syllables were incredibly intricate, and she was speaking faster than I had any hope of parsing. When she finished, a strange glow in a nameless back-of-the-eyelids color rippled out from her body. The soil immediately surrounding her went numb, becoming inert and falling away.
I sprang to my feet, releasing my Heroic and wheeling around to face her. She was already reciting another spell as she rose to her feet, with her left hand outstretched, pointing two fingers towards me. Her incantation would take at least a few seconds - enough time for me to duck down and draw up a wall from the ground. Almost as soon as I was obscured, the spell pierced a hole a few millimeters wide almost halfway through my cover in a split second. It felt white-hot, and the earth near it went dead as it quickly burrowed further.
I shifted out of the path of the beam just before the blinding imaginary-colored light broke through the other side. I threw all of my energy into pushing the mound upward and forward. The heat vanished in an instant as she put up her guard, but the sheer amount of mass bowled her over without issue.
She began to intone again - probably another disenchantment spell. It took effect, and the mound went numb, but she was too deep to escape under her own power. Now I just had to be careful to dig her out before she suffocated.
Hi! I’m not dead! I’ve been busy with college and work on my game for the past while, but fear not: this project has still been on my mind, and I plan to see it through to completion. This chapter turned out to be very long (extrapolating from what I’ve written so far, it’s likely to be at least 12,000 words), so I’ve broken it up into chunks about 3,000 words long. On top of that, I’ve been feeling more than a little self-conscious about my writing after reading through everything again… I hope you’ll forgive anything that reads a little stiff. I’m planning to do a Big Editing Pass through everything I’ve published so far.
I’ve also started a short story set after the end of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Keep an eye out for it! I’ll be releasing it here soon.