After the moon goat had flown off, it wasn’t spotted again for nine days. When it finally turned up again it was circling Drggstyal, the great tree that presided over pinefrost forest. The very forest that Trabic had first discovered Hero in. This tree was considered a historical anomaly. It was the most iconic and distinctive landmark that still existed within Iceverian territory and as far as the humans knew there was nothing else like it on this planet. To call Drggstyal high does not do it justice. It at the very least breaches the cloud tops, but even on a clear day it reaches far beyond sight’s limit, presumably breaking through the atmosphere into open space. There are other signs apart from its size to indicate that it is more than a normal tree as, along its trunk, you’ll find rivets of clearly inorganic material and sections where metal seems to blend with the bark.
Drggstyal is guarded by a strange creature known as Farrister, A plant-like being that is as singular as the tree he guarded. Farrister, for the most part, displays no hostility, but he will adamantly keep anyone from approaching the tree within a certain distance, more in the way of a clerk than a sentinel at least until the issue is pressed. But despite this he did willingly trade leaves of Drggstyal with anyone willing to deal with him. These leaves and the way they might be pertinent to their current predicament was something that Trabic, even if it should in theory be Shirl, was familiar with. So, when discussing pursuing the moon goat into pinefrost forest Trabic let it be known that he had something to share with them that could make the trip knock two birds out with one stone. Which brings us now to a small inn kept within a ramshackle town bordering the forest.
Hero awoke in the bed of the inn groaning. He still had the ghost sensation of being nibbled on his side the same way someone might keep thinking a bug was on them every time their hair brushed their face when they have been recently spooked by one. He had changed from the D. E. A. uniform he had been wearing into his normal traveling clothes. Hero took a look in the mirror. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with a dark green cloak that was somewhat tattered since he had been using it since he’d been found in it. He put his headband on to hold his shaggy hair in place and the action seemed to make his face mark’s appearance go from the bags of grogginess into the face paint of determination. The one part of his outfit that was the same as before was the yellow scarf wrapped around his neck. Hero was always wearing this scarf, and the truth was he couldn’t take it off if he wanted to. It was a curious thing, right now he had it wrapped around his neck to look like he was wearing it properly, but if he was to loosen it, it would begin floating around his neck, with the knot folding in on itself and orbiting around him without effecting the placement of the scarf’s tails. The ends of the scarf were three pronged, almost resembling claws and sometimes the hero felt as if that’s exactly what they were. Whatever, it’s not like this is something I can figure out just by thinking about it, I better get downstairs, Hero turned away from the mirror and went to meet up with the rest of his party.
He considered what Trabic said about knowing a solution to Shirls condition. He would be happy to have that particular situation put to rest. Shirl the girl was a regular firecracker to deal with at the best of times, and now it was as if that essence had been turned up by one hundred degrees, even if they were doing their best to keep her confined and unconscious. Along the way to this town Shirl would occasionally regain consciousness and begin ranting about lord goat, creating the most absurd reasons they needed to join his side and attempting to reach for her gun to heal their addled minds. Currently she was once again unconscious and kept tied up in Angeline’s room.
When Hero arrived in the dining hall everyone had already gathered and were sipping ale from around a table in the corner. Hero took a seat, and a swig of the glass laid out for him. “So, what have you got for us Trabic?” He asked the mage anticipating good news. “Alright, so I’ve been considering the nature of the moon goats brainwashing and I think it, at least in theory, shouldn’t be any different than a spell to control minds I’ve studied in the past. If that turns out to be true, I should be able to create a counter measure if we can get leaves from the tree Drggstyal” This was indeed good news. The only thing that would make reaching the leaves difficult was that the moon goat was currently over them, but they had come here primarily to confront it in the first place so that was a non-issue. “Well, that seems simple enough, that gigantic thing’s got plenty of leaves, there should be enough to cure everyone affected in the country,” hero replied. “Unfortunately, things aren’t gonna be quite that simple, Hero you remember who the guardian of Drggstyal is right?” “Of course, the tree golem Farrister.” That is what the creature was referred to as without a proper understanding of its origins. “And what kind of person is Farrister?”
Hero immediately understood what Trabic was getting at. 20 years ago, when Trabic had first found Hero, it was in these very woods, it had been near the base of Drggstyal. At that time, they got to know the tree’s guardian. He was a friendly creature, but personality wise, well he was a lot like Shirl, at least in terms of flightiness and unpredictability. In fact, his intelligence was probably much lower since it didn’t seem to be hiding anything. “In other words, he’s gonna be under the spell too.” “That’s right and he has all the magic of the forest at his disposal, not to mention every creature in Pinefrost is under his command, on his home turf this is not gonna be easy.” What went unspoken was that this would be the forest under the influence of the moon goat. So, what would be under the mad Farrister’s control would be monsters and gnarled eldritch brush and roots rather than the normal forest. “Not to mention we’ll be lugging goat the girl along with us.” The one who had interjected was none other than Raiguin the Reaper himself who had been tagging along with Hero’s group as if it was completely natural. “Alright when did we invite the bird along? Anyway, Angeline’s the one who’s been pulling her cart, so I don’t see why your complaining,” Hero grumbled back at him. In order to transport Shirl, they tied her to a post on top of a cart to pull along with them. Angeline, who had taken it upon herself to keep watch on the befuddled Shirl had been the one pulling her along. “But we all have to listen to her insane rambling whenever she wakes up yeah?” With this Raiguin walked up to Hero and jumped into his hair. “What the hell are you doing?” Hero cried out.
“THIS IS THE KINGS NEST”
Raiguin shouted this as if it was a royal proclamation. Indeed, the only thing that differentiated Raiguin from other D. E. A. members was his kingly coat. “Whatever, let’s just get going already, Angeline is Shirl still unconscious?” Angeline held the unconscious Shirl coiled in her lap and was patting her head as if trying to soothe a wounded animal. Hero didn’t really know what to make of the sight. “Out like a lamp, I’ll go grab the cart.” The hero’s party gathered their equipment and headed for Pinefrost forest.
Leaving the Inn, Hero made his way to the edge of the woods. Following behind him was Trabic, now in his mage attire. He wore a pointed wizard’s hat a top a haircut that looked like it would go better in a ball cap. A loose cloak hung about his stone wall of a body, on it emblazoned the symbol of a crescent moon sandwiched by triangles, apparently the logo of his family. Behind him, Shirl’s car was Angeline. She wore a jet-black combat outfit with tan bandages that wrapped around her forearms and obscured the lower half of her face. Her hair was parted into ponytails and her eyes seemed to hold a calm and insightful expression. Two short swords were sheathed at her waist ready to be drawn at a moment’s notice. Shirl, still tied to her post, was wearing her large white coat, so that her sleeping face was dipped into its collar and was further veiled by her half shell mage hat. She was currently snoring away while resting lazily against the post with her cane leaning on her head and her gun and potions, read grenades, strewn across the floor of the cart. Is it really okay to leave those near her? Hero thought to himself.
As they entered the forest, Hero began hearing shuffling sounds in the snow beyond the trees. Looks like it’s already begun, he summoned his sword. A pack of white wolves emerged from the trees, usually docile creatures, they currently had snarling faces and malice behind their eyes. “All right, remember that these are normally peaceful creatures that are under Farrister’s dominion, everyone, do your best to knock them unconscious without killing them.” Trabic immediately cast a protective dome around himself and the cart while Angeline rushed ahead, letting go of the cart and drawing her twin blades. She initiated combat with four of the twelve wolves weaving between them while countering their lunges and making sure not to and any mortal blows. Hero twirled in a circle while whipping his sword around, creating a gust of fire that sent another third of the wolf pack slamming into trees. As Hero began to keep the rest occupied along with Angeline, Raiguin had also jumped out from Hero’s hair and was doing the same with his scythe, Trabic began chanting paralysis spells and cast them as bolts on each of the wolves. At last, the whole pack had been incapacitated, and the group sheathed their weapons. “There’s gonna be a lot more where that came from, keep your eyes peeled everyone."
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While they made their way through Pinefrost forest they encountered many more legions of woodland creatures. Hero single handedly fought off a massive bear. The party was attacked by a cluster of animate tree stumps with ghoulish faces. A brigade of crows swarmed them in mass. They even encountered what appeared to be a duck person that they had trouble taking seriously. All the while they had to make sure that they didn’t kill any of their opponents. At first, they relied mostly on Trabic’s magic, but as he began to become fatigued, they had to resort to more brutal methods. Angeline mercilessly wacked a horde of gnomes on their heads with the back of her blades. Raiguin temporarily froze a herd of crocodiles in ice. Hero performed a sleeper hold on a harpy. Every once and a while Shirl would wake up and begin her mad rambling.
“Miasma in my head, thorns in my veins, THE SUN! I CAN SEE THE SUN’S LIGHT! Yet Severatine has already set low below Lord goat.” After entering the forest surrounded by the lurking shadows of the goat’s influence Shirls ranting had become increasingly mad and no longer seemed to be in her own words. The party was unsure if this was just the normal perversion caused by the proximity of the beast or an indication of its influence over her taking on some purpose, but it only seemed like gibberish to them. Apart from the fact that she was making increasingly clear references to the star of their galaxy, Severatine. The parallels of the monster having fallen from the moon, Ecliptis, gave rise to chilling possibilities.
Whenever this happened Trabic would use his magic reserves to cast sleeping spells on Shirl, but even this was getting to be too much for him. As they trudged along through the snow the giant tree Drggstyal that stretched beyond the clouds never seemed to get any closer. Honestly the stress was starting to get to Hero.
Several hours of combat had passed and Hero stood encircled by rabid squirrels with his arms thrown in the air, laughing madly. Swords made of flame circled around him as he fired them into the army of squirrels, scattering dozens of them at a time like charred debris. “Hero, I think this might be a little much, weren’t you the one who said we should go easy on them!?” Angeline cried at him. “Don’t worry!” Hero declared in a serious tone with a dark shade obscuring his eyes and his face paint looking especially like stress marks, “I hit them with the back of the bade!” As he said this in a creepy tone one of his blood shot eyes became visible.
“BUT THE BACK OF THE BLADE IS FIRE!”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP! I DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT THE GOD DAMN FOREST! DO I LOOK THAT GOD DAMN GREEN TO YOU!? I WAS JUST TRYING TO FIT THE MOOD!
“BURNING CATACLYSMIC DANCE OF THE VERMILLION BLADES!”
Hero sang this out as the remaining blades rained down turning the fur of these now unconscious tragic squirrels into ash. “Burning cataclysmic dance of the vermillion blades?” Trabic asked dubiously. “I’m trying to think of a name…” “A name?” “A name for what I’m gonna do to Farrister when we find him,” hero said this with his head hanging crookedly on his shoulders. Hero began marching on muttering harshly under his breath,
“Whirlwind to the end
Fist of the bull god
Meteoric flash
Burning prism crucible…”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Angeline sighed. Though truth be told the situation was beginning to grate on them all.
Several more hours passed before they finally stood before Drggstyal. The great tree was so wide that it would take them another entire hour to walk its circumference. Its massive branches on which the leaves they sought grew seemed out of reach by any normal means. Between them and the tree was Drggstyal’s guardian, and Hero took a mental picture of the way he remembered him from the past. He had been a greenish fairylike creature with a round head and florescent yellow eyes. He wore a small tunic that looked like it was made of bark and grass. Large wings that resembled leaves stretched out from his back. His legs were like tree stumps and had twigs with leaves growing on them. On his head rested a small bowler hat with an acorn growing on top. That was Farrister as he remembered him, but currently only the description of his clothing still fit.
Now the trunks of his legs were gnarled things, shedding bark and oozing purple-black sap. His head appeared more angular, and his greenish pallor had become a sickly yellow that was more reminiscent of a goblin than a fairy. The leaves that formed his wings had browned and now consisted only of the veins. The eyes still glowed yellow, but there were clouds of purple in them and the same sickly sap that leaked from his legs, leaked out as tears. As they approached him, his feet peeled off the ground tearing away thin roots that seemed more like fungus than that off a tree. It was as each step tore a pus infected scab from the very earth itself. From the surrounding woods, eyes began appearing in the shadows, those of every creature they had encountered on their way here. He spoke to them with a harsh whisper like a cold wind howling through a wind tunnel within a tightly knit forest rather than the calm meandering groan it usually was. “My master doesn’t realize. He doesn’t remember what he has done and there’s no speaking to him. But I remember. I’m the only one left who does. I know what became of Severatine and I can…”
“HEROIC EDGE OF THE SOARING PHEONIX”
Hero charged forward and slammed his knee into Farrister’s face. Farrister went spiraling through the air and crash landed with his head buried in the ground. As everyone looked on with stunned expression, lamenting the loss of what sounded like important exposition, Hero ran up the trunk of Drggstyal and broke of a relatively low branch offshoot, kicking off the tree into a back flip and landing in a crouch. “We got what we came here for, Trabic, refine and administer the leaves to Farrister and Shirl.” “Yes… yes of course…” Trabic stammered as he got to work, but he was quickly interrupted by the arrival of the monster they had originally came here for.
It impacted the ground immediately before Farrister and stretched out its neck to stare Hero dead in the eye. The Hero’s party plus Raiguin braced themselves. As exhausted as they were they had primarily come here to chase the beast down and had been mentally prepared to confront it whenever it chose to abandon its arial meandering to attack them. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this wouldn’t be where they had their showdown with the moon goat. It howled into the air, a painful and lamenting thing that sounded as if it would tear at the throat to the point of bleeding, then launched itself skyward like a rocket higher and higher up the tree until vanished from sight presumably reaching outside the atmosphere along with the trees top.
Awhile later Shirl and Farrister had returned to normal, and the Hero’s party was preparing to leave. Before parting ways with Farrister however Trabic asked about something that had been nagging at him. “Hey Farrister, when you and Shirl were hypnotized, you kept mentioning the sun, do you have any idea what that was about?” A mindless beast can’t cast spells, thought Trabic, this could be connected to whatever that thing really is. “When the moon became strange it killed the sun. But the sun is still here it has only become dim.” He waited for him to continue, but apparently that’s all he had to say on the matter. Once Farrister regained his sanity it became apparent that he had a very simplistic way of speaking. Hero and Trabic already knew this, but Trabic could see that Farrister seemed to know something beyond what he was being influenced to say. “Sun and moon? Moon as in the moon goat? But what do you mean by sun?” There must be another monster, one the goat is looking for. Farrister cocked his head quizzically, “the sun is Severatine, you already know the sun.” Hero who sat brooding cross legged a little way away spoke up. “That’s enough, you know that’s all the sense you’re gonna get out of him.” “I guess you’re right.” Still Trabic couldn’t help but wonder as they walked back through the forest.
High above the sky on a branch extending into space, Fraiken slowly opened his eyes. He was essentially a newborn, created just seconds ago, but he held an innate understanding of the world that matched a fully mature adult. He was a familiar, the same type of being as Farrister, only he appeared bird like rather than tree like. A familiar is a sub spiritual entity created almost instinctively by greater spirits in order to eke out some of their overflowing spiritual mass. The planets and stars held an unbalanced proportion of what Nexus left behind so they could easily lose an amount equal to one living being without greatly impacting themselves.
Fraiken was born without a purpose. It was not as if every familiar must be made with a mission in mind, but he doubted his creator had even made him consciously. He watched him perched on the edge of a branch of Drggstyal gazing at the moon in a mix of longing and stupor with glazed melancholic eyes and wondered what he could possibly do for him in this state. He had the same sense of loyalty towards him as a familiar would normally possess but somehow was not born influenced by the madness of his creator. Ecliptis, the moon goat, the spirit of the moon.
The illusion he had weaved, the goatish leviathan slowly faded, and his real humanoid body was revealed under the light of his greater body. It had shaggy brown hair that covered one eye, a thorny vine came out from underneath wrapping around its head. His hair lifted in the vacuum revealing a flower eye patch being held in place by the vine. On top of its head grew two brown rabbit-like ears or perhaps goat-like horns and a single fang jutted out from the right side of its mouth. His one remaining eye carried a swirling madness, but most curious of all was his scarf. A grey scarf that resembled Hero’s floated about its neck, only this scarf had a dark miasma hanging about it and at the hand like ends floated tiny blue-grey luminescent moons. Moons that were a perfect match for the one that floated above them. As he stood there continuing to gaze at the moon with arms draped listlessly to his sides it was impossible to tell if it was laughing or crying. “I can feel the miasma in my head, thorns in my veins. Do I dream as I walk? The sun is alive? But why should it have been dead?” It was impossible to tell whether he spoke with regret or joy in his voice.
