“What in the hell was that thing?” Ken asked, as soon as the satyrs stopped moving and gave the all-clear.

  “A wood wose,” Rinthas grimaced. “We did not know they had one here. This is bad.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” Ken said. He was shaking, and Beth helped him sit down as his adrenaline faded.

  Rusty was feeling it too, and as he slumped down next to his best friend and his sister, he translated the Lion’s words. “When the elves wish to create a guardian of exceptional power for an area, they choose one of their own and entomb them within the soil. They are enchanted with elvish magic, many rituals before they are laid to rest. In time, the roots of a nearby tree are drawn to the elf’s dying flesh. They are consumed as they perish, and what is left of their essence… Possesses the tree. Yes, that is a good word for it.”

  “Oh my God,” Beth whispered.

  Rusty couldn’t blame her. That sounded absolutely horrific. But he found himself asking, “You said this happens over time. How much time?”

  The Lion hesitated. It paced back and forth, with movement that Rusty had come to associate with serious thought on the elder being’s part.

  “It takes a month at the very least. And that is for a young one,” the Lion muttered. “For one of power equal to that one over there, of that resistance, it would have taken at least half of one of your years. But how was this not discovered? Woses are mad things, that try to strike down all non-elves that enter their domain. And this is not that far from the lines…”

  Rusty squeezed his eyes shut, as he translated. He was shaking now, and it was harder to think straight. “How did Alice even get through?” he whispered.

  Ran Tan the Meril Jannesiva Dok answered. “She applied arcane measures. For a nonce, her manipulations rendered the path to yonder aperture impermeable to tuberly barrage.”

  “She obsctacled the roots with her new rune and ran like a bunny with a coyote behind,” Beth added. “I think that’s what I heard her say when she was casting the spell.”

  Rusty looked to Rinthas. He was crouched down, eyes wide and looking for trouble. The other satyrs had faded back into the trees, keeping a perimeter. Which was smart, because they WERE behind enemy lines.

  But not that far, Rusty realized. “Rinthas, you all didn’t see the wose the last time you patrolled through here?”

  “That was before my time here, Lion,” Rinthas shook his head. “But we were patrolling around here a month ago, and there are no reports of a wose. And we are not fools! A small one might have been hidden or missed. One that size? No, no.”

  “Unless…” Ken hesitated. “Trees in bags.”

  “What?” Beth asked.

  “My family runs a shop. We’ve got a small gardening section, mostly because Mom loves doing that stuff. Every spring we get saplings in bags to transplant into places. It’s easier than trying to grow them from seeds. Could they have done something like that here? Grown the wose in our world, and transplanted them here?”

  The Lion went still. “They would have had to take a tree from Elythia, and used the power of the greenroot to sustain it in your realm, for it would not grow in your soil otherwise. Doing that would kill much of the greenroot. So much of it would rot away to mold…”

  Rusty relayed that, then added to it. “It’s not impossible. That’s what they probably did. They’re using the time difference against you guys— uh, I mean, us.”

  Ran shot him a warning glance, but Rinthas didn’t seem to notice the slip of the tongue.

  “This is bad, Lion,” Rinthas said, eyes flicking back and forth as worry lines wrinkled over his forehead. “If they can fast grow woses, they can take territory and hold it without risking men or elves. How can we fight this? Should we go back and report this to the bandelo?”

  “No,” Rusty decided. “If we give them time, one of the elves that escaped will get through the portal and warn the elves at the farmhouse. Heck, they might be doing that now. If we come back in a couple of hours they’ll have a bunch of elves ready to ambush us. We have to kill the wose and take care of the patrol somehow, and we have to do it now.”

  “How?” Ran burst out. “Even with your velocity, the arboreal menace still nearly deceased our buttocks!”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Rinthas casually backhanded her horns, and Ran staggered back a little, fell on her butt when her bad leg gave out. Beth startled at the sudden violence.

  “Keep your voice low,” Rinthas murmured. “Elves may be about. Shout again and gain another name.”

  Ran went pale and nodded, rubbing her skull nervously.

  “She has a point,” Rusty said, slowly. “I… we cannot simply run up and stab it. It’s a tree. Even if ah, we climbed it and stabbed the head area, we’d be unable to dodge its attacks on the way up. Or down. And my… our speed spell is expensive. Oh! That’s something else,” Rusty said as thinking of the spell cost triggered his total recall. “The thing has insane magic resistance. We got through it once, but it would explode you guys if you tried and I don’t have the chakra to do it again.”

  “So you can’t simply deposit a hole into yonder petulant perennial? Pity,” Ran said. Quietly.

  “That’s right. One of your runes is ‘hole,’” Ken said, rubbing his chin. “I don’t think mine are helpful here, but there’s got to be something…”

  Beth raised her hand. Rusty almost laughed to see it. “You can talk,” he told her kindly, instead.

  “Um,” she hesitated. “What about erosion? We learned about that in class this year. Maybe…”

  “Go on,” Ken said, eyes widening.

  “I mean… I started going down to the riverbank after you disappeared, Rusty. This was when the rain got going pretty hard, and there was this one bush by the edge that slipped further and further down as the water washed the soil away.”

  Ken’s eyes were wide open now. “I only saw it for a little bit, but that was a really big, really heavy-looking tree, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Rusty said, replaying the scene in his mind. “And y’know, those roots were awfully strong, but they weren’t that long. Not compared to the size of it.”

  “If you got some water in there, in a trench, like… maybe?” Beth started.

  “Lion?” Rusty asked, in his mind. “I’m guessing the wose can swing the branches some and move the roots around, but does it have anything to use to protect its head? From stuff above it, I mean?”

  “No,” the Lion purred. “Usually we must tame flying beasts and charge at woses to slay them with pick and flame. A perilous task, for often the elves defend its vulnerable head with deadly arrows. And while it seems likely that there are no elves here at present, we do not have any flying beasts. But I see you smile. Why? What do you plan?”

  Rusty grinned, and told everyone the plan.

  They all grinned back.

  *****

  The thing that had been an elf once didn’t feel satisfaction, not exactly. It didn’t feel much at all, anymore. Snipped from the greenroot and forced to adapt not one, but two sets of alien soil, the only emotion it felt much these days was a dull annoyance at the discomfort of having to strain for nutrients in this damp, green realm.

  But when intruders had trod upon the forest floor, and the thing they called a wose had been woken from fitful slumber to strike down the unworthy to lash and grab and rip and tear, it had felt the closest it could to joy. It had been made to guard, and it was guarding!

  It was fully awake now, eagerly manifesting its face at the peak of the trunk, forming it first in one direction, then switching to another. It looked as far out as it could, for it did not feel anyone treading above its roots.

  That as why it didn’t see the hole that snapped into existence right next to its trunk until it started to shift and tilt.

  Panicked, the wose moved its face to that side of the trunk, looking down and seeing the long, twenty-foot wide sinkhole that had opened up next to it. Water swirled in the bottom of it, surging in from below and ate away at the dirt, and the horrified wose felt itself tilting faster, as its suddenly-exposed roots on that side started snapping. They were unable to bear the weight of the wose’s body without the soil to brace against.

  Terrified, or as terrified as the wose could be with the facsimile of remembered emotions that it had to work with, it made a very large mistake.

  The wose shifted the roots from its sides over to lace around the hole, pushing against gravity with tireless, vegetable force.

  It might have worked. It slowed, then stopped, wooden face flickering in and out with anxiety, watching the slowed trickle of dirt falling into the water below. Given a little time, it might have been able to balance the root structure out through the dirt, and compact and shift it to fill the hole in.

  Given time, it might have.

  It never got the time.

  The second hole snapped into existence just ahead of the first one, and oh, that was it.

  The wose didn’t scream. It couldn’t.

  It had no lungs to gather air, as it fell and its branches on that side snapped and broke against the ground beyond the holes.

  Its mouth was for show, a mocking remembrance that could not cry out, as the satyrs rushed in with hastily-made torches and set the sun-dried foliage around its suddenly vulnerable head aflame.

  And it had no tongue to shape words to beg forgiveness, as it felt its flailing roots rip and tear and constrict, spasming out of control and ripping the artifact, the very gate it had been placed to guard, into pieces.

  It died then, as the energies of the ruptured gate pulsed through it, though it took some time for the rest of its body to stop moving.

  Its attackers didn’t even notice.

  *****

  Exhausted, down to his last dregs of chakra, Rusty lay on the ground and stared at the smoke rising into the sky. He was thirty chakra richer for the death of that wose, but he had spent so much that he was still sore from it.

  After a time, Rinthas trotted up and peered down at him.

  “The gate is unusable. Buried or destroyed,” Rinthas stated. “What now, Lion?”

  “Now we go back and report,” Rusty said. “And we hope Alice does the same.”