On the far end of the weird little grotto crouched a creature with the menacing shape and size of a tiger, but which seemed to be made entirely from highly-manicured shrubbery. Seymour had to think fast:
“I’ve got fire.” He did his best to sound threatening, but in fact he did not have any fire, and he wasn’t the least bit confident that the monster facing him could even begin to comprehend his bluff, anyway.
He recalled that back when the maze first started replacing the depot’s third floor, Eusebio had made an evacuation announcement over some kind of loudspeaker – though Seymour had mostly zoned him out. The spectacle of watching his surroundings transform had demanded almost all of his attention. But now, staring down this weird-ass tiger-thing, he could recall his boss saying something about how customers who failed to evacuate in time would become trapped within an endless hedge maze populated with these living topiary creatures.
And that was all the information Seymour had to go on. He was completely on his own now, and it didn’t feel great.
“You do know what fire is, don’t you? Well, you should really learn a thing or two about it, Tigger – mind if I call you Tigger? Helps make you seem a little less scary, which helps me stay a little bit cooler. Anyway, I’m rambling here, but seriously – you gotta educate yourself on the properties of fire, Tigger, seeing as how you’re a cursed topiary and all. Pretty much just a big, dumb, kitty-cat made of kindling, you know?”
In response to Seymour’s nervous rant, the topiary tiger creaked open its wooden jaws and let loose a horrible roar, setting its leafy coat trembling. Within the hollow of its mouth, corkscrews of twisted roots emerged fang-like, somehow slimy with ropes of saliva. But other than its well-defined mouth, the tiger didn’t have any other fully formed facial features – although there did seem to be an intermittent spark behind a pair of dark divots where the eyes should be. For some reason the lack of defined features made the creature all the more awful for Seymour to look at; all the more unreal and mindbendingly impossible.
The tiger suddenly leapt, closing the space between it and Seymour before he could even blink. It crashed into his chest and they toppled over, Seymour landing flat on his back with the tiger on top of him. The fall caused him to fumble the cactus in the teacup and it went wobbling away, coming to rest on its side near the wall of the grotto.
He thrust out his forearm just in time to intercept a tiger-bite that would have eaten his face. Instead, the creature clamped its jaws onto his forearm and Seymour let out a pained shout. The roots which had twisted to become the topiary tiger’s fangs weren’t nearly as hard as a real tiger’s canines would have been—and its jaw lacked the same crushing strength—but the damned things were still sharp as screws. Worse yet, as the topiary tiger gnawed on his arm, some of its wooden fangs began to splinter and crack, which only intensified the pain as dozens of wood slivers slid into Seymour’s flesh.
Fortunately, his attacker didn’t possess the same kind of mass as a real tiger, either. It was more or less just a tangle of sticks and leaves, after all. In some places, Seymour could actually see straight through its body and he had to wonder where the awful roar had come from a few seconds ago. The thing clearly didn’t have lungs or vocal cords with which to produce such a sound. And because its body was largely hollow, it was exceptionally light for its size, so after its initial rush and tackle Seymour easily turned the tables by simply rolling over and effectively placing himself in a sprawled top mount.
With the tiger now pinned beneath him and flipped awkwardly onto its back, Seymour wrenched his arm out from its jaws. Bloody gouges could be seen through the shreds of his shirt but thankfully they all appeared to be superficial and not dangerously deep.
He maintained a tight mount and pinned the tiger’s front legs to the floor using his elbows, while seizing the creature by the snarls of twisted sticks which would have been its cheeks in order to prevent its slobber-filled mouth from landing on him again. Its hindlegs were still free, though, and they drew up close to kick and claw at Seymour’s stomach and thighs. He contorted his body, scrunching up in an effort to protect his manhood.
Seymour had a choice then. His strongest instinct screamed at him to release the tiger and roll away in order to escape the hind-claws thrashing frantically at his middle-section. But he knew that doing so would only reset the combat. It would cost him the advantage he currently held – an advantage which had been purchased with some of his own blood.
The topiary tiger was coming apart as they struggled. Every kick, every twist, every attempt to shake itself loose from Seymour’s grapple caused twigs to snap off. A mess of sticks and leaves already littered the stone floor around them. Seymour realized he would likely need to take this thing apart quite literally limb-from-limb before it would stop attacking. But he needed to end the fight far more quickly than that or he’d come out of it completely shredded.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Fortunately, he had an idea.
The topiary tiger’s face was nothing but a mouth and some shallow divots where the nostrils and eyes would have been. Behind those eyes, Seymour intermittently caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a magic spark – the only bit of the monster which seemed to be made of anything but plant matter.
Setting his nerve, Seymour released the tiger's cheeks and before it could react he punched his fist straight into its mouth as deep and forcefully as he could manage. It clamped down and one of its large canines cracked off, embedding itself entirely into Seymour’s forearm. He howled and fought with his free hand to control its front paws but to little success. The paw which had been pinned by his right elbow now raked up his back, drawing nearer and nearer to his neck. Up to this point he hadn’t felt that he was truly in any mortal danger due to the tiger’s inability to inflict deep wounds, but suddenly it struck Seymour that even a shallow gash across his throat could prove lethal.
He frantically felt around inside the tiger’s head, hoping to land upon the flickering spark he’d seen. He assumed it must essentially be the tiger’s lifeforce – the magic animating it, possibly contained in some sort of gem. But he was having zero luck finding the damn thing, if it even existed.
Inside the tiger’s stick-built skull, there seemed to be only more sticks. Seymour clutched a fistful and yanked but the tiger seemed unphased. Even as the root-like insides of its head and throat were drawn out through its mouth in a sort of arboreal oral prolapse, its claws continued to kick and rake with the same animalistic frenzy as before. Seymour unhanded the length of rooty plant-guts he’d dragged out of the creature’s maw and resumed the grapple, grabbing both of the tiger’s forelegs to at least stop it from ripping out his throat.
But this wasn’t a position Seymour could maintain for very long. The tiger’s hindlegs continued to thrash at his body. His shirt had already been torn to bloody shreds. With its insides dragged out through its mouth, the tiger’s fangs had at least been eliminated as a threat, but that still left all four claws. It might have been possible to simply snap off each of its legs, but Seymour didn’t think he had the strength.
Panic welled in his chest as he realized this had become a battle of attrition and he was going to lose. The tiger would continue to dig into his abdomen with its hind claws and eventually the loss of blood would cause him to lose strength. To lose consciousness. It might take an hour, but Seymour knew that this garden golem thing wouldn’t suffer from exhaustion the way he would himself at some point. It could keep raking him with its claws until it got the job done.
He started to go numb. He felt his jaw begin to tremble and wasn’t sure if it was from the cold of the wintry weather blowing into the grotto from the hedge maze or if he was simply going into shock. He scanned the small chamber for anything that might help, but there was only the cactus, which remained well out of reach, and the sticks and twigs and leaves which the tiger had shed during their struggle.
“Oh shit – that’s it,” he whisper-growled, suddenly realizing a plan. Goosebumps sprouted up all over his body. He squeezed the tiger’s forelegs and activated Infringement.
The tiger went suddenly rigid. Its left foreleg, held in Seymour’s right fist, splintered and cracked as the Sigil of Greed devoured each individual sinew of branch and stick which constituted the whole. A nauseating wave rolled through Seymour as he absorbed more and more softwood from the suddenly wounded creature. It was like he had eaten too much and needed to reforge the materials he’d stolen into something else before his palm could barf it all back up.
The topiary tiger kicked him hard in the gut with both of its hindlegs and pushed. But it didn’t want to fight anymore – it only wanted to escape. Seymour fell off to the side and watched it limp pitifully back toward the stone archway, desperately struggling to drag itself once more out into the maze.
Then wand after wand began to expel themselves from Seymour’s palm. They started plinking onto the grotto’s snow-speckled stone floor.
He had successfully transformed the tiger’s front leg into more than half a dozen of the sneezing wands he’d been practicing with the day before. He’d kept the schematic for it in his Object Memory just in case the opportunity had arisen to prank Dathon. He wasn’t even sure if his squid-faced roommate was capable of sneezing. He didn’t have much of a nose, after all, just a pair of nostril-slits.
Before now, Seymour had never attempted to use Infringement for mass production—absorbing a large amount of raw materials and then producing many items at once—but it had worked. And he’d crippled that tiger. It fled from him pitifully, limping and falling, scooting on its inside-out face like a dog who was wormy at the wrong end. It hit him then: he’d just fought his first monster.
“And you kinda kicked its ass.”
He watched the sad tiger drag itself away until it disappeared back into the blizzard. Then he lifted himself up into a kneeling position and began gathering up the wands he’d just made. They felt like souvenirs that he should keep, even if he knew they’d revert to twigs soon.
But he found something else, too. Something small and paper-flat and rectangular, buried beneath the thin skin of snow that the wind had blown in. It was a card—less like a playing card and more the type of thing a gypsy would use to read your fortune—and lifting it from the snow and brushing it off revealed it to be The Card of the Gambler. The phrase was printed across the bottom edge in black ink, and the card held an image of a smirking man rolling a set of dice onto what looked sort of like a craps table, but far longer.
“Card of the Gambler?” Seymour wondered. He stuffed it into his pocket alongside the wands.
And he realized how close he had just come to overlooking it. A moment earlier it had been hidden beneath the snow and the wands, but he could also see the remnants of a round depression in the snow, overlapping where the card had been. The teacup with the weird cactus inside had been placed on top of the card, hadn’t it?
“Did someone leave it here for me to find?” He wondered. “Was it the maze, somehow?”
He turned to find the cactus again. It had been knocked from his grip during the topiary tiger’s initial attack – but he didn’t see it anymore. He was sure it had rolled wobblingly over by the wall, but now it was just gone. And an odd pang of guilt and shame hit him then, as if he’d let the cactus down.
“Dude, get it together. It’s just a cactus you happened to enter into a bloodpact with.” He sat on the floor of the grotto hugging his knees, settling in to wait for someone to come find him.
