The next morning, with as good a night's sleep as she could manage, after cooking David a healthy breakfast, she reminded Karline of David's regime of rest and potions, telling her to seek Healer Cassandra should his situation deteriorate rapidly, and set out, dressed for adventure.

  Walking through the north gate, unfolding the rough map Karline and David had given her, taking a deep breath, and adjusting her belt and straps, the lone catkin alchemist woman entered the waiting forest's maw.

  Karline burst into David's bedroom, waking him up from the thin sleep he had managed to fall into.

  “David!”

  He blinked a few times, trying to focus on her.

  COUGH “What is it?”

  “There's a bunch of people at the front door!”

  What?

  “Which day is-” COUGH “-today?” He asked, half-remembering something.

  “Huh, the 40th of Summer? Why?”

  He slapped a hand over his eyes.

  “The shop's opening. It was-” COUGH “-today.”

  “Oh... do I just tell them to... leave? You know, since Niala isn't here?” She offered, hopeful.

  He let his hand slip down, then observed her.

  She fidgeted under his gaze, looking back to where she came from.

  “Would you like to make some-” COUGH “-money?” He asked.

  That had grabbed her attention.

  “...how?”

  He smiled.

  She had never really ventured deep into the woods. Civilization had never been more than, at most, a bell away. The farther she went, the more unwelcome she felt. The small creatures stared at her, the large ones warned her off, the dangerous ones went unseen, but let her know they were watching her with roars and growls, filtering through the green.

  She was a very small woman in a very large forest, and it was getting larger with every step.

  But she kept taking those steps, towards that one singular goal.

  Her feet hurt, her muscles complained at the extended abuse, and her breath came quick and heavy.

  But she kept walking.

  She reached Camp Freshmeat by the end of the day. Manda and her crew weren't around, so she offered the barest of greetings to the adventurers present and then promptly ignored them, preparing herself a sleeping spot, pouring a potion around her camp.

  The liquid foamed, reaching half a meter in height, forming into small wall. She used a stick to poke at it; the beige wall glued itself to the stick, seemingly pulling it inward. No amount of tugging dislodged it.

  She nodded and poured on more potions, building the wall up to two metres, and then went to sleep.

  She woke up to yelling coming from right outside the sticky wall. In a sleepy daze, she fumbled around her satchel and retrieved a small ampule that she uncorked and lobbed in the yelling's general direction.

  The yelling stopped, followed by a few thuds. She went back to sleep.

  The next morning, she splashed a section of the wall with a neutralizing agent, digging a small gap through which she left. Whoever was stuck to the wall would have to wait for the 36 bells for the wall to naturally dissolve.

  Serves them right, trying to abuse a small, defenceless woman in her sleep.

  Heading north-east, the game trails weren't too hard to find, though she ended up backtracking a few times, having a hard time recognizing the one they'd described to her.

  The forest's relative quiet was broken by roaring and hissing, which she assumed were the gorezillas that David had said inhabited this region.

  She made her choice of which trail to follow and tracked north, wary.

  The path meandered through the trees, following the terrain's contour, but nothing jumped out at her as had happened to David.

  Instead, she turned around a tree and stumbled upon a very large Gorezilla, busy relieving itself between two bushes.

  A moment of surprise passed.

  The Gorezilla's face turned into a snarl.

  Niala, wide-eyed, plunged her hand into her satchel and fished for a specific potion.

  The Gorezilla hammered the ground with its fists.

  Where was that potion?!

  It charged.

  She grabbed whatever her hand was over and flung it at the beast.

  It turned out to be a flask of acid.

  The irate reptile batted at the flask, shattering it, its contents coating its arm and part of its face.

  One drop landed in one of its eyes.

  It tumbled forward, head over tail, as it roared in pain, flaying its sizzling hand around and rubbing its face into the dirt.

  Niala's gaze hardened. She pushed mana to her hand, stepping up to a tree and laying her hand flat on it.

  To the sound of the thrashing predator, she told a story to the tree.

  Tale told, she stepped back and watched as a branch detached, falling close to the Gorezilla, who was in the process of standing back up, its one good eye bloodshot and locked onto Niala.

  It didn't notice the branch wiggling and slithering like a snake towards it until it coiled around its leg and began crawling up its body, towards its head. The beast grabbed at it, ripping it off its body, but the branch mindlessly resumed its travel from its hand.

  They struggled with each other, the branch coming ever closer to its target, the Gorezilla giving in to panic.

  And then it failed grasping it away, and the branch coiled around the beast's neck, and tightened, until the Gorezilla laboured to draw breath, and then, stilling, turning into a rock-like substance.

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  The creature kept scrapping and grabbing at its neck, its eye bugging out, until strength left its limbs. It fell to the ground, wheezing and gurgling.

  Niala stepped up to it, retrieving a healing potion and pouring it over the beast's burn wounds, which began to sizzle as the flesh knitted itself back. She spoke to it softly.

  “I'm sorry for the acid. I was looking for a sleeping potion. Don't worry about the noose; It'll loosen once you lose consciousness. Be good, ok?”

  The Gorezilla tried to focus on her, its vision going grey, reaching out with a limp hand, the other still gripping at the coiled branch.

  She stepped back and continued north-east.

  Nothing else bothered her.

  It was already night by the time she reached the bluff overlooking the depression with the river. In the distance, the stone pillars pulsed with moonlight.

  They really did look like stars.

  She doused her campsite with a blend of monster repellent, then coated a pouch-full of caltrops with a sleeping agent and scattered them around.

  Tomorrow, she was getting her hands on those mushrooms.

  The sun tickled her nose. She sneezed, then sneezed again, before grunting and forcing her eyes open. She sat up and stretched, arcing her back, expelling a deep yawn.

  She turned to observe the area she'd seeded with caltrops and noticed four imposing wolf-like creatures slumped on the ground, snoring. The largest of which was practically touching her bedroll.

  She blinked the remaining sleep away from her brain.

  “Huh.”

  She blinked once more.

  Leaving the sleeping doggies behind, she made her way down the depression and to the other side.

  As Karline had described, the area around the stone pillars gently sloped up, and at the apex, she would find a small mound with a blown-out metal door in front of it.

  The birds' calls soon began filtering through the trees, and the rumbling of the underground thunderstorm crawled up her feet some time after.

  The normal rules of the world seemed to be relaxed here; things were slightly off-axis, just enough to tug at your instincts that something was wrong.

  Ears scanning in all directions, the tip of her tail swishing, and the hair on the back of her head raised, she made herself as small as she could and moved up the gentle slope.

  She found the mound near midday. Stepping through the doorway and peering inside, the only light was the one shining in from outside.

  David had said he had somehow turned the manalights back on, but that had evidently been temporary. She had good low-light vision, being a catkin, but nobody could see in the perfect dark.

  She retrieved two vials and mixed their content in a small bottle. Twisting the cap on, she gave it a good shake. The liquid inside began glowing a soft green, gaining in intensity as she shook it.

  Tying a looped length of leather strip to the bottle and hanging it around her neck, she stepped forward, towards the edge of the shaft and the protruding ladder.

  Was this a good time to admit she wasn't a fan of heights?

  She swallowed and did her best at staring straight ahead, beginning her descent.

  A few terrifying minutes later, Niala took a shaky step onto the small ledge that outlined the shaft and shuffled toward the opening that led into the atrium.

  Tiny step after tiny step, without looking down. Mostly without looking down.

  She grabbed hold of the wall's edge and spun herself onto flat, solid ground, letting out the air she'd been holding in.

  As the fright left her body, she began looking around, the green glow of her illumination potion barely managing to reach the far wall. The sound of her breathing came back to her as an echo, so silent it was.

  She turned to the right, from where David had come, and retraced his steps as he'd described to her.

  She took a moment to look out of the observation deck, down at the incredible sight offered to her.

  David had seriously undersold the grandeur of this place. If anything deserved to be called a wonder, this was it. So much land, kept alive through arcane means, hosting so many animals in so close proximity...

  Her mind spun at the number of rare or unknown ingredients she could recover from this place.

  She shook her head. Mushrooms. And let's be quick about it. The Fel probably hadn't climbed all the way up without a prey to chase down, but the less time she spent in the dark and stuffy corridors, the better.

  She trekked up to the half-hanging doors and squeezed herself through. She was close now – just had to find the ceiling venting shaft and the mushroom colony with the David-sized imprint on it.

  She donned a filtering mask, gave her bottle another shake, revitalizing the glow, and turned left, one step at a time, the tiny bottle at her neck the only source of light.

  This must be it.

  She had reached a patch of rough-looking mushrooms, with bits and pieces of a metal grate strewn about.

  She rummaged in her satchel and retrieved a glass-lined metal tube and a small pair of tongs.

  With deliberate movements, she picked up a few mushrooms, doing her best not to disturb them and spread their spores around, dropping them into the tube and screwing its cap on, discarding the tongs, probably contaminated now.

  Satisfied, she straightened back up and took one last look around.

  To her left, at the far end of where her light reached, a pair of sickly-yellow eyes with pinpoint irises were staring straight at her.

  Her heart stopped.

  She hadn't heard a single thing.

  She saw the eyes dip down, still staring at her.

  A flash of memory jostled her brain.

  She threw herself along the inner wall as flat as she could. Spear-like quills whizzed past her back, one so close it clipped her robe.

  She snapped her eyes back to the Fel, only to see its eyes at half the distance they'd been a second ago.

  She reached into her satchel and grabbed a handful of potions, throwing them all at the thing.

  The crystal rings of shattering glass filled the air, and flames lit up the corridor, allowing her to catch a glimpse of the Fel's body.

  It was a tangle of limbs, having squeezed itself somehow in a corridor half the size of its body, contorted in inhuman ways. Only its head jutted out forward, expressionless, ever staring at her.

  Its front limbs and body were slick with the splatter of potions of all kinds, none of which seemed to affect the Fel, which stalked ever closer, yellowed eyes locked on her like orbs floating in the air.

  But then she heard something rip, something splatter, the eyes stopping growing in size as the creature ceased its advance.

  It peered down at one of its limbs. It had fallen off at the articulation and flopped on the floor, sizzling.

  Its head flashed back to her, irises narrowing down even further. It resumed its advance.

  Only for a side of its body to stick to one of the wall, a small mound of beige foam having formed in that area.

  It pulled itself forward, uncaring as its skin ripped away.

  Niala laid a hand on the wall, her hand glowing a deep violet. She had prepared a story, and the wall would listen to it.

  But where she usually had to force her target to listen, the wall was a rapt audience. It drank Niala's mana. She could see its violent tendrils spread through the stone, gaining in strength and width as it fanned outward.

  And then the story found its resting place, the span of wall next to the Fel, which was still in the process of self-mutilation, its limbs straining at the floor as it pulled itself onward.

  Fist-sized pillars of stone erupted from the wall, plowing into the Fel, stamping it into the other side of the corridor.

  It made the first sound she'd heard. It whimpered.

  Where the pillars made contact, its body was pressed against the wall; where they did not, they locked its body in place, restricting its movements.

  Its eyes never left Niala.

  She was breathing heavy, panic on the verge of escaping her grasp.

  She thought of using the opportunity to run.

  Instead, she retold her story, with grander words, her tone more imperious, and clapped her hand on the other side of the corridor.

  This time again, the story expanded, gaining a life beyond what she had gifted it. It raced towards the Fel, saturating the section of the wall it was stuck on.

  Screw-like pillars drilled through the Fel's body, crashing all the way to the other side of the corridor in a spark of heated stone, so tightly packed against the opposing extrusions that the result might as well have been a wall.

  The Fel whined, grunted. It attempted to keep moving, toward her still.

  Its eyes never left her.

  Even when life left them.

  She stood there, panting, hand still against the wall.

  The Fel's body never even twitched. It had just... stopped. Frozen in place.

  She let her hand slip, her mind overloaded by what had transpired. She turned around and walked away, her face blank.

  It was only once she'd climbed back up the ladder and stepped out from under the mound at the top that her emotions stirred once more. The fear, repressed as it had been, forced its way out.

  Her knees gave out, her heart pounded as if trying to escape its cavity. A few strained tears rolled down her face as she put a hand over her chest and began panting.

  The encounter replayed in her mind over and over. All the little things that could have gone wrong, how the ways she could have failed to halt the thing's advance and been ripped apart.

  It took her a quarter bell to regain control of her legs. A few more minutes to remember how to walk.

  And then she remembered someone was waiting for her, back home, and she could process all of this oxshit once she was back in his long, warm, strong arms.

  With a slight blush, she straightened her outfit and started her trek back.