Chapter 8-1The Depths of a Garden Grave…

  Navigating the White Forest was no particurly rexing task, especially now that it was being much more aggressive about controlling their movements. For Damon, the danger wasn’t about how the trees seemed to mold a path before them as they walked, guiding them deeper within the forest. Instead, he feared who the voice he'd been hearing belonged to, and how dangerous it could become if he and Deney didn't follow along with it's — or or her — wishes.

  Speaking of Deney, he'd noticed she was a little shaken up over all this, and decided to attempt at easing the tension while maintaining a comfortable distance.

  "So… d’you think Zoey and Marrow are going the same way?” he asked, dispying about as much social confidence as a stray cat meeting a new human with a tin of tuna.

  "Huh? Oh. Er... Good question..."

  Luckily, the ginger had been distracted by her own thoughts, flitting through the pages of her Grimoire as she walked. She hadn't really been expecting Damon to strike up a conversation, so of course his voice caught her off guard.

  Then again, whenever Deney was reading she tended to forget that other people existed.

  “Yeah…”

  Damon gnced several times, quite awkwardly, at Deney’s thoughtful expression, waiting for an answer or eboration of some sort.

  Waiting... and waiting…

  Oh good God, she was just reading again—

  "Okay, new question,” Damon decred a little sharply, hoping to rouse Deney's attention before she walked straight into a tree.

  “What's... that book you have there?”

  Finally, the ginger’s gaze briefly shot back to Damon, as if she had completely forgotten he was even there.

  In all fairness, she vaguely had.

  "Oh, this? Haha, it's called a Grimoire,” Deney attempted to chuckle her way through the awkward blunder and pretend she had been completely alert this entire time. It had never worked in the past, so surely it would work now.

  “They're books with instructions on how to perform necromancy. This one was actually written by Marrow.”

  "Marrow?” asked Damon, as if they knew another Marrow. Having known the Deney-sized phantom for approximately two days, Damon imagined the book to contain enough angst and sarcasm to fill two puberties and a prison cell.

  "Is it, like… educational, at least?”

  "Well, yeah, of course," Deney chuckled gently. "I mean, it's a book of incantations and rituals. It's gotta be educational, otherwise I might bst the skin off my hand for not knowing the proper magic wavy motions, ya know? Besides, I only know how to do necromancy because of this book. It's...how I resurrected Marrow in the first pce…”

  "As well as every other dead body known to man, apparently..."

  Damon let an awkward sigh escape him as he stepped ahead. He then made a soft, short, merling sound from his throat as his pace slowed for a moment before becoming sharper and more purposeful. He had spotted something.

  A few paces ahead, pced directly in front of the pair so that their path curved around it, was a ghoul. Luckily, it was skewered by one of the many white trees, but it didn’t let a silly thing like impalement stop it from trying to munch on some cat food.Cat food? Food that is Cat? It was trying to grab Damon.

  Not that the Lucifee was in any danger, of course. A benefit of practicing swordpy was that one developed a knack for attack ranges, be that with a weapon or grasping arms. He knew how close to the pinned Ghoul was too close.He did not, however, know that Deney was too engrossed in Marrow’s work to process the breathless snarls before her, let alone the decaying stench. It wasn’t until a rotted hand spped the page she was on that Deney let out a sharp cry of shock. She yanked the book out of reach first before stumbling out of the Ghoul’s range, practically prioritizing it over her own life.

  "Whoa… That... How did that happen??”

  Damon, more inquisitive than he was afraid, didn't respond, instead observing the ghoul and the tree impaling it.

  The undead's skin was long rotten, bits of bone peeking through what flesh had yet to decompose. Its clothes were worn and torn from weather and bugs, looking a lot more like the fashion of st decade. But most notably... This corpse seemed to not only be impaled by the tree, but woven with it. Branches had sprouted around the hole in its torso, the corpse's nutrients apparently serving to bolster this tree in particur.

  "This tree isn't as new as the others,” said Damon at st. “It and this corpse have been here for a long time…”

  "So, you mean... This ghoul was resurrected after the tree had already killed it..."

  Deney swallowed hard and scanned her surroundings a bit more closely. It was a chilling thought to confront, that this forest had been ciming lives for at least a decade or so. Further inspection of the ground revealed more signs of life, despite the White Forest’s depths being so eerily still; if Deney looked hard enough she could spot scraps of cloth, broken tools, and bits of bones.

  "Do you think this forest...actually preys on people..?” She inquired with unease. “I read before that trees can actually break down flesh and bone to absorb nutrients..."

  Damon was about to answer when the voice reverberated around him again — a voice from everywhere, yet only he could hear it.

  "Come closer... Hurry..."

  The voice left the hair on the back of his neck standing tall, and it gave him an all-too-familiar, dreadful squirming in his gut.

  "Ah… Uh-Uhm… M-Maybe so..." Damon finally said, scrambling to gather the frayed strings of his composure; if not for his sake, then for the people he needed to protect.

  "But… Right, you saw how quickly those trees sprouted from the ground. If it wanted to kill us, it likely already would have.”

  Deney nodded, running a weary hand through the disheveled locks around her face.

  "Yeah... You're probably right. I guess so long as we don't seem like a threat we'll be fine..."

  Moving her gaze from the forest bed to the tree trunks, the ginger noticed that there seemed to be a pattern… a pattern that broke with the trunk that had impaled the ghoul.

  "Hey, look... This tree doesn’t have dirt at its base like all the other ones…”

  “I… What?” Damon, having regained composure, was now beginning to lose it again.

  “Look at the bases of the trees around us,” Deney continued. “Some of the trunks are clean and white, like the one that snared this guy. But, a lot of the others are dusted with soil!”

  Damon followed Deney's gaze to the tree trunks that made up the walls of their arboreal rat maze, searching for the same realization that had apparently dawned on the necromancette.

  Unfortunately, all he found was the dirt.

  "Uh… Yep. Definitely dirt. Some are clean, and some have… dirt. Sorry, what's so special about dirt on trees again?”

  Deney looked at Damon quizzically, but her expression softened when she realized that he might not have been taught certain things about the world. Being Lucifee meant that he and his sister were likely unable to get any sort of formal education, and the more she considered that, the more a small piece of her heart broke.

  "Well... How often do you usually see dirt on tree trunks like that?” Deney expined. “It looks kinda like they were underground, and see at the base? The ground's all loose and mounded up, like the tree somehow pushed up from underneath it."

  "Oh yeah... You're right..."

  Damon spoke slowly, his ears gently swiveling as his thoughts began to recollect themselves and set into pce like a puzzle. He shifted weight from one foot to the other, carefully, before repeating the process. Deney imagined that if she could see his tail it would be flicking periodically in that way she'd seen on strays while they were trying to judge the distance between a trashcan and a ledge.

  "Come to think of it, the ground here is actually really soft. Like... almost plush under foot. That's probably why walking has felt more draining than it should."

  "Oh yeah, it's kinda like garden soil!" The ginger agreed with a triumphant revetion. The entire time they'd been walking in the White Forest, even since the previous night, it definitely felt like Deney was becoming exhausted easier. She hadn't really noticed it until Damon said something, but now she'd become particurly aware of the soreness in her legs and feet.

  "So if that's the case..."

  Damon pondered for a moment further, scanning the many trees that made their path walls.

  "Then these trees aren't just sprouting spontaneously... they're moving around, kinda like… like tentacles!”

  "Tentacles..?!"

  Deney snapped the Grimoire shut in her hands. Something seemed to click into pce in her mind. The way the trees had grown into a wall to separate them... The dirt, the traces of decomposed bodies, and the sudden rearrangement of the forest around them... It all made sense now.

  "Marrow was right... This forest really is alive..."

  The words half-uttered beneath her breath served as cement to her rapidly assembling bricks of thought. With an earnest expression, Deney turned to Damon.

  "I believe you."

  "Uh... Sorry..?" Damon asked, taken particurly off guard by her sudden… Well, it was just very sudden.

  "About the voice you heard. I believe you," Deney continued, gripping the strap of her messenger bag with determination. There was a certain fire in her emerald eyes that was hard to argue with. The kind that gave people the courage to sy dragons, or to finally do the undry that’s been piling on the chair for a week.

  "The trees here seem to be sentient, so I wouldn't doubt that they're trying to communicate with you. They obviously want something from us, or else we would be pnt food by now instead of getting guided to the heart of the forest."

  Damon nodded with understanding, swallowing a little as his ears went prone.

  "So what do we do? I don't think we'd survive trying to C-U-T through the tentacles," he ventured a guess that the White Forest was better at speaking and listening than it was at spelling, "there's too many of them."

  Deney gave a curt nod of agreement, followed by a grin.

  "That's why we're going to do as we're told.”