How we were able to sprint through the forest without falling and breaking our necks, I had no idea. I was operating on pure adrenaline, trying to put as much distance between myself and Camilla’s crew as possible.

  We were successful in that regard; we’d neither heard nor seen a bandit in at least half an hour. Unfortunately, we also had no idea where we were, what direction we were going, or indeed what direction we wanted to be going.

  Aeshma, as the faster runner between the two of us, had naturally been leading the way. First she’d cheerfully declared that the main road was just over that hill, right up until it wasn’t. Neither was it right across from those boulders that she insisted looked familiar.

  It was obvious to me, at least, that we were lost – in the middle of the woods with no light source save the moonlight, no sense of direction, and with a pack of bandits on our trail who were still eager to sacrifice us to their hungry forest spirit.

  Also, my legs were starting to get tired. “Aeshma,” I gasped out between breaths, “Slow down! We gotta… figure out… where… going.” Between this and her admitting that she didn’t know how to read a map, I swore that Aeshma was losing her navigation rights. Assuming we made it out of this scrap.

  She huffed and begrudgingly came to a halt. “Look, there’s only so many more directions to try, Roland. One of these has to be the right way.”

  “What… what are you talking about? That’s… hoo… that’s not how going places works at all.”

  Aeshma opened her mouth for what was sure to be a pithy comment, but she was interrupted. A new voice spoke out, one unlike any of the bandits’. “Oh ho ho! What have we here!” came the voice, with equal parts whimsy and formality. It sounded creaky and ancient and awfully high-pitched, like it belonged to a forest hermit putting on a falsetto.

  Aeshma and I spun around, trying to locate the voice’s owner – but there was no one around. “Why, are these lost travellers I spy? Two of them, only two? And navigating these most dangerous woods, home to a despised spirit most dastardly?”

  There was a rustle to our left. Then a small figure emerged from the lush foliage. It was a tiny, wizened old man, strangely well-dressed for someone walking deep in the woods in the middle of the night. His suit was neat and tidy, although it was a bit baggy for his slight frame. He wore gleaming white spats over a pair of pristine, stark white gym shoes, and despite wearing a tall tophat, he barely came up to my shoulders.

  There wasn’t a speck of dirt on him – which was weird considering how mud-spattered my own clothes had gotten from the past hour or so of running in the woods. Even in the dim pre-dawn light, it seemed impossible that I would have missed him standing nearby… but somehow I must have.

  “Fear not, young adventurers! I mean you no harm,” the old man said, trembling gently as he spoke. He leaned heavily on his cane, a metal contraption complete with a four-pronged foot to stop it from sinking into soft ground. “No, not at all. I am here… to warn you! Yes, warn you!” he wailed dramatically, “To beware that dread, despised Spirit, whose Avatar has taken root not far from this very spot! Oh, though the rewards might be great, only the bravest souls would dare to face it!”

  Aeshma and I exchanged confused glances. “Uh, thanks for the words of warning, sir. We were actually just passing through here. We were getting chased by a band of… like, bandits? And– ow, quit it!” I said as Aeshma elbowed me hard in the side.

  “They’re thieves, Roland!”

  I slapped her elbow away. “Anyway, sir, you wouldn’t happen to know the way to the Queen’s Threshold, would you? That’s where we were headed before this group of… bandits,” I said, with a pointed glare at Aeshma, “kidnapped us and tried to sacrifice us to the idol of Sylvandroon.”

  “Oh!” the old man cried, raising a trembling hand high in the air. “Oh, Sylvan– I cannot even say it! The name alone coats my tongue like a putrid ichor! I must– puh! I must spit it out! Sylvan– puh! Droon! Pah!” Something like anger flashed across his red-rimmed, rheumy eyes. “For it is his Avatar of which I speak! If only there were a pair of adventurers strong enough, brave enough, to possibly slay the thing!” he wailed towards the heavens.

  He looked and sounded distressed – but I saw his eyes slide expectantly towards Aeshma and me, before returning skyward.

  Aeshma clicked her tongue and crossed her arms impatiently. “Yeah, we get it. Sylvandroon is nasty and his Idol sucks. Do you know the way out of here?”

  The old man squeezed his sunken eyes shut, hiding them in the shadow beneath the brim of his tophat. “I am afraid, dear Human, dear Succubus… oh, I do not know the way forward! I simply cannot fathom any route that leads away from that dreadful Idol of… of… oh! Of Sylvandroooooooon!” he howled, clutching his cane in one hand and shaking his fist at the tree canopy with the other.

  I leaned in close to Aeshma and whispered, “Do you know what’s going on with him? Are deranged forest guys normal here?”

  She put her arm around me to initiate a huddle. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Roland, I think this dude’s nuts.”

  “It sounds like he wants us to destroy the Idol of Sylvandroon, right? Maybe he’ll help us find the Threshold if we do him a favor,” I whispered.

  Aeshma peered over my shoulder to look at the old man, who had lowered his fist and now was staring at us blankly. “I guess it can’t hurt to ask, but…”

  “Excuse me, sir?” I said, leaning away from Aeshma. The old man sidled over to us and joined the huddle. “You said this evil forest thing is somewhere nearby, right? If we were to, say, destroy it… would you be able to tell us how to get to the Dungeon?”

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  His watery blue eyes lit up at my suggestion. He looked delighted. “Destroy it? Oh, indeed! Young man, I am certain that if that horrid Avatar were slain, the way to the Queen’s Threshold would return to me in an instant!”

  He rearranged his face into a more suitable, worried expression. “Although… oh, the Avatar is hideously strong! You must only take on this Quest if you are truly–”

  “How strong is it?” Aeshma interrupted. “Like, in Levels?”

  “It must be… oh, horrid thought! Two Levels above average for this section of the woods!” the man wailed, falling to his knees.

  “This feels weird, right? Like there’s something up with this guy?” I whispered to Aeshma, as the man alternatingly writhed on the ground and sobbed. “On the other hand… if we destroy the Idol, then Camilla and the rest of them can’t sacrifice us to it anymore. So maybe it’d get them off our backs?”

  She sighed, then stomped over to where the man was flailing in the dirt. “Listen, dude. The Idol, or the Avatar, or whatever it is. Tell us where it is and we’ll take care of it, alright? That sound good to you?”

  The man stopped crying long enough to give us directions to the Idol of Sylvandroon. I was obviously worried this was a trap of some sort. I didn’t trust this strange man as far as I could throw him… and he was directing us to exactly the spot where Camilla wanted to take us as sacrifices. But with any luck, the Thief Queen and her crew would assume we had better sense than to waltz into the grove under our own power, and wouldn’t think to look for us here. At least, not before we had the chance to destroy the Idol.

  It wasn’t a far walk, only a quick rustle through some shrubs and we had made it to the outskirts of a large, grassy glade. We were practically within spitting distance of where we encountered the old man. Aeshma and I ducked behind a thick tree to scope the place out and get our bearings.

  The clearing was approximately the size and shape of a baseball diamond. From every side, the land sloped gently down to form a shallow pit, leading to a strange… well, a strange something at the center. It looked like a bare wooden post, or maybe a tree that had been stripped of all of its bark along with its branches. As I watched, it moved faintly from side to side. Not swaying with the wind, like a tree, but moving of its own accord. Undulating, almost. It was a subtle thing, but even from a distance it was strange enough to get my hackles up.

  We scanned the perimeter, looking for any guards or lookouts Camilla may have posted. But as far as we could see, there was no one and nothing around – except, of course, for the Idol itself.

  “Can you tell what that thing is?” I asked. I thought I could make out some features – a few nubs near the top, almost like a crown of pruned branches. But otherwise it was just a featureless, pale thing in the murky glade.

  “Looks like a lotta easy experience to me,” Aeshma said. She stepped out from behind the treeline, cracking her knuckles. As she entered the clearing, the Idol froze, then pointed straight up into the air. Suddenly it seemed to grow, stretching five, then ten feet into the air. Soil flew out from the spot where the Idol erupted from the ground. It wasn’t growing, I realized, but rather revealing more and more of itself as it emerged from deeper underground.

  Aeshma took a few paces forward, tentatively at first, then broke into a run as the Idol reached its full height and coiled around to face us. The nubs on its end wriggled and writhed, and closer up, I saw that it looked less like a tree and more like a great big woody maggot. What we had seen at first was only its most distal segment, protruding from the ground; what I had taken for pruned branches was its horrible, fleshy mouth, which now drooled yellow goo onto the grass below, which sizzled as it hit the ground.

  I was still back behind the treeline, and feeling awfully relieved that Aeshma would be taking care of combat for the both of us.

  The feeling was short-lived. I felt the soil shift beneath me, and I lifted my foot around just in time to see something wriggling in the ground: a white, fleshy protuberance dotted with coarse brown hairs, ending in a mean-looking curved stinger. It pushed its way through the soil as it inched towards my other foot, bobbing and wiggling like the butt-end of a wasp all the while. The stinger was at least half a foot long and needle-sharp.

  The protuberance was moving slowly, fortunately, slowly enough that I could easily retreat. But even as I backed away, another identical thing emerged from the ground beside it, then another. As I looked around, I saw that the whole treeline encircling around the grove was filling with them, hundreds of pale, grubby nodules, each one questing for a victim.

  Death by a hundred grub asses was not what I wanted written on my tombstone – which meant I had no choice but to flee. Into the clearing, towards Aeshma and the main part of the Idol.

  I left the treeline and ran into the fray. Aeshma turned back to admonish me, but what was happening in the treeline made her grit her teeth instead. Those white, grubby, protuberances had erupted from the ground, like the Idol before them, and now stretched about five feet into the air. They formed a ring encircling the glade, an impassable fence of grub meat topped with deadly stingers.

  There was no getting around it; I was a part of this fight, whether I wanted to be or not.

  I was confident that Aeshma could take care of the Idol on her own, but for good measure I pulled the Mimic out of my pocket, where it had been resting since we fled the bandit camp. It had relaxed back into the form of the old, mostly unadorned dagger. I brandished it in front of me and gave a practice slice to test its heft and balance, like I had seen in the movies.

  “I know you didn’t want to cut the Thunder Cord earlier, but do you think you could maybe cut into a grub if you had to?” I whispered. The Mimic wiggled excitedly in response, slashing its blade to and fro like a razor-sharp tail. It was as much confirmation as I could’ve hoped for. With any luck I wouldn’t need to actually use the Mimic for anything, but just having a weapon in my hand gave me a sense of security.

  A loud slap echoed through the clearing, the sound of meat hitting meat. Aeshma had landed a solid punch above the Idol’s gaping mouth – right where the strange, maggot-like creature’s nose would’ve been, if it had one. Its head whipped backwards a few feet before slowing, rebounding, and smacking Aeshma in the face in turn. A gout of yellow fluid poured out from between their faces and steamed in the cool night air.

  I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but I was worried. Was that more of the thing’s acid-saliva? Whatever it was now coated Aeshma’s head and torso.

  Aeshma didn’t seem bothered, though, as she twisted around to grapple a middle segment of the Idol – and then I saw that the Idol had impaled itself on one of Aeshma’s horns. The wound was leaking yellowish buggy blood.

  Slowly, her muscles straining with effort, Aeshma dragged her head up towards the sky. Horn carved through white, grubby flesh as the Idol’s head was cleaved clean down the middle. It thrashed about wildly, whipping from side-to-side. Slick with blood, it easily slipped out of Aeshma’s hold. By the time Aeshma let out a curse, the Idol had already retreated back underground, leaving the glade strangely quiet in its wake.

  Aeshma leaned over to peer into the Idol’s burrow, before shrugging and flashing me a smile. Her hair was soggy with grub juice, but she looked otherwise no worse for wear. “I guess I beat it?” she said. She sounded a little uncertain. “I mean, it’s an Idol, so maybe getting it to retreat is like a symbolic victory?”

  But around the edges of the glade, the ‘fence’ of grubs had started undulating from side-to-side.

  As one, they pointed their stingers towards the center of the clearing. Towards the two of us.

  And then the fence started closing in.