Thorny branches snagged on Rosalie’s feathers, but nothing would slow her frantic flight. It couldn’t be them. It couldn’t! After all these years?! Here?!
“Rosie!”
“Rosie sweetie!”
“Where are you?”
She followed their calls deeper into the forest, the suffocating canopy of the Falefal rendering her falcon eyes virtually useless.
Bright light cut through the haunted growth ahead. Her wings screamed through the trees toward it. Whether it was a swiftly nearing clearing or some horrible bite-y thing waiting in ambush didn’t matter. That’s where the sound was coming from. Their voices.
Mama? Papa? Rosalie mentally whimpered.
It had been so long. They were hardly distant memories. She could barely visualize them any longer. Mere phantasms of carefree youth cut before she’d lost her first tooth.
Zipping through a gap in the tree pack, that scent hit her. Rot. Decay. A swamp? The Larris Marsh? She was home?
Reflex spread her wings wide, slowing her to a near hover on an updraft above the fetid water.
How? she thought. That’s… This is impossible. The marsh is leagues from—
“Rosie!”
Mama?!
She was closer than ever. But where?
“Where are you, sweetheart?”
Papa?!
His voice, as if time never passed, drifted upward from an island in the middle of the swamp. The trees there were low, stunted by the sopping soil. Moss heavy branches bent beneath their load.
Home Tree?
She couldn’t help herself. Tucking her wings, she slowly descended. Swooping over the water’s surface, her keen raptorial eyes focused on the shaded island. Two figures stood there, waving. Two figures just as her faded memories remembered.
Her parents, beckoning her home.
Reason was long gone. Dead and buried in that cave next to the forest elf. Her mind was a warzone. She was furious and ecstatic. Her body shook with relief and rage. But beneath the anger and joy, confusion, questions she needed answered overtook all.
Adjusting her angle to land, her talons began to expand into feet before she cleared the beach. Her peak slid back to form her true face. Feathers sliding back into her, wings shifted back into arms. She touched down at full flight speed.
Her legs were taken from her immediately.
Stars flew through the Yesha’s vision as she toppled head over heels across the island. Her head rung like a bell, but still she forced herself up on her hands and knees to crawl to them as quickly as she could.
“Mama?!” Rosalie’s voice shook with confusion. “P-Papa?!”
“There she is!” Papa called back.
Kneeling, he beckoned her forward.
“Is it,” she swallowed hard, “is it really you?”
“It is, darling,” Mama answered. “Oh, my sweet little girl, we’ve missed you so much!”
“Where did you go?!” Rosalie demanded. “I waited! I waited so long! I waited ‘til all the food ran out! What happened?! Where were you?! H-How did you get here?!”
Papa’s brow knitted in confusion. “Get here?”
“Whatever do you mean, sweetie?”
“Falefal Forest! Papa! We’re in the Falefal!”
“No we’re not, darling,” Mama assured her.
“That must’ve been a terrible dream, sweetheart,” said Papa.
Rosalie stopped mid-crawl, her face twisting in confusion. “W-What?”
Mama sniffled. “You’ve been asleep for days!”
“The flour we bought from that mill in town made you sick, my little shifter. You got a terrible fever and wouldn’t wake up,” said Papa.
“We thought we were going to lose you!” Mama wailed.
“W-What are you—”
The young Yesha’s eyes went wide at the sound that came from her mouth. It was her voice, that there was no mistake, but it wasn’t right. She hadn’t sounded like that in years!
Her hand went to her lips, but her fingers, they didn’t feel right.
Taking it away, she gasped. It was so small. Not hers! Or rather, not since she was a child.
She glanced to a puddle next to her. The murky water made a terrible mirror, but her features, those there were no denying. Her face stared back at her. Her four-year-old face…
“But,” her toddler voice whispered, “how? This… This is impossible. It’s—”
“Let’s go inside, sweetie,” Mama called to her.
“It’s been so scary, little shifter,” Papa agreed.
“I just baked a cake.”
“Doesn’t that sound good?”
Impossible. It was impossible. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be!
But… But that smell. It was there. She could smell it. The heavy, sweetness of cake wafted from the door of Home Tree. And… And it was them. Their voices. Exactly like she remembered. Their faces, clearing from the fog of her childish memory.
A bad dream? Rosalie mentally processed. I was sick? It was just a bad dream? But Big Brother? The krirum tribe? They… They took me in. They taught me everything… Th-They weren’t… real?
Papa opened the door set into the roots of Home Tree. Beckoning to her, her feet inched forward.
“Come along, darling,” Mama cooed. “We’ll make some lovely tea, and you can tell us all about the scary dreams.”
“Better to let them out, sweetie,” Papa assured her.
Rosalie wasn’t sure if it was her own will that pried her feet from the spot. It was like tearing up a tree taking the first step.
War raged in her mind. Even as she moved toward them, in the back of her head, her instincts screamed to run. But she couldn’t. It was Mama and Papa. It was… It was a b-bad… bad dream. It… None of it was—
Something huge and white hot flashed past her. Boom! Flames erupted from the base of Home Tree.
“Rosie!” Echo shrilled as she dove in next to her.
Magic crackled down the zephyra’s arms as the forest elf climbed off her back. She was already channeling another spell before the Yesha’s mind could form words. The noblewoman thrust her hands at Mama and Papa. Fwoosh! A continuous gout of fire erupted from her palms.
“Mama! Papa!” Rosalie screamed. “Stop!”
She reached out to grab her. But how? She was so little. What could a toddler do to stop a—
Her hands. A woman’s hands wrapped around Echo’s forearm. Gasping, the shapeshifter shot backward, tripping and falling to her seat.
A heavy thud sounded next to her as Mira landed with a grunt.
“Breathe!” Healer bellowed as he scrambled to her from where the knight had dropped him and covered her mouth with a damp cloth.
“B-But, Mama! P-Papa!”
“They ain’t your parents, lass!” Vadanian roared as he shot a flaming arrow into Papa.
Arctic chill filled the air as Mira lunged at an approaching Mama. She howled with pain as Frost Fang impaled her to the hilt, but before Rosalie could scream, the woman’s face blackened and crumpled in on itself.
The Yesha’s face went taut in horror. Squelching sounds popped and oozed from Mama as the icy sword spread its frozen wrath through her. Her limbs sunk in on themselves. Flesh sloughed off in great chunks. Then, the smell hit her. Filthy. Rotten. The stench of decay after the first frost.
“Mourn pitcher,” said Vadanian. “Its spores lure you in with what you’ve lost. Gets you to walk straight into it. Then, it eats you.”
“It… A plant?” Rosalie muttered. “A plant made me see my parents?”
“If that’s what you saw, then aye,” said Vadanian.
“But you saw them!” She scrambled toward the smoking husk of Papa. “It was Mama and Papa! I—”
“Rosie!” Echo grabbed her shoulders to stop her. “We didn’t see anyone! Just plant buds mimicking movement.”
“Them spores ain’t completely outta your system, love. The visions a mourn pitcher gives are unique to its prey. So if it was your folks you was seeing, that’s what you saw,” said Vadanian.
Her lip trembled. Plant spores. Her parents. But it felt so real.
Echo rubbed her back comfortingly. “You want to talk about it, Rosie dear?”
Rosalie’s throat rose and fell. Her mouth was completely dry.
“My parents,” she croaked. “I… I was little. Maybe four or five summers at most. It was a normal day. Mama and Papa went out to fish and forage. They told me to stay inside ‘til they got home. Be a good girl. And I was a good girl. I stayed inside. I stayed inside a-and I waited, and I waited, and…”
She shuddered. “I stayed inside until the food ran out. I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to be a bad girl, but I was hungry. So I went out to look for them. That’s when Big Brother found me and took me to the krirum tribe. They taught me everything I know, but… but I never saw my parents again.”
A tear slid down her cheek. The wound was old, more a scar than anything, but the plant, that damned plant, it tore it open and smeared salt in it.
“Rosie, I… I—” Words failing her, the petite zephyra wrapped her in her arms and wings.
“It was that monster, Thousand Teeth.” The name growled through her teeth. “I’m sure of it.”
A firm hand gently gripped her shoulder. Vadanian reached through Echo’s feathery shield to offer what comfort a ranger could.
“You’ve my sympathies,” he said softly. “You do, mate, but this is hardly the place to break down. We need to leave. Every part of the Falefal is deadly, but none more so than the swamp.”
“I agree,” Mira muttered. “I might not know as much as the forest as he does, but there isn’t a part of me that isn’t screaming that we need to go. I haven’t been able to get my feathers to un-bristle since we got here.”
“Master Vadanian,” Echo began slowly. “How far are we from our intended campsite?”
“A few hours, but there’s an alternate safe zone we can set up in not far from here, if I’m following your question. Twenty, maybe thirty minutes if the roots get grabby.”
She nodded. “We should make haste, then.” Smiling to Rosalie, she unfurled her wings. “How does a nice cup of tea sound?”
Sniffling, Rosalie shook her head. “I’ll be fine, Ms. Echo. We’ve not the time for me to weep into a cuppa.”
Sigh filling her, she spread her arms. Feathers slid from her skin as the shifted into wings once more, but unlike before, she didn’t shrink. She grew. The form she took wasn’t a lightning fast falcon but a great eagle. Or rather, something far larger.
The young Yesha didn’t have a word for the bird whose form she learned deep within the Larris Marsh. At least, not in the common tongue. An, “arok-rok” the krirum called it for its piercing cry. It was eagle-like but not quite. Massive, seemingly too large to attempt flight, her gray feathered form stooped to look Healer in the eye.
“Let’s be off, shall we?” Rosalie said, feigning a tone that all was right.
Sliding an arm beneath Vadanian’s shoulders, Mira unfurled her wings. “Are you sure, Rosie?”
She nodded. “Be a bit daft getting broken up over something that happened near fifteen years ago, wouldn’t you say?”
“Ain’t never too old for grieving, wee one,” Healer assured her.
Had she lips at the moment, she’d have offered him a sad smile, but beaked faces, she’d found long ago, were utterly incapable of offering expression.
Her wings beat hard against the fetid air sending her airborne. Not gracefully, such wasn’t the way for such monstrous animals. The arok-rok was as capable of performing aerial acrobatics as an elephant was a candidate for prima ballerina. But the mammoth raptor was the strongest flyer she’d yet witnessed.
Strong enough to carry the demigiant back to the dense forest in her talons before turning back into a pit viper to serve lookout from the go’thial’s towering shoulders.
Pressing on, no one dared break the silence, and, for once, that suited Rosalie just fine.
It felt like another lifetime when last she saw them. Mama. Papa. Exactly as her blurry childhood memories remembered them and more. That plant. It reached inside her. Drew them out. Made that as real as the morning they’d left. And that was the part that hurt the worst.
There were untold advantages of the various forms she could take. Of course, the most obvious were the abilities of animals—a bird’s flight, a snake’s heat vision, the claws and fangs of cats—but the unspoken advantage of the serpent form she wore was the lack of tear ducts. In her inner world, anguishing within her mind, she cried a deluge such as could drown the world, but on the outside, no one would ever see.
At least the cursed forest let them pass freely the rest of the day. No more creatures that wore the faces of friends. No more predatory unicorns. No more plants that promised hope to feed itself. Just a quiet, unbroken hike into its haunted depths.
A little over an hour to sunset, or at least, according to the nu-sadis it was, they stopped to make camp. Echo opened her book and set to work conjuring a spell directly from its pages while the others stood guard. Blessedly, Vadanian’s decision to add buffer time proved correct. Having never cast the spell before, the duchess needed the entire hour to cast it.
“There.” Echo nodded firmly as she finished casting. “All done.”
Although she wasn’t familiar with the arcane arts, even Rosalie could tell the spell the petite zephyra cast was complicated. But the result…
Pit viper or not, the look Rosalie cast at her was of unmistakable confusion.
A door. It had taken her an entire hour to create a door set into the side of a tree.
Not even a particularly large or impressive door either. It wasn’t any different than those the Yesha had seen countless times before. A simple, rectangle of wood. Too big for her. Too small for Healer. Just large enough for an ordinary human.
“What?” Echo’s eye glinted with mischief. “Did no one ever tell you? It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
Opening the door, Rosalie couldn’t help but cock her head. She slithered down from Healer’s shoulders. Body growing and limbs squishing out from the tube of muscle, she returned to her true form to peer inside.
Hearth fire light crackled beyond the frame. The welcoming aroma of a hearty stew reached out to her.
Issuing everyone inside, Echo locked the door behind them, but all Rosalie could do was gape at the wonders of magic.
It was a cabin. Not grand or spectacular. Simple. Functional. Split into three rooms, two for beds, and one central space to sit and eat around a hearth. It may not have been a mansion, but it existed in defiance of the space the tree could hope to provide.
“Men’s quarters on the left,” Echo said as she started doling out bowls of stew from the cauldron bubbling on the hearth. “Ladies, we’ve the right. Privy and bath’s to the rear. You’ll have to forgive we’ll all need to share. Remember to leave your clothes in the hamper, and they’ll be laundered as we sleep.”
“How long’ve you been able to do this?” Healer muttered.
“Not long, actually,” Echo admitted. “Ms. Charlotte gave me the spell before we set off for Sitri.”
“You’re telling me,” Mira began darkly. “We could’ve been sleeping in a magic cabin with food, a bath, and beds all the way to Sitri, but instead, we slept on the ground, stewing in our own juices for days?!”
Echo smiled toothily. “Whoops?”
Mira’s eye twitched as she regarded the noblewoman.
The tiniest laugh snorted from Rosalie’s nostrils. Her hand flew up to stifle it, but it was too late. The sound was out. All eyes turned to her. The second peel was hardly as small or lonely.
Safe within the magic cabin, a good laugh was exactly what they needed. The Yesha most of all. It did nothing to heal the wound the mourn pitcher had reopened on her heart, but, at least for the moment, it helped ease the pain.
Continue the story soon.
About the Author
A. S. Raithe is a fantasy author living near Pittsburgh with their spouse and children. Always the creative type, in high school they were introduced to a local bestselling author and discovered a passion for writing. They took time away from writing to attend college before being encouraged by their spouse to return to it shortly after their wedding.
Outside of writing, they enjoy exercise, baking, gardening, folklore, music, and hiking.
