With a loud crash, the massive, slate-grey rock bear fell to the ground, the weight enough to cause a perceivable tremble and shake some needles from the nearby trees. Sigmir stood above it, her chest heaving with exertion as she had taken on the bear alone in an effort to diversify the employed methods of death and destruction.

“Well done,” I complimented her, giving her hand a brief squeeze before pulling her into the shadows and the concealment we had prepared beforehand. While we were relatively sure the Sprites wouldn’t arrive for at least twenty minutes, there was no point in taking a risk and having them appear early.

As we all waited, I focused on the Astral Power leaking from the dead bear, still trying to comprehend the methods employed to control the Astral River in the Forlorn Forest. So far, I hadn’t been able to recognise what caused the effect, forcing me to observe the working of it, in an effort to find the deeper truth. I was relatively certain it was something akin to a magical formation, somewhat similar to the crystal forest around Neyto or the Ancient Roads that spanned Aretia. The Roads were probably the better comparison, only that there, the magic was linked into the road itself, while in the Forlorn Forest, I wasn’t sure what the magic was linked to. I couldn’t even directly tell that the magic existed, only from the effects, it asserted on its surroundings.

A frustrated sigh escaped me, when after twenty-five minutes, the Sprites appeared, swirling around the carcass like flies and turning it into dust. Once their work was done, they didn’t linger in the surroundings, instead, they swirled around and flitted back into the depths of the forest, just as they had done at the last dozen sites we had observed them.

This time though, we didn’t just let them disappear, instead, we moved as swiftly as we could while concealed by a combination of my own Darkness-Magic, Adra’s specialised magic and Rai’s skills, all working together to erase any mark of our presence. In addition, we all had some skill when it came to ordinary stealth,

Following the Sprites was both hard and easy at the same time. The easy part was the actual following. While the Sprites moved incredibly fast for their size, their speed wasn’t anything to write home about on a macro level. For the five of us, it was no problem to keep up and losing them was almost impossible, thanks to the aura that constantly surrounded them with a bright, green glow. Like fireflies, they were easily visible in the dim forest.

The difficulty was to keep hidden while moving at their speed and avoiding any measures that might give our presence away. That also meant we had to carefully avoid and circumvent the various critters and sentient plants the Sprites simply flew across, protected by some unknown mechanism.

As we moved deeper into the forest, I noticed more and more things I could only describe as weird. In the outer parts of the forest, where we had roamed the last week, the creatures had been somewhat normal, the weirdest being the Living Trees we had fought initially. Otherwise, we had mostly dealt with monstrous forms of normal beasts, simple animals empowered by elemental magic.

But following the Sprites, we came across other things, some of which sent a cold shiver down my spine. There was a colony of fungi, cartoonishly perfect shapes, almost a metre in height, their caps a bright red with white spots on them. That wasn’t enough to make them weird though, their weirdness came from the fact that they started singing when the Sprites buzzed by, their caps opening to reveal a massive maw and some gooey strings stretching from the two sides, reminding me of a spider web, ready to trap any prey that they got their mouths on. What truly weirded me out, was that their song actually sounded quite pleasant, if one managed to ignore the meaning of it, delivered to me by Lenore’s Universal Understanding Ability. There was something profoundly wrong about a wonderful auditory experience that spoke of tearing flesh from bone and devouring people whole. The entire song was about murdering and eating other beings, especially sapient ones.

A little further in the forest, we saw a likely reason why the Living Trees were called such, in the Non-Living Trees. Sadly, just because they weren’t living any longer didn’t mean they had ceased to be. Instead, their limbs were bone-white, somewhat similar to birch trees and thanks to Lenore’s sight, I was able to detect the vast amounts of Death flowing through them, just like Life was flowing through normal trees. I hadn’t seen anything that aligned with death before, even the Undead of the Dorrian Mountains had been more ‘alive’ than these, even if the ‘life’ within the Undead had been something of a mockery.

In addition, there were strange shapes, composed entirely of Astral Power, weirdly reminiscent of small swathes of mist that seemed to move with purpose between the trees, in addition to a couple of birds sitting in the trees, shining in Lenore’s sight.

At one point, I gestured for the others to stop, even if the Sprites hadn’t stopped yet, I wasn’t confident in remaining undetected if we continued to chase them. Before us, the forest opened up a little, the trees becoming far larger, with few limbs near the ground and almost no shrubbery between them, only a thin layer of detritus covering the ground.

Looking closely, I could see some small structures built into the trees, similar to a woodpecker’s den, only fitted with carvings, a landing and something resembling furniture.

The whole area was filled with enough Astral Power to make me a little dizzy, the scent intoxicating and the sight blinding, to the point that I could even see faint outlines and shapes without Lenore’s sight to allow me to view magic directly.

Even without the magic in the air, I would have thought things were weird. The colours looked more vibrant, the dark bark of the trees almost gleaming like metal, the few needles I could see had an impossibly vibrant green colour and everything looked a little… unreal.

We stopped in the shadow of one larger tree, a short distance away from the weird structures, observing the creatures living there. Or maybe I should say, observing the people living there, for that was what I had to consider them as.

Otherwise, a squirrel wearing a dark, red vest in contrast to its light red coat and, for some, utterly unfathomable reason, a black top hat was just too weird. I had no idea how the top hat stayed on its head, I saw it jumping from tree to tree with it or why it had the top hat in the first place and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

In addition to fancy squirrels, I could see some worms with bags slung around their bodies, a couple of spiders carefully working together to weave some sort of object and even a couple of birds, flying around while carrying goods from tree to tree. Even a colony of giant ants was visible, carefully working around a tree, trying to accomplish some unknown project with the help of a few rather large beetles. Some of the creatures, like the squirrels, were only slightly larger than they should be, but an almost fifty-centimetre tall beetle wasn’t something I wanted to see too often.

If I wasn’t quite certain that I hadn’t imbibed anything, I would think the whole experience was a drug-induced hallucination, or maybe some weird fever dream. But I was quite certain that I hadn’t been subjected to any drugs and my Avatar hopefully wouldn’t get sick without my notice. A glance at my status screen told me that there were no debuffs present and I wasn’t able to feel anything when looking inward with my blood magic. Nothing, but a slightly elevated concentration of Astral Power.

“Let’s leave,” I whispered, suppressing my voice as much as possible. Luckily, it was enough for the others to hear and understand and we began our way out of the forest, away from the insanity that was near its centre.

A part of me was fascinated, wondering where the creatures, the magic and the whole weirdness came from, another part was completely weirded out, trapped in an uncanny valley by behaviours that I completely associated with people, displayed by animals I would only consider pests. It was one thing to see sapience in beings like Ravens, Wolves or even Spiders, but a whole different kind of experience to see it in bugs and worms.

We continued to carefully retreat until we reached the edge of the Forlorn Forest, where I studied our forms once again, trying to make sure we hadn’t picked up any magical residue or some sort of tracking magic or something of the sort. Just to make sure, I bathed us all in a magical devouring mist, hopefully getting rid of anything unwanted.

Only then, we all returned to our camp, with more information than we had in the morning but also a whole lot more questions.