Jorfr was still awake when Zelsys woke; he hadn’t slept, at least not in the traditional sense, and was kneeling before the skinless, hanging bear corpse with its pelt draped over his back, the hollowed-out top half of its skull atop his head. The body swarmed with ravens pecking at its meat, somehow not emitting a single squawk. There was a sort of spiritual electricity around him, swarms of green and amber-coloured monads flitting about.

He looked up at her when she stood by his side, just outside the cave; merely standing here, she felt her Core of Earthly Iron replenishing by the second.

“I have petitioned the local spirits for aid in navigating the Boundaryless Forest. We will be protected, but the forest’s guardians have been agitated by the invaders’ constant attempts to cross; we will most likely be attacked.”

Though she hadn’t said anything of wanting to divert their journey through the forest, Jorfr had read her intentions. They departed quite soon, erasing all but the smallest traces of their presence here; even these were soon purged from this place by the ravens, scattered to the nine winds. Only the imprints of Zel’s fist on the cave wall were left.

Jorfr was given the lead, riding ahead alone as Victor had opted for the notably less comfortable ride of being the third behind Zel and Zef. When he learned of this, the norseman gave an understanding laugh, asking if he truly smelled that bad.

The narrow road into the Boundaryless Forest yawned before them like the entryway to a labyrinth; strange, bamboo-like trees with wide, funnel-shaped crowns formed a sprawling plain of pillars with nearly no light reaching the meager undergrowth at ground level. Soon after entering the forest they had no choice but to turn on their sturmgandrs’ lightgems, even these barely sufficing to illuminate their surroundings.

“The woods won’t allow us to see more than a few footsteps ahead! Stay close behind me!” came a warning shout from Jorfr. Slowly and carefully, barely faster than walking pace, they rode together, making seemingly arbitrary and counter-intuitive turns, but Zel’s gut feeling gave no protest and Zefaris saw the self-same illusions which Jorfr guided them around, but his choices here were by far faster than her ability to discern which way was which. In a mere few minutes of trying to keep up visually, the blonde had to close her left eye as it pounded with ache, hissing: “There are dozens of illusions within fifty meters of us, layers and layers of them just down one path… By the dead ones, this forest is a nightmare…”

Victor wasn’t any better off. Having nearly puked up his breakfast from the nausea of looking around for just a few minutes, he had pulled his hood over his eyes and leaned face-first into Zef’s back so that he wouldn’t fall off his precarious seat just above the machine’s rear wheel.

For what felt like hours upon hours, they rode through the Boundaryless Forest, and the further they pushed on, the more it felt like they weren’t welcome. Shapes that didn’t belong cropped up amidst the trees more and more often, moving and shifting when they thought they were unobserved. They soon came upon an apparent dead end, only for Jorfr to bring his steed to a halt, looking around.

“There are no illusions at play here, yet the spirits say there was a clear path in that direction only yesterday…” he said, gesturing in one direction.

Zel had felt a hostile intent for the past several minutes, but it boiled over at this very moment into an internal scream of danger. In the blink of an eye, they were surrounded; twisted, deformed figures of men and animals alike dropped from above and emerged from within the trees, the bamboo-like wood bending at impossible angles to let them pass. They set upon the party with impossible ferocity and the cultivators responded in kind, setting loose their violence upon these guardians of the forest, cutting, smashing, and burning them apart, yet they kept getting back up until far past the point where their bodies couldn’t possibly support their own weight. Only when their bodies and the roots holding them together were utterly destroyed did these horrid things cease.

There was an exception, however.

Despite precise firearms being seemingly ill-fitted for destroying these bioarboribous horrors, they withered away under just a single bullet from Zefaris.

The trees refused to fall or catch flame no matter the amount of damage the treeline around the clearing should have rightly sustained, breaks in the trees simply mending themselves in moments. The corpses of the root-walkers were immediately pulled back into the labyrinth by root-tendrils, only to be replaced immediately by a new root-wreathed corpse. Zefaris recognized the uniforms of several battalions she was personally aware of, as well as the uniforms of Pateirian and Grekurian soldiers.

Jorfr feverishly chanted in Borean for aid from the spirits as he smashed aside root-walker after root-walker, and hundreds of ravens gathered in a swirling maelstrom overhead within minutes; many of them swooped down to rip at their foe, pecking at the unsettlingly eye-like buds which seemed to serve as the root-walkers’ sensory organs.

It didn’t take long before the seemingly unending tide of bodies was stemmed by the arrival of something of an entirely other magnitude; a humanoid figure carried atop jets of smoke and embers, descending from the sky. The ravens parted at its arrival, the darkness obscuring all but the most obvious features: Loose, wide pants, and long, white hair which whipped about freely in the wind of the figure’s flight.

From all the way down on the ground they could feel that presence, an overbearing spiritual heat like that of a comet screaming through the sky.

A raspy woman’s voice thundered down: “HUNDREDFOLD PYRE BURIAL!”

There came a wave of scalding heat; in rapid succession, the root-walkers surrounding the group burst into sparks and acrid smoke, turning to statues of ash and charcoal without so much as a flicker of proper flame ever enveloping them.