11. Chapter 11:
Chapter 11:
As we walked, Foxglove began to tell me what she had been told by Nettle. Apparently, he did not quite trust me as much as maybe I had hoped, and so had told the most crucial information of all to her, once had learnt that he could not accompany us on our journey, at least for the time being.
Foxglove seemed giddy with excitement, and I wondered whether she really understood the gravity of what we were about to do. I did not want to be with someone who did not. "I trust you, Stuvlok." She said. I was slightly taken aback. "Why? What have I done to win it? and what would trust help with, if anything?" I asked, quizzical in my voice and perplexed at why she had brought this up. "Well, trust is important in a team. Is it not where you are from? You have done nothing to win it, but trust is given to everything, until you see it betrayed, at which point you should give it no more. As long as the being you give your trust to does nothing to break it, they can have it." She said, suddenly assuming a much more philosophical and serious personality. The words she had told me sounded starkly different from her usual chatter, and I doubted that they were her own. The otters seemed to operate on a wholly different set of moral values than I had ever seen before, and it was intensely interesting. During the evenings, when I was alone, I noted these things down, ready to be analysed another day. "That's what nettle told me," she said, back to her usual self, "But I doubt it." she stopped for a moment and thought carefully about her next words "I think that you can tell whether somebody is trustworthy or not based on how honest you can see them being. I do not think that your body shows me any lies, and so I trust you. How does your trust work?" she asked. I thought about whether my body may have been speaking for me during any of the times I had met with the otters, who now, in retrospect, did seem to be analysing my body as much as they had been analysing my speech. I decided to tell her the truth. I could not afford to risk breaking the trust she had on me. Instead of weighing me down, the trust seemed like celestial strings, hoisting me higher and further away from the heady baseness of selfishness. It felt good. "Where I used to work, in the town, Trust was earned, never given at first, but earned, and always based on action and gifts." I told her, ruminating on whether any of my teammates had ever really trusted me, and whether I had ever trusted anybody in the guild at all. I soon found myself drifting off into memories again, the woods sombre silences only heightening the feeling of drifting through place where past and present are one, where stories are reality and reality sounds like a fable.
Foxglove would often ask me questions, rarely listening for the entire length of the answer before pouncing on me with another question. She was quite like a young child, and I tried to entertain her as much as I could. She once asked me about my family, where I receded into a silence even she was too afraid to break. To alleviate the atmosphere of emptiness, she decided to fill it with he stories of her own family.
"I was born too small and too lightweight. My parents, of which only my old father Bramble survives, soon tried to teach me to swim, but I was unable to paddle effectively, and soon found myself alone and isolated. Sat in the mound while the rest of my friends frolicked in the water. I soon began exploring the land instead, the ground helping me to overcome the loneliness that came with not being able to do something that should have defined me. I looked for trinkets and other curiosities in the woods, wandering farther and farther every expedition that I made, my parents rarely able to control my wandering. I once got lost in the woods, and heard a terrifying swooping sound, and fell unconscious, only to wake up near a rock near the mound. I was taken by my worried father to Nettle, who suggested that it was a witch who had passed over me, and showed me at my fur had darkened by a shade which symbolised the shadow of the witches burning itself into my body, branding me with a witch's mark. All of us who were chosen for this journey were in some ways linked with the witches. You know about Nettle, I believe, but Hawthorn was born with a twin sister, who was snatched away while she was young from right in front of her eyes. I says that she does not remember much of her youth, but that moment has been seared into her mind, and she sees the meat his sister was replaced with every night." she told me, quickly but stopping often to think and compose herself.
I looked closely at her coat, and I did in fact notice that her coat had an aubrun sheen that none of the other otters I had seen had had. I still did not know how the witch could have done this, but I accepted it, it was by far tyhe least strange thing I had learnt about them, even that day. "They apparently live on a small island in the middle of the The Lake." She told me, returning to her original exciteable nature and inquisitiveness. "Where is this lake?" I asked.
"There is only one lake in the woods, and I rememeber visiting it when I was younger. Unlucklily for us, however, it is somewhere in tyhe northern territories of the Western Conglomerate. they do not tend to have scouts they way we are going, but I cannot promise an easy journey." I thought about this as I walked. Foxglove could not swim, and I was not very good at it, having always had a boat or some sort of marine creature to ride on, but I left that thought for later, and asked Foxglove a question, for once.
"Why did you become a warrior?" I asked, and Foxglove was shocked for a while, likely purely out of the change in rhythm of the conversation. "Once Nettle told me what had happened to me, He offered to teach me to battle, as I could not swim like the other otters, and Nettle was unable to after he broke his leg on an expedition to the fronts. He soon taught me everything he knew about fighting, and I promised him that I would one day fight the witches and kill them." She looked at me, expectantly, maybe waiting to be asked another question. "Do you think that we will be able to kill them?" I asked, unsure about the schematics of such a thing. "Kill them, no. I do not think that they can be killed, but I think we will likely be able to harm them at least, and that is enough for me." As she said this, she hopped off to a nearby tree, and ripped off a large lilac fungus, and stuffed it in her small satchel. I asked her about it. "This is a fungus called the Dreiden Fungus," she told me, pulling off a piece, "it is good for joint pains, I know because my father used to have them, so I used to collect these to grind into a paste for him. It can be eaten on its own, do you want some?" I took a small bit, and put it into my mouth. it tasted like the colour Violet. Bright yet intensely dark. I did not quite feel myself chewing it, because my tongue had been largely left incapacitated by the intense burst of flavour. I soon came to my senses, and found my joints to feel more fluid than they had before. A thought had been gnawing at my mind ever since I fears heard about the witches, and I thought it best to ask it now, spurned by the boost of positive energy that the dreiden had given me. "Do you knew what the witches look like?" I asked. Foxglove stopped in her tracks. "Yes." She said, rigidly. "Could you tell me, I assume we can prepare how to fight them based on their size and weapons and such." I commented, blissfully unaware of the storm that was making itself known inside of Foxglove's head. "No." She said, in the same rather stilted voice. "Why not?" I asked, suddenly realising that something was going on with her. "I cannot explain it to you. their form is something to be experienced not seen." she said, using her paws to try and articulate the ambiguity of it all, but only leaving me more confused. "I'll se for myself then." I stated, confident that I would be the one to put in words, describe the witches as fully as I could. I could put it in my notebook after the fact - I had begun to think that I would publish my notebook after my travels were over, as a sort of guide to the woods, but it was something I used to divert my attention from the fact that there was a rather sizeable chance that I would not make it out of the woods at all, a thought which scared me to such an extent that I deluded myself by calling the very idea nonsensical in my mind, like I did with death, ignoring it as much as I could, until it came rearing its ugly head and I was left as surprised and shocked as ever.
We walked in silence for the next hour or so, I looked around at the trees, and saw that as we got closer to where Foxglove had told me the front was, the leaves got shorted and shorter, and broader and broader. The leaves of these trees were the same purple as the fungus, and were connected to the trunk by a vivid ochre coloured wood, the sticks looking like bones covered in blood as they lay on the floor. The air here was also heavily perfumed by the flowers on the very same trees, which were a delicate green, and had long, twisting petals which emenated a sickly sweet smell, only attracting the tiniest flies, who swarmed the flowers, making it so that you had to be careful where you breathed, as breathing in a few dozen flies was a real possibility. Foxglove soon told me a story about a friend of hers who had breathed in the eggs of the flying tapeworm, which rode the differing densities of air in he atmosphere to travel to organisms to lay its eggs inside of it. A few days later, he felt a very strange wiggling sensation in the back of his head, after which a hundred or so flying tapeworms flew out of his ears and nose, leaving him deaf and unable to smell. A strange byproduct of this event, however, was that he was able to see in a different type of light, a light the otters named Life-light, and point out living organisms even in the dark, through his heat-detecting eyes, which had made him an asset to the hunters of which he was now a key part. I made sure to avoid the flied, wrapping a bit of cloth around my nose and mouth while we walked to a less insect-filled part of the woods.
When night fell, foxglove crawled up a tree, and went to sleep on one of its branches, shaking dead leaves onto the floor. I made my bed near the base of the tree, wrapping a few large leaves around my head to help prevent heat loss. It was getting colder.
I felt more at ease with somebody else who could help me if something went wrong at night, but had to keep reminding myself that I could never rely on another being to help me. It made me weaker. i could only ever use her as a emergency second plan.
That night, I woke to go and get some water. I felt hot and light headed, and a got the passing thought that I may have a fever, but my mind was too sluggish to react or even consider what that may mean for me. I stood up slowly, walking over to a place I knew had a small stream. I noticed that the moon had not come up. I counted in my mind the days since I had entered the forest, and found that I should have seen at least one full moon in the time I had been there, but I had seen none. When I thought about it for a bit longer, I found that I did not remember seein the moon at all. I assumed that the forest had done what it did best and distorted reality again, and sat down by a stream I had found, and cupped my hands so that I could drink. the water tasted bitter.
Once I looked into the water, I saw my own reflection, shifting and morphed into grotesque shapes by the moving water, my eyes stretched till they burst, my mouth elongated and my ears almost absent. Seeing this, I felt my vision go blurry, and I felt as If I was about to fall into the water. With all of the will I could muster, I pulled myself away from the bank, and hulked along to back to the tree. I soon found myself lost, and unable to use my now corrupted sense of direction to get back. All of the trees now looked the same to me, and I was scareculy able to tell the ground from the sky anymore. The blackness looked painfully bright to my eyes, and so I relied on my ears and hands to lead me back. I felt as if the ground shiftend and morphed under my feet with evey step, talking me at moments closer and at others further away from where I wanted to go.
I suddenly saw something behind me, and I stumbled around to see it. I saw giant shapes, swirling endlessly and randomly - yet with a distinct pattern to them. They were mainly red, but a thousand colours I could not name surrounded the threads of read that twirled and were interwoven with each other. it was at once too large to fully understand yet almost seemed as if it could fit in your palm. I walked towards it, and it only got smaller. I heard a single piercing scream of sorts, which rattled my entire body, making every fivre on me osscilate uncontrollanbly. I fell onto the ground and tried to get up, but I felt as if my weight had been increased by tenfold, and I soon saw the creature as both completely flat and also with more dimensions and directions than I could describe or even understand. My head's throbbing slowly returned, and the thing disappeared once I blinked. I found myself drenched with sweat, and unable to form any coherant thoughts.
With nothing else left to do, I screamed out Foxglove's name, and collapsed, using every bit of strength I had to not lose myself to the endless darkness.
I opened my eyes when a reassuring paw tapped me on my shoulder, I was under the tree, in my sleeping bag, with Foxglove stood over me, looking exhausted. "Foxglove... How?..." I asked, now able to see things properly. "You had a fever, Stuvlok. I found you wandering the area near the tree dripping wet. Haven't you been taught never to look at your reflection when you have a fever?" She tutted at my apparently incomplete education, and gave me some water. It tasted sweeter than it had yesterday. But I needed an explanation. "I saw something yesterday, I do not know what it was." I said, looking intensely into her eyes to try and work out if she had any ideas. "There are many things in the forest, Stuvlok, that can appear at night. But now we need to get going. A bird came in the morning with a message from Hawthorn and Nettle telling us that out route may not be as abandoned as I originally thought it may have been." her answer seemed dismissive, but I was content that I had at least gotten something. She did not seem to have seen or heard it, and this only made my mind muddier. "Oh, and I used some of those leaves from your bag. You do not seem entirely unprepared." She said, and I glanced over to my pack, where the durdell leaves I had collected lay partially ground into a paste that I tasted the remnants of on my tongue. Foxglove seemed to have changed, she was no longer as jovial as she was previously, and I sensed that she felt as if there was much danger to come, and that she would have to find a way to deal with it all.
As she went off to get ready, I tried to stand up, finding it difficult, but good enough. I packed my pack, and slung it over my shoulders. As I waited, I noticed a little ant that was being chased by a beetle on the trunk of the tree in front of me. The beetle snapped at it with its pincers while its bright-red legs moved so fast that it became a blur. the ant seemed to be desperately hiding in crevices while the beetle ambushed it again and again. I thought about how I was so large, in comparison to the Ant and and the beetle, that I found their fight largely meaningless and petty, seeing their lives as short and meaningless. I looked on as the beetle had finally caught up to the ant, biting off its head and crunching throught the rest, the ant's translucent hemolymph spreading over the beetle's pincers. If I wanted to, I could destroy both of them with just a finger.
I wondered if this was how the Witches felt about us.