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Final Fantasy VI: The Sands of Time

Book 2: The Goddess War

Chapter 11 - Red Tide

Part 11.3 - Malodorous Intent

The forest had come alive, and into its great earthen jaws Servais had fallen. Maduin noticed at once that there was something strange about the trees, the plants, the soil, and even the very air of the forest. As he coasted over the treetops towards where Servais had disappeared, he could see the entire wood at a glance, and he distinctly felt that it could see him.

Every green thing below him undulated in a rhythmic pattern that looked suspiciously like a human chest, rising and falling with each breath. The central area Servais had been drawn into was filled with ancient, pitch-black trees twisting with malicious intent over top an ominous looking bulge in the ground. More than once Maduin saw long, vile tentacles slip out of the canopy to follow and then grab any unwary prey. There was no doubt, all the flora of the forest was acting in concert to feed whatever rapacious entity was hidden beneath the mound of black trees at the nucleus. This was not natural. This was wild magic gone amok.

Maduin dipped and turned to avoid swinging vines, each tipped with orange spikes. He was over the spot where Servais had been only moments before, and he could hear the din of a major disturbance just below. As he gazed into the gigantic mouth of the forest, gnashing its wooden teeth, he wished Elphis and Kumiro would have stayed behind. It was suicide to dive into the belly of that beast, but he had to do something. The ferocious warking of the black chocobo could be heard above the forest's weird churning and howling, calling out to any one who could hear it.

"Elphis listen very carefully," Maduin said as he prepared himself to dive.

"What's going on?" Elphis said in a high voice, on the verge of panic. "What's that horrible sound? It's hurting my ears! And something smells bad!"

"Elphis," Maduin repeated, calmly. "The forest is making strange noises, but we have to go into it. Do not be afraid."

Elphis gulped and nodded, but Maduin could feel her shaking as he sank into the gloom. He knew she was a strong girl. She had proven that to him in Antissa. But this was so far out of her understanding, and his as well, he wondered how much more she could take, and just what was waiting for them below.

The vines whipped and latched onto him as he slowly lowered himself into the thick heart of the forest. They couldn't hurt him, but they were surprisingly strong, and he had to work to keep himself steady as he approached the ground. More than once he had to rip the vines off him, and he found they bled a vile, dark green ooze when he broke them. It flowed from the vines like blood, spurting and hot. He wondered if this ooze was corrosive like the acid blood of the crawlers? It didn't seem to harm him any more than the crawler blood, but what about a human?

"Elphis are you alright?" Maduin called out over his shoulder.

"Yeah, but this is scary, Maydune," her faint voice called out from just beside him. "Kumiro's able to make the stinky plants stay away from us."

"Kumiro?" Maduin said, confused. He knew the moogle had strange powers, and it could sense and even control weather to a small degree. Apparently, the moogle could control wild life as well.

"Kuu...plants bad...," the moogle said slowly, resorting to human speech to make it's point perfectly clear. "Bad magic..."

"Yes, I gathered that," Maduin said as he hit the spongy bottom of the forest floor with a soft thud.

The scene at the forest floor made Maduin cringe. There were no animals visible anywhere. Instead, the entire forest was covered with twisting, slithering vines. They were everywhere, completely overwhelming all other life in the forest. Looking down at his feet, he could see he landed on a thick mat of the stuff, and he jumped back instinctively.

"Ugh...what smells!" Elphis cried out, covering her nose with both hands and gagging.

Maduin could smell it too. It smelled like death, but not animal death. The odor was thick and pungent with rotting leaves, wood, and fungal overgrowth. Again, there was no sign of any beasts here, even dead ones. The entire forest had become one gigantic, putrid fungus-like organism. Somehow all the plants had mutated and grown together into a single colonial life form, bent on devouring first everything within the forest, and it would seem now anything that passed near it as well.

The scientific mind of the Esper had little time to reflect on such a fascinating evolution and what might have caused it. The vines were now writhing at his feet, trying to engulf him and drag him forward. Obviously there was a central core to this conglomeration, and the vines were trying to take him straight into it. He could feel hundreds of the tiny orange barbs trying to prick him, and failing miserably against his tough skin.

Another loud warking call told Maduin that the center of the forest was exactly where he wanted to go. There was no way to simply walk into it, though. He would have to make a path and rush over it before more vines took the place of the ones he was about to destroy.

"Elphis, get ready, I'm going in!" Maduin said loudly, mustering his magical energies.

The directed tornado of freezing wind Maduin conjured was carefully aimed like a tunnel through the forest, and it required a surprising amount of effort to maintain such a specific shape. Sudden bursts of magic were easy, and even concentrated, sustained spells didn't need much thought, provided they were just large explosions or waves in all directions. Molding magic into exact paths and shapes, however, taxed the Esper's mind and body in an unexpected way. He would not be able to maintain this path for long.

The effect his icy path had on the foliage was equally unexpected. The extreme cold was abhorrent to the plants, and killed everything that it blasted through, as Maduin assumed it would. Around the path, though, he could see many of the orange-barbed vines slinking as close as the ice as it dared, and then...feeding off it.

"Just like the vaporites...," Maduin mused briefly, then he dashed towards the sound of the chocobo. Obviously these creatures fed on magic, which meant they were likely aberrations born from the increase in ambient magic, just like the gaseous vaporites. But far more deadly.

"Kumiro!" Maduin shouted as the memories of Narsillian mountains came back to him. "Don't let the vines get to you! They feed on magic, like the vaporites."

"Pu...," Kumiro said anxiously, his eyes scrunched tighter than usual with concentration.

Somehow the moogle could maintain limited control over the vines, and had been able to dissuade them from touching either him or Elphis. Unfortunately, Maduin was far too big a magical target for the vines and the moogle's small influence was not enough to convince them to ignore the mighty Esper as well. Maduin would have to fend for himself, and as he saw the quickly vanishing path of ice just behind him, he knew the vines would try twice as hard to capture him now that they knew the vast magical feast before them.

Soon, the source of the warking came into view, and Maduin could see a struggle of dire proportions taking place at the heart of the evil forest. Servais and his chocobo were fighting tooth and beak for their survival, and to Maduin's surprise, giving a good account of themselves. There was only one other human Maduin had ever seen fight like this grey-haired man, and that was a ginger-haired woman with the eyes of a killer and dancing blades of death. As he watched the two fight, any doubts that he was watching another Stradivari in action vanished.

The heart of the forest Servais found himself against was nothing but one great ball of dark green fuzz, like mold, a dozen feet across. The mold ball hung from about a dozen thick vines that pulsed dark green, and stretched off in all directions into the forest. It looked like a giant, spongy brain, and as Maduin watched the action, he was convinced that was exactly what it was. A giant plant brain, controlling the squirming masses of once harmless vines that filled the rest of the forest, and perhaps all other plant life in the forest. And at the moment, the full anger of this land was directed at Servais.

The man fought alongside his chocobo as one force. His back was always to the chocobo, and his front always towards the giant brain. The chocobo fought in a way Maduin had never suspected the regular, yellow birds he had seen could. Its immense size and strength kept the vines from wrapping around it sufficiently to stop its rampage. The claws and lethal beak did the rest, shredding any vines that attempted to encircle the two. Every once in a while one of the thousand vines would gain a brief advantage, but the chocobo would simply let loose a wild cry and fly into the air. Servais, hearing the signal, would be on his steed's back in a flash, and the two would rocket out of the range of the reaching tentacle. And then they would slam into the soft forest bed again, trampling whatever mindless thing was beneath them.

Servais himself was more than a match for the vines, and like the Lady Blunt, he wielded daggers with fatal efficiency. Unlike the Lady, Servais fought hand-to-hand, instead of throwing them. His daggers were much larger and more ornate, being shaped like golden X's with a single haft intersecting the cross. These dual crossblades were deadly effective in the hands of a master, and Servais was definitely a master. Nothing was able to approach him without being diced into pieces by a flurry of perfectly timed slashes. The odd multi-bladed shape of the daggers allowed him to cut multiple parts of the encroaching vines with a single strike. More than once in the few moments Maduin watched before joining, he saw Servais swipe just one time at three or four oncoming vines, only to watch the entire mass fall to bits at the man's feet a second later.

Chagrined, Maduin wondered if this master hunter even needed his help. As before with the rock, the man noted his presence immediately, and put to rest any doubt that the Esper was needed.

"Maduin!" the man called out over the din of battle, slicing two more vines inches from his throat as he struggled to speak. "Get over here and make some room! The Paraladia are gathering from the whole forest, and I won't be able to fend them off much longer!"

"Kweh!" Servais's chocobo called out loud and clear, but this time the war cry sounded desperate. It was fighting with every ounce of energy it had, but the vines were squeezing more and more life out of it with each rush.

Maduin turned to Elphis and Kumiro, speaking quickly. "The both of you, stay here, and don't attract any attention. Kumiro keep her safe."

Kumiro nodded and grabbed Elphis with his little claws, hovering the both of them a foot above the writhing mass at their feet. "Kupo...hurry!"

As the magical energy of Maduin entered the clearing, the flow of the sea of green changed. Sensing a real feast for their newfound magical appetites, the vines stopped attacking Servais, and the entire forest bent its voracious efforts on the Esper that had walked right into its waiting jaws.

"Seems to like you, friend!" Servais called out, his strong voice showing no signs of fear. As Maduin approached, he could see a smile on the man's face almost identical to the one he had seen on the Lady Blunt's as she pelted Cerberus with her knives.

Love of battle must be a trait common to all Stradivari, Maduin thought grimly. Perhaps that was the mindset necessary to stand up to the forces of this world and make a real difference. Perhaps Maduin's peace-loving reluctance to fight was wrong after all?

"Hey, snap to, and keep these Paraladia busy while I go after the big one at the center!" Servais shouted, mounting his chocobo.

"Right," Maduin said, grabbing a clump of vines, crushing them in his bare hands, and setting to work. The stench of the vile blood filled his nostrils, and he wanted to gag. Where the battle had been at its thickest, there was at least a foot of green liquid clogging the entire forest floor. The sea of grime made the area look distinctly like a swamp, with the tentacles rising up like relentless sea monsters, threatening to pull them all under.

Even as he fought to save Servais, and himself, Maduin's only thoughts were of Elphis, being sucked down into this mire. He glanced back at her, and breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Kumiro's white fur standing out against the waving vines. It was an odd sight. Despite their furious twitching back and forth, none of them actually tried to grab either Kumiro or Elphis. The moogle was a small, furry island of peace floating in the total chaos of the awakened forest.

Several minutes went by where Maduin battled with the vines, and Servais struggled ineffectually to pierce the hard shell of the plant brain. The darker vines that held up the brain were as hard as steel, and his crossblades had little effect on them. The brain itself was more vulnerable, but no matter how fast the man hacked at the light green vines on its surface, more vines would rise from the forest to repair the damage. And more would come to try and bring Maduin down as well. They were holding their own...but nothing more.

"Servais! We can't do this forever, we have to escape!" Maduin called out hopelessly.

"Never! I must have a sample of this plant brain!" Servais yelled out in a voice slightly more unsteady than before. There was no fear still, but he was in a frenzy, and his hunter's blood was burning with the excitement of an unknown quarry.

Maduin watched as Servais stopped hacking and pulled out his silver, double-barreled rifle. The breathing room Maduin's presence had made allowed him to attempt a point blank shot.

"Don't you see? I must find out what is inside this mass of Paraladia!" the man cried out in joy, obsessed. "You see the darker vines holding it all up? Those are part of the real creature. The don't seem to even be a pure plant, but some sort of fusion of plant, animal and fungus! And they're tough as a behemoth's hide! I must have a sample of their source!"

While he prattled on in his excitement, he leveled his powerful gun at the malodorous sphere and fired a full double blast. The sound was terrific, briefly silencing the forest and halting all movement of vines. When the gun smoke cleared, there was a gruesome hole several feet wide penetrating all the way to the hidden center of the globe.

"Look at that! Servais cried, ecstatic. "Do you see it! It's a mouth! A bestial mouth with teeth! Amazing..."

Without thinking, Servais directed his chocobo closer while the forest lay still at the shock of his gun's wound. Indeed, there was an enormous, filthy mouth exposed where Servais had fired, and its long, needle-like teeth were grinding with the fury of a mind completely foreign to this world. Maduin had never seen anything so grotesque as that mouth, staring out of the plant brain like a giant, malignant eye.

Servais joy was only heightened at the weird secret inside the plant barrier, and he dived in for a closer look. Just as he was about to reach out and grab at one of the small whisker-like appendages that sprouted from around the mouth like a beard, a noxious cloud of green gas vomited from the alien mouth, obscuring both the hunter and his chocobo. The smell was quite possibly the worst thing Maduin had ever endured, and he felt himself growing dizzy as its fumes washed over him

"My god!" was all Maduin heard Servais say, weakly, from inside the giant cloud, and then all was silent again.

"Maydune!" Elphis screamed from behind him, her voice muffled and nasal as she wrapped her arms around her face to avoid the cloying stink that filled the area.

Maduin whipped his head around to see why Elphis had cried out, but there was only green before his eyes. Dark green.

A thick tentacle had detached itself from the forest and swung wildly from the plant brain, colliding with Maduin like a falling tree. The giant Esper fell, and before he could recover, the mass of vines had crawled over every inch of his body, sealing him in a cocoon from which there was no escape.

Elphis's scream echoed through the clearing again, but this time Maduin barely heard it. His head was swathed in greedy feelers, trying to drain him of all his magical power. And they were managing quite well, despite not being able to pierce his flesh with their orange barbs. They could still crawl inside his ears, his nose, his mouth...it was an unspeakable way to die. Maduin tried with all his supposed newfound strength to break free. His struggling only gave off more magic for the plants to feed off, though. He had little time to escape, and he knew Servais must be in even worse condition. But perhaps they were only interested in him, and perhaps his sacrifice would allow everyone else to escape...

"Elphis! Servais!" Maduin called out in his roaring Esper voice, barely audible through the vines filling his mouth like a gag. "Get out of here while they are focused on me! It's the only chance we have!"

"Never!" was Elphis's only reply. Servais remained silent, in unknown condition at the fume-covered foot of the plant brain.

"Dammit, listen to me!" Maduin yelled angrily, his voice a frightening and monstrous tone Elphis had never heard before. "Kumiro! Get her out of here, NOW!"

"Puu...," the moogle moaned softly, grabbing Elphis tighter and fluttering his wings furiously. It would take all the creature's strength, but the girl was small, and he could do it. Abandoning another friend was something the little moogle never wanted to do again, but he had the girl to worry about, and she must survive.

"Ku-PO!" Kumiro squeaked in angry surprise. Elphis had bitten him!

The girl dropped lightly to the forest floor, Kumiro's influence still protecting her from the ever-questing vines. But as Kumiro shrieked in surprise his concentration was broken, and the vines were coming alive to their presence fast.

Everything happened at once. Maduin, completely hidden in a tomb of green, was being lifted off the forest floor and guided to the rapacious maw at the center of the plant brain. Servais, too, was in the clutches of one dark green tentacle, ready to be dropped into the mouth. Both seemed unconscious, and showed no signs of struggle. The black chocobo, too, was held in place by two tentacles, ready to be devoured next. The magical Kumiro had been swatted out of the air as soon as his influence over the creatures was snapped, and he was being conveyed to the forest master by his willing Paraladia slaves along with the rest. Only Elphis remained, the least tantalizing of the group. But that would not last for long.

With a wailing shriek, the little blind girl rushed towards where she could hear Maduin being dragged inwards. There was nothing she could do, but that didn't matter. She had never given up hope on the harsh streets of Antissa, and she would not give up hope here. As long as she breathed, she would fight to survive. It was all she knew how to do.

A searching vine latched on to her foot, and she stumbled face-first into the disgusting slime. It made her wretch, and she felt like she would die from the smell, but that didn't matter. She clawed her way forward, ripping into vines blindly, using her little nails, her little teeth, every weapon she had left. The vines slowly covered her, heedless of her feeble efforts. There was nothing left for her to do but to go down fighting for her last breath like a wild animal, but that didn't matter to the little girl with the heart of a giant.

The heart of a giant, indeed. Call out my name, little one. Do not forget you have one friend left!

Elphis heard the call from inside her mind. She was confused, since she was now completely entombed by the forest, and could not hear anything outside her green prison. She was wholly blind to the world. But the voice was still there, calling out to her urgently across an abyss she could only dimly comprehend.

Call me! You must!

She could feel the orange-tipped barbs sinking into her, and she felt their poisonous touch weakening her senses. Her head felt thick, and her thoughts were fading. The voice began to recede, farther and farther into the back of her mind. There was a name, a name she must call...but what was it?

Little one, you know my name. Summon my power now, or we will all be consumed! I can feel their draining touch, even here... I do not know what it means to die truly, but for the first time in my existence, I fear oblivion. Call me!

It was on the tip of her tongue. She couldn't remember...but she must. Nothing else mattered but the name. The magic word that she somehow knew would save them all. If she could just remember!

A single black moment of total unawareness stole over her, and for that moment, she felt the cold reach of death in her unconsciousness. The brief dip into the waters of oblivion was like a lightning bolt to her still-beating heart. Her body surged with the desire to live, and her mind cleared for one shining second. It was only a second, but it was enough to say one word. One single word.

"TITAN!"