The morth was blown away by a gust of wind. Its single bloodshot eye was not terribly good at seeing, and so Aradia was more than a little confused at finding herself inside its body. The taste of hyoi was still fresh in her new mouth—she didn't think she'd had one. She could make out pinks and blues but not greens of any kind; thankfully this made Roxy stand out like a brilliant flare against the smudgy greys of the room, like the negative of a lit candle. It seemed infinite in its vastness now, its edges depthless blue-grey walls of haze. Aradia tried to crawl over to her friend but found that she had no instinct for controlling the monster, and her mouth was not formed for anything much more than being a horrible tooth-ringed pit intended to suck in fruit and small bugs like a sinkhole while terrifying the shit out of people. Or so she assumed; Roxy hardly looked at her before firing off a blast of flame, scorching greasy-grey looking moss into ash.
All around her brother and sister morths screamed as they boiled in their shells until they exploded (though her brain was all insect her mind was still a troll and relished in the smell of cooking shellfish). However, she had been positioned just so, and the heat of the fire lifted her up in a calming, warm updraft, higher and higher, up to the grey ceiling. She realized that this was how morths must reproduce; the mother shot out her disgusting eggs, then started a fire, scattering their surprisingly light forms into the wind.
The mothula screamed across Aradia's line of sight, a nearly invisible smear of grey, its edges brilliantly colored, trailing fire like a comet, and Aradia was buffeted far away into the corner of the room. She hit the wall and bounced off, tumbling as she fell so the whole world spun crazily. Beneath her was a crack in the floor, so black and huge (though to her troll form it would be barely big enough for her arm).
She drifted down through it. Aradia floated into a massive chamber, the counterpart to the Deku King's grove in the Carapacian city, though it was impossible to judge depth with her one eye. What's more, almost all of it the same murky grey that she had been having trouble seeing. But what made Aradia want to gasp was the gigantic flower suspended below her. It was huge and blue-white, almost too bright to look at with her horrible morth vision, the edges of its petals a burning, dim violet. It bloomed atop a woody stem that was bigger than a house, but most interesting of all were its roots. They had twisted and snarled every which way in a wriggling woody mass, but only a few had found purchase, stretching into thin tendrils and hooking onto the walls. Perhaps at one point this flower had been rooted to a wall, but now it was suspended a hundred feet above the chamber floor.
She was still tumbling, and was only able to take it in in snatched glances, but it was so lovely that she kept it in her mind. But suddenly, it felt like her tiny body was seized, from the inside out. An intelligence took root in Aradia's mind, massive compared to the insect brain she'd inexplicably borrowed, and still quite hefty by troll standards, or so she figured. It reached deep down, into her borrowed animal instincts, and then her sticky orange burrs were twisting, turning, arranging themselves, changing her wind resistance, until finally she was gliding, as well as a puffy lump of chitin can glide, straight towards the flower. She landed on top of it with barely a sensation, and the intelligence propelled her forward like tiny springs; she even heard them make a sound, like the snap of tiny piano strings. Excuse me, she thought tentatively in the direction of the alien intelligence, how are you doing this? And why?
It did not deign to respond; she perceived that it was like a tree, a big golden tree of mind, its roots spreading throughout the tree of wood and all its parasitic plants, imbedding itself in the minds of the simple creatures that lived within its wooden walls. There came the strange thrumming sound of the spiraling golden creatures from outside; they looked like puffs of golden dandelion floating in the breeze, too fast for her eyes to really catch except their burning blue spots. Pairs of young Mothula, their wings not yet grown, scuttled up the walls towards the flower's tendrils, distinguishable to Aradia's vision only by the rusty markings on their abdomens. Two of them climbed all the way to the ceiling until they were directly above the flower and dropped. One of them missed its mark, and tumbled to the darkness below. The sounds of Boko Babas feasting reached up into her primitive ears while the Mothula that stuck its landing began to dig into the flower's flesh, completely disregarding the death of its friend.
Aradia saw now the true shape the Forbidden Woods, a cesspit of parasitic incest and death, one massive organism being leeched by others, like the treehouses, and the flower on which she stood, themselves being fed upon by the tree, and by smaller plants, and finally by the few creatures deemed base enough as to be harmless. Insects mostly, with the odd squirrel slowly being choked to death by fungal spores here and there.
A swarm of her morth cousins came crawling up the walls like a black cloud, and another drifted down onto the flower the same way she had done. Slowly the weight of them began to crush her body, but she could not move unless the great intelligence willed it. I'm sorry, it boomed at long last, all you little morths stuck under there, this is the only way.
A tendril snapped like a steel cable beneath the jaws of a Mothula and came crashing down onto the morth pile, shattering their shells and sending their spiny bodies flying. Meekly, feeling her lifeblood leaking from her, Aradia said, it's okay, really, before her shell cracked and everything went back.
The great winged Mothula had landed and crawled its disgusting, chitinous way over to a crack in the floor, and John followed. It turned to pour a sickening black river of its eggs into the hole; its singular eye did not seem to see him approach, even as he raised his hammer and struck. It was dead in one blow, its eye popping like an overripe melon, its primitive brain spilling out of its braincase like so much rancid fruit syrup, but John did not stop. He swung the hammer again and again, shattering its body with each swing. Glowing green scales and rusty dander sprayed up with each blow, striking his face, then thick, syrupy purple blood and yellow hydraulic fluids from its joints, splattering all over his shirt. He snarled and growled, angrier than he had ever been that such a weak monster had slain his dear friend, who had toppled a god. His ears pricked up as high as they could go, their fur standing like they'd been struck by lightning, and his hair almost following suit.
Roxy might have stopped this display, once. However, she was disinclined to feel generous to an insect, and maybe John just needed to get this out of his system. Watching him, she felt she might have been afraid of him if the situation was different, if it hadn't been Aradia who had died.
Aradia's body shot bolt upright, coughing and hacking out a glob of phlegm, colored a sickly orange by the Mothula slime she'd ingested. Her friends turned to look at her, tears and gore staining their faces, which were now displaying a complex mixture of rage, grief, and befuddlement. Aradia's own face had settled into confusion; she'd just died twice as far as she was aware. But then, after a second or two, she fluttered her lashes and smiled a big, wide smile. They really did care!
Her stomach rumbled, breaking the silence. "Who do I need to pap to get some Deku nuts around here?" she said, starting to giggle. A huge, woody crunch sounded far below.
Aradia shoveled toasted, honeyed Deku nuts into her mouth while recounting her story as Roxy wiped off John's face. "That's about it," she said, licking her fingers. "Sweet Din, I need some meat now."
"Why do you think this happened though?" asked Roxy, giving her handkerchief a disgusted look. She threw it to the floor instead of pocketing it. "Maybe your deathy powers activated because you thought you were dying and your soul left your body?" John just stared at the troll, brow furrowed.
Aradia shook her head, curls bouncing. "I've had an out of body experience before," she said. "I really was almost dead then. I'm pretty sure my soul can tell the difference." She ran her hand along her scalp, thinking. It came away sticky. She crinkled her nose, staring at a yellowish substance stuck on the tips of her claws. "What the hell, did I fall on some fruit—" she gasped. "My hyoi pear! Where is it?" Aradia turned and twisted on the table, searching frantically as she could for the pear without actually getting down from it.
"Sorry," said John, "One of those bugs must have eaten it."
Aradia, hanging upside down to look under the table, smacked her own horns. "Right! I remember tasting pears when I was a bug…" Her eyes bugged out and she righted herself. "What if the pear let me control another creature?"
"That's a really dumb idea Rae-Rae," said Roxy, squinting at the troll. "It makes no sense. Why would anyone make a magic item that worked that way? It's so unintuitive!"
"I have a spare," said Aradia, pulling another pear from the folds of her top. "Or should I say s'pear?"
Roxy banged her head on the frame of the treehouse, snorting, while John chuckled wholeheartedly. "We can try feeding it to the next animal we find," said John. "And then we'll have an animal companion to take on our adventures, except that we'll also have to carry around your comatose body in the meantime."
"Yeah!" said Aradia. "Wouldn't that be fun?"
Roxy giggled into her hand. "Oh my fuck you guys, would you believe I was the weird friend back home? Me? Compared to you losers?"
After about twenty minutes of searching, an exit was found. In the back of another of the treehouses was a still-functioning mechanical door, like the one Aradia had torn down, seemingly so long ago. It had become overgrown by thin green vines with fleshy orange flowers; Roxy hacked them off in no time with the severed mandible of the Mothula, as sharp as a machete. "Ugly but effective," she said, appraising the black blade-like piece. "I think I'm gonna keep it. Magic is all fine and good but it takes a lot out of me."
In that time, the group saw the moss on the floor growing over their footsteps, coming back thicker and greener than before. No wonder the forest seemed completely untouched despite the apparently regular forays sent by the Carapacians.
Through the door was a long tunnel made from a hollowed log that had been laid between two branches of the host tree. The ends were nailed in place with huge ironwood pins, still shiny yellow after however many centuries of decay and salty air. The right side had once been home to an array of large bay windows, or so John assumed. A huge jagged strip had fallen off, from nearly one end to the other, leaving only vaguely carven shapes where the window might have been. The very edge of the sun was rising above the topmost edge of the hole, and sunlight streamed through for just a moment. The ocean was pounding against the base of the great trunk far below.
The left side had been breached by four of the tangling, thorny vines, three in a cluster right by the door and one closer to the midpoint of the tunnel. The kids had to duck under a thorn; it moved as they did so, trying to touch them. "I think it reacts to heat," said Roxy, waving the tip of her rod in front of her face. The thorns stretched toward its glowing pink gem instead of her body.
John shuddered. "Do you think they…hunt or something?"
"Probably," said Roxy. "You've already seen Boko Babas, and there are tons of plants like them back in Chosen."
"All over the world in fact," said Aradia, tossing a chunk of nutmeat at the vines. It bounced off unharmed. "It's really interesting! Some scientists think that there's two sets of lifeforms on this planet, those descended from creatures with no clear boundary between plants and animals, and those that can be easily categorized as one or the other."
"That's really interesting," said John, picking up a glowing green beetle the length of his thumb. He threw it at the vine cluster, which twitched frantically until the insect was crushed. Its remains slowly sank into the vines until there was nothing left. "But let's move on!"
They trudged along down the tunnel, carefully picking their way across the half-rotted ground.
They got an opportunity to test the hyoi pears in the next room, carved from a knot in the wood. It was open to the air; and a pair of kargarocs had flown in to deliver a payload of green-skinned Bokoblins. The forest however, was not letting them get away with it.
Near the ceiling hole, one was being twisted and crushed between a pair of thorny vines, already dead, its blood seeping into their green flesh. The other was squawking its awkward goat-like cry as a pair of Boko Babas tore at its legs, their fat yellow tongues wrapping around its legs.
The two Bokoblins were sitting on the floor, gazing up amusedly at their former mounts, until they noticed the children and immediately forgot about their lack of a ride. They jumped up and made their creeping, hopping way over to the party. The one on the left was immediately swallowed by a gigantic, carnivorous flower, red-violet and tiger-striped. The other screamed in pain and leapt aside, and then Roxy went after him.
She lifted her improvised weapon and swung it down with both hands, burying the wicked, serrated tip in its brain. The mandible immediately broke in half. Roxy threw it down in disgust just as the bokoblin fell to the floor, gibbering and twitching.
The kargaroc was still squawking up near the lip of the hole. The Boko Babas' mouths were touching each other in a gruesome kiss, each crunching down on a quarter of the bird's total mass, their tongues constricting its chest like pythons. A pile of golden feathers lay on the floor immediately beneath it, the severed tail coiled around like a protective serpent. John drew his slingshot and silenced the creature with a shot to the throat, ending its misery.
Meanwhile, Aradia sauntered up to the carnivorous flower, a short knife in one hand and a hyoi pair in another. "We really need a swordsman on this team," she said as she carved away the petals. "This would be much easier with a sword."
The other two looked at her oddly, but she was focusing on her work, so Roxy had to clear her throat. "What are you actually doing right now?"
"Letting the Bokoblin out," she explained. "I can hear him moving around in there, so I should be able to."
"Yeah but why?" said John. Then he smacked his forehead. "You're gonna test the pear on that?"
"What else am I gonna test it on?" she asked testily, "a fire breathing giant moth or a network of predatory vines the size of an island? Or maybe I'll just use this warm-blooded humanoid that's easily subdued and already sedated!" John admitted that she had a point.
When the Bokoblin had been extracted, he looked more grateful than anything. "Aww, you poor monster baby," cooed Aradia, patting his head just behind the horn as he lay in the moss, breathing hard. "Here, have a nice piece of fruit," she said, offering the hyoi.
He sniffed the yellow lump, eyeing the strange face-like markings. He wrinkled his porcine snout at the thing, but then decided to eat it anyway, enveloping it with his tongue and sucking it back into its huge, froggy mouth, crunching it, seeds and all. And then Aradia's soul passed from her own body into the Bokoblin's.
She saw herself falling, only to be caught by John. What a sweet boy. She stood up, admiring the surprising strength in her skinny arms and legs; the muscles underneath were like steel cables, thin but powerful.
She tried to stand straight up, but her spine didn't allow it, starting to hurt at a certain point, and refusing to straighten at all just past that. She wondered if that was just how Bokoblins were shaped or if hers just suffered from back problems. Regardless, she felt that her weight was most well balanced at a stooping posture, head forward like a hunting mammal. She waved at her friends, and the concern immediately melted away from their faces.
"Can you speak?" asked Roxy. Her voice sounded muffled; Bokoblins had worse hearing than trolls, it seemed. Aradia opened her mouth to say something, but all that came out was screeching and hissing, mixed with very few recognizable phonemes. She figured that Bokoblins were capable of speaking their own language, since they seemed to understand English. It made her sad, and she vowed to research the topic, and eventually even compile and anthropology of the monster races of the Great Sea. Now that would be something.
She tried to tell her friends all about her thoughts, but of course, they had no idea what she meant. Aradia tossed her head, giving her beady goblin eyes a roll. The experiment was a success of course, so now she just needed to know how to break out of it.
Shenoticed her attendants for the first time in a long time; she'd gotten so used to them that she barely thought about it, but they were with her as always, and what's more the Forbidden Woods was very haunted, nearly every part of it at least slightly obscured by white fog. But now her attendants were looking down, pointing (the ones that had fingers that is), as if they could see through the floor. Something reached up from the ground and into her, taking hold of her heart.
You again! She shouted psychically at the great intelligence. Not quite so great now she was in a normal sized body.
Oh, um, hello, it said. I'm sorry but I need to borrow you. Wait didn't you die? As it spoke to her Aradia turned on her paw and arched from the chamber towards the next door. It was sealed shut with vines, so she turned back around and sprinted for her machete.
"Are you okay Aradia?" John asked as she picked it up. She hissed in response. He saw that her Bokoblin eyes looked dull and glassy, as if she were in a trance, just like her regular body. "Oh shit," John realized.
"Hmm?" asked Roxy, watching Aradioblin cut through the door.
"Can you sense anything magical?" John asked. The vines were gone, but the door wouldn't open, so she kept right on hacking at it, hoping to chop it down.
"John," said Roxy, "don't take this too harshly because I love you like a brother almost, but magic isn't some 'do whatever the fuck' card. I can't just announce that I'm gonna do a thing with magic and then roll a die and if the number is lower than my current level of magic then I can do it. I have not in all our time together indicated that I can sense magic, except maybe when someone is shooting it right at us. So no John, I can't tell if there's anything magical going on or not."
John groaned. "I think something is borrowing her, the same way that she was borrowing the Bokoblin."
"The great intelligence thing," Roxy muttered. "I thought it only affected insects, like some kind of queen or whatever but…" she trailed off, uncertain. "How do we get her back then?" Roxy snickered, trying to lighten the mood. "The kiss of life clearly didn't wake the sleeping princess last time."
John thought for a moment, stroking his chin, furrowing his brow. "VIOLENCE IS THE ANSWER!" He concluded, and leapt toward Aradia.
He clocked her in the goblinish face, and her body came to.
"It was him," Aradia said, stroking her nose. She felt a phantom pain from John's punch to her goblinsona. The three were sitting in a circle around a stump, on which Roxy had set out a little meal. Greenish, herbal water streamed from a hole she'd bored in the wall; heated with magic to kill any bacteria, it made a lovely tea. "Or it. Whatever." Aradia muttered, turning to look at the hole in the door. The Bokoblin had slipped right through like a serpent after she'd left its body, the great intelligence gripping its mind hard.
"How closely related do you think Carapacians are to insects?" Aradia wondered.
Roxy snorted. "Wow, racist much?"
Aradia growled. "I am just wondering if maybe it took control of Ms. Paint? What if it can take Carapacians just like it can take morths and Mothulae?"
"It would explain why they couldn't do this themselves," John muttered into his cup. "But Bokoblins aren't insects, right?"
Aradia nodded, smiling enthusiastically. "They're monotremes, egg-lying mammals! They're also hermaphroditic, and they have two di—"
Roxy covered Aradia's mouth with lightning-reflexes. 'That's amazing and beautiful and the circle of life is a wonder to behold, but I really don't want to know what goblin dick looks like. I can live my whole life without knowing that and it'll be a life well lived."
Aradia gasped loudly and with extreme exaggeration, her back arching and chest swelling. "I think I might know what it is!" she said. "But I need to dissect that dead Bokoblin's brain!"
And with that she stood up and drew her small knife. It was barely a knife, mostly meant for cutting food. "I'll need your hammer, John," she said, "and something I can use for a chisel."
"I'll need some space," said Roxy, "to contemplate my life choices."
Roxy waited out in the hall, listening to the ocean with a cup of tea in her hands, though she'd done Aradia the favor of pulling out one of the ironwood pins in the floor with her magic. It was three feet long, but it would have to do.
John helped her, holding the stake steady while Aradia tapped it in with her hammer. The Bokoblin's now exposed skull gleamed in the sunlight, its brain visible and purple through the wedge-shaped hole that Roxy had left it with. They cut a neat circle that immediately fell into two halves, and Aradia scooped out the organ and held it up to the sun. "Aha!" she said, gazing at the organ, dripping violently purple blood. "It doesn't have two hemispheres!"
John looked at it, head tilted. It was elongated and thinner in the middle than the tip. Despite the wound Roxy had left in it, he could tell the thing was one solid piece. "Whereas humans have like, two halves, right?"
Aradia nodded. "Trolls too. The great intelligence only affects creatures with simpler brains, it looks like."
She rose from her knees, holding the brain in front of her like a prize. "I gotta go show Roxy!"
John stood up, reached out and grabbed her arm, making her drop the brain, breaking it into a dozen bloody gobbets. Aradia was horrified. "Why would you do that?" she whimpered.
"Sorry," he said, quickly letting go. "It was an accident and I didn't mean to, I just, uh…" He stopped for a minute and stared at her. Aradia stared back, head-tilted.
"We've almost lost you…like a lot. It's alarming how often you nearly die, and it scares me a lot so. Um." He trailed off, scratching the back of his head.
"Yeah John?" she said, taking a step forward, a lump of brain squishing under her foot.
"Fuck it," he whispered, then leaned in and gave her a little kiss at the edge of her mouth. "Do you wanna be my girlfriend or whatever?" he sputtered out.
Aradia's jaw dropped. She took his face in her hands (he didn't even seem to mind the blood) and smiled. "I'm really moved John," she said. "And super honored that you would ask!" She leaned down—she was just a bit taller than he was—and kissed him on the bit of skin between his eyes. For just a second, it felt like an electric charge burrowing right into the pleasure center of his brain. Aradia let go and took two steps back. "But no!"
Notes: *snort* you actually thought? Lol
I wonder how many people I actually fooled all that time ago with the last cliff-hanger. I want to say nobody that's played the game, but I dunno, the hyoi pair only works on seagulls in-game (making it neat but not that good of an item, and it's baffling that it exists when there's a song that lets you possess people later on anyway...which doesn't work on seagulls to my knowledge).
I may have mentioned it before but I think this dungeon is really hard to write and I have been dreading it ever since I started this fic (but The Tower of the Gods is going to be so fun omfg you guys hahahaha fuck all y'all).
Finally though I stumbled upon this tidbit that I had written almost a year ago, how Roxy observes the nut parasitizing the table that is itself parasitizing the tree, which is also being fed upon by the thorny vines (and is in fact feeding off of them as they devour it) and I realized exactly how to write this dungeon then and there.
I think The Parasitic Forest is a much better name for this dungeon than The Forbidden Woods anyway.
Check out the Ao3 version for the soundtrack! :D Archive of Our Own is a far superior platform for fanfiction lol.