August 18th, 2013: The Wild and the Woolly

My Love,  

Upon waking I found myself alone in the middle of a different forest, far wilder than any I’d seen previously -- this was no suburban oasis of verdancy, but a truly primordial environment. Unsurprisingly, there were no motorcycleable paths in sight. I lay upon a mossy granite slab, almost like an altar, at the top of a crumbling stone staircase. I was still wearing my pajamas, but they seemed to have been laundered. All the moss and dirt were gone and they smelled of honeysuckle and lavender rather than fear and sweat. Well, some sort of magical being from beyond human imagining saw me naked; I can cross that off the ol’ bucket list. 

Standing carefully, I padded down the steps and studied my immediate surroundings: at the center of the relative clearing, a few meters beyond the base of the stairs I’d descended, a massive tree towered into the sky. It was something of a cross between several trees I knew and probably many more I’d never laid eyes on. It was mostly mahogany, but boasted the unreal height and breadth of a massive redwood, shimmered with the mystic miasma of an ancient elm, danced in the breeze with the tragic grace of a willow, and its roots writhed up and out in discontent like the myriad tendrils of a mangrove. More to the point, it was impaled on the diagonal by a flurry of enormous gleaming meteorite shards! The stone had a metallic sheen, almost pure black striated with throbbing sapphire veins, and I felt both drawn to it and repelled simultaneously. The tree had embraced the foreign bodies, growing over and around the shards to create a meandering morphology with innumerable nooks to nestle in. This tree was rather my jam.     

Perhaps even more curious than the meteor shards and/or the strange giant snuggle tree was the fact that a thin sheen of rime rolled lazily over both despite the summer’s dry heat. Complex crystal lattices formed and collapsed before my eyes, always reaching for new territory to explore. Occasionally this meant reaching outward from the meteoric mahogany only to collapse into vanishing mist on the warm winds. Incidentally, inordinately many of these doomed adventurer vectors seemed to be forming towards me. Was the rime beckoning or grasping, I wonder? Perhaps both. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, so elected ‘cautiously flattered’. 

Since the tree was the obvious point of interest in this strange setting I’d been dropped into, I decided to be contrarian and head off orthogonally to it into the surrounding woods. Can’t be too hard to find my way back to the colossal tree later on, right? Setting off in a random direction away from the tree, I quickly found the forest nearly impenetrable. That didn’t stop me, and I stubbornly crashed through vines and thickets in a mostly aimless quest to get my bearings. Aside from the meteoric mahogany, the foliage was not so unusual… or so I thought until I tripped over a root and vines shot out to catch me. A thick one looped around my middle and two more wrapped about my arms before gently pulling me back upright. I turned swiftly and caught a glimpse of soft emerald eyes shining out of a feminine face in the bark of a nearby willow, but all was still and relatively mundane again in an instant.

“Uh, thank you?” I addressed the maybe willow dryad and bowed deeply, trying to keep my heading general in case she hadn’t been the only one to help. Regardless, she seemed shy. It was well that she caught me, as beyond the leaf-veiled hill I’d been approaching was a sudden drop into a deep gully through which a dark river cut like a serpent. The water was clear and beautiful, but looked like it hadn’t ever seen sunlight. What little indirect light filtered down through the canopy seemed to be devoured by the calmly insatiable current. The grasses and underbrush stopped well short of the riverbank on either side, only a poisonous looking bright purple moss flourishing near the water. Electric green light pulsed rapidly along the riverbed as I cast my gaze upon it and the surface swelled up as if running over the curved sides of a massive invisible aquatic creature. A deep rumbly-purr shook the air and a squall of warm cinnamon roll scented air blasted my hair back straight behind me. I held perfectly still as loud snuffling sounds and the occasional boop from a massive scaled snoot traveled up and down my body. The river splashed up over its banks as an approving sigh whipped my hair about my face and the whatever it was presumably settled back into the water. Seemed friendly enough, but perhaps a bit deadly dangerous; I decided it might be best not to push my luck at the point of first impressions. I’ll put a mental pin in this shadow-wrought river location and visit again inna bit.    

As I turned back to continue my random exploration, the spirit patch on my pajamas pulsed and a fox made of emerald fire poked a glittering snout out of a monstrous rhododendron bush ahead. It yipped playfully, its very breath sprinkling dancing sparks into the air, and rushed out to run exactly three circles around me before disappearing back into the bush. Peeking through the leaves, I beheld a group of glowing creatures sharing a plunder of berries: ghostly raccoons, feather-winged rainbow serpents, minute humanoids with gossamer dragonfly wings and gemstone eyes, and several spiders bigger than my head with arcs of purple lightning dancing between their legs all gloried in amiable repose. As I barged in through the leaves, they all looked up as one in startled wonderment and suddenly I was falling. A moment of blackness consumed me and then a flash of pain in my rump lit up the world with flashing stars as I landed hard on the stone altar whence I’d come.

Scrambling back up, I rushed off recklessly in a different direction away from the meteoric mahogany. It was a matter of principle at this point. Moments after I started back into the verge, a pair of softly glowing neon pink faerie lights peeked out from behind a massive elm in the middle distance. Within a second of appearing, the lights zoomed back out of sight behind the tree. I leapt after them, rabid curiosity lending wings to my stride, and spotted them dancing symmetrically on the lowest branches of a distant pine grove. My quickly eroding survival instinct warned me to approach with some semblance of caution, but then the faeries started BLINKING DIFFERENT COLORS. No point trying to resist that!

Waving maniacally to show my friendliness, I charged on after them through the curtain of pines to see them alighted on a holly bush. I could make out their features now, and though I noted that their expressions were oddly plastic, I noted with much more enthusiasm that they were holding hands and each was extending her free hand out to beckon me in. For hugs, maybe? Grinning broadly, I skipped forward to meet my new friends.

It was for hugs, as it happens, but only for certain values of hug. The instant I reached an invisible threshold about four meters from the bush’s base, the bush and three meters of mossy ground around it erupted upwards; six meters of the grove proved to be the diameter of a trapdoor, and it had been burst open by a forest of hairy brown legs like the grasping fingers of the hand of death itself presently scrabbling frantically to reach me! The massive spider beneath would have had me immediately, but the very instant the trapdoor opened a haunting humming filled the forest; a woman carrying a tune so complex in its harmonics that no single human voice should have been capable of producing it. The thicket of thorny appendages hesitated for a moment, as if weighing a risk, and that gave me time to react. 

Even as I dodged backwards, I was worried about my faerie friends; would they have had time to flee the bush while the spider was after me? Could they have been hurt by the trapdoor opening so violently? Then I saw them dragging along the ground with the spider’s movement, tethered to it by gossamer web strands that had been invisible at a distance. Lures. My heart lurched as I realized that these lures were (or had been) discrete creatures, long dead by their pallor, which the spider had been manipulating like puppets. But why hadn’t I seen any signs of a complicated webbing rig throughout its domain? Sadly, I realized the answer to my own question as soon as I spotted knots of gently glowy-fuzzling web bored into their heads through ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, no doubt explaining how their lighting mechanisms had been triggered and how such lifelike movement had been possible in the absence of a prefabricated rig -- the puppet spider was able to manipulate the faeries’ brains, pulling their strings as literally as possible.

Screaming wildly, I turned to dash back out of the grave grove, but a strand of webbing caught my hair in a vice grip before I could make it two steps. Four more pinned my arms to my sides and my legs together in quick succession. A spasm of inconceivable pain shot through me as the threads sent relentlessly pulsing arcs of white-hot electricity through every nerve and muscle in my body. Though I tried to strain against my bonds, my body refused to respond to my will. The spider pulled HARD and I found myself on my back looking at upside-down doom: innumerable orange lantern-like orbs glowed brilliantly in the darkness of the spider’s pit, and I swear that by some outré curvature of clacking chelicerae and unearthly mechanism of mouthparts she was grinning. The humming music on the air crescendoed madly.

I would not close my eyes. I’m not certain I could have given the spasmodic state of my muscles, but I’m proud to say I resolved not to try. If a challenging glare was all the fight I’d be allowed, then by the gods all around us I would glare until the end. That’s why I saw the other, bigger spider sailing down from the canopy towards my captor and managed to twitch my own grin at her just before her trapdoor was slammed shut and her protruding limbs severed in a gush of putrid yellow ichor. Which I still can’t get out of my hair.

The new spider was a giant indeed, at least the size of a large cargo truck where the first looked to be more like one and a half sedans. Maybe a hatchback-and-a-half. She paid a minor morsel like me no mind, instead stepping back off the trap door and ripping it free in one fluid swipe of her mighty forelegs. The trapdoor spider cowered in her burrow, retreating as far and fast as she could, but her injury slowed her. The titan spider pulled her out in a matter of moments and began to feast, messily. 

Having no desire to linger and wind up an after dinner sweet, I hurriedly started jerking my reawakening limbs in a bid for freedom. Thankfully, the trapdoor spider’s silk was fairly brittle and came away quickly with a little wiggledy-torsion. As soon as I could get my legs under me I took off with twice the gallop and none of the grace of a gazelle back the way I’d come, to the relative safety of the meteoric mahogany.

When I arrived back at the altar, I slowed to catch my breath and evaluate my circumstances. My mildly suicidal curiosity and too-quiet fear of death seemed to have met and were presently hugging it out, so I decided to go along on the vector I was apparently being herded towards: to investigate beneath the meteoric mahogany. Regardless, that hauntingly beautiful song continued and I could tell now that it was rising from beneath the labyrinth of its roots. As much as my next breath, I

needed

to meet the singer.

Burrow beside me,

Violet