Return to the Great Tree 3

The Party is stuck in the Feywild! After an attack by pixies and displacer beasts, the party makes their way towards the Giant Mushrooms in hopes that the portal is there to take them back home.

Recap

The clearing still smelled of blood and sinew. Quick crouched beside the fallen Displacer Beast, his small hands working methodically through the creature's fur as he separated tentacle from sinew with practiced reverence. Helena joined him, and Rowan after that, each claiming what the beast had surrendered in death. Coiled muscle, curved claw, the strange rigid architecture of something built for ambush.

The pixies watched from the treeline — dozens of tiny luminous faces peering through the undergrowth. Their initial horror at the harvesting softened as they observed the way Thalen worked: unhurried, deliberate, nothing wasted. He wasn't looting. He was paying respect in the language only a hunter knows.

While the others worked, Aldric Vaun knelt in the soft earth and carved. His knife traced the old lines of a chwinga friendship rune — a symbol older than courts, older than armies — into the dirt of the clearing floor. When he looked up and gestured to the rune, then to himself, the nearest pixie tilted its head. The group of them exchanged a rapid, inscrutable look, then nodded in unison.

Chittering filled the air. None of the party could parse a syllable.

Kouzlo spread his fingers slightly and breathed the words that unraveled language into meaning, the old magic settling around his ears like water.

Nearby, Thalen had gone quiet in a different way. He stood before a flat stone, a length of parchment unfurled across its surface — and the parchment was alive. Not scrawled with static ink but breathing with it: rivers threading through painted valleys, miniature trees swaying in no wind, a glowing mark drifting where the party stood. He hadn't drawn this. Grit's map case had given it to him, and it had given him this — a map of the moment.

The valley ahead stretched toward a mushroom of improbable scale. He traced the path with one finger. A mile, maybe less.

The pixies noticed the map immediately. They crowded close, peering at the moving image with the reverence children reserve for fire. One of them traced a route from their glowing marker to the Great Mushroom and clapped both hands together with delight. The whole group rose into the air and began circling the party in a tight, excited swarm, one gesturing urgently toward the path ahead.

Shadow reached out and poked the nearest pixie.

It tumbled sideways through the air, righted itself, and came back grinning, treating it as the opening move in a game it had already won.

They rested before following. The clearing settled into a temporary peace.

Rowan wandered to the treeline, looking for something to eat. He found berries: deep purple-black, round and swollen, flecked with white like stars in dark water. He'd never seen their like. He held one up toward the nearest pixie, mimed eating it, and raised an eyebrow.

The pixie inspected the berry carefully. Then nodded.

The first bite told him something was wrong before his body could explain it. His hands — he was staring at his hands — and they had started to change. For one terrible, elastic moment, the Feywild asserted its claim on his flesh. He gritted his teeth. Closed his eyes. Held himself together through nothing but refusal.

When he opened his eyes his hands were his own again.

The pixies looked deeply disappointed.

Aldric, meanwhile, had taken a seat beside Luminor and was contemplating a small vial pressed upon him by Professor Fiddlesticks. He tilted it back. It tasted like the bottom of a cauldron. His stomach turned. Nothing else happened.

In the shadow at the far edge of the clearing, Shadow sat perfectly still in the darkest patch of shade he could find, meditating with the focused deliberateness of someone who understood that the Feywild was watching, and watching back was the least you could do.

Kouzlo sat apart and took stock of what he carried. Spell by spell, component by component. Helena laid three cards across her knee. All women. All nature. No doom today — or at least, no immediate doom.

The path to the Great Mushroom was beautiful in the way all Feywild things are beautiful: extravagantly, performatively, inescapably. Colors that don't exist in proper light. Flowers that opened as you passed and closed after. The pixies played the entire way, looping and diving, occasionally shrieking with laughter at nothing visible.

Thalen's map tracked their progress. A living compass, pulling them true.

They stepped into a second clearing — and the world changed scale.

It happened without warning or sound. The small mushrooms ringing the clearing swelled to tower over them. The rocks became boulders. The trees became walls against the sky. The pixie laughter deepened by an octave, and the sweetness in it curdled slightly at the edges into something that wasn't quite sinister, but was adjacent to it.

They were standing in a fairy ring.

"Ye adventurers entered uninvited," said a voice, smooth and ceremonial, somewhere between a welcome and a verdict. "Now you are invited."

A table had appeared. Not gradually, not with fanfare — it simply was now, as Feywild things simply are. It stretched across the clearing, covered in food and drink and the assembled company of creatures who clearly considered this entirely normal. At the head stood a male pixie in a top hat and cane, surveying them with the satisfied expression of a host whose surprise has landed precisely as intended.

They were introduced to El.

Helena watched him carefully and read something genuine beneath the performance — warmth behind the mask, real pleasure at guests, but also the awareness that this was a game and he knew all the rules. Possibly had written them.

Thalen's grandfather had lived in the Feywild for a time, he recalled, and had told stories about it. Thalen had slept through every single one. He remembered the broad theme — different rules here, stranger stakes — and nothing useful whatsoever.

El tapped his cane once on the table's edge. Every creature at the table sat up, folded their hands in their laps, and went perfectly still.

Aldric, who had spent years in royal courts, moved without thinking — he matched the posture before he'd processed why. Thalen, in the middle of eating something he'd already decided he liked, set it down and swallowed. El looked at him with an expression that defied categorization.

Rowan attempted to follow suit. It did not go well.

The introductions proceeded.

El. The host. A chipmunk named Chippy, protector of these woods, who vibrated with energy too large for his body. Henna, a pixie with the careful eyes of a tailor. Then a snail who had been raising his eyestalk with the dignified pace of someone who refused to be rushed — until Lola, another pixie, jumped ahead to describe the evening's menu. El's cane came down lightly on the table.

"Lola. We've talked about this."

Lola's face registered one flash of naked fear before smoothing back to cheerfulness. Thalen noticed. He filed it away.

The snail — O'Shello — finished raising his eyestalk and introduced himself as the one in charge of travel in these woods. He said it with the modest authority of someone whose job mattered and who knew it.

El invited the party to introduce themselves.

Shadow stared at him. El waited. Shadow continued to stare. El moved on.

Thalen said his name was Quick, then immediately asked if he could eat now. El observed that he fit the harengon stereotype rather well, and suggested they might be able to help him get where he was going.

Rowan gave the name Roland. Thalen caught it and said nothing, but Kouzlo — who had been watching the whole table with the focused attention of someone who'd read too much about Feywild customs to be comfortable — clocked it immediately. He knew what this was. He didn't know the stakes yet, but he knew a game was in progress, and he was being played against.

Helena said she was simply a mystic traveler, and asked what occasion warranted such a feast.

"Why, every day is a cause for a feast," El said pleasantly.

He asked her name again.

She told him she had none.

El smiled and made a small, deliberate note of it.

Aldric pressed Luminor quietly for guidance. The celestial horse knew little of the Feywild's specific mechanisms, but his counsel was simple: be careful. Aldric had already started mapping the table's silence, watching how Shadow's small illusory warning drifted toward him through the air, watching who was and wasn't giving their names, watching what had and hadn't happened yet to those who'd withheld them.

Kouzlo set his hands flat on the table. He told El plainly: everyone we have met has been duplicitous. You'll understand if we exercise caution.

El understood completely. He was delighted to host. He gestured for everyone to eat, gave Thalen a specific look, and disappeared.

The feast was enormous. The food was real, at least — genuinely cooked, genuinely strange. Lola rattled off the offerings with the pride of a chef: things that had no equivalent on the material plane, Fey Berries, and, yes, Displacer Beast. Thalen served himself three portions of the last one and resolved privately to hunt them again.

Rowan ate selectively, watching which dishes had already been touched and sticking to those, quietly noting which items no one at the table had approached: a gnarled root that looked like ginger, a few untouched glasses of wine, a small bowl of Fey Berries. He nibbled cautiously at the rest.

Kouzlo didn't eat. He slipped berries into his satchel for Fiddlesticks and read the decorative books on the table, which proved to be purely decorative.

Helena pushed food around her plate with convincing theater.

Aldric took nothing. He sat in quiet prayer, and when he cast his senses outward through the ring, the whole space answered with a faint gray luminescence — not holy, not evil, but charged with something. He noticed Lola watching him.

She asked if he was hungry.

He told her Tyr would provide.

Rowan flicked a Wyld Berry at him. Aldric batted it out of the air without looking.

When El returned, he surveyed the table with satisfaction and began his assessment. He worked through the party methodically, noting who had eaten, who had not, asking Kouzlo directly why his plate was empty. Kouzlo repeated himself. El seemed to find this genuinely charming.

He paused on Shadow. His expression became thoughtful rather than theatrical.

"Two of you have broken the rules of the game," he said finally, looking between Shadow and Helena.

He produced two small sealed pieces of paper and set them on the table with the finality of a judgment. "You can read these later."

Then he clapped his hands, the table vanished, and the instruments appeared.

The dance was mandatory in the way all Feywild things are mandatory: nothing says you must, but declining seems to require an argument with physics. The creatures moved naturally into the music. The pixies played from various branches and perches, and the clearing became something like joy.

Thalen dove in immediately. It felt like the Harengon warren of his childhood. It felt like home.

Aldric found the rhythm elusive, but tried — clapping and stomping with the sincere effort of a soldier who knew he was outside his element. Rowan gave himself entirely to it without knowing what he was doing. Shadow positioned himself at the edge of the ring and watched.

Kouzlo walked the perimeter instead, testing it methodically, until he dipped a toe past the boundary and was flung bodily back to the center without ceremony. He sat down, catalogued the pain, and began thinking about what kind of magic maintains a barrier like that.

A pixie approached him and began mimicking his limping walk as though it were a dance move. It watched him with complete sincerity.

Helena walked with him, radiating the quiet fury of someone who prefers to be the one running the scheme.

A pixie curtsied to Shadow and asked, with all the gravity of a formal request, if she might have this dance.

Shadow declined with marginally more grace than he'd deployed at the dinner table.

El returned to the center of the floor for the farewells.

Chippy pressed a gift into Thalen's hands — a fish, perfectly preserved, wrapped with the care of something precious. Henna produced a small sewn scene for the party. O'Shello offered a rock. A nice one. Lola produced a cookie for dessert, and looked at it regretfully as she handed it over.

Shadow broke off pieces of his rations and distributed them to the creatures one by one, moving through the group with a gentleness he hadn't shown the table at large.

Rowan gave a fine leaf, some lint, and a set of thieves' tools. Aldric declined the offered gifts with one hand and gave away his old dice set with the other, wishing them all good games in the days ahead. Kouzlo offered a burst of conjured fireworks that scattered colored light across the ring before fading.

El walked them to the edge of the circle and tapped his cane against the boundary.

Kouzlo felt the magic dissolve.

"You will remain small for a time," El said, almost gently. "But you will want that for where you're going."

They crossed the boundary one by one. The threshold hit each of them like a wall of heat — a physical punishment for having been inside, brief and specific and calibrated. Shadow crossed first and took the worst of it. Helena, armored by her own protections, fared slightly better. Kouzlo slipped through quietly and found, to his surprise, a sealed piece of paper pressed into his hand.

He looked back. El was already gone.

Thalen and Rowan reached the edge and found it solid. A wall where everyone else had walked through.

El appeared behind them.

"Where are you two going? You partook in everything. You're one of us now."

Thalen told him, politely but without ambiguity, that they needed to get home.

Rowan agreed. He said he'd love to visit again sometime. Said he'd had a lot of fun.

El regarded them for a moment with something that might have been admiration, or disappointment, or both.

"Fine," he said. "But it will offend our people."

He gave them each a piece of black paper sealed in red, and stepped aside.

They walked out. The heat didn't touch them.

Outside the ring, the party was still small, and Rowan wore a pixie's face like a mask he'd slipped on at a masquerade. Thalen's map was still alive, still tracking, and it told them they were close.

One last bend in the path.

They took it, and the Great Mushroom rose before them — vast and ancient, ringed by its smaller kin. But something was wrong. The smallest of the cluster, the one that would have stood at their height in normal scale, was covered in dark patches: necrotic tissue spreading from points where creatures clung to the surface. Six of them, in pairs, each one driving something into the mushroom rather than feeding on it.

Injecting shadow.

The same rot they had seen on the Great Tree. The same Shadowfell signature.

Aldric mounted Luminor without a word. The others spread out into the undergrowth.

The creatures never heard them coming.

The fight was brutal and brief in the way that well-planned ambushes tend to be — until they weren't.

Thalen's vines seized the lowest pair before the first blow had been struck. Shadow scaled the mushroom's cap in pure silence and sent one of the creatures tumbling a hundred feet to the earth, stunned and twitching, and as it fell the dark smoke it had been injecting billowed free and began to coalesce.

By the time Rowan's arrow found the seam between chitin plates and Kouzlo's fire turned the second-tier creature to ash, the smoke had found a shape. Something vast and hungry and deeply wrong, pulling itself together from the expelled darkness of every creature they'd brought down.

It moved like a predator and hit like one. It pulled more shadows from thin air, spawned its kin from its own substance, and wore away at them with the patient violence of something that had nowhere to be except here, doing this.

Helena tolled death's bells; across the clearing the sound of a distant bell rang a bug collapsed, dead. Aldric drove Brine Justice into the smoke-thing's mass and felt it part and resist and finally yield. Luminor put his hooves into it. Kouzlo turned its own insubstantiality against it with sheer magical force, hammering it down through spells that didn't care what it was made of.

Shadow rained down from the mushroom's cap on all fours, struck with everything he had, and kept striking.

The smoke collapsed.

Where each creature had fallen, the dark patches faded. The necrotic tissue shrank back. The mushroom breathed.

And from the cap, from the gills and the hidden spaces between the rings, small faces appeared — pixies, watching. They looked out at the party standing in the aftermath below.

Then they began to cheer.

The interior of the Great Mushroom was familiar in the way that important things sometimes are: a portal room, like the one in the heart of the Great Tree. The same architecture of planes made visible. The pixies moved with practiced ease, adjusting the destination, aligning the passage home.

Kouzlo stood before the door between worlds and turned Trogeth's journal in his hands. He understood it well enough now. He knew what the book had been doing to them when they crossed before — the magic bleeding through without intent. He knew how to suppress it.

The portal shimmered.

The Great Tree waited on the other side.

He stepped through first, and this time the passage between planes was simply a step.