Story Complimentary Comic [11/12]
Art by 5enketsu
Written by D.M. Rhodes
The bramble scratched against their leather armour as the bandits crouched in the undergrowth, staring at the obsidian gate that marked the entrance to the dragon's lair. Goblin patrols moved along the carved stone walls and ramparts outside of it, their crude spears glinting in the afternoon light. The entrance hummed with quiet menace, traps and wards woven into its very construction that were visible even to untrained eyes like theirs. Many of them, the defenders didn't even bother to hide. Perhaps their purpose was as much to act as a visual deterrent to outsiders as anything else.
"This is bad. I really don't like this," one of the bandits whispered, his voice tight with fear. "Let's just go. We'll just run away."
From the small stone he was standing on, the fairy turned to him, wings flaring with agitation. "Where the hell are we gonna run to, idiot? F.P. can get us anywhere. The fairy kingdom has more ways into it than your mother."
"Settle down, both of you," the third man hissed, his eyes never leaving the gate. "Let's just get in, grab what we need, and get out. We'll get her what she wants so she'll get off our backs. Maybe we don't need to go inside at all? Maybe it just lost a scale outside somewhere? That can happen, right?"
The others look around for a moment, foolishly hopeful that their luck would have panned out this way. But it didn't. Solemnly, they all looked back toward the gate.
The fairy bandit pressed his face into his hands. "Fuck. I don't want to think about what she'll do if we mess this up."
A skeletal hand shot from the soil and grabbed his ankle, daintily holding it with two pinching fingers.
The fairy shrieked, stumbling backward. More hands erupted from the soil around them, dozens of bony fingers clawing through dirt and dead leaves. The bandits scrambled to escape, panic overriding training. The elf made it three steps before skeletal grips locked around both ankles, sending him sprawling. The others were grasped more firmly than the fairy.
The elf tried to scramble and rise, turned to run, and collided directly into something solid. The elf fell backward onto the ground with a grunt of pain. Skeletal hands immediately seized him, dragging him down whilst he thrashed and screamed.
The dragon girl stood before him, completely unfazed by the impact. Barjuchne stared down at the captured bandits, her eyes glowing with vicious red light. Her lips pulled back from her fangs in a snarl that promised violence.
"If you think that's bad. Wait until you find out what I'm going to do with you," she growled. "Hello guys. It's nice to see you again," said the creature, clearly recognising them. She grinned, leaning down over them with her hands on her waist as she flashed a sharp, smug grin their way. "What's the matter? Nothing to laugh about now this time?"
The captured fairy sat bound in crude rope, surrounded by goblins in the depths of the dungeon. Firelight cast dancing shadows across the walls. Rou-ya sat nearby, her expression thoughtful. Beside her, an older goblin woman drew slowly from a long, crude pipe, the smoke curling upward in lazy spirals. Rou-ya's mother and the tribal elder.
"Yes, the little ones," the elder said, answering Barjuchne's question about fairies. Her voice carried the weight of years, each word measured and deliberate. "Many, many long years ago, when I was only so young that I still played games in the forests with my litter, my mother would tell me stories from her own childhood."
She paused, taking another draw from her pipe. The other older goblins shifted uncomfortably, whilst the younger ones watched with curiosity unmarked by fear.
"She would tell us of the little ones," the elder continued, studying the bound fairy with eyes that had seen decades pass. "They lived with us, she said, but not where we were."
The dragon girl didn’t get it. Barjuchne's tail lashed with impatience. "He won't talk. What can you tell me? Where in the forest is this place?"
The old goblin woman smoked for a long moment, her gaze never leaving the captured fairy. Around her, the elder goblins recoiled slightly, some ancient instinct warning them away from the helpless prisoner that they were still nonetheless visibly afraid of. The younger generation seemed unimpressed, ignorant of whatever their elders remembered.
"My mother told me never to listen to them, never to follow them," the goblin elder said quietly. "She told me that they would try to trick us, to deceive us in order to bring us to where they lived."
"The deep forest," an older male goblin added from the edge of the gathering. The young goblins looked bored, but the elders murmured amongst themselves with voices that carried old warnings.
Barjuchne turned her glowing eyes towards him. "Where? I've seen every inch of my forest. I've never seen anything else there."
The old woman exhaled smoke that hung in the still air. "The little ones left the deep forest. Unlike us, they went to live with humans and elves. They gave up their ancestral home." Her tone carried judgement as she looked at the captured fairy. "But the doors are still there. Or should I say the pits?"
Rou-ya gasped, her golden eyes widening with sudden understanding.
Barjuchne's head snapped towards her. "What?"
"The mushroom circles," the goblin princess said, memories flooding back. Old warnings whispered by her own mother when she was small. Stories told to frighten children away from dangerous places. "They're the entrance to the deep forest."
Even if the fairy kingdom had long since fallen, the goblins had maintained their traditions. Stay away from mushroom circles. Never step inside their bounds. Never follow the lights or voices that might emerge from them.
The captured fairy made a choked sound. "Just kill me. Whatever you have to do, just kill me before she finds out we failed." Terror cracked his voice. "She has magic. Powerful magic. She'll know we failed if we don't come back soon."
Barjuchne gestured to a nearby guard. "Take him away to the others. I'll figure out what to do with them when I'm back."
The guard lifted the fairy to his feet and dragged him towards the holding cells deeper in the dungeon. His protests echoed down the corridor before fading into silence.
"Barjuchne," Rou-ya said carefully, rising to her feet. "If this is a holdout little one from the deep forest with pure blood, then you need to be careful. Their magic was once very strong when they were unmingled with humans. The last of their pure kind were all supposed to have died out by now."
Barjuchne's wings rustled as she stretched them. "That's what they said about dragons too."
She turned and strode towards the cave entrance, her claws clicking against stone. The goblins parted before her. Rou-ya called something after her, but the words were lost beneath the sound of wings unfurling.
Barjuchne launched herself into the air.
The forest spread beneath her in a carpet of green and gold. Autumn had painted the canopy in warm colours that caught the afternoon light. Barjuchne circled once, her eyes scanning the terrain below with predatory focus.
There.
A mushroom circle beneath an ancient oak, half-hidden in shadows where sunlight barely reached. The fungi glowed faintly with their own light, arranged in a perfect ring around a patch of moss.
Barjuchne folded her wings and dived.
The ground rushed up to meet her. She braced for impact, claws extended, ready to tear through soil and root to find whatever lay beneath.
She passed through.
The transition tore through her senses with nauseating force. Up became down, left twisted into right, and colours bled into shapes that had no names. The forest canopy she had been diving towards inverted, becoming a floor of leaves rushing up to meet her, whilst the soil she should have struck became a dark, cloudless sky. Barjuchne's wings flared instinctively, but the air moved wrong here, thick as water in some places and thin as a vacuum in others. Greens shifted to purples mid-flight. Tree trunks bent into impossible curves that her eyes couldn't follow. The world spun around her axis, or perhaps she spun around the world's axis, the distinction meaningless as reality rearranged itself according to rules she didn't understand. When the vertigo finally stopped, she found herself dangling upside down from a branch that hadn't existed a moment before, her tail wrapped around the twisted wood whilst moss-covered ground stretched above her head. It took three disorienting seconds before gravity remembered which way it was supposed to pull, and she dropped onto her claws with an ungraceful thud onto ground that felt too soft.
Barjuchne spread her wings to slow her descent, her eyes adjusting.
She landed in a forest, yes, but not her forest.
The dragon's eyes looked upward, toward where the sky should be. But there was nothing there except dirt, as if she were underground, but in a space so massive and so large that it fully surpasses the concepts of calling it a simple cave or cavern system. The same glowing moss that lines her own cave lined the far-distant ceiling of this place in abundance, patched over it like clouds.
This place… It was a whole other world below the surface of her territory. The fairy kingdom. It was a whole other forest, underground.
[ENVIRONMENT]THE DEEP FORESTThe Hidden Forest exists as a massive subterranean wilderness, a silent grave for a kingdom that was once drenched in high magic but has since faded into myth.
This underground nation remains empty except for the horrors that fill its strange recesses, situated beneath the world. The space defies traditional classification.
Within this pocket dimension, gravity and physics have begun to unravel; tree trunks bend into impossible curves that the eyes cannot follow, and colors bleed into nameless shades of shifting purple and green. The air density is unpredictable, fluctuating between the stifling thickness of water and the hollow vacuum of a tomb. On the soft ground, giant fungi illuminate decaying, fairy-sized dwellings suspended from trees like rotted lanterns. Amidst ruins of forgotten palaces and crystalline flowers that have long since wilted, a lingering and unnamed darkness presses against the senses, while something unseen splashes in the black waters.
And, as the goblins had said, this one really was deeper.