Luna's WP Responses

The Red Forest

"You *sure* they came this way?" Paul asked his son, pointing up the path. He thought he saw little dimples in the snow that could have been tracks, but it was hard to tell. The snow was coming down so fast that the hoof prints would be buried already, and the driving wind would have brushed them aside if not.

"I'm sure, Pop," Liam answered. "I tried to chase the two of them down after I got the rest of the cattle settled, but they'd already gone up this way. And you told me to never enter the forest without you."

They both looked up at the foreboding path through the trees. The trees towered overhead, soaring up into the blizzard until the tops were no longer visible through the clouds. The sun, just starting to set, cast everything in a dull red hue that made the snowflakes look like little bits of rose petals.

Paul considered his options. Two cows missing from the herd wasn't *that* big of a deal. On long rides like this, a few losses were to be expected, especially along *this* route. And all of his cows were branded, so if they found their way onto some other ranch, they would hopefully be returned. Most people around here were good upstanding folk, although there were probably one or two who might butcher the stray cattle and get rid of the hides as soon as possible. But they'd entered the forest, meaning that finding their way out alive on their own wasn't a likelihood. And it had been a lean year: the herd was smaller than he'd promised his clients, and the cows were underweight to boot. Two more could make the difference. "All right," Paul decided at last, "We'd best go in and look for her before it gets dark."

Liam contained his excitement and gave a solemn nod. Like all children who are told that something was forbidden, his curiosity about the forest knew no bounds. He'd asked everyone in town about it, but none of them would give a straight answer. Now he'd finally find out for himself. Pop handed him a gun. "You be careful with this, OK? This is only to defend yourself." Liam nodded again.

They made their way into the forest and up the hill, following the slight dimples that may have just been in Paul's imagination. The howl of the wind through the fields was replaced by a soft whisper as it stirred through the branches. Some of the trees looked normal: pines, furs, even the odd birch and maple. Paul had been teaching Liam all the names of the different types along their route. But some of the trees were... odd. Lines of vibrant red ran through cracks in the bark, looking like running trails of blood. And the branches didn't end in leafy boughs, but sharpened spear tips. At their roots, bushels of vibrant, glistening red berries grew. They looked juicy and plump, just *asking* to be picked. These types of trees grew more and more common as they went deeper into the woods.

Paul noticed his son looking at the berries. "Don't touch those, Liam. They're not good to eat."

Liam nodded, but didn't avert his gaze. So Paul stopped them, kicked up some snow drifts, and eventually found a fallen branch on the ground. Then, making sure that his son was still watching, he poked at one of the clusters of berries until he managed to dislodge one from its stem. It plopped into the snow and sat there motionless while Paul quickly retreated.

Then the roots came to life, flailing through the air in search of prey like octopus tentacles. They lashed out blindly in the area all around the tree, causing one of the roots to collide with the berry cluster of a neighboring tree. That then set off a chain reaction as each tree thought it had caught something in its trap and began trying to pull it in with its own roots. The trunks, seemingly rigid like all other trees, bent low, stabbing the ground repeatedly with those needle-sharp branches all along the trunk. Paul put an arm across Liam's chest to make sure the boy didn't move an inch.

Eventually the trees either realized that they hadn't caught anything, or determined that if something was caught, it was sufficiently stabbed to death now. The roots burrowed their tips back into the ground, and the trunks became stiff and upright against the wind. Only the chaotic mess of churned-up snow remained as evidence of what they'd just seen.

"What was that?" Liam asked.

"They're called Piranha Trees," Paul said.

"They... *eat* things?" Liam was still gaping in horror at the branches all around him.

"Anything," Paul confirmed. "People, cattle..." He nodded toward a cow skull that had somehow gotten lodged on one of the branches. "Or anything else it manages to get a grasp on." He pointed to another skull, stuck on another branch. It was some sort of lizard, but the skull was even larger than a cow's skull. The lizard it belonged to would have had to be four or five meters long at least. There were lizards all over the ranch, but never ten or eleven centimeters.

"You think one of the trees got our cows?" Liam asked. He hated to think of them trapped by those snake-like roots, bleeting and snorting and struggling in vain as they were gouged by branches.

A distant primal roar echoed through the woods, clearly audible even with the dampening effects of the snow. Paul did a quick check to make sure his gun was loaded. "If they're lucky," he whispered to himself.