Edited: May, 17, 2020
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Some branches rustled furiously and out flew a whole flock of black faceless birds. They were living silhouettes. Each flew into the other until they became one big bird. At last, they flew into the forest like a shadow melting away.
Deel tripped on his feet. "I see something! I think a house!" He said in excitement and ran farther ahead. Getting lost in a place they knew nothing about was not going to be good. Pinti bristled in annoyance at him for being so careless and went after him. She tried to keep his gray t-shirt in sight, but it was hard when he kept disappearing and reappearing beyond scraggly branches or tall bushes.
At last he stopped. Ahead of him was a flock of bright yellow ball-like birds with dark orange eyes and bright blue feet. They were pecking at some tree roots jutting out from the ground. Deel was staring at the birds with a blank expression on his face as if he wasn't looking at them at all.
"Deel?" She reached out when he squeaked and lifted his head.
"Galag is gone? Dead?" He said in a quiet voice. His eyes were big in shock as if realizing the fact for the first time. "He gave me these." Deel took out three purple pills from his pocket. "For good measure."
"What are they for?" She asked.
The birds let out a collective squabble then, startling both her and Deel. The strange ball birds had looked up from their meal. Their eyes bulged and then they exploded making feathers fly everywhere.
"Whaaa—!" Deel shouted and grabbed onto her arm. As they watched, yellow feathers paired up with each other two by two and flew away.
"Impossibilities, like Galag had said," Pinti whispered.
A cackling noise like laughter came from behind. There were different birds now and they had wings like daggers and a beak on each end of their body. The two beaks opened and cackled, making their bodies shake from side to side. They flew up and disappeared into the clouds.
"I don't like it here!" Deel whined and scrambled off towards the moss curtain. "Thereanbold! Thereanbold! Where are you?" He cried. Pinti was tempted to call out, too. The moss curtain was right there, but they didn't seem to be getting any closer. If this was some kind of Sorcerer trick, she wished Thereanbold would cut it out. They didn't have time to be messing around with this.
The second time going through also brought them back to where they started. Pinti hoped 'third time's the charm' would work, but it didn't. They came to the same upside-down sky and ground situation as the first two. It seemed pointless now to try again, but they couldn't go the opposite direction. It was just a rock with sky on it. When she swat at it, it was like hitting concrete. Their only option was to go to the moss curtain.
On the fifth time, she was getting impatient. "Heizak! Just let us go through, stupid Crup! What the feigat is a Crup anyway!"
"Hey," Deel bounded over to a tree trunk, half hidden behind a tall bush, "look, tiny houses." He disappeared inside the bush. Pinti threw her arms up in exasperation. Why wasn't Deel taking this seriously? They could be doing this for an eternity while the rest of the world went into Edgling chaos.
"Deel," she called, "we should go. Not like going would do us any good, but we don't have time for—"
"Come look, Pinti! A little castle!"
Deel's excitement made her itch to see what it was. In fact, it made her itchy all over. She had to know what he was looking at.
That's why Huamanoas say, 'Curiosity kills the cat anthro'. Pinti scowled at the near accuracy of that sentence. Inside the bush near the base of the tree trunk were some ruins so small they looked like a child's plaything.
Among dried up melon-green moss sat small fortresses and castles. Little moss step stones weaved through these small buildings and a miniature grave site. Pinti bent down next to Deel and brushed away the moss from the small gravestones to find a small depiction of a Human carved into it.
"Wonder if tiny Humans ever existed in ancient times," Deel remarked, peering at the stone over her shoulder. A warm eggy breath punched her nose.
"Yuck, did you eat any mint sprigs? Your breath smells ancient." She wrinkled her nose and stood to escape the stench.
"I hate mint." Deel breathed into his hand and sniffed. "I don't smell anything!" He crossed his arms. "And what's the point of going anywhere when we just end up somewhere we've been before? Thereanbold probably doesn't want us to go—" He choked on his words and his body twitched.
When Deel spoke next, his voice came out low. "I don't think Thereanbold really lives here?" His statement turned into a question at the end, returning to this usual higher-pitched voice. "What are you saying? Of course, he does! Stop it!" He cried and took out a purple pill, swallowing it without water.
"Are you...okay?" She eyed him suspiciously. He was still twitching, but he gave her a smile and walked off. Sighing, she followed him back to the path. Why did she have to be stuck with an idiot that twitched because he had to act out his imaginary friend?
Soon, they came upon that same mossy curtain again. Pinti pulled his sleeve and stopped him, ignoring his complaints. Going through the moss curtain did nothing. They just ended up in the same place.
"We have to go through here, to go back to where we were, so that we can go through here, and go back to where we were, all over again!" Deel stomped his foot and crossed his arms. "I hate Forest Crup!"
Pinti twitched her tail tip in thought. "What if we don't go through here and just turned around? Would we still end up in the place we started at?"
Deel shook his head over and over and fell down from dizziness. "I don't understand how not going through here to not end up to where we don't want to go again will help get us to where we do want to go. I don't understand what I'm not understanding and it's not understanding me!"
"You're making zero sense right now, you know. Just follow me." Pinti said in a stern voice. Then she turned back around and made her way down the path they had just come without touching the mossy curtain. She briefly stopped to look over her shoulder. Deel was marching towards her in stiff movements. She curled her lip at him, and he just gave her a nervous grin.
Pinti wouldn't admit to him, ever, but she was nervous, too. It could be that there was no more of Forest Crup to get to and either Galag had fooled them or Thereanbold had fooled Galag. She wanted to believe the latter to be true. Galag had died protecting them. Why would he die for a lie?
When the path turned from dirt to gravel, she let out a little trill of success. This was a new path and it sloped slightly upwards. On both sides of the path was an aquamarine forest dotted with yellow flowers on the forest floor. Streaks of golden sunlight poked between branches or leaves, making dapples on the path. A foggy sunset painted the sky in peach pink and lilac purple hues.
Deel began panting before they even reached the top of the hill. He wheezed and called for water. "I need that good energizing cold stuff!" He whined, but they didn't have any.
Once they reached the top, the gravel merged into a dirt road with plants growing up over the sides. There was a strange musky scent of an animal or an animal-like creature that had passed this way not too long ago. Pinti hoped it was Thereanbold who she knew was a Halfhuman of the lizard type.
But then, the scenery in front of her rippled, melting away the illusion. When she looked left and right, they were back to where the moss curtain was, but the scenery before them was different.
A monstrous tree loomed over them. On closer inspection, it was actually the result of many trees merged together. There was a face with two eyes staring down at them. The eyes even had eyelashes made up of branches and fluffy green leaves. A mouth with thick lips rested among the exposed roots. Under the chin was a string of elongated bright red flowers, each coming out of the last. It took her a while to realize the flowers made letters and the letters made two words.
"Pawn Woman?" she whispered.
"Those are words?" Deel quipped. "Makes nonsense."
Pinti pursed her lips. "You mean it makes no sense."
"I said that." Deel argued.
A rumble came from the Pawn Woman and they both turned their heads as the thick lips moved and a warm lavender scented breath wafted out. There was such pungency it made Pinti's eyes sting and she had to look away for a second until the breeze leveled the scent.
"One Prestigious Parlor you shall come," a loud female voice reverberated from beneath the ground. Pinti held her stomach as the voice echoed inside her.
"A lounging chair hard to resist. If you sit you shall never stand again. I will tell."
Dumbstruck, Pinti just stood there almost doubting her ears. How could it talk? It was just a head! There wasn't even a neck attached.
"Sit," the Pawn Woman bellowed, and it spewed white liquid from its mouth covering them. Pinti grunted as the liquid pushed her over with force. It matted her fur and made her sticky. The sour milk stench made her heave.
"Bleh, bleh, ugh!" Deel was spitting out the liquid that dripped into his mouth.
"Good," the Pawn Woman's root mouth turned up into a grin. It had little pointy yellow teeth inside. It quickly lost those teeth as they fluttered out like butterflies and went up to the tree-root hair.
"Aw, ow, aw." The Pawn Woman's voice boomed, making the whole area shudder. The tremor made the yellow butterfly teeth flutter up and back down again. "One Prestigious Parlor, a hall in a forest where chandeliers hang from branches. Old furniture from nowhere. Sit, sit, they will say. You must not obey."
The Pawn Woman began to bob its head up and down. Its eyes rolled back all the way and popped out onto the ground. They were the two ball-like yellow birds Pinti saw earlier. They exploded and turned into the Pawn Woman's butterfly teeth. Two more eyes rolled to the front, but it was obvious from the little feet that poked out, they were just the exploding bird balls.
"One Prestigious Parlor takes all." The Pawn Woman closed its eyes. "Gone, forever. Lost, for eternity. Lost..." Its voice began to fade. "I am the Pawn Woman," the voice echoed all around. The scene rippled and a new scene replaced it shielding the Pawn Woman behind illusion again.
"Pinti!" Deel squeaked, breaking the quiet. "I'm not sticky anymore!" He rubbed his shirt and checked himself all over.
Pinti looked down at herself. No liquid could be found on her fur, but the sour milk stench still seemed to linger in the air. She sniffed and caught another scent—some sugary scent out of place when all around them was nature. Standing, she followed the scent, ignoring Deel as he questioned her. They were back on the slope surrounded by the aquamarine forest, but a sliver of a dirt path led into the forest and that was where the sugar scent was coming from.
"Do you smell that? It's," She sniffed, "apple pie."
"Don't smell nothing."
"Anything." She corrected him. "I thought you were a mastery of Universal language."
"I said that." He argued. "Anything, nothing, not something...those all mean the same thing."
"What books have you been reading?" She sniffed the air and found the scent was still following the narrow dirt path. "You don't do double negatives."
Deel came up beside her to shuffle through undergrowth instead of following the flattened path. "I don't know what that means. And if you," He jabbed a finger at himself, "don't shut up in there, I'm going to have to take another pill. Yeah, it's a threat. Galag taught me how to threaten you."
"Who are you talking to anyway?" Pinti had had enough of his antics. It was making it hard to concentrate on the task at paw. "Can you just stop talking to your imaginary friend?" She hissed, not caring if that wording hurt him. "We're trying to get out of here alive!"
"Not an imaginary friend and not a friend." Deel pouted and crossed his arms which didn't make for good balancing on uneven terrain. He wobbled a bit and fell over with a crash. "Now look what you made me do to myself!" He glared at her with leaves and twigs stuck in his hair.
Pinti twitched her whiskers. He was crazy, he was childish, and she had enough of him. She hissed at him and he cowered under her glare. "Oh yeah, you should be scared. If you keep acting up like this, I'm just going to have to—"
She didn't get a chance to finish her threat when the trees before them rustled and shifted away to reveal the moss curtain that Pinti was getting tired of seeing. Just as she sighed in annoyance at it, it began to change.
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Note: The picture above is the inspiration for the Pawn Woman. Artist - YongSub Noh