Jonathan Dove POV
By the time they reached Slimewood's true edge, Jonathan had decided three things.
First: the Archduke's maps were lies. They called this "sparse outer growth." The reality was a wall of trunks slick with film and hanging veils of translucent slime.
Second: the forest smelled like a butcher's floor and an alchemist's lab had rotted together.
Third: nobility had better be worth it.
"Last chance to turn around," Lysa murmured.
She stood a few paces ahead, bow in hand. Behind them, normal trees thinned out. Ahead, everything belonged to Slimewood. Even a drunk could see the border: ordinary bark on one side, swollen, veined, glistening on the other.
Brann tried for a grin. "Doesn't look that bad. I can still see fruit trees. Maybe we grab an apple on the way in, eh?"
Lysa's mouth didn't so much as twitch.
"Anything in this forest could be a slime," she said. "Last time I came this close, we saw a fruit tree just past the line. Red apples hanging low, fresh as you please. Two of my companions went for them before I could shout."
She paused, eyes on the dark between the trunks.
"They weren't apples. Just slimes wearing skin. Once the men bit down, the 'fruit' bit back. Turned to jelly in their mouths and slid inside. By the time we pulled them away, the things were coming out again. Through the softest parts."
Brann swallowed hard. No one joked.
Lysa nodded at the glistening bark ahead. "So when I say don't touch anything, I mean anything."
Jonathan rolled his shoulders, adjusted his grip on his sword.
"All right," he said. "Formation as we discussed. Lysa ahead. Sylvie behind her. I'm front. Sir Calen right, Brann left. Sister Maera and Arlen in the middle. No one touches anything without asking. If it looks valuable, assume it eats fingers."
Sylvie snorted, a little weaker than usual. "What if it looks like it eats faces?"
"Then you let Arlen poke it," Jonathan said.
…
Arlen sniffed. "My job is to keep you all from dissolving, not to lick every slime we see."
"You signed up to walk into Slimewood," Jonathan said. "Forward."
Lysa stepped past the invisible line. Nothing flashed, nothing screamed. The sound simply… changed. No birds, no insects. Just the wet suck of mud and their own armor.
Jonathan followed.
The air thickened three steps in. Light turned murky. His boots sank deeper. The forest felt like a place that had forgotten what wind was. The prickle between his shoulder blades said ambush—not from one direction, just the usual too many places to hide.
They walked.
Trunks bulged like they'd swallowed boulders. Pale, blister-like sacs clung to the wood, pulsing faintly, thin threads of clear gel running between them. In some places, knots in the bark had split and oozed a slow drip that thickened before it hit the ground, forming little mounds of jelly.
Once, Brann's boot landed in something clear. It hissed against his greave; the metal darkened where it touched. Sister Maera tapped the spot with her staff, whispering, and the sizzling faded.
"Outer ring was never this thick," Lysa murmured. "Used to be you could still see the sky."
Jonathan glanced up. He could see it, technically—strips of grey between interlocking branches and swollen growths. What light made it through arrived tired.
"How much further until we hit your 'no sane person goes there' line?" he asked.
"You crossed that when you signed the contract," she said. "But the place I mean is about a thousand paces in. You'll know it. Things stop pretending to be trees."
"Encouraging," Arlen muttered.
They squeezed between two particularly swollen trunks. Jonathan put a hand on the wood for balance and pulled it back quickly. It wasn't rough and dead like normal bark. It was smooth and faintly warm, with a slow thud under it, like sap moving in a too-thick vein.
He wiped his hand on his cloak.
"Eyes up," he said. "This place likes surprises."
The first slime they saw lay pooled at the base of a stump, pale green jelly with bones floating inside. Jonathan motioned them past.
"We're not here to catalogue every puddle," he said before Arlen could complain.
The second hung from a branch, a clear droplet that drew itself up as they approached. Sylvie gave it a wide berth.
"Slimes shouldn't climb that high," she said.
"They used to just crawl," Lysa added.
Jonathan filed that away under Things He'd Rather Have Known Yesterday.
The sense of being watched wasn't magic—just the way every surface seemed ready to move. Some of the swollen knots in the wood looked too much like half-formed eyes if you stared too long. Once, when Brann stumbled and grabbed a trunk for balance, the skin of the tree flexed under his hand, like overripe fruit giving way.
"Did you feel that?" Brann whispered afterward.
"Feel what?" Calen said.
Brann hesitated, then shook his head. "Nothing, ser."
They reached Lysa's line a short while later.
It wasn't a real line. Not a carved marker, not a wall. Just a change.
One moment they were moving through a sick, overgrown forest. The next, the pattern broke.
The trees here grew further apart, still swollen and damp, but spaced in rough rings instead of random clusters. The ground flattened in patches, as if something had worn it smooth. Slime pools no longer lay wherever they pleased; they dotted the earth at intervals that were a little too regular for comfort.
"That's… deliberate," Arlen said softly.
Lysa nodded. "When I came here last time, this is where we turned back. We lost two men. I promised I wouldn't cross it again."
"And yet you're here," Sister Maera said gently.
Lysa's shoulders rose and fell. "Yet I'm here."
Jonathan stepped onto one of the flat patches. It felt the same as the rest of the forest, just less lumpy.
"From this point on," he said, "we assume Slimewood is worse than the stories and try not to give it any help."
"That's not a proper theological term," Arlen muttered.
"Write a proper one when we're back," Jonathan said. "Lysa, tracks?"
"Plenty," she said. She pointed with her bow. "Heavy drags—slimes, most likely. And those smaller marks—rounded, repeating, not hoof or paw. Something that doesn't bother with toes. Whatever made them circles this place a lot."
A soft wet sound to their right cut her off.
"Hold," Jonathan said.
Plop. Plop. Squelch.
Sylvie peered between two trunks. "Uh. Boss?"
Jonathan moved up beside her.
In a small clearing, a shallow dome of transparent gel lay draped over a stump. At first it was just another slime.
Then it blinked.
An eye floated up inside it: round, human-looking, iris a pale grey-green. It rolled, fixing on them. A second eye joined it, then a third, slightly misaligned. Deeper in the gel, darker shapes shifted—more that might become eyes if given time.
"By the Green Mother," Sister Maera whispered.
The slime swelled a little, as if it had taken a breath. Its cluster of eyes slid, tracking Calen's armor, then Maera's staff, then Jonathan's sword. One deeper orb darted after a reflection on the knight's breastplate.
Arlen's hand tightened on Jonathan's sleeve. "Don't move," he breathed. "This… this is new."
"New how?" Jonathan asked.
"Slimes react. They don't arrange themselves," Arlen said. "That's focus. Something's either riding it, or it's getting ideas of its own."
The slime eased off the stump.
It didn't crawl. It unrolled, stretching into a low, wide smear. Eyes bobbed within like fruit in jelly. The front edge rose, tasting the air, then flowed a few paces toward them and stopped, tilting.
It felt like a beast checking its range.
"Brann," Jonathan murmured. "Plant your frame. If this goes bad, you're our rear anchor."
"Y-yes," Brann said.
"Maera, anything?"
"It's wrong," she said. "Not empty like undead. More like… sight pulled out of something living and left on its own."
"That sounds undead enough to me," Sylvie muttered.
One of the eyes near the edge stretched upward on a thin stalk of gel, wobbling. It pointed at Maera. Then at Jonathan. Then at the trees above.
It was pointing.
Arlen swallowed. "If you can understand me," he said quietly, "blink twice."
"Arlen," Jonathan warned.
The slime blinked once.
Nothing else moved. No tremor, no answering chorus. Some drip somewhere let go and hit the ground with a soft plip. That was all.
Jonathan's shoulders didn't unknot.
"All right," he said. "You get one chance to poke it. One. Then it goes in a jar or in the ground."
Arlen nodded, pulling a heavy-glass specimen jar from his satchel. Sister Maera whispered a quick blessing; a faint green sheen crawled over the glass.
The mage edged forward, rune-stone in one hand, jar in the other. The slime watched him.
When the stone was a finger's breadth away, the front edge snapped up like a whip.
Gel splashed over Arlen's glove and the rune-stone. An eye rode the blow, suddenly inches from his face through a thin veil of slime, iris contracting.
"Jar!" Jonathan barked.
Arlen slammed the jar down over the front half of the slime. Maera's blessing flared; runes on the rim lit. The captured mass thrashed, eyes spinning. The part left outside sagged, less coordinated, then slowly oozed back, trying to rejoin the rest through the narrow gap at the base.
Lysa's arrow hissed past Jonathan's cheek and buried itself in the exposed gel. A few of the outer eyes burst and ran like spilled ink.
Somewhere off to the left, something splashed, then went still again.
"Back," Jonathan snapped. "Form up."
Calen stepped up beside him, shield raised. Brann grabbed the pack. Sylvie slid to the flank, watching the trees.
Arlen clutched the jar like it held his future. Inside, the trapped slime pressed itself against the glass, all its remaining eyes fixed on them. It blinked three times in quick succession.
"Whatever you did," Lysa said under her breath, "you've got one of them very interested."
Jonathan believed that.
He met the thing's gaze through the glass.
"If this gets us killed," he told Arlen, "I will haunt you."
"Think of the research," Arlen whispered.
Jonathan thought of the Archduke's promise, the patent of nobility, land, a seat off the mud. Thought of all the fools who'd already walked into Slimewood chasing that same glitter.
He tightened his grip on his sword.
"Fall back ten paces," he ordered. "Slow and steady. We see if it follows. Nothing runs unless I say so."
Behind the glass, the slime's eyes rolled, tracking every step.
For the first time since crossing the border, Jonathan Dove had the distinct impression that some slime in this cursed forest had just put his name on a list.
Sum'gial POV
"Again," Sum'gial said.
The skeleton snapped its spear down, up, turned, and braced as ordered. The motion was technically correct. It was also ugly. The haft wobbled. The shield angle was wrong by a finger's breadth.
"That," Vyrgil said from atop the workbench, "is not how a respectable legion presents itself."
The goblin was dressed like a minor noble inspecting a parade: neat coat, polished boots, a ridiculous little monocle that did nothing for eyes that glowed faintly green from repeated exposure to the Tower. He tapped the rim of his teacup with a claw.
Sum'gial ignored the cup. He studied the skeleton.
The new plate fit. The joints moved cleanly. The enchantments along the bones hummed at the right frequency. Functionally, it was a success.
Aesthetically…
He flicked his fingers. The shield straps tightened on their own, drawing the limb into a more precise line.
"Better," he said. "Once we replicate that in ten thousand units."
Vyrgil sighed. "You say that as if ten thousand perfectly-equipped undead are something one finds in a cupboard."
"In this tower," Sum'gial said, "one does."
He snapped his fingers. The skeleton froze, then walked itself back to its alcove, armor plates clicking softly. A dozen more stood waiting along the wall, bare-boned for now, each tagged in his mind by the pattern of reinforcing spells woven through them. Infantry variants, cavalry variants, shield walls, pike lines.
The eye experiments were done. Muck had its prototypes and more complaints than any sane forest deserved. Now it was time to arm the rest properly. When—if—gods and kingdoms finally remembered this corner of the world, he wanted the welcome to be orderly.
A faint flicker nudged the edge of his awareness: the Tower's connection to the Forums of the Damned requesting his attention. Someone poking his name.
He did not immediately answer. Instead, he turned to Vyrgil.
"Opinion on the breastplate?" he asked.
"It says 'disciplined terror' at a glance," Vyrgil said, hopping down to walk a slow circle around the nearest armored skeleton. "I approve. Perhaps a touch more flair on the pauldrons. Intimidation is cheaper than adding more metal."
"Later," Sum'gial said.
He opened the Forum.
A new thread blinked at the top of his feed, labelled with a username that always seemed slightly damp even in plain script.
[BallofLiquid]: HUMANS IN MY FOREST
[BallofLiquid]: WHY DO THEY HAVE FIRE
.
.
.
Sum'gial's soulfire twitched.