Bring Death appeared in the sky.
It was a giant ship's wheel. As it fell through the air toward the forest, it made a horrible whistling noise, but at the same time made no noise whatsoever.
As it returned the forest to a state of death, it did so both painfully and painlessly.
Living beings both suffer and do not suffer in death.
The forest screamed, yet the forest was silent.
The wheel gently rolled through the forest and killed everything. Its path was entirely methodical.
Enza and Athalia only sat to watch it descend from the sky; they knew they had to get moving once it was headed toward the forest barrier.
Enza reached her hand into her suit and pulled out a large handful of pebbles. She handed them to Athalia, then took a handful for herself. As she dug through the suit, she tried to forget that part of it had been alive very recently.
The Explorers began to toss the pebbles onto the adjacent paths. A few paths collapsed, but they found the one that held. Repeating this process, they began to traverse the criss-crossing forest.
In the Forest of Ash, some of the tree wells have an Instrument buried underneath.
Just like with the catwalks, the locations of the trees change. However, the trees that had a buried Instrument will still have a buried Instrument at their next location, albeit a different one. This meant the Explorers could use colored tape to mark them.
It was one of the most reliable ways to get Instruments. However, Athalia and Enza weren't digging, even when they passed trees marked with green tape.
Speaking through her teeth due to the pain of being whipped at the tree earlier, Enza said, "Athalia, how's the smell in the air?"
"The evaporation cycle seems to be proceeding normally."
The Explorers naturally would have a reason to forego this opportunity to get more Instruments.
Back at the start of the expedition, something odd had happened here.
In the Forest of Ash, acid rain falls periodically. It's difficult to cross without getting rained on. However, this doesn't mean you can't make it through—platinum resists this acid rain, and the Institute had a platinum umbrella.
The key word being, they 'had'. For some unknown reason, the acid dissolved the umbrella while Athalia and Enza were sitting under it.
And this wasn't the only weird part.
Whenever that acid rain falls, a beautiful event called the Dance of Instruments happens.
But when the acid rain had fallen over Athalia and Enza, there had been no Dance of Instruments.
For this reason, Enza and Athalia were being additionally cautious and not interacting with any of the Instruments as they crossed the Forest of Ash.
The truth was, the Dance of Instruments hadn't happened because Azarias had suppressed them. Once he learned it was Enza and Athalia climbing the Mountain, he wanted to maximize their chances of making it to the third stratum.
But now, the pair of Explorers could clearly see that the Dance of Instruments would start… The tree wells were already starting to shift and tremble slightly.
Fortunately, they had prioritized moving quickly and were able to get out of the Forest of Ash before the rain started. They had finally reached the tram platform, which was generally a safe zone.
They sighed and slumped against the tram's copper walls.
They couldn't go inside and sleep yet. There was still one final task.
Far out of their sight, the Instrument called Bring Death had just finished killing the Forest of Life.
And at that moment, Bring Life had finished evaporating to the sky above the Forest of Ash, and started to pour down.
At once, there were little explosions all across the forest as the tree wells burst open.
An incredibly varied collection of objects started to fly and dance around the forest, matching the rapid drumming of the rain on the catwalks.
There were children's toys made from impossible shapes, power tools that had melded with live plants, full-fledged military weapons, medical supplies and scanners covered with organic overgrowth, heavy equipment with mismatched parts, factory biohazards congealed into objects with handles… Instruments could be all sorts of things.
The Explorers watched the dance with a smile on their faces.
After the rain had stopped, all the false paths had been stripped away, leaving only orange-painted catwalks.
At the border between the Forest of Ash and the Forest of Death, Bring Death was pushing itself through the border, turning into a puddle of acid. It slowly began to evaporate…
At the same time, Bring Life was reforming. After being turned to acid and falling as rain in the place it could not go, it was allowed to become itself again, to revive the forest once more.
The Explorers were performing their final task. This was to 'map the sentence'.
The pathways in the Forest of Ash periodically rearrange themselves. Each time the rain gets rid of all the ash, those pathways form a sentence. If one walks along all the pathways and draws out their path on a piece of paper, it forms words.
The messages contained in those words have value to the Explorers. Many think their source is the same power behind the 8-Ball. The words always seem to come true in some way, and nothing good comes of ignoring them.
On their way up, the sentence Athalia and Enza mapped was, "You can trust the foreman." Neither of them had any idea what that meant. They were hoping the next sentence would give them answers.
As they walked along the catwalks with pieces of paper and writing utensils in hand, they both felt short of breath and tightness in their chest. However, they were calm, as they had expected this.
Breathing in the acid rain—even after it falls—leads to the buildup of strange crystals inside the airways and stomach. Luckily, these are easily removed at decontamination. Nobody knew what their effect was, but all the crystals that had ever been removed were currently in storage at the Institute.
It didn't take long for Enza and Athalia to map the sentence, since the paths were clearly laid out for them. After they each did their half of the forest, they met in the middle to put it all together.
The sentence read, "The foreman is with you right now."
Enza and Athalia looked at each other in confusion. They were unable to come up with an explanation for what it meant.
They stumbled in exhaustion back to the tram, right as the next rain cycle started to fall on the Forest of Ash.
Enza reached under the tram and pulled open a hatch. This was where the new Instruments would be stored until the two got back. The main reason was to insulate the Explorers against any peculiar side effects of the Instruments which hadn't been discovered yet.
The deck of cards, the fishing rod, and the magnet were all tossed inside. Finally, it was really over. The last task, the last protocol…
At least, it was over until the next waking hour. There was still the turbulent crossing for them to worry about.
Enza and Athalia slumped down on the seats inside the tram and fell asleep. Since they had to be up for three days straight during the crossing, it was absolutely necessary to get rest now.
The two of them were relaxed, but little did they know there was someone under a lot of stress right then…
***
Kismet stood at the giant curtain in the Amusement Emporium. He was screaming curses at a cloud of bees, although they really didn't deserve him taking out his anger on them.
He was angry because of what was behind the curtain. Right now, that big wheel was rolling through the Forest of Death.
He was hoping to be chased by Bring Life rather than Bring Death, but it appeared he had no other choice.
Based on when he had seen Athalia and Enza last, he knew they must be sleeping inside the tram. He had suffered multiple delays while following them, and was desperate to make it back before they woke up and left. If he didn't hitchhike back, he simply wouldn't make it back.
As for the reason Kismet was afraid of being chased by Bring Death specifically, it was due to his personal preference.
To explain, let's first consider the way Bring Life violently evolves nearby lifeforms if it stays in one place.
Usually, this phenomenon is observed on surrounding life when an Explorer blocks Bring Life's path. But if Bring Life manages to catch an Explorer, it will stop to 'play' with them out of its curiosity, evolving them into something uniquely grotesque.
Bring Death exhibits a similar behavior. When an Explorer is caught by it, it stays by their side for some time and curiously looks at them, although it does not have eyes.
Even after it kills them, it stands there and continues to kill them.
What happens when a grand source of death tries to kill something that's already dead?
To consider the outcome of stacking the effect of death, you must consider what the effect of death is. You must first consider what it means to be dead in the first place.
Death doesn't have one definition.
An intuitive way to say it is, "It's when you stop existing."
But that third word is where the divide in definitions lies. It's with YOU. According to this intuitive definition, when YOU—the conscious YOU—leaves to never come back, that's when you die.
But how do you define what YOU are? There isn't any way to measure what being 'YOU' feels like in a way that is scientific.
This unfortunately leads to the scary problem that you can't prove if others around you are conscious like you are.
However, most people generally ignore this problem when going about their day-to-day lives.
Even if you can't prove others are conscious, you don't really have to. For most, it's harder to imagine that everyone else is dead on the inside than them being alive. When someone else says the right words, and you feel those words resonate within you, you think that someone really does get it. 'Other people really are alive after all.'
…You don't have to prove it in daily life, but you have to either prove it or simply discard it entirely when you're trying to come up with a scientific definition of death.
By discarding abstract consciousness, you're left with the various systems that make up a living creature. The brain, the heart, the lungs, and the others. The medical consensus is that when all these systems irreversibly stop working, the creature is dead. However, this leaves us with a strange issue: the definition hinges on the word irreversible.
These systems can fail in all sorts of orders, and in all sorts of ways. For that reason, you can't say something like: "When you die, the heart stops, then the brain." It's difficult to pin the definition on the cessation of any of these organs in particular, so you have to refer to the system of processes as a whole, when it has reached a point where those integrated processes can no longer be maintained: the point of irreversibility.
And this leaves a rather soft definition. You can't draw a true physical line for when something is dead; you only have a general agreement that it 'won't come back from this'.
It's easy to see where the problem lies when you zoom in on a living creature just a little bit; far enough to see the microorganisms and living cells.
When you die, it's not like all your cells die at once. Countless microorganisms continue to live inside you. The process of decomposition is actually the process of being eaten by the bacteria that live inside you.
So, even when you die, life continues on within you. A tree can even grow from your nutrients.
We treat death as discrete, but it is continuous.
But how does this relate to the Instrument called Bring Death? What happens when Bring Death's effect is stacked?
Well, on its first pass, it dismantles all those systems to the point of no return. This is death as we know it, but not everything has truly been killed. So, on its next pass, the grand ship's wheel rolls gently over all the tiny life. The bacteria that allow your corpse to continue in the organic cycle; it kills all of it. In a way, you become more artificial.
And with enough time, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper. All the way down to the quarks. Quarks—and the other elementary particles—were discovered on Earth rather recently; the understanding of them is limited, but they generally aren't thought to be living beings on their own. However, ultimately, all life is made of them, right? You can only destroy all life, truly 'kill', when you destroy the lowest form of matter. With enough time, Bring Death goes beyond the limit of quarks and electrons and into the unknown. Who knows what it does from there, but it definitely kills.
…And this is what Kismet was afraid of. The idea of dying this way, truly dying, simply terrified him.
You see, Kismet is a little obsessed with having a natural death. In a past life, he wanted to reach the center of Earth. He believed it was the most natural place to die. In this life, that manifested as reaching the bottom of the Chasm.
So, as he stood and watched Bring Death roll through the forest, he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He had to make it to the tram and sneak inside. If he didn't, he would die on the Mountain for sure. But if he took the risk, he could face an undesirable fate.
Unfortunately for him, he was beginning to forget who really held the power here.
BZZ!! BZZ!! BZZ!!
The bees had sensed that time was almost up. They grabbed Kismet by the collar and dragged him through the forest. They were so fast that Kismet didn't even have time to be scared. In seconds, he was across both of the forests and was standing right at the tram platform.
He looked at the bees in shock. "I had no idea you could move that quickly…"
He noticed they were trembling. They started to spell out the words, "We were scared too."
Kismet let them hug him, which really looked like him being attacked.
He tiptoed up to the tram and pulled open the compartment underneath for the Instruments. He climbed inside and shut the hatch behind him. His plan was a success. Right above his head, Athalia and Enza were sleeping peacefully.
He had made it in the nick of time.
Shortly after, Athalia and Enza woke up. The tram began to move slowly into the darkness, leaving the Mountain and its mysterious strata behind.
There weren't any windows in the dark compartment, but Kismet stared right through the wall.
He felt like he could see Azarias staring back at him from the third stratum.
***
Inside the tram, near the halfway point of the crossing
Athalia reached as high as she could. No matter what she tried, nothing was working.
"Aha!"
A glint appeared in her dark eyes as she noticed an opportunity. She lunged out and caught her target between her fingers, then she crushed it to death. She let out a maniacal laugh as she watched the lifeless fly drop to the ground.
"Buzzing around for the last eight hours behind the seat, and then suddenly revealing yourself? Your demise is well deserved. Arrogance killed you, not I. Your bravery to challenge death cannot be ignored, but neither can I praise you, as your last stand was only taken due to your ignorance. Ha, thank me in the afterlife for making it a fast process."
She leapt up in celebration, only to be pulled back to earth by the seatbelt loosely strapped over her waist.
WHAM!
I forgot we had reached the halfway point. Need to worry about turbulence for the next few hours…
She fell back to the floor and exclaimed in pain, caressing the forming goose egg on her head. She felt dizzy as she slowly swiveled her vision back and forth.
Regaining her mental clarity as the ringing in her ears quieted down, Athalia heard someone's voice.
"-Alia?"
Athalia turned to look at the black-haired girl who was talking to her.
"Athalia, are you okay? You know, if your seatbelt had been tightly fastened, you wouldn't have been able to get enough height to hit your head."
Enza looked worried, but there was clearly amusement concealed within her expression.
Athalia didn't dignify her question with an answer and responded with her own.
"How much longer until we arrive?"
Upon hearing this, Enza frowned.
"Let me hear your guess first."
"Twenty-four hours," Athalia said with a yawn after thinking for a moment.
The black-haired girl's eyebrows rose.
"Twenty-four? By my count, there are thirty-seven…"
"Want to bet on it?"
Just then, Enza and Athalia felt all the hairs on their arms raise.
It's starting…
They both began counting out loud.
"One, two, three, four…"
As the mental affliction became stronger, the numbers they counted out loud were mixed with crazed laughter.
Luckily for Kismet the stowaway, the laughter of them both was enough to drown out his own.