As the path cut deeper into the forest, Tara saw more species of wildlife, mostly plants and fungi. Collapsed trees became the housing complexes for numerous mushrooms shading the graying bark with their umbrella-like caps. Ferns were the new addition to the leaved plants occupying the spaces in between the trees, but their additional to the greening of the forest floor was minor at best, for moss clung to trees both fallen and still standing. The moss even seemed to gather into small piles, as if patiently collecting together into some terrible being. But the most welcome life was the flowers that had fought their way through the dead leaves to gather whatever beams of light happened to shine on them. Granted, the flowers Tara saw now were small and white, and none of them were the Celestial Flower, but they were an indication that she and Vivian were on the right path.
The path eventually brought them to another fork. Tara hadn't taken this path before—hadn't been in the park before this day—but she guessed that the path to the right wrapped back around to the park, while the other led further into the forest.
“This way?” Tara pointed down the path leading right.
“Guess again,” Vivian said. “I'm getting vibes from the other path.” She hooked a thumb to their left.
Tara shrugged her shoulders and said, “Whatever you say.”
As the pair veered to the left, Vivian said, “If we're lucky, the flower won't be too far from the path. Else, I hope you're prepared to do a little off-trail hiking.”
The trees were thick as ever in most directions, each one with a girth no less than three times that of the trees at the forest edge, yet they gave way for the clearings increasing in both size and numbers. Yet for all of the flowers they contained, the pair passed them by, Vivian paying little or no attention to each one. And as they continued, the hooting of owls and calls of unknown bird species reminded Tara that they were still in the bowels of the forest.
As the sun dived for the horizon, the forest was bathed in darkening shades where the sun's light failed to reach, and where the light did reach cast elongated shadows taller than even the trees to which they belonged. Yet with the night threatening their search, Vivian mentioned nothing about going back, and her pace, Tara swore, hastened more and more as the dead leaves and snapped twigs passed beneath their feet.
Tara began to wonder if they were going to find the flower in time. She was irritated that Vivian hadn't detected its presence until about five in the evening, but she knew that Vivian couldn't detect the Flowers until their buds had sprouted. And even then, during the car trip to the park, Vivian talked about how lucky she was to have picked up on the Flower while passing the park on her way back from the grocery store.
“Maybe we should come back tomorrow morning,” Tara suggested, worried that by the time they found the Flower, the path would be too dark to see for the return trip.
“No, we're close,” Vivian stated adamantly. Her head zoned in on a direction as if it were some sort of radar. The direction her head faced wasn't where the path immediately took them, and that made Tara wonder if they would need to leave the path in order to find the Flower. If so, Tara hoped not too far.
Vivian snatched Tara's hand and said, “Come on!”
“Hey!” Tara called out when Vivian started jogging. “Slow down!” Tara's socks acted as the only comfort from running that her topsiders failed to provide. Tara wished that she also had the power of foresight so that she could have planned for this moment.
Tara felt every twig and every hard lump of dirt that burrowed into the soles of her shoes and thus into the soles of her feet. Yet despite her pleas for Vivian to slow down, she refused. Tara tried to free her hand, but Vivian's grip was too strong to fight against. After a few moments, since Tara wasn't blessed with athletic genes and didn't run much anyway, her vigor spent itself in mere seconds as she swallowed less and less air with her struggling breaths. By the time Vivian let go of her wrist and came to a halt herself, Tara was hunched over, sweaty hands on her moist knees, gasping for air and desiring a soft chair and maybe a fan, too.
“This is it,” Vivian said.
Tara lifted her head, and her eyes widened with awe as she scrutinized every meticulous detail of the clearing before her. Tall blades of grass likely untouched by human hands grew at heights rivaling those of the purple flowers blooming every few inches. Beams of sunlight stretched across the gap between the grass and forest canopy like brush strokes, and the wobbling bees and colorful butterflies fluttering from flower to flower made Tara think of a scene from a fantasy movie. The sight stole the breath she had worked arduously to restore.
“You're up,” Vivian said, and gave Tara a modest push towards the carpet of flowers.
Tara tipped forward a few steps before catching herself before either foot could touch the plant growth. With her chest still heaving for air, she stood at this spot and studied the clearing once more, this time for the flower that was not like the others. But from this spot, the only two colors she saw were the green of the grass and the purple of the flower pedals; the third color she sought, the color of the Celestial Flower, was nowhere in sight from her position.
Before she had finished scanning the clearing, Tara had broken her record for time spent searching for a Celestial Flower. Her past searches were brief, with Vivian escorting her to someone's garden and then asking which flower was the Celestial Flower. Because of the strange color of the pedals of a Celestial Flower, Tara was quick with her duty, and the real challenge came with collecting the Flower without the homeowner's knowing the girls were ever there if they refused surrendering the Flower to them. Thieving flowers wasn't Tara's idea of a good time until she met Vivian, but she had become an addict to the rush she got whenever they pranced up to someone's garden and took the Flower as if there were a sign that read Take One.
When her stationary search turned up nothing, Tara plotted her next couple of steps into the clearing before entering. She was careful where she placed her foot, for she did not wish to tamper with the beauty of this place, even one mere flower, with her trampling; she felt bad enough crushing the blades of grass with gleams painted on their arcing figures.
She juggled between her duty of seeking out the Flower and her personal desire to enter and leave the place with the least amount of damage done. This slowed down her search, and she found her latter task to be fruitless when Vivian left a trail of bowing grass and crushed flowers in her wake.
“I really wish I could pinpoint it for sure,” Vivian commented from someplace behind Tara.
“You really can't sense it any more by walking around here?”
“Nope. Not even a little.”
Tara groaned with disappointment, but she also detected the anxiety welling within her because of their closing window of time. And with how well she knew Vivian, they'd both be scouring the field in the dead of the night, the lit screens of their cellphones their pitiful flashlights.
She omitted the time spent searching for places to step so that she could search the clearing at a faster pace. Her dotted trail curled a clockwise ring around the middle of the clearing, while Vivian's orbit rounded her closer to the edge of the clearing in the opposite direction. Every now and again, Tara asked Vivian if she had any luck on her part, but Vivian's negative answers turned from a simple no to a shake of the head after a short while.
Tara took notice of the changing shapes of the shadows, and time seemed to be purposely ticking faster just to send her into a fretful frenzy. She didn't bother checking her phone during her search, but the moments seemed long, since she was practically counting them by now.
She had just counted twenty-three minutes when she spotted something: a Flower whose pedals were of a color not like those of the surrounding flowers, or of anything else on the planet.
“Vivian! Over here!” Tara shouted with excitement and a grin on her face.
“Did you really?” Vivian asked, her own excitement leaking into her tone, and she made a beeline for Tara without waiting for an answer.
“Yeah, it's over here.” Tara walked up to the Flower and knelt before it. As far as she knew, this Flower was the same purple as the other thousands of flowers in the clearing, at least to Vivian. But for whatever reason, Tara saw this Flower in a different color—a color that she had no name for. She also couldn't begin to describe how it looked or guess what shades she would have to blend together to create it. She had tried in the past to recreate the color using every shade of paint she could get her hands on, but her endeavor was fruitless, and nothing she created looked remotely like the color of this or any other Celestial Flower. Tara found it to this day difficult to believe that this one Flower, if left alone, could kill off the entire forest similar to how the crown-of-thorns seastar killed off large swaths of coral reefs due to its insatiable appetite. “Population control,” Vivian called it: burning the Flowers before they bloomed and had the chance to seed their poison into the soil.
“Which one is it?” Vivian asked as she approached.
“This one,” Tara said, the tip of her nail inches away from a pedal. She would have allowed her finger to draw closer to the Flower if Vivian hadn't cautioned her in the past to not touch their pedals. “They're poisonous,” Vivian had told her. “A little touch won't kill you, but it'll put you in bed for the next few days.” After that, Tara hadn't dared to handle the Flowers, fearing that she might slip up and learn the hard way how poisonous these Flowers supposedly were.
Vivian produced from her jeans pocket the trusty Swiss Army knife used to curtail the Flowers before they were set ablaze in a safer location. She unsheathed the blade and held it below where she pinched the stem with two fingers. As she pressed the blade against the stem, Tara commented, “I think this one has bloomed more compared to the others.”
Vivian withdrew her blade from the stem and said, “You're right. That means if I cut it now, I risk its poison leaking out.”
“What should we do?”
Vivian looked at Tara with stern eyes and said, “For your safety, I want you away from this Flower. I think there's only a small risk of its poison leaking out, but better safe than sorry.”
“What about you? You didn't bring any gloves or safety equipment, did you?”
Vivian masked her nose and mouth using the collar of her shirt and through it mumbled, “Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.”
“But—”
“Go!” Vivian said, her tone shy of being considered a snap.
Tara, her nerves rattled by Vivian's sudden irritability, got up and walked away, looking back to see if Vivian would wave her further and further away. She continued like this until her feet touched the dirt forest path. “I'm not going any further,” Tara shouted, trying to add her own sternness to her tone.
Vivian gave her an approving wave and then hunched over to cut the stem.
Tara clenched at her chest as if that could control her pounding heart. She gnawed on one of her fingernails as she watched and waited for Vivian to stand back up, Flower in one hand and a thumb held high in the other.
Vivian appeared to have lifted the Flower from the ground, but then she threw it as if a bee that had hidden beneath the pedals found its way onto her hand. She leapt to her feet in a single motion and ran toward Tara as if the bee had summoned the rest of its colony. She tore through the clearing with less regard for the flowers and grass now than what she had shown earlier.
“What's the matter?” Tara shouted, one hand cupped around her mouth.
“Tara, run! Get out of here!”
Without permission, one foot took a step away from the meadow as if her body were reacting to Vivian's warning. “Did the poison leak?” Tara asked, fearful.
“Just run!”
Numerous white threads exploded like buckshot from the center of the clearing. They fanned out and anchored onto the branches and leaves of the overhead canopy, some of the threads attached to the trees surrounding Tara.
Tara hunched over, her hands over her head as she stared up at the gleaming threads as thick as street lamps and probably as strong as well. Yet at the same time, they looked soft to the touch, especially where their ends had splattered against the branches and trunks of trees. But then from these ends leaked a black substance. It made no sound and carried no scent as it washed up and down the trees that creaked as their forms changed, as if this substance were the paint to a brush.
The substance spilled onto the forest floor and washed onto the path as if the forest were suddenly flooding. Tara cried out and jumped backward, away from the substance that dribbled over the twigs and acted as a fertilizer that grew curling blades of dark grass.
“Tara, calm down.”
Tara felt a comforting hand on her shoulder, and she would have lurched from her own skin had Vivian not spoken beforehand. “Vivian, what's going?!” she asked as she tiptoed away from the flood.
“It won't harm you. Promise.”
Tara stopped at what dirt remained of the edge of the path, still on her toes and shaking from both imbalance and fear. She trusted Vivian's word at first, then backed up when the encroaching substance was upon her. She did this a few times before slipping off her shoe to test Vivian's word. When the substance passed beneath it without dying it black or turning it into exotic fauna, she allowed it to pass by.
“What's going on?” Tara asked as she slipped her shoe back on. When she looked up at Vivian, she winced, because she thought that she was standing by a different person for a second. This person had the same face and hair of Vivian Hale, yet they weren't garbed in the casual street clothes that she had been wearing all day. Instead, a mandarin collar poked up from beneath the dark red cloak that was cut off at the vertex of her abdomen. Replacing her t-shirt, or perhaps covering it, was a jacket tightened around her waist by a belt and endowed with white stripes along its bottom and cuffs, and black slacks without a single crease were tucked into her shin-high boots. This uniform inspired relations to the uniform of marine soldiers, yet the addition of the cloak baffled Tara, since it clashed so much with the military vibes she was receiving.
“I know what you're thinking,” Vivian said, “but I can't help that this is what my clothes become in these places.” As she lifted one flap of her cloak, she said, “Though I have forgotten what this looks like.”
It was only now that Tara realized that her had jaw had fallen. She closed it for a split second only to open it when she asked, “Vivian, I...” She shook her head, eyes still locked on the uniform. “I don't understand. What's going on?”
Vivian possessed in her eyes the fierce gaze of someone ready to fight. It was a strong and confident look that for a second caused Tara to forget about the morphing world around her. “I'm afraid that I can't explain everything right now.” She aimed her attention past Tara and started walking. “Just know that we're not in our dimension—not anymore.”
Tara was overcome with both fear and confusion. Fear from the wording that she interpreted as walking through a one-way door, and confusion from how that door opened up in the first place. “What do you mean? How did we even get here?”
Vivian stopped a few steps from the path and stared at the origin point of the threads. The black substance oozed from there, too, and crashed into the wave from the trees. “I can't tell you how skipping through dimensions works, but I can tell you that this area is a duplication from our own dimension that sits between universes. It's stable for the time being, but sooner or later, it'll merge with its host dimension, a.k.a. our dimension.”
Tara furrowed her brow, unable to grasp the specific meaning of Vivian's words. It sounded like science-fiction yet like a work of fantasy at the same time. Did physics even apply here? She had her doubts about an affirmative answer since she apparently shifted dimensions without so much as a dizzy sensation to let her know when she had changed planes of reality. When did she change realities, anyway?
“Wait, so are we...trapped here?”
“So long as that thing is alive, yes. But if I can kill it, everything will revert.”
“What...thing?”
“The thing residing in the Celestial Flower.”
With a shiver cast onto her spine by those words, Tara started looking around for whatever “thing” Vivian might have been referring to.
Black squares fell from the trees like dried leaves on a cool Autumn breeze. Unlike leaves, however, they did not blanket the ground with their massive numbers but instead burst into tiny fireworks that fell upwards and faded into nothingness. The ground upon which they landed grew lush blades of grass that waved and curled and sprouted a second blade or a tiny blossom too heavy for even the strong-looking blades. The branches overhead lost their firmness as they curled up, their bark as flexible as need be without snapping. No leaves or flowers budded from these flora shapes, but vines serpentined around the branches and then hung low as if they were a new species of snake that waited for ignorant birds to fly too close to its jaws. The setting sun wasn't visible in the sky, but the sky itself wasn't visible, either, and there was instead a black void that somehow cast light onto this space so that Tara could observe its surreal beauty entrapped by a gray fog teetering against the backdrop of simple tree silhouettes in the distance.
Tara saw no signs of the “thing” of which Vivian spoke of in the environment, so what was she talking about? She checked back with Vivian and found her gaze still locked on the threads in the middle of the clearing.
The threads flew into the air and plastered against the curled branch of a leaning tree. Vivian put up a defensive stance, Swiss Army knife firm in her hand, and Tara was startled not just by the sudden movement but also the thing dangling from the intersection of the threads with a stinger almost as tall as herself.
It looked like a worm of impossible proportions with a ribbed body pigmented the color of desert rock formations. The body thick as an aged oak tree writhed in the air to free its still-buried head. The threads bounced with the gentlest sway despite the worm's fierce squirms, and Tara swore that she heard the crooning of moans beneath her feet.
“Wh-what is that thing, Vi-Vivian?” Tara asked, her words wavering as much as her body.
Vivian flipped out one of the tools of her Swiss Army knife, and Tara barely had enough time to identify it as a bottle opener before the tool's entire structure was bathed in a faint yellow glow. This glow that was like the sun itself in this space grew in size and took on the shape of a rifle. Tara wasn't too knowledgeable in the field of firearms—gained her current knowledge the one time Vivian took her to her extended family's firing range—but she recognized a WWII rifle when she saw one. Yet the gun in Vivian's hand didn't resemble the pictures she had seen during her high school history classes. It had the simplicity of a WWII rifle—body, barrel, trigger, sights, magazine, and bolt—yet it had the futuristic gleam of a piece of technology unrolled from the factory line in a science-fiction film. Even when its glow was gone, it had the white gleam of the full moon on a hot summer night.
Tara split her lips to ask Vivian about her weapon, but she knew her words would fall upon deaf ears, and it was agony having an increasing list of questions to ask yet no time to receive answers.
Vivian raised the rifle's iron sights to her eyes, her aim directed at the worm. She did nothing for a few seconds, and Tara couldn't tell if Vivian was waiting or still training her sights on the worm.
“Tara, find some cover away from me,” Vivian said.328Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9PPCqzNdg6
“What about y—”328Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPsKSgoGEoM
“Hide, dammit!” Vivian snapped. “Now!”328Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwA7rhDgz0m
Tara's heart skipped a beat, for she had not seen Vivian so serious before, so demanding or forceful. For a split second, she feared Vivian more than she did the worm or this space, and she obeyed Vivian's demand without any opposition on her part. She took up shelter behind a tree away from the path, but she could still see the events within the clearing no problem.328Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡPZNS3pW4Tj
The rifle kicked backward with a hum as a beam of light stretched from where the barrel had been to the base of the worm's stinger. The beam hung frozen for a few seconds before slowly fading away, the worm meanwhile thrashed so much from the hole opened in its body that it snapped its stinger as a sacrifice for its freedom.
Tara thought the tail would disappear indefinitely beneath the carpet of curled grass, but then a spray of earth and grass blew out in all directions, and from the center of the mess emerged the head of the worm.
It cried out, a hollow, rumbling roar that darted here and there between the trees. The sole feature on its round head was a pinched point of flesh, as if something had grabbed hold of the worm's skin and dragged it within its body. But then that skin crawled outward, and Tara saw with her wide eyes rows of teeth the size of a small child embedded within the spotted gums. The two inner rows pointed at the center point within its mouth, as if primed to fire should nourishment enter, but the front-most row splayed forward as if reaching out to pull prey from the air into its mouth.
Vivian's rifle kicked again as the beam of light returned, this time entering the mouth and exiting through its back. The worm cried out, this sound a pained shriek that possessed the same ghostly echo as its previously roar. Its head crashed onto the ground—Tara needed to wrap her arms around her tree for support from the quivering ground—the light unaffected by its movements. The worm slithered towards Vivian—the bulge on its midsection that resembled an earthworm's clitellum apparently not slowing its speed one bit—with its jaws wide open and teeth marking her as a target.
Light exploded from Vivian's rifle, vanishing within the worm's mouth and reappearing near its tail, sending chunks of its flesh skyward. But the worm did little more than let out a moan as it leapt into the air, its trajectory careening it towards Vivian.
“Vivian!” Tara cried out.
Vivian jumped into a roll as the worm crashed into the ground, which gave way as if it were sand on a beach. The worm didn't burrow into the ground but had dug out enough that the lower portion of its jaw filled with the dark brown dirt sprinkled with bright pebbles. The worm slowed as it raised its head, clumps of dirt dropping from its jaws, and, as if it had eyes, looked at Vivian, who was now in a full sprint.
She was fiddling with her gun—with her bolt if Tara was right—and it glowed again as it reshaped itself. Either end retreated into Vivian's hand, and when it stopped glowing, she was holding something too small that Tara couldn't identify from her hiding place. What she could see, however, was something protruding from Vivian's hand.
Grass bowed before the tail of the worm, which was sweeping towards Vivian.
She accepted the protruding object into her right hand and hurled it at the worm's tail. Tara slapped her hands against her ears as the clearing trembled with the blooming flames of a screaming explosion. The worm whipped its head about, and it threw its tail away from the blackening flames, slamming it numerous times on the ground, a gash so large torn into its tail that Tara was surprised the dangling tip didn't fling off because of the worm's uproar.
Vivian distanced herself from the flailing worm, and after fiddling with her current weapon's form, her hand radiated from its glow as it reshaped itself, this time into another gun. It had the same shine and gleam as her previous weapon, but it was colored a dark red similar to her uniform. Tara recognized this gun better than she did the previous one; this was the weapon of choice by mobsters in the movies.
Weapon in hand, Vivian pivoted and emptied her magazine on the worm without bothering to raise the sights to her eyes. The gun had the same recoil and rapping sound of the actual thing, yet its bullets bombarded the worm in a torrent of explosives that, while small individually, matched that of her grenade's.
The worm spazzed about before tunneling its head into the ground, its damaged tail leaving in its wake a trail of its own blood and gore. Vivian stopped firing on it as its tail dragged closer to where Tara had been hiding.
Not a single bird chirped, and not a single insect buzzed, so the sole sound was the faint churning of the earth, which unsettled Tara to such a degree that if she possessed the skill of tree climbing, she would have been up her tree in a flash.
She clung to the tree, ready to attempt a climb, and even if she couldn't get more than a foot off the ground, she was damned if she didn't try. She kept open ears focused on the churning sounds beneath her feet, trying to guess where they were coming from and where they were going. But because they were so faint, she couldn't tell if that was because the worm was too deep to hear or if it was closer to Vivian.
Vivian, meanwhile, had lost her Tommy Gun and reclaimed the object in her hand that housed the cylindrical grenade. Her head turned circles as if tracking the churning herself, though Tara couldn't tell if Vivian's eyes or her ears pointed to the source of the noise.
The rumbles of thunder from within Tara's chest drove her mad, and she cursed herself for being unable to somehow overturn the earth and slay the worm or impale it with an oversized spear the way someone might a fish, except she wanted the tunnels of this catch to be its grave site.
A few minutes passed, and Tara could hardly hear the unnerving noise anymore, but she noticed that Vivian was staring intently at the ground. She wrapped her fingers around the grenade and stood, legs bent, ready for a sprint or a leap.
Even though Tara had anticipated it, feared it, she still thought she was hallucinating when the earth beneath Vivian's feet bulged like some sort of heated bubble. She expected the bubble to burst, shipping a vortex of dirt into the air as if a bomb detonated beneath the surface; and when the shower of dirt ended as fast as it had begun, Vivian would have been replaced with the worm as it rose into the air, triumphant, and then—
Tara tore herself from her horrific fantasy in time to witness the earth crack and crumble and slip into an increasing hole. Vivian removed the grenade from the tool to which it was attached, hurled it into the hole, and then flew off of the rising mound. By the time her feet touched the ground, the spot she had been at was replaced with splaying teeth.
Dirt and grass blades poured from between the curved outermost row of teeth in such as way that the worm looked like it was rising from the depths of a dirtied sea. It let out another roar, this one a mumble by its standards, as its body formed an animated arch. However, before its head could birth a tunnel, a portion of its midsection above ground erupted as a grotesque supernova that left its body in two sections: the tail, which came to a quick stop at the height of the grass, and the head, which smashed into the ground. The section of body it was left with tumbled over and slammed onto the ground without anymore movement on its part. The worm closed its smashed teeth and hid them beneath its pinched skin, and its final movements were but a few twitches.
A hush extended across the space as Tara watched Vivian examine the head from a safe distance, Tommy Gun in hand and its barrel aimed at the worm. Vivian walked with slow cautious steps as she circled around the head of the worm. Every now and again, she released a round, which popped into a puff of smoke that left little more than a red dent in the worm.
Tara wondered how it could still be alive, and she knew Vivian was wondering the same.
“Is it dead?” Tara shouted to Vivian, one hand cupped around her mouth.
Vivian shouted over her shoulder, “I can't tell yet, but it can't be.” She resumed inspecting the worm when her head whipped all of a sudden like an animal that heard something in the nearby brush. She stayed in this position for a quick minute before alining her body with her head. Her gun transformed into a grenade, and Tara wondered if the worm—a second, hidden head of it?—was enough of a fool to fall for the same trick twice.
While Vivian seemed to be employing the same tactic, she performed it differently by taking slow backward steps. Her steps hastened at one point, but then she slowed down again, and Tara caught herself biting down on her nails.
A long hairy, black spike burst through the ground, its sudden arrival beside Vivian kicking her into unbalanced sidesteps. Her grenade glowed, but its light was but a flicker as another of the spikes appeared in a flash, too close for comfort. Vivian, with a spike on either side, backed away in what amounted as a backward jog.
Her grenade glowed yet again, and it had started its transformation. In one frame, a light-bathed Vivian was backing away from the two spikes; in the next, she was dangling from a third spike that had appeared as quick as the previous two. Her Swiss Army knife slipped from her fingers and vanished into the grass.
The air in Tara's lungs rushed out, and she was cocooned in a freezing blanket as her eyeballs, still in her shaking head, watched Vivian dangle from the spike that had impaled her through her torso. Little by little, Tara's jaw lowered with each shallow breath. When her jaw would fall no more, she shouted, “Viviaaaaaan!” She ran towards her, but her foot snared on the tree trunk, and she had to catch herself on her hands. From this position, she shouted to Vivian again but received no answer.
One, two, five more spikes surfaced, but they moved at a leisurely pace, and it wasn't until they arced over the ground that Tara realized they were legs. All but the leg holding Vivian touched the ground, and the soil parted as the body the legs belonged to debuted with a horrible shriek that could have broken glass had any existed in this space.
Unlike normal spiders which had two distinct tagmata—cephalothorax and abdomen—this gargantuan arachnid had three: head, thorax, and abdomen. Its thorax was a bloated light-absorbing spheroid that had an unnatural polish, and though it had the breadth of a small car, this was the smallest of its tagmata. Its abdomen was swollen to the point where it looked like it could pop with the tiniest pinprick. Two coyote brown tremors hiked up the hairy bulb that was dotted with small protrusions that vaguely resembled the proboscis of a housefly. And the head...well, Tara before today had not seen a spider with a full set of jaws, but this first of hers might have been the last thing she would see, she feared. The massive jaws hung open, the smallest teeth no less than a foot in length, and streams of swaying drool leaked from between the teeth that were sharpened to a point too fine. And while Tara had also heard of a spiders that didn't have eight eyes, she hadn't before seen one equipped without a single one. The smooth forehead of the spider had the same polish as the thorax, and it was so flat—flat because of the jaws swallowing up the vast majority of the head—that Tara wasn't surprised that the spider lacked even a single pair.
The spider tilted its head as if it could somehow see Vivian. So much drool spilled over its fat lips that Tara thought the spider would asphyxiate itself with its own saliva if it continued to salivate like this.
“No...” Tara whimpered as the spider held Vivian higher, as if admiring its catch. “No...stop...” she begged it so quietly that a person with their ear up to her mouth might have even had trouble understanding her. “Don't...please...” she said through clattering teeth and shivering lips. As the spider opened its jaws wider, she noticed the slight upturn at the rear of its lips, and she could have sworn that the spider was grinning, complimenting itself on its catch while mocking Tara as she knelt beside her tree, no power to do anything.
The spider's jaws opened wide, wider, as it held the tip of its leg over its mouth so that Vivian could slide straight into its mouth; it was the same gesture Tara made whenever she was snacking on salty foods. She slapped her hand over her lips as she threw up in her mouth.
Vivian slid down the leg so slow that Tara was confident the spider was taunting her, and as Vivian came to the final bend in the leg that would deposit her in between the spider's teeth, Tara threw her head to her right and squeezed her eyes shut. As she did, she saw threads flying through the air near the edge of the clearing. She suspected it to be her eyes playing tricks on her—her mind betraying her and forcing her to open her eyes to check and then watch as Vivian entered the jaws of the spider as nothing more than a light snack.
The spider shrieked, a pain-ridden cry that tore through Tara's body and soul but was also a magnet for her attention. She opened her eyes and saw six dark olive green ribbons floating above the clearing, starting from the edge and ending at the spider, which was stomping backward and tossing one of its legs about. The leg that it was throwing about was the one used as a skewer, and that leg was hovering in midair, Vivian still impaled, by five ribbons that were guiding it to the opposite side of the clearing. The sixth ribbon meanwhile didn't strike the spider, but it cracked at the ground before it the way a cat o' nine tails would strike the ground before a would-be torture victim ready to suffer flagellation.
Tara followed the ribbons back to their owner and, though she was confident she didn't know them, couldn't help but feel that she seen them before. The cloak they wore was a different color—dark olive green—than Vivian's and longer—cut at her ankles—but Tara couldn't help the sense of connection to Vivian she picked up from the cloak. She couldn't see what this stranger was garbed in because of the cloak, but when she studied the wavy chestnut hair, it occurred to her the identity of this stranger: the girl from earlier.
What? Her too? Tara thought as a whimper. She watched the girl for a minute as she violently waved her left gloved hand about, the sole ribbon in that hand lashing at the spider and occasionally chopping at its legs, and held her right gloved hand steady, the five smaller ribbons guiding Vivian and the leg to safety.
“Vivian,” Tara muttered, and stumbled to her feet so that she could chase after Vivian. Her heart pounded in her chest so much that she thought it might explode at any second, and though she had been immobile the last however many minutes, her body had enough vigor to trot her along at a slow jog.
The ribbons gently lay Vivian on her back, the cut leg pointing at the sky and leaking a large puddle of a vomit-green fluid around her. Tara circled around the puddle until she found the spot at Vivian's side least-invaded by the fluid. She dropped to her knees and lifted Vivian's head with gingerly care. Her jaw hung agape as her eyes flicked up down from Vivian's face to the shredded edges of her jacket and cloak. Though both were red, Tara could identify without trouble the blood Vivian's clothes had absorbed.
“Vivian?” Tara said to the motionless face whose parted lips offered no response and whose glazed eyes showed no interest. “Vivian, come on,” she said, gingerly shaking Vivian's head.
Another shriek of pain stole Tara's attention, and she found the spider missing three more of its legs with vomit-green fluid dribbling where the legs had been. The spider flailed the stubs about as it recoiled, its abdomen dragging against the ground. The girl still stood at the edge of the clearing, her right hand held up as the ribbons lashed at the spider on their own, as if they were a nest of vipers striking at their prey. The sole ribbon, meanwhile, hovered closer to the girl, its length somehow shortened to about four feet.
The spider threw its abdomen into the air, and several dashes of white illustrated themselves from the protrusions on the back of the spider's abdomen to two of the viper ribbons, pinning them to the ground, and around the girl, causing her to wince.
The girl, however, didn't allow the threads to be too much of a distraction, and, with a lash of her sole ribbon, slashed the threads that had immobilized her two viper ribbons. The slash was mostly a blur, but Tara saw that the blur was many times the starting and finishing length of the sole ribbon.
The spider launched more threads at the girl, many of them drawing too near. But she slashed them in two with another swipe of her sole ribbon. The spider fired a third volley of threads, which the girl cut down yet again, but while dealing with this third real, the spider held up its cut legs, and new ones spewed forth in a vomit-green splatter. The spider let off a confident shrill before slinging segments of thread, the shortened strings splattering on the ground around the girl, some of them clinging to the ribbons but not weighing them down by any noticeable amount. The spider maintained this method of attack while charging the girl as well.
The girl reeled her sole ribbon back, the viper ribbons held out of the way and as a shield, or at least the best they could be used a shield. She tossed the sole ribbon forward, a blur swiping at the spider's right legs, causing the charging creature to crash to the ground; the tremors from the landing rocked Tara's knees.
Yet despite being downed, the spider crawled to the girl while white missiles fired from its abdomen like some kind of automatic weapon with a slow but still formidable rate of fire.
The sonic boom of a crack pierced the air, and as the spider shrieked in pain, the missiles stopped for a second.
Several thin green lines chased after the curled tree branches above, and the girl followed in pursuit, her olive green tunic visible as her cape sailed behind. She dashed between two of the intersecting threads and spun onto a branch, which she knelt on. The spider pivoted, its head whipping left and right in search of the girl.
With her viper ribbons wriggling off to the side, the girl lashed her sole ribbon at the spider, and it cut into the abdomen near where it met the thorax. Yet that was but what the injury was: a cut.
Four fresh new legs burst from the stubs, a web of the green fluid leaking down the limps, and the spider looked up at the girl with its eyeless face and hissed as it loosened more missiles at her.
The girl, however, grappled onto another of the curled tree branches, and swung around the clearing. The intersecting threads fell one by one as she sliced them out of her way as she glided past Tara and Vivian. Despite the obstacles of the falling white threads, the girl tossed out her viper threads and withdrew them with such speed and precision that she avoided each thread, and each one fell as if she hadn't performed her acrobatics around them. And the spider's projectiles lagged behind the girl so much that they might as well have not been fired.
As the girl passed by, Tara feared the spider would spot her and Vivian and give up on the girl for an easier meal. But she sighed with relief as the spider passed them by, apparently wearing blinders that permitted awareness of the girl and only the girl.
The girl found herself a roost on a thick branch opposite the one she had been on seconds earlier. From there, while the spider struggled to pivot its body to match her position—though it wasn't slow by any means—a blur swiped through the threads on the far end of the meadow from where Tara and Vivian were.
The girl swung to another branch before the spider aligned with her, and another blur severed the last of the threads hanging over the spider. These threads draped over the spider, which fumbled, confused by the objects laying over top of it, and the air was purified of all threads for the first time in this space.
The girl soared to a branch parallel with the spider's abdomen, and as she released it, she twirled in the air, and her ribbons followed in suit as a massive pinwheel. The blades sliced into the spider, a spray of green fluid escaping from where the abdomen and thorax meet, and also released was a sequence of cries so loud that Tara dug the heel of her palms into her ears.
The spinning of the pinwheel was so fast and short-lived, and the girl slid to a halt beside the severed abdomen. The spider, with what was left of its body, scurried away, crying and thrashing about as if it still had an abdomen to throw around. A single blur, then an ensemble of five blurs: the first chopping off the left four legs of the spider, then the five removing the last four before gravity could pull the spider to the ground.
The legless spider flopped about like a fish, and like a fish, it was helpless, at least for a moment. However, the girl swung around so that she stood before it. The spider's stumps fluttered through the air as if it thought it could walk and began hopping for the girl, its jaws snapping, though she was well out of reach.
The viper ribbons retreated to their glove, where they shrunk down to the smallest squared glued to the fingertips. The girl removed that glove and stuck her naked thumb in her mouth. She bit down on it, then rubbed that thumb across her sole ribbon. The red smear she left didn't reach the end, but the girl either didn't notice or didn't care. She brought her hand over her right shoulder, waited a second as the spider drew nearer, then hammered it down.
The spider was a statue, its jaws wide open and its legs frozen in various positions. Tara could see portions of the sole ribbon in between the curled grass blades, the dark olive green line exiting the rear of the spider's thorax and entering its abdomen before exiting even that and following the vegetation into the silhouettes of the trees.
Several branches fell from the trees, and as they fell, they disintegrated into shredded black squares. As those branches disappeared into nothingness, the branches of the trees slithered back to their original shapes; the black square leaves clinging to the branches regained their shapes; the grass lost its shape; flowers bloomed once more; the vines fell from the trees in a shower of black squares; the gray mist lifted, and the black sky washed away into the purple light of twilight that painted the forest its usual colors; and the girl's cloak wrapped around her body and molded itself into the clothes she had been wearing when Tara and Vivian had passed her. The only article from that space that remained were her gloves, which she removed and stuffed into one of her pockets.
The spider met the same fate as its cut branches and vines, and Tara saw the same fluttering squares from the corner of her vision. When she inspected, she found that the leg of the spider that had impaled Vivian had dissolved into nothing. Vivian's uniform burned as fuel for tiny flames. Panicked, Tara patted at them before seeing that the uniform melted into her previous outfit. She stopped, relieved to see that Vivian was all right—from the flames, at least. The hole in Vivian's abdomen was not sealed, and Tara could see straight through her friend's body to the bloodied grass below.
With a gasp and a squeezed chest, Tara's hands jumped to Vivian's wound, then stopped, for she did not know what to do, how to treat it. She knew that when someone was impaled, the object should be left in the body until paramedics arrived, but with the leg gone...
Her hands shook from fear and shock and ignorance of not knowing how to handle the situation. They darted from corner to corner of the wound, and the blood continued to seep. She turned to Vivian to see if maybe she had words of advice to donate, yet Vivian lay staring blankly at the darkening sky.
“Vivian, what do I do?” Tara asked, an ache in her throat and a smudge in her vision. “How should I treat you?” she asked when Vivian said nothing. She reached into her pocket and produced her cellphone. It shook so much in her hand that she had to grip it as tight as she could to keep it from slipping.
She had pressed two buttons when she heard, “Don't bother.”
Tara followed the source and found it to be the girl, who stood staring at her with chilling eyes.
“Don't bother?” Then louder: “How could you say that? My friend h—”
“Your friend is dead,” the girl said adamantly.
“You don't know that!” Tara snapped back without a second thought.
“Take a look at her!” The girl pointed to Vivian. “She's got a hole so wide in her abdomen that I'm surprised she wasn't cut in half.”
Tara jarred her teeth so firmly that she thought the clicking sound she heard was one of her teeth chipping. She leapt to her feet, and her shaking hands curled into fists, one of which was thrown at the girl while she yelled, “You b—”
Tara's wrist was snatched in midair, and the girl socked her good in her face. She then threw Tara to the ground, and Tara exclaimed with the pressure from the girl's foot on her collar bone.
“Listen here: your friend is dead. DEAD! As in she's gone, not coming back. There's no saving her. She's good as gone.”
Tara glared at the girl, brows furrowed in fury, then they reversed direction as tears pooled in her eyes. As she wiped them away with her arm, she asked, “Why? Why'd she have to die? She was a good person. She didn't deserve it.”
“Your friend chose this lifestyle knowing full well that she could kick the bucket at any moment. The same goes for me or anyone else who's consumed the power of a Celestial Flower, and that's the life of people like us.”
“I don't understand,” Tara said in between her weeps. “Why do that? She could have lived a normal life.”
“I don't know why your friend gave up her normal life, but I can confidently tell you that she wanted to protect this world.”
“Protect it by throwing her life away?!” Tara bawled.
The girl rubbed the heel of her foot against Tara's collar bone and said, “In case you didn't notice, this area of forest was transformed into what that spider desired. If it or any others were left alone, this universe would look more and more like that black forest we were just in. You're just lucky that I sensed that spider's birth and got here in time before this place was copied over.”
Not lucky enough, Tara thought, then asked, “How come not all of the Flowers spew those things? What was so different about this Flower?”
“It probably matured too much.” The girl looked at the spot where the spider had been and said, “Let those things grow too much, and anything you do will set those things free.”
Solemnly, Tara asked, “How long have you been doing this?”
The girl looked down at her without moving her head. “What's it to you?”
“You were so skilled, like...like you had done this dozens—hundreds of times before.” Tara rolled her head over to Vivian. “But she...” A constriction in Tara's throat kept her from finishing.
“Your friend was either inexperienced or just not good enough to handle that spider.”
“Vivian was good enough!” Tara said, her fury present once more. “She took down a worm much larger than that spider and with no effort at all! If that spider hadn't played dirty, then—” Tara exclaimed again as the girl pressed all of her body weight on her collar bone. Tara grabbed the girl's ankle and tried to lift and push her off, but the girl was a deadweight.
“Your friend can take down all of the worms she wants without breaking a sweat, but victories mean nothing. One little mistake or not expecting there to be more to one of those things and it's all over: once someone's undefeated streak is over, everything's over.” She removed her weight from Tara but kept her foot planted on her.
The grip on the girl's ankle Tara had loosened until her hands fell to either side. Her teeth clattered, her eyes squeezed shut, and tears slipped through the cracks between her eyelids. She started sobbing yet could hear what the girl had to say next: “I don't know what your friend was doing dragging you into any of this without telling you anything, but you paid the price, and now you've touched part of our world.” She removed her foot from Tara and started away.
Tara rolled her head to watch the girl walked away, her long shadow cast in the grass, followed by the flicker of another shadow. Curious—and frightened by what she might have seen—Tara sat up just enough to see that as the girl left the clearing, her shadow revealed her cloak flowing behind.
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