“This is as good a spot as any.”  

Etl’s voice snapped Teresh away from his own thoughts, and he gave his head a quick imperceptible shake before he acknowledged the words of his travelling companion. 

Etl didn’t bother to look up from where he labored.  The little man was already hard at work, intent on clearing burze from the damp forest floor. “Gonna be a wet one,” he said, shaking his head. “Fucking hell. Look at this place.“ 

The clammy conditions of the forest didn’t irritate Teresh as much as they seemed to bother his companion.  Teresh had spent winters in worse places than this, and was more than willing to trade a little moisture if it meant avoiding the freezing storms of his childhood. Etl, however, had a gift for grievance: a penchant for placing his animosity into the entirety of the world around him – be it folk, or fauna, or apparently even flora.

“And fuck me for being stupid enough to oversleep.” Yet Etl always seemed to loathe himself as intensely as he did this surroundings, and in Teresh’s mind, somehow, that evened things out. “It’s my own goddamn fault.” 

Teresh lowered his pack and stretched out his long arms, hoping to work some warmth into them. “I don’t think it will be so bad,” he offered in an amiable tone.  “Maybe we can get a fire going.”

“There’s no fucking way,” Etl seethed.  He gave his head a disappointed shake, but then turned to Teresh and laughed.  “I grew up in forests like these.  All this wood’s soaked through, man.”  Etl laughed again, in spite of his apparent annoyance, and for some reason Teresh found himself on the edge of laughter as well.  

He shrugged at Etl, and kept on stretching his arms, then began studying the intricacies of the local foliage.  His eyes never wandered upwards to the high branches and the wide, deciduous leaves that loomed overhead. Instead, Teresh’s gaze ran downwards towards the base of the trees, to where wide, curling roots bore into the ground beneath.  The thick wooden tendrils were strong enough that they’d managed to sheer the face of the rock into which they’d grown, revealing a colorful set of stratified layers within. Teresh knelt, running a finger along the multi-colored levels of the calcified sediment, tracing it down into the depths of the dirt. 

“But also, fuck Aldrick for leaving us, right?”  Etl had taken a spot behind Teresh’s shoulder, and leaned down to see what was being studied.  Even crouching, Teresh was tall enough that the man had to bend at the waist to look over his shoulder. “What are we looking at?”

Teresh didn’t answer immediately, letting his mind wander far below, to depths immeasurable,  before he finally spoke. “This rock goes deep into the ground, and it has layers like this all throughout it.”

“And?”

“And it’s like a record that dates back. Too far to number. Further than people, maybe further than animals.”  When Etl just looked on quietly, Teresh continued.  “And it doesn’t make sense.”

“You don’t make sense.”

Teresh ignored the jibe, hearing the geniality buried just beneath it. “Do you believe the old stories?”

“Which ones?”

“The ones about the Artificer – about how this world was his design before the other Gods arrived?”  Teresh lowered his brow as he scraped away the dirt in front of him.  He could almost hear Etl shrug as he stood back up and shuffled his feet. 

“Ya, maybe. I don’t know.” His attention lasted only a moment before it again landed with ire on the confines of their seeting. “Serously fuck this place,” he seethed. “I’m gonna try to find some firewood.”

***

They lay that night without a campfire, beneath a sky that was all but kept from them.  Most of it was hidden from sight by the ceiling of branches that loomed overhead, with only the slightest of sections open to the silvery gibbous moon that loomed just beyond.  Teresh stretched out on the damp ground, cursing his long legs for reaching out so awkwardly among the roots of the tree, and the shattered rock. And he pondered, not for the first time, the persistent strength of plantlife that was capable of breaking the world around it.

“I guess I believe it,” said Etl. 

“What’s that?” 

“The old stories, about the Artificer.  I mean, they make sense, in an idiotic sort of way.”

Teresh wasn’t sure that made sense. 

Etl cleared his throat.  “The Artificer may have designed it, but it’s not like he filled the world with everything.”  Etl was lucky. His short legs fit neatly into the crook of the fissured rock, keeping him relatively dry and removed from the damp ground. “I mean, someone had to design it, right? Why not him?”  He kept his eyes fixed on the canopy overhead when he asked, “You believe in the scylla?”

“Nah.”  As much as Teresh would like to believe in amorous, naked women that killed sailors with copulation, he just couldn’t let himself imagine it.  It was too perfect a way to die.  “I sailed with a couple guys who said they’d seen them, but … y’know.”

“Yeah.”  All around them the forest squealed with life, the song of imperceptible insects lining the walls of their sylvan outpost.  “You got sea legs, huh?  Who’d you sail with?”

“Aldrick,” Teresh admitted, not bothering to consider the implications. 

“Fuck Aldrick,” Etl laughed.  “Wait shit, you were a pirate?!”

“Eh, privateer.”

“Well hell,” Etl laughed again.  ‘Who knew.”

Teresh found himself studying the roots that tangled near Etl’s feet, pondering on the slow, vegetative incursion that had managed to split the earth – a fragile, living thing that had somehow insisted on altering the world around it.  Before he could tell himself to do otherwise, he was admitting far too much to Etl. 

“I’m actually seaborne,” Teresh admitted quietly. 

Etl sat up from where he lay, leaning on one elbow with an expression that was partway between shock and admiration. “No shit?” he asked sincerely. 

“No shit.”  When he could tell that Etl was more interested than appalled, Teresh went on, his eyes still glued to the roots in the rock. “My father was … important.”

“Like a captain?”

Some of the roots ran off in their own directions. “Like an admiral.”  Some of them avoided the rock entirely. “Like a grand admiral.”  Begrudgingly, his mind recalled the all too familiar sound of his father’s authoritative orders, delivered from the prow in commanding tones. 

Etl just shook his head from where he sat perched on an elbow. There was mischief in his eyes, accentuated by the lone stand of moonlight that had found its way to them. “So did you like, raid a bunch of places and shit?”

The question didn’t catch Teresh off guard. It was the question that always came with such an admission. Nevertheless, he found his eyes lifted from the roots, as he pulled back inside himself and studied the complicated mix of anxiety and regret that sprang unbidden within him.  Teresh brought his hands up to rest them behind his head, and stared up silently to the night sky.

Beside him, Etl abandoned his line of questioning and laid back against the rock. It was quiet for about four breath lengths before he spoke again. “Seaborne,” he mused, more to himself than to Teresh.  “I guess it makes sense.  It explains why you’re so long and lanky.  Growing up on the waves stretches your limbs, everyone knows that.”  It only took a second before he followed it up with his usual self-effacing half-apology. “Hell, I wish I’d grown up on the waves. My limbs could use some stretching.”  

Teresh smiled to himself, finding himself more relaxed than he ought to be in the middle of a forest and several leagues from their destination.  Chances were that even with their intended shortcut through the heart of the woods, that they would arrive in Myriad too late to catch up to the rest of the gang.  Aldrick wasn’t known for keeping a lenient schedule, and he’d already made a point of leaving the two of them behind when Etl had overslept. Regardless though, Teresh found himself now, for no real good reason at all, very much at ease with the world around him.  

“You believe in the charbydis?” he asked Etl.

Etl considered a moment. “Nah.”

Teresh’s eyes went earthwards once more. “I’ve seen one.”

Beside him, Etl turned his head and studied him with suspicious eyes.  “A charbydis? You’re fucking with me.”

“I’m not,” Teresh said calmly. “It was …” He didn’t have the words. He gave his own head another imperceptible shake, remembering the impossibility of what he had witnessed before trying again.  “It was four days off the coast of Shi’rat, due south.  There were reports of a trading fleet that had amassed there, lodged somewhere in the straits of the Ganri Archipeligo.  “It was too good to pass up. My father wanted to reach it before anyone else.”

“To raid it,” goaded Etl with a smile.  “And shit.”

“Yeah.  ‘To raid it and shit.’” The little man wasn’t wrong. “When we got there though, all we found was flotsam, most of it worthless.” Fear tingled along the corners of Teresh’s mind, exploring caverns he’d just as soon have left unbothered before heading into his own roots, deep below.  “We were ordered to salvage what we could, try to make the journey worth it. But something was just off.  The sky was wrong, and there was this smell in the water, like oil. Like sour milk.”

“Sour milk?”  

Teresh nodded. The tingling fear in his heart had transformed into something akin to begrudging respect, and borrowed its way down into his roots, shearing the bulk of his resolve as it pushed into his deep places.  He ignored the tingling discomfort and pushed it away. He swallowed hard. “Then it surfaced.”

Overhead, a soft, sluggish spider descended from the canopy.  The thin fiber of its web sparkled faintly in the scant moonlight. 

“It was easily forty meters long, and that was just the part you could see above the water.  It breached with a scream-”

“What did it sound like?” Etl was always interrupting, and it almost cost Teresh his line of thinking.

“It… “ he stammered, then stopped to consider.  “It sounded like splitting rock, like the sound of a quarry.” He wondered if Etl had ever even been to a quarry.  “Just the wave from it surfacing was enough to nearly capsize a portion of the fleet. I was standing near the mast and got my hands on a rope.  Some of the others were less fortunate.  I slipped and ended up on one knee, and held on long enough to get a look at the thing as the ship righted itself, just in time to see it pull one of the longships down beneath the water.”  His mind dove beneath the waves along with the unfortunate longship, following it to the impossible depths below.  “My brother was on that ship.”

“Fuck,” was all Etl added in response.

Teresh’s mouth was dry. He could still see the look of fear and utter surprise on the faces of his fellow midshipmen.  He could still recall the sour smell that permeated the place, blanketing it all in a dingy haze while orders were shouted in confusion.  He could still hear his father’s voice in his head. 

Softly, carefully, the sluggish spider landed on one corner of Teresh’s shoulder.  He considered it a moment before lifting it tenderly with a long finger and placing it down among the roots. 

“Well I guess that kind of settles it,” breathed Etl. “The Artificer couldn’t have made everything. What sort of God would make something like that?”

“I don’t think he made anything.” Teresh’s voice held more of an edge than he had intended.  “The plants, the rocks, us; none of it makes sense if it came from him.”

“Then where did it all come from?”

Teresh shrugged, knowing the answer but unsure of how to explain it to someone like Etl.  “It came from itself.”

Etl nodded, not really understanding. He laughed, another of his uncomfortable, out of place gestures that never failed to bring a smile to Teresh’s face.  “Gods, man, I’ll never really get you.” And while that may have been true, Etl seemed to have no trouble accepting him.  “So you don’t believe in anything?”

“I believe,” said Teresh, with a completely different kind of smile, “in the charbydis.”

And perhaps it was the soft rhythm of their voices there in the dark, or the unnatural damp of the winter season, or even the Gods in whom Teresh refused to bestow his faith, but just at that moment something truly unique found its way into the little glade where they slept.

“We used to sing a shanty whene-”

“Holy shitballs fuck!” Etl hissed the words through a whisper, but somehow they still earned their exclamation point.  One of Etl’s hands shot out and caught Teresh by the forearm, interrupting his musical memory. The little man raised up quietly and leaned forward onto one knee, lifting a single finger to tell Teresh to keep his mouth shut.  With his other hand, he beckoned to the darkness beyond.  

Teresh squinted, taking in nothing but blackness.  “I don’t see any-”

“Shut the fuck up,” Etl hissed. He was frozen in a crouch, his feet bent beneath him and his knees low to the ground.  His eyes, though, remained fixed forward.  Then his face spread into a wide smile as the thing stepped out from among the trees.

It was a woman. Or, it looked like a woman. Her compact little body was powerful and taught, with long legs and a diminutive torso.  Much of her skin appeared lobed and glossy, like the surface of a leaf, but there were portions near shoulders, wrists, and ankles that appeared to be covered with a coarse, bark-like rind.  The shape of her ran earthwards at an angle both natural and seductive, and just below her midsection, where she stood naked and glistening, three interwoven vines wound their way around the back of her hips and down one leg. 

“Hey beautiful,” chimed Etl in his sweetest voice. 

The thing regarded both of them with bright eyes and then took a careful step forward.  In the scant light of the meadow, Teresh could see that she was as verdant as the world around them.  She raised her head and regarded both of them in turn, then inched forward once more. 

“Oh fuuuuuuuck yeah,” laughed Etl with exuberance. 

“What is it?” Teresh asked quietly, his eyes transfixed on the soft round breasts that peaked out from beneath the rough bark of the woman’s shoulders. 

“That,” said Etl, “is a wood nymph.”  He stood carefully and adopted a look of easy nonchalance, then called to the thing once more.  “Well, aren’t you easy on the eyes?” he teased with a smile.  

The green little figure bit softly at its own bottom lip, cocking her head to the side. 

“You have to call ‘em out,” Etl laughed. He made no effort to approach the woman but looked her up and down before continuing.  “You’re the prettiest thing we’ve seen in days.”

She smiled but remained rooted in place, so Etl tried again. 

“I’ve seen the sun set azure behind the hills of Lossnarch Longing, but it didn’t compare to you.”  They were lyrics to a song common in the many roadhouses along the Wayward Pass, but Etl said them as if they were his own. 

Teresh was sitting up now, feeling the moisture drip from his braids. He watched as the figure smiled and took a few steps forward, pausing just beyond Etl’s reach. 

“Shit, dude,” Etl hissed. “Help me call her.”  His voice was frantic, on the verge of laughter. 

“Call her?”

“Yeah. Fuck. Yes.  Stay right there, gorgeous,” Etl intoned.  The little man kept his eyes on their visitor but spoke to Teresh.  “They like to be … Gods what’s the word? Cajoled? Fawned.”  Etl held out an amiable hand and beckoned slowly to the nymph with his head.  “You got titties like the green hills of Argwylon.”

The nymph paused, cocking her head to the other side, before retreating a single step from them. 

“Noooooo,” Etl lamented with a partial laugh. 

“Tell her something simple.”  Teresh heard his own voice but couldn’t say exactly where he had found the impetus to speak up.  There was a tingling running along him, not unlike the painful stirrings of memory he had felt just a few minutes earlier.  Yet this twinge, while not comfortable per se, refused to be ignored and cast aside.  “Tell her you like her hair.”

“Tell her yourself.”

Teresh looked to Etl and then to the organic figure of femininity that basked before them among the damp roots of the forest.  He studied the strange hair that fell like weeping ivy across the corners of her face and torso, hiding portions of her as it descended below. “I like your-” Teresh began, then caught himself, and looked the woman in her eyes.  “You remind me,” he said honestly, “of spring.”

The nymph regarded Teresh with something resembling awe, and for a frozen moment he feared he had doomed the whole endeavor.  Then a wide, slow, smile crept across her face, beginning at her eyes. She moved towards them recklessly. 

“GOTCHA!” Etl sprang forward, catching the bark of the thing’s wrists and holding tight while he pulled her into his chest.  The wood nymph struggled and thrashed out half-heartedly, one arm flailing in feigned protest as she laughed and threw her head back in the moonlight  “Yeah, you know what it is,” Etl barked hungrily as he turned her around to face Teresh.

“What are you doing?” Teresh was on his feet, his hands balled into fists unexpectedly. 

“It’s fine man,” Etl smiled back at him.  The woman in his arms raised a hand behind her and ran it along the little man’s face.  Her hips arched up and found Etl’s groin, rubbing with a deliberate, sliding force against him. “They love this shit.  They don’t even actually know our words, they just respond to our, err… “ One his hands still held the nymphs little wrist, but the other had begun exploring the soft underside of her round, palmate breasts.  “You like that, don’t ya?”

But the wood nymph just laughed.

Teresh took a step towards them, watching as the green woman rolled her hips forcefully into Etl.  She was smiling, and had tilted her head back, but her eyes remained locked on Teresh’s own.  “So she’s just a plant?” The plant’s eyes held him transfixed. “Mindless?”

“About as mindless as any animal that fucks to reproduce.” Etl’s hand slid down beneath the tight wrapping vines, to the gentle folds of her opening. “As mindless as you and me.”  One of his fingers ventured inwards and the nymph let out a gentle squeal.”

“Ohhhhhhh…” Her cry sounded like wind in the trees.  “Ohhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhh.”

Teresh stood frozen in place, one part of him considering the biological imperative on display before him, the other repulsed by the entirety of it.

“Good thing we didn’t get a fire going,”  Etl began to pump more steadily, and with his other hand pushed the woman’s head forward, locking her hips and ass even more firmly against him. “How you so wet in there?” he laughed into the nymph’s ear. 

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!”  The wood nymph’s eyes closed and she called up to the moon above.  “OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!”  Her screams were the cacophonous symphony of the forest. 

The tingling within Teresh moved southward, shearing parts of him that were otherwise adamant, finding its way into his deep places. Unbidden and unwanted, the image of a longship being pulled below the waves, sprang into the darker corners of his thoughts. 

“OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

And then to Teresh’s surprise, the nymph gave a giggle, broke easily from Etl’s grasp, and took off at a run.  He watched the round, ample curves of her hind quarters as the thing lept a low log nearby and disappeared into the dark.  

“Amazing,” Teresh said to himself.

“Go get her!”  Etl was laughing, though Teresh couldn’t say why. Nor could he say why he acquiesced, loping into the trees to get a better look at the thing – to study it, admire it, learn it. A single hanging vine fell down across his face and Teresh impulsively moved it aside, only to find himself covered in the webs of some spider’s nest.  He pushed the gluey substance into his braids and kept trotting, ‘til he reached a small circular clearing, and realized that he had no idea where the woman had gone. Then he felt something light and slippery run along the skin of his lower back. 

“Oh!” Was all the nymph said as he turned to face it.  The thing was standing close to him, having approached without his notice. A smile spread along her face once more as she stepped in close. 

“Uh … hi,” Teresh said, glancing about to see if Etl had followed.  “You’re, uh,” one of the woman’s hands was exploring the muscles of his stomach.  “You-”

“You … remind … me … offspring.”  The words came from the nymph. 

Teresh stared down at the woman, admiring the rough rind that no doubt protected her from the baser element.  “Can you understand me?” Her smile intensified as one of her hands found his cock beneath the surface of his thin trousers. 

“Me …” she beamed. “Offspring.”

Teresh’s manhood was responding to the call, lengthening with each of the woman’s deliberate strokes, ‘til the head of him pushed out recklessly from his waistline.  The nymph looked down and pulled it free of its confines, holding it now in both hands as she intensified her work. 

“Godsdamn, man. RELEASE THE KRAKEN!” Etl had caught up with the two of them and was laughing as he trudged through the underbrush.  “How do you walk around with that thing?!”

A wave of embarrassment filled Teresh, a reminder that once again he was standing out when he ought not to have been. In every town, eyes turned to regard him as he lurched above the crowds. In every port, smaller sailors picked him out as a target for derision and animosity. And even here, hidden from the sight of nearly all, he was longer than he should have been. 

“Offspring.” 

“You gotta give it to her, Teresh.” Etl was keeping his distance, but the smile on his face smacked of playful malevolence. One of the nymph’s hands reached up and found Teresh’s face, guiding his eyes back to her own as she pushed him backwards.  His legs struck something solid, and he glanced behind to see another rock covered in tree roots, then settled onto it as the nymph shoved him once more with impressive strength.  He barely had time to find the edges of the boulder with his hands before she was climbing aboard, the bark of her wrists scraping at Teresh’s stomach as she guided him within.

“Ohhhhhhh…..” the nymph moaned.

Teresh’s eyes closed, and his head tilted back, nearly against his will. Before the blackness of his thoughts there swam images – a root that cut through rock, a red-haired woman, a sluggish spider, the figurehead on the vessel where he’d been raised. Each came and went in quick succession, burning themselves onto the canvas of his memory.  He felt the nymph’s hands as they settled on his collarbone, then her hips as she struggled to take him in. 

“OhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

He opened his eyes to see her bucking, her smile replaced now with a look of concentration as she rolled along the shaft of his cock. 

“Hell, yeah,” Etl laughed. The little man’s own cock was in his hand, and he’d come up behind the nymph to take a strand of her ivy locks in his grip, kissing at her neck while she worked herself further onto Teresh. “Didn’t you know?” he laughed into her ear, “this one’s a pirate.”

Etl’s hands lowered carefully to the nymph’s hips, held them tightly there, and then pushed downwards.  

“OOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

With a cry that tore the night, the nymph reached the base of him. Teresh felt as the corners of her gave way to the intrusion, shearing and separating as he made his way within. Into the depths of her, where sailors died happily. Into layers timeless and ancient, full of forgotten history. Into her deep places, where few indeed had ever been fortunate enough to tread. And as his own hips struggled to keep up, the last of his resolve finally broke when the nymph smiled once more and regarded him with eyes that were green, even in the moonlight.  

“Oh Gods!” Teresh didn’t know what he was saying. His cock convulsed as the seed was drawn out of him.  The wave of it nearly capsized him, and he joined his own unintelligible ramblings with the nymph’s moans and Etl’s laughter. 

“Hahahaha!”

“OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“What in the name of all that is right and holy godsdamnit take it all!”

POMP!

Then to his great surprise, Teresh watched as the woman that rode him, burst asunder.  Where she had sat only a moment ago, clutching at him with her inner workings, there now remained only a cloud of puffy pappus wisps. The little seeds danced in the moonlight, swirling about Teresh and his wet braids and his spent cock. They found their way to Etl and gave him the lightest of kisses as they blew past him, intent on finding new corners of the world to fertilize with their magic, where they would grow new nypmhs in the dampest corners of the forest.  And Teresh was left with little more than the memory of verdant green eyes, and rolling hips, and an aching in his own deep places. 

“Well, shit,” said Etl, his cock still in his hands. “Good thing we didn’t get a fire going.”