Wraithwood Botanist

The legends were true.

No matter how far we walked, the fog around the colossal statue never disappeared. It was already in front of us, tempting us to turn around. And the worst part was that there were times that it got physically closer and that only seemed to enforce that we were getting closer to it.

And at some point, I almost gave in.

Trant was dead.

Kline was shaken.

Omoxilians of all sizes were attacking us. And while I could see them, the visuals were disturbing.

I'm not sure how much time passed in that state, but it left me going crazy. Trant's death was playing in my ears, and I could hear him.

"Don't freak out," Trant said. "It was all just an illusion."

I turned sharply the first time it happened, and Kyro turned to me. "What is it?"

"Trant… you heard him, right?"

He furrowed his brow. "What are you talking about?"

I turned to Reta. "You heard him, right?"

"No," she said apathetically. "Focus ahead."

I tried, but you cannot imagine what it's like to focus ahead when you hear your dead teacher speaking right behind you.

Ten minutes later, when my arms got jittery, Trant said, "I'm coming up. Don't fight me."

Trant fluttered ahead of me and sat on Sina's head—but she didn't notice.

Neither did Kline.

Or Kyro.

Or Reta.

And that was all impossible to believe because Trant's body was half shredded and bloody.

"I thought about just playing dead forever," Trant said in his reasonable voice. "Once you think someone's dead, it's almost worse to think they're alive again."

I studied his harrowed appearance, and my heart raced. "You're dead. I watched you explode. I slowed time. There's no way an illusion did that."

"What are you talking about?" Kyro asked.

"You really can't see him?" I asked nervously.

Kyro's face twitched, and he took a sharp breath as he stared at where Trant was sitting, and his nose scrunched in, and he glared at Reta. "We're getting Mira out of this—and then I'm going to kill you."

"What?" I cried as I looked at Reta. "What's going on?"

"It's called the grieves," Reta said. "It's rare, but—"

"It's not rare!" Kyro yelled. "It's a known symptom. Or did you forget what you did to Aleand? Are you that fucking cold that you'd forget about him?"

"What's going on?" I cried. Panic had overtaken my bones, making my posture break down.

Kline felt something was wrong, but he looked at me just like Kyro was—

—as if something was very wrong with me.

Reta said nothing.

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Kyro's shoulders trembled, and I was convinced that he would rip her larynx out and feed it to the omoxilians. I wanted to stop them, but I couldn't speak.

"What's going on?" I whimpered.

"Grieves," Trant said. "It's when someone dies, and you keep seeing them. It's not too common on the outside because if you notice it, your brain rejects it. But here, where you're expecting illusions and distortion, your brain embraces it. And once you get the grieves, it's permanent. Once people leave this place, they can never differentiate between fact and fiction. Paranoia gets pretty bad."

"Stop," I whispered.

"I remember this one time," Trant chuckled in the way that he always did. "We brought back a woman who thought that normal granda weeds were the cure to mana sickness and so she picked tens of thousands of them and stored them in a room."

"Stop," I pleaded.

"Oh, I suppose that's not the topic to talk about right now…" He glanced at me and away sheepishly, just as he always did.

"Mira," Kyro said. "I'm going to get you through this, but you're going to have to trust me. Can you do that?"

I nodded with tears streaming down my eyes.

"Good. You're experiencing psychosis, and what you gotta do is treat everything by your Soul Sight as an illusion. Everything. And to do that, you need to let go. Stop trying to see fact from fiction."

"How the hell am I supposed to do that?"

"Focus on the feeling of me on your shoulder. And the feel of Kline in your arms and Sina underneath you, and then close your eyes."

I trusted him, so I closed my eyes, and everything… calmed. I focused on soul sight, but something was… off about it.

I was seeing things, but it was distinctly different than what I was seeing before but I embraced it and relaxed. But then I heard Reta say:

"You're being deceived."

I snapped my eyes open and Kline was in a trance, staring at the sky blankly as a spike vine wrapped around his neck. And it was bright under my soul sight. Powerful.

"Kline!" I screamed, grabbing him and pulling him back.

"Calm down!" Kyro screamed as I pulled back.

"How?" I creamed as I turned to him. When I did, I found that Kyro wasn't Kyro—he was a sickening flower with thousands of petals moving into a row of teeth.

I screamed.

"Trust me," Kyro said from the plant. Then, his voice distorted. "Trust me…"

I slapped it and pulled out my machete, but a force bore down on my arm and I saw other vines around my arm. I screamed, and the Kyro clone wrapped down my other arm, and they pushed me down, and I cried and screamed for Kline, and then—

"Enough!" Kyro screamed.

A snap resounded, and the entire world changed. The pillar and the impending fog disappeared for the first time, leaving a world that matched perfectly with my soul sight.

It was a freakish world filled with eight-foot plants that looked like helixes or scarecrows or bushes that looked like spaghetti monsters. A rockface created a path to our right, and it was filled with moss that studded it like toad skin, and fungi sprawled over the place. And despite the alien nature of the world, it was relieving. It matched the soul sight perfectly and it actually seemed believable.

I turned and saw Kyro had returned, holding down my shoulder. The plant was gone, and so was the world, and when I looked for Kline, I saw him pacing back and forth on Sina's fur, staring at me with worry in his eyes.

"You got your point across," Kyro said to Reta. "She gets it now. Layers upon layers. Trant, get over here."

I searched for Trant on Sina's snout, but he wasn't there. Instead, he flew back with a full container of the flower petals.

"Sorry," he said apologetically as he sat on my lap. When he did, I could feel his weight. "Here, this will help."

He lifted the preservation chamber, and when I grabbed it, I could feel the cool glass.

"What did you learn?" Reta asked.

"If you open your mouth again, I'm seriously going to kill you," Kyro said.

Reta sighed. "Are you done?"

"I swear to—"

"Can someone tell me what's going on?" I yelled.

"That's what I want you to figure out," Reta said. "Or do you want this all to be for nothing?"

I swallowed.

"Is this real?" I whimpered.

"Sort of," Kyro said. "The only way to counter illusions of this scale is to freeze them out or simply create another illusion. That's what Reta's doing. She's taking in information from the soul sight and creating something that's closer to reality. Well, minus the fog. So while this is fake, it's truer than everything you've been seeing."

I looked around at the alien landscape and shuddered.

"And Trant?" I asked weakly.

"I'm very real," Trant said, flying up and hugging my neck. "Touch really is the best indicator in the mist. Well, unless you get hit by a swarma plant. But Reta's been navigating us around those. Kyro's made her out to be worthless up there, but she's been herding us through the worst of it."

"What's a swarma plant?"

"I'm glad you asked," Trant said chipperly. "Swarma plants shoot numbing mist onto their victims that remove their ability to sense touch. Nasty little things. Once you get hit, you can't tell if you're touching anyone. And if you get hit with one of them here…" He chuckled insanely, then caught my glare and looked away nervously.

"Mira," Kyro said. "It's over, okay? We're gonna get out of here and we'll actually teach you how to avoid this shit in the future."

Reta took a deep breath and said, "Not until she tells us what she experienced and what she's learned. Question me all you want, but Nethralis sent me to teach Mira. And if you keep interfering, I'll have Nethralis remove you until training's over."

Kyro gritted his teeth, and I put up my hand and hugged Kline against my chest and said:

"Let me ask you something. When I heard Trant, and asked you if you heard it, did you really not hear it?"

Reta turned to Kyro, and he grimaced and said:

"Mira… I never heard you say that."

My eyes widened. "Wait what?"

"Neither did I."

"But you answered…"

"That was an illusion. I didn't say anything until you attacked me and tried to unsheath your machete."

My heart pumped erratically, spurting panic and adrenaline.

"You?" I asked Trant.

"I didn't," he said. "When I noticed the cord got cut, I figured that you thought I died. And the last thing I wanted to do was show up."

The world lost focus, and I felt sick, on the verge of collapsing on the ground and shedding my stomach. It was all too much to take in.

"Mira," Reta said. "Let me ask you something: you could feel Kyro on your shoulder. Why did you suddenly attack him? What made you believe he wasn't real?"

"I-I don't know," I said.

"Think."

"I-I don't know. I was convinced he was real because he was yelling at you and threatening you and that's what happening here. T-The story. I believed the story."

"So if you believed the story, why'd you suddenly change your mind?"

"That's what I can't figure out. I-I think… I was just so devastated and confused and I thought I was crazy. And then something weird happened. I trusted him and closed my eyes and I thought… This is weird. Right? Like, I trusted him so much that I fell into a trap that… in retrospect seemed obvious. And as soon as I woke up and saw Kline in a trance… he looked really possessed and there was a vine around his neck."

I started crying.

"A-And when I turned to you, I could see a plant that looked real and I could see its soul. And its voice changed…"

"So the mist convinced you were crazy so you'd distrust yourself, then used your relationships against you, and then turned you against us. Why?"

I reflected on it. "B-Because…" I took rapid breaths, coughing out phlegm. "It knew. It knew we could see it, so it tried to break us apart and turn us against each other."

"Good girl," Reta said. "There's only another mile or so. Let's get out of here."

It was amazing how effortless Misty Row became with Reta's illusions. She could change the entire world around us, and when there were enemies, she clearly described them so we could fight them, and at some point, the only traps left were natural plants.

"And that one…" Trant said with a bright smile as he pointed at a green-speckled mushroom. "That one's really neat. It's called Mad Man's Reminder because it's super hallucinogenic, and the people affected are known to talk like a mad man. And that's interesting because it keeps reminding people that what they're seeing is an illusion. Keeps them on their toes. I heard that back in the early days, they would spike one cup of tea with the spores, and someone would get them to act as the reminder. Super fascinating."

I shuddered and held Kline against my bosom and rode on.

Right before we reached the barrier, Kyro gave me a warning:

"We're about to leave but keep your soul sight active," he said. "The tricks to walk another ten miles after you leave with soul sight present. Once you go another ten without seeing omoxilians, you genuinely start to believe you're gone. If you don't go that far, you're going to be paranoid that you're still in an illusion."

"Great… let's do twenty."

"As you wish."

There was no barrier to exit Misty Row. In normal circumstances, the illusionary world would gradually blend with the real one until you walked out without knowing you were part of it. But with Reta's illusionary world, the world suddenly shifted back to the one I saw six hours before and I took a deep sigh of relief.

I patted Sina and Kael beside her and said, "Let's run. Let's fucking run far, far away from this place."

And we did. We broke out in a synchronized sprint with the lurvine blasting up the river bank with prejudice, jumping over boulder, plant, and stream as we rushed ahead.

Before long, we were back at Rall's Delta, and then we turned at the fork and ran, ran until we could see Rall's Fort, the abandoned city of a lost generation of conquerors. By the time I saw it, I was genuinely convinced that we were back in the real world.

"So that's why they built it so far from the Delta…" I said.

"Correct," Kyro said, sighing in deep relief as he drank on my shoulder.

"Hey Kyro…" I said.

"Yeah?"

"Does the term 'grieves' really exist?"

He froze and gulped.

"It does," Reta said. "It's a condition where people can't dissociate between fact and fiction after prolonged exposure in the mist. It's called grieves because it's usually triggered by death and the grief from it."

I glanced at Kyro and he trembled slightly before hardening his expression and taking another drink.

"It happens," Reta said."It happens in the way that soldiers die from bad orders. It happens the way that accidents ruin lives. It happens. And sometimes, it happens from mistakes the victim makes as well." She glanced at Kyro and then at me. "But there's something particularly terrible about grieves. Once someone you care about loses their mind, it sticks with you for a long time."

"And that mist remembers," Kyro said. "It never forgets."

My heart ached when I remembered that I wasn't the only person who was experiencing hell in the mist.

"Everything that happens in that mist becomes forever," he said. "You see it again. Live it again. Friends call out to you, beg for help. Secrets the souls heard but you didn't get repeated. And it lies and lies… I fucking hate that place." He took a drink. "I'm just glad you're okay. I'm just glad… you're okay."

I was glad, too, and I told him so, thanking him and Reta and Trant for the experience. Then we carried on until all was calm, and I had time to reflect. Only then did I remember the cailain petals in my lap and realize that we had actually completed my tribute mission and come out with a plant that was valuable enough to satisfy a god.

I wondered if I would give the plant to Elana.

Because there was no way in hell, I would ever search for it again.

I said that, proclaiming my stance that I would only go through Misty Row one more time to reach Aelium and never again. I went even further and declared that I would beat it and make it look as effortless as Reta did so I wouldn't even have to experience it. And I meant it. I wouldn't return until I could navigate it like Reta, then would cast aside illusions as the devil's work and never look back.

Yet when I went to sleep that night, my brain was alive—alive with sinister ideas about how to confuse, divide, and break opponents with illusions.

Misty Row had changed my perspective on what they were.

In the past, I imagined people changing their visual identity for subterfuge or creating hundreds of shadow clones to confuse opponents.

But now.

Now, I could see that there were thousands of subtle and darker ways to use illusions on enemies—

—and I couldn't wait to use them.