“It connected with a Clot… sisters.”

“A Clot? This does not resemble a Stone, sister.”

“It is not. Too… incongruous…”

It was an odd experience, walking towards these trees. I had a familiar feeling about it, but it was different from all other times. For once, it were real trees we were going towards. Physically present trees, with true smell and true sound. None of that emulated business I used to walk through in the holodeck (there was probably a more elitist Khaei name for it, but I couldn’t be asked to remember it.) with Grandma, way back when.

It left me conflicted. One part of me missed Grandma next to me, telling me stories about distant, forgotten lands that no Khaei ever dared even dream of. Stories my parents have always deeply frowned upon.

But the child within me was excited. I was going to walk through a real forest! Finally! After being told about them and seeing them emulated for… what, 19 years now? I wasn’t just listening to her stories anymore; I was living them now.

The closer we got, however, the less it seemed to resemble the forests from the holodeck. These weren’t the copy-paste assets of green-leafed trees with brown barks with some random variable sometimes changing it up a bit. Some of these didn’t even remotely look like any plants I’d seen, and most of them were vastly different from each other. At least the green grass was recognizable…

There was all kinds of trees.

You had big steamy pillars rising up from an underground spring with on its branches (which were just longer, firm-looking tendrils of smoke) floating stationary droplets of water, some of them dripping down on the floor. There were almost monolithic trees that seemed to burst open at the top, covering a big area in the shadow of a canopy filled with smaller stalactites. There things that looked like torches; a long, slender pillar made of vines, but it must’ve been fire-resistant, as the vines didn’t burn under the larger flame burning on top of them.

Occasionally, there was a tree that looked more or less the same as the simulated ones, but they seemed to have something burning underneath their bark, or they had pebbles growing instead of apples.

Valentina had slowed down enough for me to catch up with her by now, and started floating to the right of me, roughly in front of where I used to have a shoulder. She’d lost her yellow enthusiasm slightly, with a soothing purple now being the most prominent color shining. It only now struck me how small she actually was; she could almost fit inside the palm of my hand, about the size of a tiny apple… Good thing I found her before she got eaten, or something equally deadly.

“Val, this forest… It’s…” I couldn’t immediately find a word that could describe it. Magnificent? Wonderful? They didn’t really capture the essence of what I tried to say… “It’s enchanting…” was what I decided on in the end.

Valentina blinked a firm gray, with the slightest tint of green to it.

“You don’t think this is just… magical?”

She hesitated, shifted between a hue of green and red on top of her gray color. In the end the red tone took the upper hand.

“Well…” I thought about it for a second, “I suppose it does lose that aspect if you’ve never known differently…” But that didn’t keep me from staying amazed at it.

Slowly but surely, however, the forest started changing the longer we went on. The brightness and beauty gradually descended into twisted darkness and damp fog.

Bright burning vines became charred, crocked pillars with something strangely mossy growing all over it. The monolithic trees looked worn down; their canopy had lost the stalactites and pieces of it had fallen off to form spike rocks around their trunks. The smoky trees became almost indistinguishable from the fog surrounding them, and their watery fruits became grayish and muddy, the ground below them rotting away with every drop that fell on it.

Even the green grass had turned into something more… corrupt. The color became less vibrant, and after sometime it just downright vanished from the ground.

We started floating slower the denser the fog became. We’d only been floating in this area for about a minute and I already hated every piece of it.

A chilly wind, combined with the chilly atmosphere in general, sent shivers down my spine, while Valentina had meanwhile lost her purple color to a bright blue. She came hovering closer to me and brought an aura of cold air with her.

“Uh, Valentina…”

A quick flash of green light.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way…?”

Another one followed. She retracted back to the chilly blue.

We resumed our trek through this area without speaking a single word, both of us probably too scared of what might be lurking beyond the mist.

By now, the area had lost almost all signs of life. The once natural-looking forest turned into a fog-filled wasteland with a ground of cracked, grayish rocks.

It didn’t take long before I got disturbed by them. Something about this earth was just so… off. The gray cracks didn’t feel natural.

I felt like something was looking through them, straight at us. Some flashes of light seemed to come from underneath, suggesting movement of sorts. Maybe it was Val’s light just playing tricks on me…

As we went on, the occasional howling of the wind seemed to increasingly deform into sounding like distant whispers. Whispers of words I couldn’t even begin to understand, but always the same sounds. After a while, a rhythm even seemed to form within them. As if someone was chanting the words over and over.

“Dartokalkar”, it silently filled the area. “Dartokalkar.”

Val started clinging to my shell in her bright blue form, bringing a freezing sensation over the spot; one that was cold enough to actually make it hurt.

“You’re right, Val…” I whispered to her, fearing that whatever lied beneath the cracks would hear us and break open. “Let’s get out of here.”

And we just ran – well, for as much as you can “run” without legs. We rushed away as fast as we could, Valentina still frozen on tight. No looking back. Didn’t even think of looking back.

With each inch we rushed out, the feeling of being watched over, being stalked by some… entity grew stronger. Even after being long past the cracked earth and outside the fog, I didn’t quite feel entirely safe yet. There was something about that spot… something that intrigued me immensely, but not enough to stay there and experience it myself.

“Alright Val.” We made it back to a part of the forest that didn’t look like it was corrupted by all-consuming taint. “You can let go now. We’re safe here.” I at least hoped that last statement was true, even though I wasn’t even convinced myself.

The freezing touch of Valentina on my shell started to move away together with her, while her color was slowly turning back into a purple again.

We took a moment to calm down – not to rest, neither of us needed rest – before continuing our trek north. The white mountaintop in the distance was visibly coming closer.

The rest of the travel was… odd. It wasn’t so much awkward as it felt strange to traverse these alien Lands with an equally alien creature floating next to me. But she was an enjoyable companion.

Obviously we didn’t float next to each other in dead silence the entire way there. I did try to talk to her and she did try to talk back, but needless to say, talking isn’t very easy when one of two parties physically can’t talk. She felt sweet though. Her inability to get her thoughts out and my inability to immediately interpret them correctly caused for some frustrations, which always would result in her just floating in place for a bit, and softly having her colors fade between red and purple. She was such an adorable and charming wisp, Valentina.

I probably could’ve met with way worse creatures to meet in my first few minutes on the Lands. Like creatures that maul your eyes out, or gnaw off your limbs… Even though that wasn’t anything I needed to worry about anymore, really.

The sky’s color had shifted from a grayish blue to a more orangey tinted one as time flew by. It had taken some hours of wandering before we came across a bundle of what appeared to be roots of a tree, occasionally showing itself on the surface. There were possibly hundreds of them, big and small, jumbled up in a big mess. Their texture was wooden – remarkable, in a forest where there’s almost no wooden trees – close to that of an oak, but way darker in color.

A faint green light seemed to be glowing from between the bundled up roots, with occasionally a smoky tendril of the same color emerging from them.

The area around the surfaced roots were accompanied by a lot of various flowers. Flowers that were pouring water onto themselves, or little flames dancing around each other – Mom would’ve compared it to a binary star system –, or even flowers that looked like solid rock at first glance, but still smoothly waved in the breeze.

Valentina turned excited at the glance of these roots; from the moment she saw them, a bright yellow started forming inside her purple color. She even picked up the speed to such an extent I had difficulty keeping up with her.

“Hey Val… What’s the matter?” I asked, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t even stop or slow down; following this bundle had grabbed all her attention.

I was tunnel-visioned on Val and trying to catch up with her, yet she kept getting farther away, slowly but surely. The only thing I noticed after a while, was the severe decrease in trees in the corners of my view. We might’ve even left the forest, for all I know.

She abruptly stopped, jumped up and down quickly and then turned around to fly right at me again, with a yellow color now having overtaken her soothing purple. I started to slow down when she did, in order to not just run straight into her.

Nevertheless, she ran straight into me, at a high enough speed to push me back slightly even. She shook off the impact, and started darting around quickly in front of me.

“What’s up?” Not even a second later, she started physically flying upwards.

My gaze followed her, and as I looked up, I noticed how we were standing just before the mountain that seemed like miles away earlier that day.

The entire view was amazing. We were standing in front of a single, lonesome mountain in an open field that reached just indescribably far above the earth, its top almost grazing the clouds that drifted above it.

The mountainside consisted mostly of rocks getting lighter in color, with several ledges covered in barren dirt and low shrubbery. Near the top, these spots of dirt were even covered with a thick layer of snow and ice, glistening in the light of dusk. The top itself seemed to be mostly flattened out.

Just above the mid-way point, a cave pierced the mountainside. The area around and inside it (for as far as I could still see into the darkness of the cave) was overrun by moss and vines hanging down.

From the cave originated a massive waterfall, running down with massive speeds in a relatively small pond at the foot of the mountain. Oddly, even though there were metric tons of water pouring into it, the pond didn’t seem to overflow. In fact, there was a constant margin of about two inches before the water even reached the edge.

“Valentina…”

Before I could even finish my thought, she dashed back down to my level and pushed herself against the chest-area of my shell. A warm feeling spread through me; I don’t know if it was Val’s mild red hue doing that or not.

I put my hand behind her and held her carefully, worried I might crush her if I didn’t. The hug (at least, that’s what I think it was) was slightly awkward, but a part of me was relieved, maybe even a little proud, when hugging Val.

“The Lands surely are wonderful…” I said more to myself than to her.

It took me a moment to shake away from my wandering thoughts and let her go. She slowly turned back purple, and drifted backwards before she took her spot roughly right of me.

“This is the beginning of a story worth telling, Val. I can feel it!”