Following the Fox
You give it some thought for a beat, but in the end, you decide that you want to hear more from the strange vixen; thus, you choose to follow after her, although before you do so, you hesitate to figure out HOW exactly you ought to follow her into the forest.
The fact that the forest is covered by a thick mist makes visibility difficult – you know you could fly, but you already figured that it wouldn’t be the easiest without knowing how tall or thick the trees are, or what else may be lurking in the mist. Even so, you figure if you take it nice and slow, you should be able to get in and make it through well enough.
Though maybe it’s better to be on land to find where the vixen’s den is, you consider.
You figure you’ll just go at it from the air to start and then land when you’ve gotten a sense of the area – and so, you prepare your wings by flapping them several times, until you take off from the ground with a mighty leap and a mighty burst from your wings.
Once you’re airborne, you muse over how automatic an action it was for you to take off, and as you glide toward the forested region, you wonder if the costume is the reason why. That would make sense, you think, since you’ve become part-griffin – and since griffins of myth could fly, maybe the costume has simply made it so flying and landing and all that is second nature to you (even if you admittedly don’t know how it all works).
I never would’ve dreamt a place like this existed before now, you think. You glance at your furry paws and wiggle the digits. To think there’s some kind of Narnia-esque world where you become a hybrid creature by putting on a costume. But where did it come from? How is it even physically possible? I’m amazed people haven’t been screaming from the rooftops that this place is a thing, unless there are rules I’m unaware of…
You ponder these inquiries as you steadily move closer and closer toward the forest – the ground beneath you slowly transforms, as more and more trees are popping out from the lush earth, and the air around you, while still crisp in the scents and the coolness of its winds, becomes a tad damper. You can see perfectly fine still, and it isn’t until you arrive at the fringe of the misty blanket that your vision isn’t as great.
You halt in mid-air and flap your wings to keep your body hovering in place for a beat.
Strange, you think. You glance about. It really looks like the mist is just… floating there, like it doesn’t seem to extend past the line of trees directly in front of me. Like a barrier.
Mist or fog, that is – you realize that while you’ve been thinking of it as mist, but it strikes you as denser like fog. yet regardless, you steel yourself and begin to move forward.
Take it nice and easy, you think.
You go slowly despite your wings being quite strong, and as you near the trees and mist, you tentatively reach your paws out a bit in front of you – you do this so you can feel around the moment you breach the thick blanket that’s marred your ability to see in.
This proves to be a wise idea, because the moment you enter the thick, gray blanket, you nearly find yourself smacking into two trees close together. Fortunately, you feel the branches before you do this, and you instantly correct your positioning in the air – you squint, but, you definitely see that this is fog, rather than mist, because it’s extremely hard to see much beyond what’s directly in front of you. Still, you begin to climb up in the air, using your paws to feel where the branches of the trees end. It takes a moment.
When you feel the textures of the tree branches change into soft leaves, you scale a bit higher, higher, and higher still – all in all, it ends up bringing you almost to the same height you found yourself falling from when you finished putting the griffin costume on for you to finally reach the tops of the trees you almost ran into. Only then do you venture in more, but you maintain the gradual, wary pace to avoid any accidents.
A few heartbeats later, and you’re enveloped in the fog at last.
Jeez, I can hardly see much of anything, you think.
You feel your wings scrape against some leaves, yet you ignore this since it isn’t painful or unpleasant – that said, you can tell flying in this fog is a terrible idea, and so you take a brief instant to make sure you’re ahead of the same trees that you won’t get caught up in the branches. Then, you begin to descend, and you take your time doing this as well.
In the end, you land on the ground safely, although you admit you probably should’ve just gone on foot in the first place – you feel that the whole process probably took about ten extra minutes when walking would’ve sufficed. But, you shrug this off and fold your wings onto your back, and now you begin to walk around, keeping your senses peeled.
The ground is soft and damp to your paws, which sink into the dirt parts a little, leaving behind imprints where your feet made contact; the ground itself appears to be a mixture of earth and splotches of grass like it was outside the forest region, and while the dirt isn’t so wet that it becomes thick mud or slush that makes you slip (or that you could sink into, which you don’t want), you get the sense that it may not be like that forever. You soldier on, however, and your first order of business is figuring the area out.
How the hell am I supposed to find her in this area when I can hardly see? you wonder.
You try to make use of what your senses can accomplish, though, as you walk.
For starters, you can hardly hear anything… because it’s eerily dead silent. Other than your own heartbeat and the sounds of your paws making contact with the ground, you don’t hear any noises – there are no birds chirping or squawking or flying about, there is no running water or rain falling, there are no insects clicking or buzzing or thrumming. There is only quiet, and this is rather unnerving to you, even though you are in the form of a griffin-human hybrid. You can’t shake the unease away despite your efforts.
Your nose picks up a few scents – you can smell what you can only define as the fog itself due to the moisture in the air. It’s not a bad scent, yet it’s a strong one, and it clings to your body the same way the fog clings to your surroundings. Beyond this, you can smell damp grass and damp earth, and there’s another woodsy flavor that you can’t put your mind on, but you know it’s there; perhaps it’s the trees, which you can still see vaguely, especially when you nearly run into one, or perhaps it’s something else.
Speaking of trees, they’re the most noticeable things to your marred vision, and there are a vast number of them. Many of the trees are clustered together so tightly that you have no way of moving through them (you find this out rather quickly amid your trekking), which forces you to have to walk around the clusters to search for an opening.
You end up having to veer to the right for a good few minutes because of this.
I’m starting to regret following the fox, you think.
You retain some hopefulness, but, even so, you are incredibly leery of venturing further in because of how foggy it is. However, as time slithers by, you begin to notice that while the fog doesn’t let up, you feel as though your vision is adjusting to it, as you soon begin to see further ahead of you than when you first entered the dense, covered forest.
You weave around and through clusters of giant trees, and fortunately for you, the ground doesn’t change up from the random splotches of damp grass or moist ground.
Soon, in fact, you begin to see something in the distance, a large, dark silhouette.
After several minutes of weaving around more trees, you eventually realize that the shape is a tree – a very, very large, thick tree, which stretches even higher up into the foggy air than the ones you’ve been trying to move around. It’s so big, it takes an extra few minutes for you to even get close to the tree, and by the time you manage to, you find that the massive tree blots out a good chunk of your vision thanks to its size.
“Whoa,” you say to yourself. Is this the vixen’s den, or…?
You blink and notice something: the tree appears to have a large crater on one side, a crater that looks like it leads underground beneath the tree, like a tunnel. Not only that, but you spot that there is an actual hole in the tree on the other side, and as you move a little to get a better glance, you find that the hole is almost an entrance INTO the tree.
Oh, you think, and your shoulders slump. I have… options, I guess? But, how do I know which is the right path? I don’t feel any sixth sense stuff pointing me toward one in particular… so how the hell am I supposed to figure out where the vixen’s den is?
You sigh.
Do you want to enter the tunnel located at the base of the tree and see if it leads to your ideal destination? Or, do you want to enter the tree itself and see where that leads? Or, do you want to ignore both and scour the area for something else, just to be safe?
Written by Hollowpage on 12 June 2021