Jigoku
went where the ground breathed. The soil throbbed and the trees leaned. The earth broke and massive, armored moles—Earth Eaters—burst from the loam. Blind, ravenous, with grinding teeth, they tried to drag him into the dark. Jigoku moved with ocean-strength in his limbs. He fought to redirect and contain, not to slaughter for sport. When the last beast retreated, he stood in churned earth, palms warm with the forest's lesson: strength must be honest.
Gudan walked a sunlit trail and found Camelio, an archer with a chameleon perched on her arm. A brass-and-leather wristband changed the chameleon's color and, with it, the arrowheads she fired: green for poison, purple for sleeping gas, blue for heat-seeking. She tested Gudan with a volley that split a branch in two. He grinned and matched her wit. They walked together, trading tricks and hunger.
William moved into a green dusk. The hatchling at his waist hummed. Roots whispered. A walking tree—bark and knotted limb, roots for feet—stepped from the roots and attacked. It had sensed the black branch fused to William's head as an unnatural wound on the world and lashed out to excise it.
William rolled, stumbled, and then stopped. He looked into the tree's ancient intelligence. Its voice was a rustle that filled his head: "Why do you carry that black thing?"
"It chose me," William said.
The tree paused. It did not relent out of malice but out of duty. It offered him a path:
become a druid
a keeper of green things who can call beasts, bind roots, and take one piece of an animal he loves and bind it to himself as an emotional tether. The gift demanded care and grief in equal measure.
William thought of the chickens he had tended, of Thimble's last smile, of the branch that had become part of him. He said yes.
The tree touched his shoulder. Sap ran warm. The black branch did not vanish, but it hummed differently—less like a wound, more like a tool that could be shaped. The forest exhaled. William left the clearing with a new name forming in his chest: druid.
They moved deeper into the Trial Forest, each on a path the woods had chosen for them. The island above rested on the back of an ancient beast; the hatchling at William's waist chirped and tucked its head beneath its cloud-tail. Sixty days of hunger and taking lay ahead. Greed would test them in ways Desire never had.