Kore
As she... strolls? No, rambles, she’s rambling along.
As Kore rambles through the forest, she pauses every so often. She stares at trees she only faintly remembers from her time on Earth. She starts when she hears the twitter of bird song - and stares up as... she doesn’t know what this one is called, if it was native to her Earth. But there are living things here. Living things.
Kore leans against a tree and sighs, tension coiling through her body, pulling taut like steel wire.
Living things.
She breathes slowly and deeply, regular breaths.
Living things.
She swallows the slightly manic laughter that starts to crawl up her throat. She doesn’t know why she’s here, or where she is. But here, surrounded by life she has not had to raise by hand, she feels content in a way she has not in a long, long time. It is a verdant land, full of life (and death, she thinks to herself wryly, smelling the scent of decay and death in the distance) and she is in it.
As she straightens up and starts walking forward again, even the root she nearly trips on can’t dampen her mood.
Kore walks forward with more focus now, her steps filled with purpose.
She only stops when she sees...Rotted trees. Great redwoods, with decaying cores, gnawing at dead soil. There not a clear demarcation, but interspersed with still healthy, living trees - it’s odd, to her mind. Some odd illness, an element in the soil? She can see more dead trees beyond them, a forest of wooden corpses held up solely by inertia. The scent of rot is thick in the air, and after years of smelling only the sterile, lifeless air of her home, even this is somewhat welcome.
If disgusting.
But her curiosity has been piqued - a vice, admittedly, but harmless compared to everything else she’s done. The corruption, rot... It affects everything. And some of the flowers - oozing sickly sweet nectar, bloom as she passes.
The most confusing thing is that nothing is actually breaking - with this many rotten trees, at least some should have broken, especially with such advanced stages - they must have been like this for weeks at least, and been blown down or just crumbled, dry, rotten roots unable to hold their ground.
But if this is a new world, who knows what could be happening? Ores, water, illnesses she has never seen before - she lets herself indulge in a brief fantasy of helping people here heal, if people exist, of fighting strange illnesses - but discards it. If the people hadn’t figured out how to fight this, there was no guarantee she - a foreigner from another world, and one with no talent for medicine would. Her plants had never had to deal with illness. There was nothing left to cause it.
Trees fall, out of nowhere as she steps forward. She looks up with narrowed eyes as they collide so they lean over her together, forming an arch. In front of her, more and more trees do the same, and the effect is something like the crossed spears of soldiers, showing respect to a visiting dignitary to a royal court.
And at the end of the pseudo-corridor formed by the leaning trees, she sees a clearing of flowers and fruit, and in the middle - a short, lithe figure. Even from this distance, she can see training in their shape, in the way they hold themselves.
Even from here, she can sense what they are - more an evil spirit than a person, formed from corruption and negative emotions.
She thinks, for a moment, of a very long time ago, when she gave mortals parts of her power, to make themselves into monsters, forms twisting as they were armoured with their hatreds and sorrows.
They pale to this, whatever it is. It is like a dragon to a carp.
Kore rests her hand on the belt that now wraps her waist - sleek and angular, petrified wood that is not wood cold under her fingers.
She has many questions to ask this being. They want to tear out of her mouth. But she masters herself and says:
"What are you, and what do you intend?"
