Summoning Ocellus

They tried to head south in the morning, only to be intercepted by a pixie.

“Please! You have to help me!” the pixie pleaded.

“With the forest?” William asked.

Tixi sighed, exasperated.

“Yes! My mistress is… ill, very ill. Death would have been a kindness. The land sickens with her heart, and it cannot be cleansed until her misery is purged. You are friends with her lover, yes?”

“No, we actually never met him,” Tixi said. “And we don’t care about the forest.”

“Thousands of fey are suffering and dying!” the pixie protested.

Tixi shook her head. “I still don’t care. Find someone else. Someone who was friends with him, maybe.”

Ocellus was overwhelmed by Tixi’s impatience and couldn’t say a thing.

With Tixi and Ijj getting half a vote, it ended up in a 2.5 to 2.5 tie. William wanted to go, of course, and Danielle was swayed by the fact that it was a love story. Ijj just thought it might be fun to see a haunted forest. Flicker, Keeper, and Tixi wanted nothing to do with the whole affair.

So rather than ask Ocellus to break the tie – which, to be fair, wouldn’t be fair with her emotions being affected so heavily by Tixi’s – they flipped a coin. “Heads,” William said. “We help them.”

Keeper groaned. “We’re never going to leave here alive, are we.”

“Well, we certainly won’t be leaving here dead!” Ijj said brightly.

===

The pixie, Yap, wanted to come with them to ‘guide’ them, although apparently the path to the center of the woods had no major branches. It was awfully spooky, though, although nothing seemed overtly dangerous – will-o-the-wisps led Ijj to a pool where he saw frightening visions, a moaning sound turned out to be a half-dead dryad merged with the mangled remains of her tree.

But leave it to Yap to find actual danger. After he nearly died tried to go dancing off with a procession of ghostly fey, Ocellus cocooned him in changeling goo and put him in one of Tixi’s many pockets.

“What?” she asked, as the party stared. “It’s for his own safety.”

“How will he breathe?” Danielle asked.

Ocellus shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s never killed anyone before.”

Half an hour later came the extra spooky trees, with limbs like claws and gaping, fanged mouths set in their trunks.

“Oh!” Ocellus said. “I know a counterspell for this, I think. Pinkie taught it to us in laughter class.”

“You had a class on laughter,” Keeper said, droll.

“It’s one of the fundamental forces of my world,” Ocellus replied. “Let’s see if it works here.”

“When I was a little filly and the sun was going down

The darkness and the shadows they would always make me frown

I’d hide under my pillow from what I thought I saw

But granny pie said that wasn’t the way to dear with fears at all

She said ‘Pinkie you’ve gotta stand up tall, learn to face your fears.

You’ll see that they can’t hurt you just laugh and make them disappear…’”

She turned to one of the trees, and bravely proclaimed, “Ha ha ha!”

The tree swung one of its branches and hit her. It didn’t break the skin, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to sit there and let her dispel it.

Ocellus rubbed her cheek. “Or we could just walk past.”

The only other encounter of note was a giant, three-masted ship somehow beached in the middle of the forest. Since few of the other encounters had been actually harmful, they decided to explore it, and found the captain in his chamber holding tightly onto his treasure. William smashed his head, but apparently he’d been dead instead of undead and just crumbled to dust, leaving the party with a bunch of papers – arcane nautical maps of no terrain any of them recognized, and some sheet music that Danielle was pretty sure she couldn’t play properly without practice.

Then, at last, they reached the center of the swampy forest, to face the cursed mistress who’d caused all the trouble.

===

Yap emerged from Tixi’s pocket. “This is it! This is her glade! I dare not get any closer…”

“When did you get out of my cocoon?” Ocellus asked. “How did you get out of my cocoon?”

“About five minutes after you put me in it,” Yap said, “and I have a knife. A very sharp knife. I stayed hidden because I didn’t want to be cocooned again. It’s so slimy!” He cowered behind a gnarled tree. “Be cautious… she is very angry, and not entirely sane.”

“What kind of fey is she?” Danielle asked. “A dryad?”

“A water nymph,” Yap said.

“Then don’t look at her,” Danielle said to the party. “Their beauty is blinding, so avert your gaze.”

“Here, we can do medusa protocol,” Keeper said, handing out blindfolds.

“We have a medusa protocol?” Danielle asked.

“After that time we faced the medusa we do.”

“It wasn’t a real medusa…” Flicker said. “Just a mask that turned people to stone.”

“Either way, we have a protocol now,” Keeper replied. “Wear the damn blindfolds and don’t try to look at her.”

They heard the nymph rise from the water as they approached. “You! You have failed me, over and over! You failed to protect my love! You failed to protect fort Rannick! You failed to keep the ogres of Hook Mountain from taking his body from me! Explain why I shouldn’t kill you right here and now!”

William kneeled before her. “Lady,” he said, “I pledge to do what I can to make things right, but all of that happened before we got within a hundred miles of this place. We’re not the ones you want to punish.”

“I want to punish everyone for my pain!” she screeched. “But if you will truly help, then I may let you live for now.”

“How can we help?” Danielle asked. “If the ogres took him he’s almost certainly dead…”

“Worse than dead,” the nymph said, calming down a bit as she realized the adventurers were willing to do her bidding. “I tried to resurrect him, but it failed, and I fear… just bring me his remains, and I can bring us both peace.”

“Where’s Hook Mountain?” Keeper hissed.

“It’s part of the cliff on the other side of the fort from the dam,” Danielle hissed back.

“Oh gods, we’re never going to escape this cursed place.”

===

While there wasn’t a trail heading north out of the forest per se, there was a trail of destruction left by the ogres when they invaded the forest to kill the nymph and her lover, and it was pretty easy to follow and blessedly free of undead fey, who gave it a wide berth. At the forest’s edge, as the sun set, they set camp and summoned back Gallus.

“Here,” the griffon said, handing over the tuning fork. “Although you might not need it. The last thing Twilight needed to finish her mirror project was something to target, and your tuning fork did the trick. When I wake up after the spell ends, that’ll be the signal to open the portal.”

Ocellus stared at him. “So I can finally go home.”

“Yep,” Gallus said. “In about five minutes. Your friends can come too, I got special dispensation from the changeling army to spare them from any harassment, even if they are part of the world that kidnapped and killed you.”

“Changeling… army,” William said.

“It’s okay,” Ocellus said. “We’re good now. They won’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it.” She paused. “Unless cocooning panicking civilians counts as harm.”

“It most certainly does,” William replied.

“Pleeeease don’t fight them,” Ocellus said. “I don’t want to see anyone hurt.”

“We’ll negotiate,” Danielle said. “Explain the situation.”

“I’m not sure Pharynx will care, honestly,” Gallus said. “He’s going to lock down the area and then go from there.”

“Why aren’t you happy?” Tixi asked Ocellus. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“It just feels like the timing is bad. Like it’s a giant anticlimax,” Ocellus said.

“Any anticlimax that gets me out of seeing Turtleback Ferry one more time is good in my book,” Keeper said. “Let the army of Ocelluses burn the place to the ground.”