1.05-Forest of Slumber

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]I wound up in the debt books of a Wrot named Trekia Avantis. Wasn’t the first time I’d owed a favor to one of them. I expected something dangerous, reckless, maybe even stupid as part of their request. I went out to the Commune of Avantis’s temple and spoke to their priestess. All she handed me was a sealed soul box, a truncated hexahedron made of silver wood and engraved with all kinds of faces–human faces, Glatchian faces, Morobian, Dexikai, Lamorae, all of them with an expression of someone in awe. Or panic.The lens telemetry sent me way out past the Agora Quadrant, past the Gipsum Formations, beyond Gates of Hellis. Way out there. It was a rogue planet, the size of a gas giant but solid. Pharaoh charms around my necks to help with the extra gravity, I stepped off into a forest. Something in the atmosphere amplified the star light. The trees didn’t have leaves. The things were black, legs and roots encrusted into the bark. Symbiotic and asleep here away from all the daylight in the universe. They hummed. A soft, discordant sound echoed by the box between my hands.There was no path. Space unfolded before me, telescoping down a lane, like looking through a set of mirrors until I had them all aligned, an ever repeating promenade of of silver and silhouette trunks stretching out from me . There at the end was a single stump, a tree felled long ago.Obsidian, rent in two at the base and joined at the top, it stood no higher than my hip. I stepped before it and the leaves that weren’t stirred in their slumber. Weak astral light coalesce at my feet like witnesses called forth. The faces on the soul box closed their mouths and watched me as I set it on the burned stump. Then a hush save that hum. Something clicked and turned inside the box. It began to open. Never before or since in my life have I felt such a strong instinct to look away. That whatever was in there was not for me.The return to my ship was orphic. I never once looked back.