Prologue

“This potion, the side-effects are something else. Are you sure you want to go through with this? I’m not judging, but you know the effects are irreversible. People are gonna notice, and they’re going to talk. And many of the things they’ll have to say won’t be so nice.”

Faukner wordlessly reached out a hand for the potion. The merchant hesitated for a moment, and then, with a shake of his head, placed it into Faukner’s outstretched palm.

“Customer’s always right. It’s your life, I guess”, the merchant said, forcing a weak smile.

“Yeah”, Faukner replied, “and without this potion, I wouldn’t have had much of this life left anyways.”

The vial of potion clutched in Faukner’s hand was small and unnaturally cold, so much so that frost had formed on the surface of it. Hues of orange, red, purple, and pink danced within, reminding him of a sunset. This potion was going to save his life, side effects or not. He handed a sack of gold over to the merchant and left the shop happier than he had been in a very long time.

While it didn’t bother him, what the merchant had said was true. People were going to notice, and they would certainly have things to say. Faukner didn’t care though, he was finished living life the way he had been. Besides that, he had a plan.

- Something in the Woods -

Faukner sat up in surprise at the sound of tapping on his window. It was Fall in Mileth, and the village was just beginning to rise for its morning activities. He was in the middle of a disturbing dream when the sound woke him up. He groggily climbed out of bed and went to the window to open it.

Outside was a young girl Faukner didn’t recognize. She was bouncing from the tip of one foot to the other, a wide smile planted on her face. Upon seeing him, she waved, radiating waves of happy energy. Faukner found it a little nauseating.

“Master priest, sir! You asked us to wake you up at six am!” The girl said the moment Faukner opened the window. She was clearly a morning person. Faukner was not. He hoped she didn’t notice the grimace that crossed his face upon being called “sir”. He realized this girl must be the daughter of the owner of the inn where he was currently staying. He thought she was cute, but something was off about her behavior. Why had she come to the window, instead of the door? Why couldn't she stop bouncing? Still, he couldn’t stop it when his insides twinged with envy at the sight of her.

“Thank you!” he said, unable to help but feign a sort of liveliness in response to her own, authentic enthusiasm.

“If you’d like breakfast, we’re serving it in 15 minutes, so you’d better get a move on if you don’t want to miss all the best stuff! Okay? Bye now!” She ran off before Faukner could respond.

As it happened, Faukner would very much have appreciated a good breakfast that morning, but alas he was eager to get on with his day. Faukner planned to be far away from civilization by nightfall, deep within the East Woodlands. So it was that he decided to settle for the quick and easy dried meats and fruits he kept stored in his travel pack.

Faukner spent much of that morning, wandering from shop to shop in town, gathering the equipment he would need to spend a few days away from civilization. He planned to escape from public view by going into the woods - deep enough that no one else would be around to see what he was doing. He would take his potion, change his life, and begin fresh.

He started his hike in the early afternoon. East Woodlands is an enchanted kind of place, filled with various types of monsters like goblins, giant mushroom creatures known as “shriekers”, faerie folk, and wisps, amongst other less threatening varieties of creatures. It’s not the most welcoming of forests, but there was nothing there that Faukner believed he couldn’t handle - he was a master priest, after all. While combat wasn’t exactly his strongest suit, he was still sure that he was more than capable of handling anything the East Woodlands could throw at him.

There was nothing unusual about the woods that day, at least not on the surface. The leaves were just beginning to change colors, in preparation for the coming winter. The birds chirped in the trees, the insects played their mating songs, and at any given time one might hear snippets of what goblins called conversation off in the distance. The sky was blue, and the sun was shining. The day was pleasant.

Faukner’s hike progressed easily, through much of the afternoon. He spent a lot of his time avoiding the various monsters that called East Woodlands home. It wouldn’t do to get into unnecessary fights. Because he was proceeding so cautiously, it wasn’t until night was beginning to fall that the first thing out of the ordinary occurred.

As he was walking, Faukner began to notice a strange scent in the air. It was sweet. Faukner accredited the smell to the wildflowers that grew in abundance all around this section of his path. It was almost as though someone was baking a pastry. But then there was a sudden shift. All at once, the sweet smell became horrible, like someone was baking garbage. A metallic scent accompanied the smell of baked garbage, underlying it, running through it like a vein. The entire effect left a disgusting taste in Faukner’s mouth.

Suddenly, what Faukner had thought were wildflowers, bloomed into a giggling swarm of faerie folk. This must be where the scent had come from. Faeries are known mischief-makers, so perhaps they thought a rude scent would be funny. Most of the fae took to the sky, but a few stayed behind. They darted around his head, tugging at his hair and clothing, some flying by his ears to whisper words in their fae language, which sounded to Faukner like little more than confusing noise.

He raised his staff and began swatting them away, but they were nimble creatures, easily dodging his blows. So he began to run. This was a mistake. It turns out that running through thick undergrowth, while being heavily distracted by flying creatures, is a recipe for tripping on exposed roots, which is exactly what he did.

The faeries, seemingly satisfied with their work of having caused a potential injury, decided that they were now bored with their victim, and flew away to find other forms of mischief to engage in.

“Well, that’s just my luck isn’t it,” Faukner said to himself.

He began to pick himself off the ground when he noticed that in front of him there was an old wooden cabin. For some reason, these old houses were built throughout the woods. No one seems to know why they were there, or who had built them. In addition, they seemed to remain unoccupied, further adding to their mysterious natures. Perhaps goblins are more intelligent than most people like to think? But why then didn’t the goblins live in the small houses they built? No one knew.

The cabin seemed to be the perfect place to bed down for the night, as the remaining daylight was quickly fading from the sky, and the woods would soon be too dark to navigate unaided. He wasn’t that far off from the path he had been following, and the growth in this section of the forest was dense enough to hide it from the view of any would-be potential shelter seekers, and hopefully from the view of any would-be predators as well. There was also the matter of his newly bruised ankle and ego that made the decision to rest for the evening even easier to make.

Inside it was dark, so the first thing Faukner did was light his lantern. He was surprised to find that the small house was lightly furnished. There was a fireplace, complete with signs of a long-abandoned fire, a small table, and a chair. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust, so it was clear that no one had been in there for a long time. The walls of the cabin were thin and full of holes, but they would be sufficient for keeping any of the forests’ monsters at bay, at least for the evening.

Once he was as certain as he could be that he would be left quite alone, Faukner began to unpack some essentials from his traveling pack. It was while unpacking that his mind drifted towards the potion he had spent so much of his hard-earned gold on. The potion that promised to change his life; to fix his life. He could take it now. He was certain that, even though it had only been half a day’s travel, he was well enough away from prying eyes that he wouldn’t be found out.

And even if he was found out, what business was it of anyone’s what he did with his body? The potion was, after all, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. A dream which was brought to him by a childhood nightmare. A consistent, unstoppable, brutal nightmare, which he carried with him well into his adult age. A nightmare that thrummed within him, from the moment he woke up, until the moment he fell asleep, every single day. He hadn’t been lying when he told the merchant that he didn’t have much life left to live. Without a solution, Faukner would have eventually been driven to produce a solution: death, by his own hand.

He sat on the lone chair in the cabin, the sunset potion in his hand, nearly freezing to the touch. The bottle stared at him, daring him to drink it. He picked at the wax seal around the edge of the vial's stopper.

To hell with it, he thought, I've waited long enough for this, I'm done waiting!

He twisted the stopper, breaking the wax seal with a little tsst.

He put the vial to his lips and drank.

Immediately there came a slamming knock on the door to the cabin.

Faukner frantically tried to rise to his feet, but something was off. His legs didn’t want to work.

The slamming knock again. Much louder than before.

His legs felt like jelly. His? Was that right? He couldn’t think straight.

A third knock. This time the banging threatened to break the door off its hinges it was so fierce.

His vision blurred. He felt like his stomach was twisting itself into a knot. He tried to be sick, but nothing came of it except dry heaves.

The banging came again, only this time it didn't stop. It had become so intense that Faukner could feel the impact of each bang in his head. It droned on, the noise driving itself deeper and deeper into Faukner's skull until he thought for sure he must be bleeding from his ears, nose, and eyes.

Abruptly as it had started, it stopped. The banging, the nausea, his legs regained their strength. Faukner felt around his face with his fingers, confident they’d come away covered in blood, but there was none.

Then from the door came a much more reasonable knock, like that of a neighbor coming to borrow sugar.

Taking his lantern in hand, he went to the door and opened it.

There was no one there.

Faukner shined the light of his lantern all around the now completely dark woods that surrounded his temporary shelter, certain he’d find someone or, more likely, some monster hiding in the growth that surrounded him. There was nothing.

He shook his head, trying to clear it from the remaining effect of the assault. He retreated into the cabin.

I did hear banging, didn’t I? He thought to himself. That couldn’t have been one of the side effects of the potion. Is this cabin haunted?

It was while lost in thought that Faukner noticed something that he hadn’t noticed upon first inspection of the cabin he was currently occupying. In the center of the floor, hidden beneath the table, was a trapdoor.

Now, normally Faukner wasn’t one to snoop. But, given that the cabin he was in was seemingly owned by no one, and perhaps the potion he had just consumed had had a sort of intoxicating effect, he allowed curiosity to get the better of him.

With a loud scraping noise and more difficulty than he was expecting, Faukner moved the table away from the door on the floor. It was easy to see why he had missed the door during his initial examination of the room, as it sat nearly flush with the floorboards around it. In a corner of the door, there was an indent that was perfect for a hand to fit into. Faukner used the handle to pry it open.

The first thing he noticed was a putrid stink. That door must have been close to airtight because there was no way it would have otherwise blocked the smell that was emanating from below. It struck him how similar the stench was to the metallic scent that came from the faeries in the forest. Faukner’s eyes began to water.

It’s like a butcher’s shop, he thought, like rotting meat and blood.

He dipped his lantern into the hole. At the edge of it, there was a ladder, seemingly of solid construction. If he decided to climb down it, he didn’t think he would have to worry about a rung giving out on him unexpectedly. Alas, the lantern’s light did not reach the bottom of the hole. From what he could tell the door opened into a large chamber.

“Hello?” He shouted into the hole. Not expecting an answer, and not getting one. He thought perhaps he’d at least hear an echo, but it was as though the darkness beneath him consumed all sound. In fact, the silence stood out to him. His shelter, while sufficient enough to keep him from being attacked by monsters as he slept, was thin-walled, and full of holes to boot. The entire time he had been in the cabin he had had no issues hearing the chirping of the forest’s many insects outside. But now an eerie quiet settled over his world like a blanket, as if the forest itself was anticipating his descent into that hole in the ground.

He peered into the hole for a long moment, he thought he could make out something deep within it, like small lights, lazily moving back and forth.

Well, this is dubious, he thought. With a snap of his fingers, he decided I don’t think I’m going down there. This is already turning out to be a strange night, I think I’m better off not tempting fate.

When he looked back up moments later, he was surprised to see that the door to the cabin had disappeared. It wasn’t smashed in, it wasn’t ripped from its hinges, it was just gone as though it had never been there in the first place.

“Well, that’s even more dubious!” Faukner told himself. He got up to check, as though giving the situation a look-over could solve the mystery of the missing door. Before he could make it to the entrance of the cabin, however, a figure just outside moved into view.

It was all black, with no definition. The only thing Faukner could see was its outline, vaguely humanoid, and even its outline seemed to blur into the background around the edges. It took a step into the room, and where its foot landed, shadows spread from it, as though in a battle with the light of Faukner’s lantern, and the shadows were winning.

As the darkness spread, Faukner knew instinctively that combat was not an option. It wasn’t a question of spell power, Faukner had plenty of that, but somehow he knew that all the spell power in the world wouldn’t be able to defeat this creature, as this thing in front of him didn’t seem to exist on the same plane as him. He knew he would be utterly powerless to interact with it. Looking around the room for some kind of way out, he didn’t see any other options but to go down into the hole.

He had just enough time to hastily grab his lantern, and clip it to a loop on his belt designed to hold it. He threw his staff in the hole and slung himself over the edge to begin his descent.

Shortly into his climb, he heard the door above him slam shut. While he wasn’t being pursued, he didn’t dare feel relief. He hoped what lay below was less threatening than what waited for him above, but a feeling in his gut told him that he would regret going down there.

It was a surprisingly long climb. There seemed to be more chamber hidden beneath the cabin than Faukner thought was possible. He had to save himself several times from slipping, as something about his body was beginning to feel… different. Was he smaller than he used to be? He’d reach a leg down expecting his foot to meet a rung, only to find that the rung was just a little further below where he expected it to be.

As he climbed further, the texture of the ladder began to change. It went from being made entirely out of wood, to being made out of stone, as though it was in the middle of being petrified. The air also grew more and more humid, until Faukner found himself sweating.

After what felt like too long, he found himself standing at the bottom of the ladder, ankle-deep in dirty water. He immediately began the search for the staff he threw into the hole ahead of him. He wasn’t entirely without the ability to defend himself without it, but it made channeling and the associated incantations quicker and more deadly. Without it, what would have been a minor threat became something he was better off fleeing from.

The staff was missing. It couldn’t have bounced or rolled further than he looked for it, and it was too awkwardly shaped to be entirely hidden beneath the water. It was just gone.

Something had to have taken it, he thought. This is bad it’s getting worse by the minute.

After all but abandoning his search for the staff, Faukner finally took notice of the chamber he was in. He was surrounded by the tell-tale signs of a long-forgotten mining operation. The only mine he knew of that was even remotely close to the East Woodlands was the Kasmanium mine. This must be a forgotten offshoot from a long-ago collapsed tunnel. This section of the mine must have been flooded at some point, as well, because the entire area surrounding him was covered in a shallow pool of water.

He looked around at the room he was in and began to take things in in greater detail than he had when he was searching for his staff. He noticed that what he had previously thought was just rubble and stone had clear and definite shapes. Littered all around him were dozens and dozens of petrified faerie corpses.

It was only after noticing the petrified corpses of the faeries surrounding him that he started to realize something else. His feet, which had been soaking in the unknown liquid that flooded the area around him, felt heavier than usual. He lifted one to check, and sure enough, the outside of his boots were beginning to become petrified.

So no laying down. He thought to himself. My boots should protect my feet for a little while, at least.

The chamber he was in was colossal. Now that he was closer to the source, he could see that there were indeed lights lazily swaying back and forth in the distance. Now and then one came close enough for him to make out a form, and he was able to tell that they were wisps. Not a dangerous creature in ordinary circumstances, but without his staff, Faukner was better off avoiding them.

The wisps floated lazily by piles of stone faerie corpses, casting eerie shadows as they passed. Faukner observed that, despite being submerged to the ankle in water, the sounds he made when he walked were muffled, almost to the point of silence.

“Hello?” Faukner said quietly out loud to himself as a test to see if his hearing had been affected somehow.

Whoa! Was that my voice? His voice sounded foreign to him like it had gotten higher in pitch.

“I just want to go home,” he said, to further test the sound of his voice. The change was subtle, but it was there. His voice was softer, and definitely higher in pitch. But volume-wise, it sounded normal. His voice was unaffected by the muffling effect of the room, his hearing was fine.

So, was it the water itself that muffled the ambient sounds around him, or was there some other mystical property of the cavern he was in that was less obvious?

He picked a direction that seemed as good as any and walked. The quiet around him brought about a kind of tension. It felt like one of the senses required to survive down there was shut off, and he wasn’t certain that the wisps floating around him were the only threat he needed to be aware of.

With every step forward he took, the tension in his body continued to grow. There was a weight in the pit of his stomach, his jaw and neck felt tight, and they were getting tighter. He was also beginning to develop a nasty throbbing headache. He flexed his arms and hands, trying to will his muscles to loosen up, but they refused to cooperate.

Just when he thought the tension in his body couldn’t get any worse, when he had nearly collapsed from the pain, when he felt like he couldn’t take another step without falling to his knees, it stopped. Everything loosened all at once, and the throbbing ache in his head began to subside. The tension of the situation remained, but the physical sensation was severely lessened.

He felt lighter, smaller, closer to the ground. Not by much, a few inches perhaps, but the water surrounding his feet was surely closer than it had been mere moments before. Faukner wished he could kick himself for not waiting to drink that potion.

He continued walking in the direction he picked. At least, he hoped it was the direction he picked. Because he had to avoid the wisps that occasionally floated across his path, he could have been walking in circles for all he knew. Without any sort of landmark to aim for, or a compass, he had no real way of knowing if he was making any progress at all. He had planned to reach the outer wall of the chamber, and hopefully, follow it to another ladder or a path that might eventually lead to an exit.

He walked for what felt like hours. Zig-zagging where necessary to avoid the wisps. He found that when he got too close to them they’d begin to turn a violent shade of red and start emitting a sound that, while muffled, seemed to bore into his head. It was an effective deterrent.

Eventually, he came across the first of what appeared to be a veritable forest of massive stone pillars. The pillars reached towards the ceiling, beyond the light of his lantern. He noticed that the wisps stayed in what he had dubbed the “faerie field”, every time one would get too close to a pillar, it would rapidly dart in another direction.

Whatever is scaring them away from the pillars can’t be too good for me either. Faukner thought. He found that the voice in his head had already gone up in pitch to match the voice he now spoke with. He would find time to be happy with the change later. But, if I’m going to find a way out of here, I’m going to need to keep moving forward.

The pillars reminded Faukner of the forest that was somewhere above his head. They were even worn in a way that made them look like they were covered in tree bark. Perhaps they were trees at one time, petrified by the water that was currently turning Faukner’s boots into stone. They were the biggest trees Faukner had ever seen, though, and he found it hard to believe that they could grow this way so deep beneath the earth.

He crossed the pillar line. He immediately felt a shift in the atmosphere around him. The sound of his feet splashing through the water hit him like a slap to the face. Had he been making this much noise the entire time? He could clearly hear, too, the noises that the wisps had been making whenever he’d get too close to them. Off in the distance, he heard dozens of them, loudly droning. Whatever enchantment lay across the faerie fields to muffle sound the way it had been, ended inside these pillars. He was relieved to feel that the remaining tension from earlier also faded away completely now.

The deeper into the pillars he walked, the more obvious it became that they were once trees. Eventually, he started to see low-hanging branches. The branches became denser the further into the pillars that he went until he could no longer tell that they had ever looked like anything but fully realized trees. He was in an underground forest made of stone.

Then he came across a clearing. In the center of the clearing, resting against a pile of stones, sat his staff.

“Oh, come on now,” Faukner said out loud to no one. “That’s clearly bait.”

Without emerging into the clearing, Faukner circled his staff, looking for what could have left it there. After he was satisfied that there was nothing in the immediate area surrounding him, he cautiously stepped into the clearing.

He took a step forward, and then another. A third step, and suddenly he felt a shooting pain in his leg. He looked down and noticed that his leg was submerged in the water up to his knee. The water had hidden a sudden dip in the ground. Faukner fell backward, using his hands to brace for impact, but this only served to soak them in the water too. Pain shot through his arms now, he quickly recovered, getting to his feet, but it was too late. Stone had begun to form on his skin.

He rapidly brushed at the stone, and while it was flaking off, it was forming faster than he could clear it away. Eventually, his hands stopped moving, and then it became harder to move his wrists, his elbows, his shoulders, his neck. The petrification had also started at his legs and crept its way up his body so that it met with the petrification from his arms somewhere around his stomach. He felt it climb up his jaw then, the effect was slower than it was before but it never stopped progressing.

I guess this is it, time to rest. I’m dead.

With that thought, he relaxed, expecting the petrification to close in around his awareness at any moment.

Only, he remained aware. He couldn’t move, of course, but he could still feel. His insides were all there, the petrification seemed to be only skin deep.

Then the unexpected happened: his skin began to crack. Soon large chunks of stone began to fall away from him, revealing new skin, fresh and pink. When he was able to move his head again, he looked at his arms and noticed that they were thinner and nearly hairless. His face too, which had had a few days of growth of facial hair, was now hairless.

When he became aware of his surroundings again, he noticed something else. The water that had surrounded his feet before had disappeared without a trace. Not even puddles remained. He looked around and noticed that the trees outside of the clearing that he was in had lost their petrification as well.

“I suppose that explains why my clothes aren’t still petrified,” he said.

Fully able to see the ground he was walking on now, Faukner moved to retrieve his staff. Only before he could get there, he noticed something moving through the trees beyond the clearing.

A legless, headless torso pulled itself towards him, hovering inches from the ground.

Its limbs stretched and shrank in all the right places required to move it along, they were gooey and sinewy at the same time. It was clear where the smell in the chamber was coming from now. Every movement it made unleashed a new onslaught of the stench of rotting meat and blood.

The monster left drooling oily stains where its hands touched the tree trunks. You’d have thought its movements would be slow and clumsy with the method it used to propel itself, but they were smooth and quick, unnaturally so, making the torso appear as though it were gliding through the air. It made sickening squelching and suckling noises as it moved, like punctured lungs gasping for breath.

Faukner recalled accidentally stepping on a mouse as a child. It wasn’t with all his weight, but enough to roll the poor thing over and crush its ribs. He remembered the mouse sucking for its last breaths as it lay there dying. The sounds of this creature made Faukner think of that mouse, only unlike the mouse, it never had the decency to stop dying and just die.

It took Faukner a moment to register that the thing was rapidly traveling in his direction. Its movements would be graceful if the whole scene wasn’t so abhorrent.

When the creature entered the clearing, it ran out of trees to propel itself forward, it shifted to running along on its hands. While it wasn't as fast this way, it still moved at an impressive rate, quickly closing the gap between itself and where Faukner stood.

Before Faukner could grab his staff, the creature was on top of it. It grabbed the staff and, as easily as though it were a twig, snapped it in half.

That slight delay had given Faukner just enough time to incant the long version of a spell, though, and by the time the monster had finished with its display of strength, Faukner was ready to unleash it.

"Deo saighead!" He cried out.

Pink electricity hit the monster as though it were being struck by lightning. His spell was weak, weaker than Faukner would have liked by far, but it served a purpose. The monster shuddered and dropped. It wasn't dead, that was more than Faukner could have hoped for, but it was stunned. For how long, though, Faukner did not know. He wasted no time and turned around to run.

Only there were more of them. Behind him, at least three more of the creatures stood guard at the edge of the tree line. Flanking him, preventing him from running anywhere but...

Faukner turned towards the original creature, which by now, was beginning to stir, shaking off the stun.

He had no choice but to run towards it, forward on his original path. He didn't see any of the creatures in the forest ahead. He couldn’t help but feel like he was being driven somewhere.

As he sprinted past it, the creature swiped at him, just missing, and causing itself to lose balance. The delay was enough for Faukner to distance himself and it.

He broke through into the tree line, he could hear the slapping of the creature's hands against the stone ground, and then nothing, as the creature entered the trees behind him and switched to its faster, quieter method of traveling using their trunks to pull itself along.

As he ran he caught glimpses of more of the creatures to either side of him, they were easily keeping pace. He noticed silhouettes of the things hanging from branches all around him, crawling down the trunks of the trees like spiders. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. He started to hear rocks flying past his head. They were throwing things at him while he ran. He expected to feel the crushing grip of one of those hands wrapping around an ankle, or an arm at any moment. He expected to be pulled back into a flurry of gouging, ripping hands.

He ran for what felt like an eternity but was more likely no longer than a few minutes.

And then he saw it: his light spilled onto a ladder. He clipped the lantern to his belt as he ran, and then he was climbing the rungs. He climbed faster than he thought possible, knowing that the creatures were still just behind him. He felt the ladder shake slightly as they mounted it. He sped up, his arms and legs screaming for him to stop, or to slow down, but he couldn’t listen to them, not now when he thought his life was at stake.

He climbed hard, not daring to look down. Eventually, he reached a trapdoor at the top of the ladder. He pushed it up, thankfully it wasn’t locked or blocked somehow, and crawled into the small stone chamber above.

Once there, he chanced a look back down. He counted no less than six of the creatures, hanging from the ladder below. They had all stopped pursuing him when he reached the top. They had driven the intruder from their underground home. Perhaps they were the reason why this section of the mine was abandoned.

Faukner collapsed onto the door, slamming it shut. Then he promptly passed out.

He woke up hours later, his head aching, his mind in a fog. Blearily he searched the chamber he was in for an exit, and eventually, he found one. A small tunnel just big enough for him to crawl through. The tunnel exited into the Kasmanium mines proper. From there, he was able to find his way out of the mines, and back to civilization.

Sometime later, Faukner found himself waking up to the sounds of tapping against a window. He got out of bed and went to the window to open it.

Outside was a bouncy girl he did recognize as the innkeeper’s daughter.

“You asked us to wake you up at six am, master priestess, miss!” the girl said the moment Faukner opened the window. Only Faukner wasn’t quite “Faukner” anymore. The potion she had taken had worked its magic changing her into who she was now.

“Thank you! My name’s Celes, by the way!” She told the girl, this time with an authentic enthusiasm of her own.

The End

Epilogue

“It wasn’t obvious at the time, but I was absolutely suffering from hallucinations. The side effects of that potion,” Celes told Firion. Many Deochs had passed since Celes had taken the gender potion. “I can see now, a lot of what I experienced in that hole wasn’t even real.”

“I went back there, a while after it all happened. I took some friends, thinking we’d check out those things in that hole, but when we got there it was just a mine. There were no trees, and certainly, there wasn’t a lake of petrifying water. The ladders were there, but in between them, there was nothing but piles and piles of mined stone. We never did find my old staff,” she said, absentmindedly placing her hand on the staff she used now.

“That’s a pretty wild story,” Firion responded. “How can you be so sure you were just hallucinating though? What if the potion got you in touch with another plane or something? I wonder how different your experience would have been if you hadn’t decided to take a trip to the East Woodlands to take it, like if you’d just taken it in an inn room.”

“I wish I could have just taken it in an inn room, but it was harder back then. Somewhere along the way, people got tired of hiding it, so these days they’re more open about taking it, regardless of how well it’s received. And there have been improvements to the process of making it, so when people take the potion there aren’t as many side effects. We’re living in different times. In a lot of ways, they’re better times, but in a lot of ways... well, there's a lot of hatred in the world.”

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