The longer I watched the tree’s dazzling transformation, the more I started to have my doubts. I wanted to remove my roots and stop what I was doing, but for some reason they wouldn’t listen to me, like they’d been glued together with the tree’s roots when I wasn’t looking. My seed also wouldn’t cooperate with me, and was just pumping out more and more magic with seemingly no end, no matter how much I willed it to stop what it was doing. Honestly, I was kind of beginning to panic! Sure, I was worried what kind of tree the Spirit had tricked me into growing, but what was even more worrying and urgent was the feeling of starvation that was gradually getting greater and greater inside of me.

  [Calm yourself, child. I have no pns of killing you.]

  Well then what the heck do you think this is?! Can’t you tell how low on resources I’m getting?!

  [I promise that you’ll be fine. The process is almost completed.]

  Yeah? Well it’s not ever gonna be completed if I starve to death!!!

  As I compined and grumbled and worried and stressed, suddenly the pull of nutrients from my seed began to slow, and the glowing of the tree, which had already long lost its bark and leaves, began to fade away a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t completely stop glowing; If anything, I’m sure it was still perfectly lit up enough to provide plenty of light once night came. It just wasn’t, you know, blindingly bright now, like it was before. In fact, you could say that the light it was giving off was quite pretty, and maybe almost a soft, shimmery chromatic type of deal.

  Yeah, it was definitely, definitely pretty.

  Too bad I’m a bit too hungry to really appreciate it right now!

  [Don’t worry, child. Your hunger will be fixed in a moment.]

  Huh? By what exactly, because with my stupidly big self marching over here and that light show I just put on, I doubt there’s anything edible nearby-

  All of a sudden there was a very loud creaking sound that came from every direction, echoing through the area from multiple sources. All the smaller trees that surrounded the newly chromatic one began to crumble and fall, turning to dust when they hit the floor, like some kind of mummy’s curse had finally gotten hold of them. One after another they fell, leaving not even stumps or roots behind, slowly clearing the area around the tree and I.

  …Um… Did I… maybe do something wrong?

  …Am I gonna get in trouble?

  [No, sweet Mellily. This was supposed to happen.]

  Oh…? Are you absolutely sure that you’re not gonna get mad at me for this ter? Because you know, if it helps at all, I’m sure I could summon up Trig again ter once I have more resources and-

  [It is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, child. Hush about that now, and look.]

  The big chromatic tree seemed to shudder slightly, and a softly glowing twig from it fell onto the ground in front of me, leaking a bit of milky looking sap. Okay, I say twig, but considering how big the tree was, and considering how big I am, it’s more appropriate to say that a small branch dropped off of the thing.

  [Consume it, and you should be completely satiated.]

  Oh, is that so? I mean, I’m definitely gonna do as the Spirit says and not look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’ve never once eaten another pnt and had it ever work for me before, so… Yeah, my hopes aren’t too especially high.

  I took the branch carefully, like I was handling the most delicate gss in the world... and then much less carefully dropped it into my mouth without any dey. And you know what? I apologize! I apologize completely for any of the angst driven things that I said to the Forest Spirit before this, because it completely and utterly worked! As soon as the glowing branch melted away and my stomach began to digest the milky sap that it left behind, I immediately started to feel myself getting energized. It was like I just chugged down barrels of the most nutritious thing that I’d ever eaten in my entire life! The Pack members that mom ate while she was controlling my body didn’t even come anywhere close to how much magic and nutrients were flooding through me right now. Even the Aqua Cores, which I had to quickly photosynthesize and run through so that I wouldn’t feel like I was going to explode from all the excess magic that was in them, didn’t come close to how completely filling this one, simple (but still chromatically glowy) branch had given me!

  And even though I don’t have any taste buds, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the elves, you know? Just like how people can eat something and go ‘That tastes like chicken!’, I definitely had the urge to smack my lips and say that this branch tasted just like elves. Or, well, more specifically, I guess I’d say that it tasted like elf blood; I’ve never had the chance to taste what anything else elven was like, after all.

  What was it that Til said to me? Something about how the Forest Spirit protected them from us corpse pnts because we’d want their blood too much or something? Does that maybe have something to do with this?

  [You’re almost correct, but not quite. What you’re tasting now is my power, direct and unfiltered, energizing you. For the elves to change their allegiance from the Fire, who created them, over to me, they had to be dyed in my power and remade from the inside. It was something that had never been done before… which is why I perhaps put a bit too much of my power into them. Even now, generations ter, my power radiates in them, causing them great control over the natural energies, or as it is called ‘magic’.]

  Oh okay, I get it! So you’re saying it’s not that the branch tasted like elves, but that elves taste like ‘Forest Spirit’!

  [Yes, that’s about the gist of it.]

  Okay okay, if that’s the case then no wonder you had to shield them from us pnts; I mean, I bet it would be practically impossible for most of us to not try and slurp up as much of this power as we could otherwise, right?

  [...There were, in fact, a handful of incidents when I first made your kind because of it. Many elven lives were lost.]

  Wow, that must have been absolutely awful! Good thing you figured out how to stop it.

  [Yes, although it’s far from a perfect system.]

  Ah, I guess you’re right about that. No wonder the elves seemed to be so cautious of us still. But hey, wait a sec! If there were a bunch of corpse pnts like me running around and eating up all the amazingly delicious elves, then why aren’t there a bunch of super strong pnts protecting the pce right now?!

  [...]

  There was an awkward silence in my head, enough for me to even make out the soft tinkling sound that the ethereal leaves on the tree made as the wind blew past them. I might not be the best in a conversation, but even I know that I must have brought up something that made the Spirit distinctly freaking unhappy.

  Umm… I’m sorry, Spirit, I didn’t know it was such a bad thing to ask. I was just curious, but I don’t really need an answer, okay?

  [...Thank you for your kind words, child, but… I suppose you do have a right to know about this.]

  Oh, really? Wow, I was really thinking that you weren’t gonna tell it to me! It’d be a lie if I said I wasn't super curious right now! I mean, if it’s not too much of a burden for you to tell me, then… Um…

  [Heh… You always raise my spirits, Mellily. Don’t worry, I’ve resolved myself to tell you, even if the memory pains me. You see, at that time there were three of my creations that had discovered and besieged my elves. They devoured entire communities, cutting the elves’ popution by over half before I was able to finally hide them. And then, when the appealing prey was gone, they unexpectedly turned on each other, once more sensing my power, just as you’ve experienced before.]

  Ohhhh, I get it, I get it. So they did that whole ‘there can only be one’ territorial thing to each other, huh? Yup, I know exactly how it goes.

  [Yes. It’s something that I can’t manage to fix, it seems. I needed to make your kind choose a spot and protect it, but for some reason that always caused them to hate any intruders on their nds, including their own kind.]

  Yeah well, I guess that’s perfectly natural, isn’t it? There’s plenty of animals that do the same thing, right?

  [It’s true… Nature is indeed hard to overcome. But if only I could have succeeded, if only my creations didn’t have to fight alone, then perhaps they wouldn’t have been at such a disadvantage…]

  Mmm, yeah, I think that’s probably right. I know from experience that it’s better to have a whole corpse pnt crew together when fighting against the invaders; Really helps to cover each of their prospective weaknesses. No wonder the Forest Spirit decided to give me this whole minion-mancy skill; It must have been the only way to force the corpse pnts to py nice and work together.

  So… I’m guessing from what you’re saying that those three strong corpse pnts didn’t make it in the end, huh?

  [...By the time their fighting ended, there was only one pnt left, battleworn and maddened after the long, almost unending fight. It was close to starvation and desperate, but by that point it had grown so rge and hungry that there was nothing left in my nds that it could find to sustain it, since I’d hidden away the elves. In the end, its only choice was to drag itself to the territory of the Fire… At first it was able to tear its way in and caused a good amount of destruction, but it didn’t take long before the Fire’s three Envoys appeared and put an end to it. It died without even putting up much of a fight.]

  Oh…

  Oh, I see…

  I’m sure I’m heaps better and stronger than that past pnt, but uh…

  …Is it bad if that story scares me a little bit?