Turning away from the door, Jon spent a few moments looking around again. The hold music continued. A jazz riff began playing as Jon examined the posters covering the walls.

  The posters were of the inspirational variety, a single word pasted over each image. Jon remembered posters like this from grade school. They were the ones in the awkward space between the blackboard and the ceiling that seemed to offend teachers when left unfilled. A particularly unimaginative middle-manager might have framed them as office decorations. Jon’s eyes flicked across three on the wall nearest him. The first stated:

  “Excellence!”

  It featured a snow-capped mountain with a lightning bolt hitting the peak. The next was:

  “Reach!”

  The picture on this was a rock-climber hanging one-handed over a precipice. A third said:

  “Determination!”

  This one showed a puppy stumbling on a stair-step.

  There were hundreds of them, practically overlapping one another at the edges. No surface remained untouched, save the floor and ceiling, which both consisted of some sort of some smooth dry-wall-like material. He glanced at the desk. It was plain, without drawers or any place a key or other helpful materials might be stored.

  The door was obviously not an option. With a breath out, Jon began to explore the room as best he could, searching for any other way out, or a clue to his location. He began feeling along the walls. He was cautious at first, worried that his observer would strike him with another bolt of the energy from the door, but there was no signal this time, and no painful jolts. He wasn’t sure what the voice meant by the catalog; were they referring to these posters?

  He felt on the walls. He couldn’t get a finger under the images, no matter what angle he approached them at. Whatever held them to the walls was extraordinarily strong. He couldn’t even get the pictures to ripple. As he felt along the walls, not finding any defects, he couldn’t help but look closer at the posters.

  The words seemed a little odd. Sometimes his vision would shift when he looked at them. The words would almost look like they multiplied, becoming longer phrases.

  One of them had a picture of the ocean, a massive wave crashing onto the shore. As Jon looked at the poster, the music playing overhead faded and slowed, the pitch dropping an octave. He saw the word,

  “Balance!”

  superimposed on the poster in white letters. Jon heard the word in his mind. The word was followed by the flash of an image. It was a man. He was in rags, standing on the beach, holding out both hands towards an ocean. A gigantic wave many times his height was rapidly closing on the shore. The man pushed out towards the wave, looking like a mime pressing against an invisible wall. As the man did so, Jon heard a voice in his mind:

  “Path of balance: pull of the waxing moon.”

  The wave loomed, then slowed, holding over the man’s head before it ricocheted back out to sea.

  Jon felt his head swim for a moment, then he was back in the room, the music playing again as though it had never stopped. The beat broke just long enough for the voice to comment,

  “Affinity noted, fourth quartile.”

  The experience was bizarre. He had not just seen the wave: he had tasted the spray and felt the cool breeze washing over the shore. Jon felt a sense of recognition just before he heard the words from the poster. When he looked back at it, the picture looked ordinary once more, the accompanying feeling and vision not recurring.

  Jon looked over several more of the posters, but did not feel the resonance he had felt with the balance one. He tried tracing his fingers over them. He still felt nothing. Shaking his head, he continued his slow journey around the room’s perimeter. His thought he felt his fingers catch on the lip of a poster, and he glanced to the spot. Jon’s fingers were on an embossed tree. It was standing alone on a hilltop. The word on the poster was

  “Transcend!”

  As he looked at the tree, Jon felt the room fade, the music cutting altogether. He was in a forest, following an elderly woman in white robes with a pronounced limp. She carried a large branch in her left hand, and used it as a walking staff. The branch was flowering at the top, bearing trailing vines with cherry blossoms. As the old woman walked, the blossoms swayed to the rhythm of her step. The air was warm and damp, reminding Jon of the indoor rain forest exhibit at the local zoo. The trees were huge, with the top of the crowns out of sight, supported by trunks thick enough to carve a home into with room to spare.

  Looking on, Jon realized the source of the woman’s limp. A wooden leg poked out from her robes. She was hobbling along quickly, a slight grimace on her face as she pushed the pace. Then she stopped without warning. She smiled, tilting her head to one side. Jon saw her glance at a shadowy spot near the base of the tree on her right before averting her gaze. She began wandering around, glancing into this bush and that one, using her walking staff to lift branches and allow her to inspect the ground around them. As she did so, she moved ever closer to the base of the tree she originally looked at. Jon heard a child’s giggle from the spot. The woman stopped, her back turned to the space, playing up her confusion as she searched every way but the correct one, making a great show of her inability to find the very obvious toddler standing in the shadows. Abruptly, she turned and grabbed the little girl, who laughed and giggled as the smiling old woman swung her up in the air. Jon’s vision faded as the woman gave the child a hug, and a new vision appeared.

  He was high in the sky, looking down on a city stretching over a hill in the light of the setting sun. Jon wasn’t sure why, but he knew it was the hill from the poster. He was momentarily confused. The ‘hill’ was actually a small mountain, but that wasn’t what was odd. The tree which dominated the poster was nowhere to be seen.

  The mountain was coated in the massive trees the woman and the child had wandered through, but none stood out the way the one on the poster had. From the height he was at, they looked like little more than sprigs, but Jon could see buildings integrated into the trees, like some elven city straight out of Tolkien’s world. The trees on the left face of the mountain were burning, providing nearly as much light as the fading sun despite the smoke billowing towards the mountain’s peak.

  Jon’s view was drawing closer and closer to the top of the mountain, feeling like the opening credit sequence to an older movie, an impression made stronger as he heard clanging noises from an ongoing battle and the crackle of the burning branches. As he came in, he saw a hoard of black bodied creatures swarming out of the burning area to one side of the summit. They ran down the dirt streets of the city which wound between the trees. They wore iron plate armor, and carried crude weaponry. Spears poked out from the ranks. The only word Jon could come up with to describe the creatures was demonic, with the tails poking from behind and the horns integrated into their helmets.

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  A small force of men and women in leather armor stood obstructing their path down the dirt roads, but a constant stream of arrows and forward pressure from the spear-bearing demons was driving them back. Then Jon saw a sphere of green haze erupt from the peak of the mountain. It rapidly rolled down to encompass the entire back lines of the retreating force before halting. It held there, a bank of roiling green fog casting off an eerie glow.

  The men and women rushed through it, the front ranks holding the line as the others turned to run. The front of the pursuing force tried to hold back as the fog appeared before them. Unfortunately for them, the rear ranks either didn’t see or didn’t care about the fog, and the press inevitably forced them stumbling forward.

  The demons forced into the fog screamed as they lifted into the air. Then they were hurled back into their own lines as their flesh began boiling. Moments later they burst apart with flowers, mushrooms and vines erupting from their wounds. The flowers and mushrooms then bloomed, releasing clouds of pollen and spores, with the vines growing swiftly over the ground.

  As the vines, spores and flowers spread, death followed. Over a few seconds one flower or vine became five, and dozens soon after. Though row after row of the demons fell, the hoard pressed ever onward towards the haze. A red glow sprang up from their feet, and the vegetation burned to ashes where they tread.

  Jon’s vision receded once more to give him a view of the mountain from overhead, and he could see the sphere of fog all around the summit. Jon could see the red light pressuring in from the burning areas of the mountain. Then his perspective shifted once more.

  It was unclear exactly how much time had passed, though it was now fully dark. He was with the old woman from the forest, standing in a glen at the top of the mountain. She stood in front of a wooden alter in a circle of standing stones the size of small houses. Her hands were outstretched, and glowed softly with the same color as the sphere, as did the stones around her. Her staff lay on the alter. The woman’s expression was calm, stoic, her eyes closed. All around the circle children were clustered, ranging from early teenagers to toddlers. Jon saw the older children looking after the younger ones. Some held infants on their chests and with packs strapped to their backs. These ones stood near a freestanding stone archway in the center of the glen.

  The red glow outside the sphere intensified, and the green sphere flickered and then winked out like a soap bubble. There was wailing from all around, noises of fear and exclamations of incomprehension. The woman collapsed to her knees.

  Then a man in plate armor ran into the stone circle, carrying a bundle of white cloth soaked in blood. He ran to the old woman where she lay kneeling. Tears streaked across his soot covered cheeks. Jon looked between the man and the old woman, noticing similar cheekbones and jawlines. The man gently placed the bundle in front of the old woman, and the similarities between the two were even more pronounced in their near-identical frowns. The bundle of rags the man had been carrying was revealed to be a small child; it was the little girl who had been playing hide and seek in the other vision. The girl’s face was pale, drawn, and covered in beads of sweat. An arrow stuck out from a wound in her right chest, oozing blood in a steady stream around the shaft, bubbling slightly with each exhalation.

  New life came into the woman as she examined the child. A pulse of green light from her left hand, and the arrow turned to ash, fading to a breeze that did not stir the surrounding grass. The child coughed and blood flew from her lips, then she went limp. The old woman let out a small gasp, her hands now trembling, and more green energy poured from them into the child. The grass around the woman and child began to light with the same green energy, but then the glow winked out. The woman’s shoulders slumped. The man in the plate armor was sobbing something. The child was still not breathing.

  The old woman remained kneeling there with the unbreathing child for several moments. She reached backwards without looking up, and her staff flew from the alter behind her, landing in her hand. The old woman leaned down, whispering in the girl’s ear and kissing her forehead before placing her palm on the girl’s chest. The old woman closed her eyes again, and Jon saw the man in plate armor asking her a question. Above, the sky glowed an ominous crimson, and the noises of combat could be heard coming closer.

  Then, a deeper emerald light shown from the stones around. There was soft *thump,* and the light glowed again now from every blade of grass as well. The old woman’s lids snapped open, but there were no eyes now beneath them, only the light. The man saw this, and shouted something, trying to grab the woman and pull her off the child. He might as well have tried to move the mountain. The child let out a gasp of air, then floated up to the man in armor, who was still yelling at the old woman.

  Jon heard the woman speak for the first time. The words sounded within his mind, just as in the vision of the wave. He somehow knew their meaning, though he did not know the language.

  “Path of transcendence: the verdant earth,” Jon heard in his mind.

  Her eyes still glowing, the old woman turned to the man, smiling. Then she held out one hand with the palm towards him and the stone archway. A golden light kindled in the arch, and the man soared into it with the child in his arms, who had just begun to stir. He was still yelling at the woman as he disappeared. The older children saw the golden glow, and immediately began running for it, as did the others scattered around the stones. Defending soldiers began making their way into the clearing. They took up defensive positions as the demonic creatures began pressing in from every direction.

  The old woman looked towards the creatures, her smile gone. Then she struck the ground at her feet with the staff, releasing a pulse of the emerald light which rapidly grew in intensity. It became blinding, and was accompanied by an ominous rumbling noise, the sound somewhere between a foghorn and a train approaching.

  The earth quaked, the wind whipped, and as Jon watched the green light merged into the woman’s wooden limb before covering the rest of her body. As the light suffused her, her skin turned to bark, and her legs fused into one. Her mouth and nose began emitting the light just as her eyes did.

  A wave of earth erupted from the edges of the clearing and moved towards the center, collecting the remaining men, women and children as it did so. The shifting earth carried them into the golden light of the archway, and they disappeared. The demons tried to pursue, but were rebuffed by another sphere of the green light which sprang up around the clearing.

  The glowing woman lifted her arms over her head, the staff held toward the heavens, the light traveling up it as well. Her form stretched and her body faded into the form of a large tree. Roots grew out from where her legs had once been, with a crown of branches extending from her fingers, shoulders and brow. As they grew, leaves formed along them, and the green light turned to gold. The white-pink flowers from the former staff blossomed along the branches by the thousands, and the branches shot skyward.

  Over seconds, the tree expanded, looming hundreds of meters high. Then the flowers began to drop like rain among the demons clustered around the green sphere. Jon’s view moved upward with the growth of the tree, giving him a vantage where he could see the broader scope of the battle. There were tens of thousands of the demonic creatures swarming over the small city, lit by the strange red glow that accompanied their movements.

  As the flowers hit the demons, Jon noted they were followed by little flashes of the golden light. Where they contacted the creatures, hoarse screams filled the air, and fresh saplings grew up all around, demonic corpses draped upon them, speared through and carried towards the sky.

  A massive eruption of golden light came from the rear flanks of the army. It swept up and towards the summit of the hill, and where it touched, the crimson light faded to nothing. More screams arose with its passage, and Jon saw an endless tide of roots silhouetted by the golden glow, rolling over the remaining demons. A roaring torrent of soil followed the roots and buried both them and the golden light. In moments, the entire mountain was silent.

  When the first rays of dawn shown forth some time later, new growths poked up from the bare ground where the burning army had marched the night prior. A tree nearly as tall as the mountain it stood upon held silent vigil. It cast no shadow, instead radiating gold and green light in an ever-shifting pattern. The picture grew blurry as he looked on, and his other senses grew dim as well.

  As the vision faded, Jon fell to his knees in the room. He took a couple of deep, ragged breaths, then collected himself, and stood.

  “Never go full Fern Gully,” he muttered. He was distracted, or he might have noticed that the music didn’t come back, and he didn’t hear the voice make a comment this time.