Chapter 221: Meeting the Mother of Thorns
The Briar changed around them as the boat took them deeper and deeper into its shadowed interior.
At some point, the clumps of dull, lifeless moss hanging from trees began to emit a pale, almost sickly green light. Likewise, the petals of flowers turned luminescent, appearing in the fog as clusters of pale pink, lavender, and red light that Jacques assiduously avoided.
The further they went, the darker the water beneath their flat-bottomed seemed to grow, changing from murky brown to an almost inky black that drank in the light from the glowing plants above and sound alike, turning even the sound of their passage into little more than a quiet ripple.
Now and then, something large would move beneath the surface, creating ripples that spread out until they vanished into the fog. Once, Ashlynn caught a glimpse of pale, scaled flesh and what might have been an eye larger than her fist watching them from the depths.
Each time such a creature approached, Jacques tapped his pole on the surface of the water, sending out a ripple of his thorny aura that drove the unseen beasts away. Even Talauia’s excited chatter would pause briefly when these encounters occurred, her wings humming at a higher pitch and her eyes radiating a predatory menace until whatever beast approached them thought wiser of offering itself up as a meal and retreated.
"You should know, you should know," Talauia said as Ashlynn leaned out from the boat to catch a better look at the glowing flowers as they floated by. "The brighter the glow, the more concentrated the essence of the plant is. See over there, over there," she said, pointing at a towering sandbox tree that seemed to pulse with a bloody light between its prickly spines.
"That one’s been feeding for years," the enthusiastic witch said. "Another decade or two and it will be ready for harvest."
"Feeding?" Heila asked, shivering as she looked at the tree. The bloody aura seeping from the strange tree reminded her of Sir Thane and Nyrielle’s other progeny on the rare occasions they’d gone too long without feeding only this tree felt more... malevolent than any of Nyrielle’s progeny ever had in her presence. "Trees don’t ’feed’ do they?"
"Maman," Jacques said as he pushed them along. "She knows the ways of things. To wake dem to deir true nature so dey can achieve deir true potential."