Ermos drew his sword to carry on his futile battle. He hacked the growing branches back as they came at him.
When two branches met, instead of waging war, they bound together like lovers. They wound round and round each other like cordage, growing thicker and stronger in the process. Hundreds of years of reserves were being used up all at once.
The Queen had told them to step back, but Pash soon found that he had to step forward as the forest mutated around him. He left his master to his struggle, wondering at the impossibility of his effortless strength. He moved so quickly with his sword that all Pash saw was a blur and the falling of the branches that he had severed.
The trees did not slow. An amalgamation of two branches soon met an amalgamation of another two, and they greeted each other like brothers, winding themselves around and around, just as they had before. They wreathed like the tentacles of a green kraken.
They continued their combinative attempts, until Pash saw all the branches of one tree wind together with all the branches of another, and then a monster was truly born.
But still it seemed that the Queen was not satisfied. Thousands of monsters from every tree rose up into the air and flew towards the Queen of flowers. In front of her they bonded, and all the efforts of all the trees bound themselves into one deadly weapon. An otherworldly green-brown tendril of pure animated destruction
It flew up into the sky even higher than the Stone Tree. Its width was even thicker than that of the bridge. It changed its shape as freely as water. It adopted the head of a dragon and weaved its way through the clouds, letting loose a terrifying roar that called forth a burst of thunder and a shudder of rain. When the fat droplets fell, Pash was immediately soaked.
And then it changed into a sword, the sort that seemed ready to cut the world in two. It tried a practice slash up there in the sky, and clouds parted before its might. The grey rain clouds moved to make way for clear blue sky and a shining sun. It seemed to like that.
Just before it came charging back to earth, it changed its shape once more. It spread out into a giant green hand, the true limb of a tree. It boasted of its mobility, flexing its fingers and clenching itself into a fist. It moved itself as easily as Pash moved his own hand, all according to the will of the Queen of Flowers.
And then, she opened her eyes. She flung her arm downwards, and the hand of the trees went with it. It grabbed a hold of the fleeing bridge, and clenched it tight between its fingers.
The tip of the middle finger must have gone too close to the Stone Tree, for it disappeared in a screen of ash. It must have been the spell that the Queen had mentioned, Pash realized.
The bridge was given no time to react to the sudden attack. It squealed like a million-ton rabbit, and wreathed like it was caught by a fox.
The hand tightened its grip further and flung the bridge hard away from safety, right into the cliffs that bordered the moat.
The impact took Pash's feet from underneath him. He was thrown hard against the solid trunk of a mutated tree. His ears rang as he skidded to the ground and a groan escaped his lips.
"You okay, Pash?" His master was above him, holding a hand to help him up. "You went flying."
Pash did not stop to ask how his master managed to make it out of the tree completely unscathed. Such feats he had come to expect from his master. There was no one stronger in all the land than him, and yet, no one knew his name.
"I'm fine…" Pash said, scrambling to his feet, feeling rather grateful for his backpack. Had it not cushioned his collision with the tree, then he knew he would have ended up a good deal worse off. He staggered in dizziness, taking a few moments to right himself. He felt like he was hallucinating when he saw those five girls stood ready for battle.
They were protected from head to toe in an armour of varnished wood. Complicated runes were painted in mud all across it. Large squares of wood protected their shoulders, whilst a jigsaw of wooden pieces woven together with twine protected their torsos. A skirt of wooden pieces – the bark still on – gave protection from their upper thighs to their knees, whilst well-shaped grieves took care of their shins.
They were all helmeted differently, that was the only way to distinguish between each of them. One sported two antlers, another had two buffalo horns, a third a narwhal's tusk, a fourth a rhino's horn and the fifth claimed an elephant's tusks. All of the horns were not made of ivory, but fashioned out of wood and darkened so that they appeared black.
He could only see their backs, but they were no longer the same weak looking girls that he had worried about before. They were as large and intimidating as any man was likely to be. They replaced their mild lutes with long glaives bearing vicious shining points. They looked to be steel, but from the way they shone a quiet blue in the sun, they might have been something very different.
The ground trembled as the bridge struggled to right itself. Chunks of rock and brick tumbled down into the water as it detached itself from the cliff, staggering like a wounded dog. The Queen of Flowers hung over it like an executioner.
Her face was that of stone. She showed it none of the warmth that she had shown Ermos or Pash. She clenched her hand into a fist and the hand of the trees clenched with her, massive and menacing as she prepared to deliver the final blow.
The bridge understood the danger it was in, in an animalistic sort of way. That strange mouth it had surfaced again. Bricks parted from the walkway, and it tentatively loosed itself out into the open, all slimy and disgusting.