Young Writers Society

Knight had to stop himself from recoiling when the man suddenly touched him. He didn't have an aversion to touch, but it was disturbing having anyone other than Mage get so close to him when he was stuck like this. Still, he kept his cool - he quelled a little bit of the shaking, and looked away from to Mage so he could stare up at the man instead.

"I-It was a spell, the last time," he finally said. He didn't want to say too much about the spell - about how he had forgotten who he was, about the years knowing he wasn't right, wasn't human and about how the trigger for his return to normal was being betrayed by someone he cared about. "It's not like this. It was different. Last time I...I..."

He stopped, thought it over and then simply shook his head.

"It was different-"

"Follow your soul," a voice whispered on the wind once more.

Knight tensed, and he could feel Mage tense beside him as well. "That was the voice that spoke when I woke up," Mage said. "Right before I started panicking. But what can it mean?"

"It means follow your soul," the voice answered.

Mage and Knight immediately broke apart and wildly looked around, trying to find the speaker. But no matter where they looked, they couldn't find whoever was talking to them.

"Who are you?" Mage called out.

The voice was silent.

"Why won't you show yourself?" Knight asked.

Nothing.

And then, suddenly, another response. "Just follow your soul," the voice insisted. "I can't say anymore - I've probably done too much already. I know I'm not supposed to meddle in things like this, but I wasn't going to let you all die after they separated your souls from your-"

The mysterious voice suddenly gave a startled, worried little cry and fell silent.

Oh dear. He wasn't quite sure what that voice had been going on about, but none of it reassured him (to say nothing of the voice being cut off). Whatever this soul was, it was connected to his death, and he was supposed to go looking for it. But he didn't remember dying. How could he have died? Had he died in his sleep? Of what? Had someone killed him? Who would get any value out of it? It wasn't even like he held his old titles anymore. And how could they kill him by separating him from his soul?

The lion straightened himself. There wasn't any point thinking about it - he knew what he had to do, and he knew that everyone else was probably a little more frightened than he was. Someone had to be the adult here.

"Where should we go first?" Thytes said, crossing his arms. "Where might our souls be?"

When the voice abruptly ceased, Mage stopped searching. He was beginning to doubt that the person was really in the surrounding area - a spell could easily let them project their voice from wherever they truly were. Knight grew still beside him; the sudden lack of his shaking was either a good or bad thing, but being stuck like this made it impossible to tell unless Knight gave a verbal reaction.

He looked at Thytes for a moment, then dropped his gaze down to his own chest. There was no way to confirm his guess, but he couldn't ignore his (now nonexistent) gut feeling. "I don't think we need to find our souls," he guessed, hand going to where his heart should have been. His soul was nestled inside of the wood, right where it should have been - he was sure of it. "A person can't be who they are without their soul. We're ourselves. But if something's been separated..."

"...then we lost our bodies," Knight realized.

They looked over at each other, Mage's hand returning to his side.

"'Follow your soul,'" Mage repeated. "They were saying to follow our instincts - we just have to trust that our souls will lead us back to our bodies."

Thytes shuffled his feet. "Well, I followed my instincts, and it brought me to the rest of you, but I do not believe my body is anywhere nearby, so I am not exactly sure how to do that."

In a hidden glade, deep in a forest, Amber awoke with a feeling something was missing. Before she opened her eyes, she knew exactly what it was. She couldn't feel her roots. Or her branches come to think of it. As a dryad, she had always been able to feel her tree, all the parts of it from the leaves on each branch to the tips of each root. Now, she could feel none of that. She stayed where she was, contemplating the loss of her tree. It was a while later when the thought occurred to her. If she couldn't feel her tree but she was still alive, where was she? What was she?

Amber opened her eyes and the world became clear around. To her surprise, however, she was not in her forest. This was worrying as she had no recollection of leaving her clearing, let alone the entire forest. Slowly, carefully, Amber got to her feet. It was the first time she had left her tree in years. When she was younger, she had often left her tree and taken on humanoid form. At one point, she had been well acquainted with that form. She still remembered enough of those days to feel something slightly off about her wooden form. She looked down and immediately shuddered in revulsion. This body was not the smooth wood that flowed with the grains of a tree, the wood that carried sap through a tree's heart and towards it's limbs. This body was of dead wood. Though it followed the rough shape of her normal humanoid body, it had followed a different shape, on that was less graceful and sleek. She wondered, for a moment, if her humanoid form had changed because her tree had, somehow, been destroyed. She suppressed the thought though, if her tree were dead, she would be too.

She had no time for further contemplation on the matter, however, for the voice had returned. "Follow your soul." Amber glanced about the clearing but there was obviously no one else there with her. She was trying to remember how, exactly, speaking worked when the voice blew through the clearing again.
"It means follow your soul." It sounded like an answer but she had asked no question.

"Who are you?" She heard a voice call out. It was a very different voice from the one in the wind. Male and, somehow, more solid. It came from the woods off to her left. She immediately turned and, starting off haltingly but slowly remembering how a body works, headed off in the direction of the other voice.

The voice turned out to belong to one person in a group of others. Amber held back as she watched them. As she watched, the voice returned, saying something about not letting souls be torn from... Something. Given the fact she couldn't feel her tree, Amber was willing to guess that the end of that statement would have been bodies. She watched the group as they discussed what the voice had said. They had to follow their souls to find their bodies? That would be difficult. She had dwelt in her tree for so long, thinking only of the wind in her leaves and the ground beneath her roots that she had not spent much time thinking about her soul for eons. She would definitely need help.

Amber stepped out of the trees and walked towards the group, more graceful now as muscle memory came back. Standing before them, she managed to haltingly put together a few words in a low, soothing voice, "I would like to join you in this endeavor, if you will let me."

Thytes turned back in time to see the newcomer arrive. She - the voice was definitely feminine - seemed a little off. Those movements were a little too jerky, voice a little too strained, as though she hadn't been using either in a long time. But Thytes figured it could just as easily be shock. As hard as he was trying to resist the urge to shiver, he could relate.

"Of course!" he said. "I would have to imagine that more people would make this task easier. Somebody has to have a better connection to their soul I have to mine."

"Unfortunately, I will not be much help there. It has been," she paused, searching for the right thought, "Much time since I paid attention to anything except the breeze in my leaves."
Amber thought the appropriate response to add to this was to smile and, at that point, realized she had no face with which to create the expression. If she had to be honest, she was relieved. Trees didn't have to show emotion and it was something that would take time for her to remember. It would be nice for no one to be able to tell the difference in the meantime.

Staring at the newcomer for a few seconds, Thytes tilted his head. "What were you before you became one of these things?" he said, gesturing to their bodies.

Knight felt a shiver run up his wooden spine as the newcomer appeared and expressed her interest to join them; the comment about leaves didn't make any sense to him, and he was worried about what it could possibly imply. Then there was the issue of finding their bodies - he needed to get back to normal as soon as he possibly could. Any minute spent in this...this prison was a minute too long.

Mage didn't seemed as outwardly concerned as he did. He had quietly observed her arrival; Knight could see him following her body's clunky movements, and carefully musing over what she had said. But then his boyfriend perked up and darted over to her side, and it was at that moment that he knew Mage had a very good idea of what the newcomer was.

"You're a dryad!" he exclaimed. He didn't have a face to show his joy, but it was easy to hear in his voice. He grabbed onto her hands and tightly held them up in his own. "I heard stories about your kind in one of the last kingdoms I've visited! I've never met anyone like you before, but this is so cool~ You're technically a tree, right? So this must be a little weird, but not as weird for the rest of us - you're already made of wood as it is, just living wood and not dead wood like this."

He abruptly let go of her hands and took a step back. "This is amazing," he whispered, voice filled with awe. "If only I had my notebook on me! But, fate, I can't wait to tell Zogin and Soul and Janos all about this later!"

If he had a face to give one, Knight would have grinned at Mage's enthusiasm. It reminded him of when they first met - Mage hadn't known the truth then, but he had been so eager to learn about his kind from a complete stranger. It was kind of adorable, though he had never told his boyfriend that.

The grabbing and abrupt release of her hands happened a bit too quickly for her to react to. However, hearing the joy in his voice, perhaps this time a smile would have come more naturally to Amber if she had a face. She hadn't seen anyone this enthusiastic about anything since... Well, since Sorrow and his unicorn foal. She shut off that line of thinking, it did not do to dwell on Sorrow.

"You are correct, I am the dryad of a willow tree in the Forest of Mistly. And you, are you human in your normal bodies?" She expanded this question to include everyone in the clearing, "This is not just a matter of dryads then?"

Mage faltered. His boyfriend had grown stiff - even stiffer than a body of wood would regularly be - and he was sure he was running through the same thoughts in his head. They had to judge the people present. The other three hadn't acted harshly towards the newcomer when she hinted at being something other than human, and the dryad obviously wouldn't pose the same concerns.

They looked at each other. Mage wished Knight had a face again - with eyes he could stare into, lips that could form a thin line, a frown or a confident smile, and cheeks that could grow pale or flush with color. It would make trying to secretly come to a decision so much easier.

But Knight must have decided the same thing; he turned back too confidently to the others in the clearing not to have. "Mage and I aren't humans," he said. Yup, he had read him correctly.

"Neither of us are dryads, though, so I think your guess is correct," Mage cheerfully added. He slung his arm around Knight's shoulder and pretended that he could feel his body's warmth again. "I'm a demon from the kingdom of Arium, and Knight's a dragon."

Mage being a demon sounded intriguing. Amber had never met a demon before, not even in her travels in her youth. However, upon hearing the word dragon, Amber stiffened. She did not mean to be rude, she herself had been discriminated against because of her race, but she was scared of a beast who could create fire. Perhaps more so than other dryads, Amber was terrified of fire. Not only had she heard stories of dryads who had burned up with their trees, she herself had nearly gone up in flames on one dreadful occasion when someone had held her tree hostage to avoid capture.

"A dragon?" Amber asked, her tone even more stilted and impersonal than usual, "With fire?" Then a thought occurred to her and her voice changed, becoming nervous and scared, "You can't use fire now, can you?"

Thytes was a little glad that he hadn't tried to light another fire; whether or not it could hurt the dryad now, she certainly sounded afraid of it. As she did about dragons, but, with Knight around, that could be a little easier to deal with.

"Ah, I know quite a few dragons," Thytes said, turning to Knight and ignoring the snort in the background. "And none of us are quite human either. I, myself, am a lion, and the young men back there are an otter and a hound."

"Yeah," said Tristan. "I'm the otter, and -" he nudged Kynan - "He's the hound."

Mage had never heard of anything that Thytes was mentioning. If he hadn't heard of it, he doubted that Knight had, either. But his boyfriend didn't ask any questions, his head tilted so he was looking in Amber's direction.

"I can't breath fire now," Knight confirmed, his voice gentle and surprisingly quiet. He turned, attention now shifting to the other two wooden people. "Do you know Aegeas and Kendrik? I met them before in a situation like this, and they were both...different than what I was used to."