Nissa brought her staff sweeping from the right, pulling energy from the branch she was standing on and directing it in a wide swath out the tip of the staff. The mana touched the trees, and they animated and pulled in together, forming a wall of branches and vines that reached out for the beasts. The elves began shooting between the branches at the creatures, two of which fell as Nissa watched. The other creatures threw themselves at the wall, thrashing against it as the elves shot them dead.
Nissa heard a swish behind her and turned to see a squad of twenty flying creatures rushing at them. On the ground, more creatures converged on the tree they were in. The giant one lumbered on tentacles twice as wide as her waist. This could be the end, Nissa thought.
She screamed a warning, and some of the elves turned, but not before the flying creatures crashed through the foliage. One of the beasts bashed into the Tajuru standing next to Nissa, and she knew by the impact that the elf was lost. Another came at her, but she whispered the secret name of her favorite flower, the dendrite, and with that spell delivered a blow with her staff that sent the creature shooting backward off the branch. Other elves had turned and shot many of the flying creatures before they reached their ranks. And the climbing creatures on the other side of the grasping wall of branches and vines, Nissa noticed with a quick glance, were much diminished.
Then she felt the turntimber under their feet jerk hard to the right. She regained her footing, but the tree shifted again. She looked down and saw the huge creature through a gap in the leaves, pushing against the trunk of the turntimber.
One of the flying creatures slammed against her, and they fell crashing through the leaves. She silently mouthed words that pushed mana ahead of her like a pillow, and in a moment she was falling slowly, eventually landing next to the creature that had fallen with her, its body still.
And then they were on her again: two of the creatures with blue eyes, and the giant one the size of two forest trolls. The giant had lowered its shoulder against the tree and was pushing, its tentacles churning up the soft earth as it struggled for purchase. She focused her mind and felt the mana boiling, making her hands glow green. She twisted her staff and pulled out her stem sword a long, thin green shoot hidden inside its wooden sheath just as the first creature lowered its head and charged. She stepped to the side and pivoted hard to her right leg. As the beast barreled past she inserted the rigid stem neatly into its side, just where its heart ought to have been if it had one. She pushed the sword all the way to its wooden handle before yanking it out. With a whispered word, the bloody stem became flexible. She snapped it like a whip, and the stem lashed out and took off the arm of the behemoth pushing on the tree. It turned its body and regarded her calmly, as pale blood bubbled out of its arm stump. No scream, no anger, she thought. Not even a sneer. The creature simply planted its other shoulder against the trunk and kept pushing.
She was about to take the behemoth s other arm off when the second creature charged hard into her side. But as she fell, she kicked away and turned, whipping half its tentacles off with a puff of emerald-colored mana.
She landed just as the tree shifted to the right. Its flat root ball heaved up and out of the ground, slapping Nissa violently against the giant creature. She clambered up its back and onto its shoulders, and wrapped her stem sword around what should have been its neck. As she pulled and twisted, the creature s hundreds of blue eyes blinked and turned to look at her, but still the creature did not stop pushing. She d seen single-minded animals in her life, but never anything like the giant. She pulled hard for some minutes, and began to fear that the creature had some enchantment about it, but eventually she heard a crack and the creature went slack and fell forward into the trunk.
They must have a spine, Nissa thought. She looked around as she sheathed her stem sword in her staff once again.
The tree had settled into its new position, pitched off to the north. She followed its trunk with her eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of her squad through the branches. But she heard neither the twangs of their bows nor their battle cries. She walked away from the trunk. A loud grinding sound echoed somewhere through the canopy. A common sound of two floating hedrons rubbing against each other in the sky above the trees came to her.
She walked to the clearing, ducking under the white-barked boughs of a young jaddi tree.
A narrow draw extended to her right, and farther down it, the pound of the WhiteShag thundering through its deep ravine echoed off the still trunks. The sunlight shone through the trees ahead and she walked toward it as if in a dream.
Nissa stopped at the edge of the forest. Once her eyes had become accustomed to the sunshine, she saw the swath of land dotted with what forest plants the creatures had not stripped and stuffed in their holes, dug in irregular intervals throughout the cleared land. The bodies of MossCrack s Tajuru were strewn about between the holes. The nearest was only thirty paces away, lying on its side with a crushed skull. A handful of vampires on hands and knees were bent over the corpses almost tenderly. They were wearing rags, and their matted hair was dull in the bright sun. She wasn t sure if the rank smell was the dead Tajuru or the vampires. Or was it the tentacled creatures standing behind each vampire, sucking vampire ichor through the proboscuses under their armpits? Nissa swallowed the lump rising in her throat.
Suddenly, there was a chirping sound behind her, and Nissa turned with her staff at the ready. She expected to see the Tajuru and Hiba running toward her with a handful of creatures following. She closed her eyes and felt the nearly inexhaustible power of the forests of Zendikar rise in her blood and pull in from the vines around and the soil under her feet. She would show the beasts, those killers of trees, how the Joraga of Bala Ged dealt with interlopers, with barong outsiders. And it would not be pampering, Tajuru justice but the savagery of the jungle meted out with plenty of hate.
She opened her eyes and nearly dropped her staff in shock. Where were her rangers? Where was Hiba? Instead, at least two hundred creatures of different sizes and shapes stood at the tree line they had created, staring at her. They were alike in only one way: they all had tentacles. One had a harnessed, growling vampire on a long lead.
But none, not even the four or five specimens larger than the one she d killed in the forest, seemed angry with her. They simply stared at her. One cocked its head as it studied her. Some were spattered with blood, she noticed with a pang of regret, and many were festooned with short Tajuru arrows. She knew at that moment that her squad and Hiba were dead. She looked down to see her scarred hands, white and shaking, as they squeezed her staff.
The creatures ambled forward, their tentacles writhing and touching one another as they moved. When they were about forty feet away one stopped, and they all stopped. There was no speaking; there were no hand signs only squirming tentacles. Where had she seen that behavior? It was like some insect. Like Ants!
There were close to two hundred creatures grimly arrayed before her. The odds were not good. Her eyes wandered to the blue sky above the approaching host. A gentle breeze stirred her hair. Far away a lone stele floated over a high mesa. Beyond that, dark storm clouds promised a good rain by nightfall. It was a beautiful day.
Nissa twisted her staff. The stem sword she had gained the day of her coming-of-age-reckoning back home in Bala Ged slid easily out of its scabbard. She held the rigid green shaft before her eyes.
Where had her life left her? She was standing in a clearing in the Turntimber Forest, outnumbered and about to perish. Yes, she had traveled to a couple of filthy planes that had neither the beauty, nor the power of Zendikar, and were full of big-nosed humans and beings as nasty as any she could imagine. She glanced at the creatures ambling forward. Beings like those outlanders, she said to herself.