The Wodlands 11 - The Umber Woods

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This is another one for K, who wanted me to finish this series. Nearly done.

1. The Plains of Anaesthetic Fire.
2. The Antigoblin Empire.
3. The Whetstone Ridge.
4. The Painted Plain.
5. The Vermillion Sea.
6. The Large Goblin Collidor.
7. The Wodlands.
8. The Necropolis of Glass.
9. The Incoherent Isles.
10. The Maw.


11 THE UMBER WOODS

Not only are the Umber Woods one of the least-travelled places in the whole of the woodlands, but they are anti-travelled. No-one remembers going there and you often meet people who do not know where the woods are and who are moving directly away from them with incredible speed, embarked on recently-decided adventures, chasing old memories and old desires. Memories that take them a long way from the Umber Woods.

These people scream when they see beetles, though they do not know why.

The woods are quiet. Great tidal waves of silence surge unpredictably from their borders and flow across neighbouring lands before ebbing away.

The silence comes in stages

First, a wariness or a hunting of the eyes, a perturbation; "well wait and see".

Then, a grim inward turning, thoughts are ammonites curling into themselves. An unwillingness to speak and intolerance of chat.

Then suppression of sound, a scream becomes a shout, a shout becomes speech, speech becomes a whisper and a whisper dies.

Then finally the mute weight of annihilating silence presses down like a euthanizing pillow.

(These silences are loathed by the Goblins of the Large Goblin Collidor who set up irritating sound cataclysm machines facing the woods and who start garage bands and point their dog-powered amps in that direction just to drive the silence back.)


Above the woods silent flocks of birds spill into the sky like the flint tips of invisible spears, before looping like vines and falling back into the insect-haunted, orchid-spattered, fig-rich trees.

Within, the earth smells rich, like dried compost. Roots curl around gloom-pale bone. With rain the ground splits and fumes like a burst loaf. Umber moths and glimmering silent bees flit between trees where it seems Autumn is always about to arrive. Some trees have woven nets of grass curtained between trunks, repeated for hundreds of metres. The shape of the weave and the dense spiderwebs serve to dampen decibels in the forest even more. Black flying squirrels leap between oozing fig trees. The tunnels of the sleepy mega-sloths are often hidden beneath soft moss and are easily fallen into. The sloths do not take well to this.

The streams run silently over utterly smooth stones. None chuckle or sound. Impudent Tapirs lie waiting beneath the surface - ready to blast wanderers with jets of water before escaping into the brush.

Arrow-straight moss-strewn paths follow radial geomantic lines and where they meet the streams drystone bridges cross them. Beneath many are Whispering Toll Trolls. Monochrome, deep black with white teeth, nails and hair and knobbly grey-knurled skin, asking questions impossible for anyone without psychic powers to answer;

"What am I thinking of?"
"Is the Blue I see the same as yours?"
"What did I do yesterday?"

Here dwell the PenumBeetles cousins to the InvisiBeetles of the Vermillion Sea.



THE PENUMBEETLES THEMSELVES

Matte black in direct sunlight, in shade: iridescent, milk white in darkness, green beneath a Gackling Moon. Like ghosts at night, pale and shining, threatening silhouettes by day.

They once inhabited the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire when they were still verdant, a forest like this one, before the fire reduced them to ash and clinker. There are still old PenumBeetle temples and ruins beneath that waste, as there are here in the Umber Woods, their shapes and roads hidden by the vegetation.

They grow house-sized gourds over decades and eat them away from inside in huge bursts of melon madness, then lie flat on their backs, limbs spread out - rocking and sleeping. They need glass for the greenhouses, which they assemble and dis-assemble around the growing gourds as they expand, like shining chrysalids.

They farm aye-ayes with flutes. The meat is not good but the creatures are silent at least. The Aye Ayes eat the pale fig-moths that flit about like snow. They herd them really - the tear-pale monkherd playing unearthly airs on its bone-carved infra-flute - just chilling in the forest.

They raise hives of silent bees - their iridescent wings shining in the beams of light.

Big on geometric scent gardens. They have a big Beetle parliament, but its more like a silent masque - buzzing instead of shouting - wings vibrating inside the case. During big arguments psionic backdraft (the PenumBeetles are psychic) freaks stuff out for miles around.

Beetle Politics are based around; Qualities of silence, Interaction with the Outside, The Morality of Mind alteration, The Necessity of murder, Hopefulness/Nihilism about keeping the Wodlands from decaying to shit and the virtues of Writing vs Memory.

They are sculptors, builders, architects and gardeners. They learn these things in a mind-palace university where they share knowledge across generations.



MIND POWERS

Those shells crack open and they fly into minds. In reality it looks as of the PenumBeetle is utterly still  but they are actually moving in the ethereal plane. They fractalize their awareness and swoop into your brain hole, swarming your thoughts, climbing about invisibly and altering things.

Mind changers, or destroyers when they want to be. Usually its simpler for them if they only alter memories, first removing any memory of the Umber Woods, and anything that might make you desire to seek them out again.

Then they go through previous memories to provide some strong motivation to do something, anything, other than to go to the Umber Woods. Preferably something a long long way away. They delete, amplify or emotionally mute recollections to provide a nice clear path. This often leaves the subject with the sense that there are insects inside their heads.

(All of this of course, providing that you are not a Goblin making noise in the woods. In that case they just kill you.)

PenumBeetles are not meant to use these mental powers just to fuck with people, but some do sometimes go bad and need to be hunted down and taken out by 'deniable assets'.



THEIR PURPOSE

What are they doing in those ancient temples, following those radial paths? Something geomantic. Keeping reality sane. Stopping this reality-decayed piece of the Wodlands from fraying out into the Reach, or collapsing into the Vermillion Sea, or being sucked into The Maw, or falling apart any of a number of other ways.

The temples need to be out of use to be in-use, they harmonise the silent power, the amplification of emptiness, the monumental stillness. It spreads across the Wodlands forming a lock on reality.
The ruins must be a built place that could, or seems to be meant to, have people in it, but doesn't. The thronging of inhabited parallel worlds intensifying and compressing the absence. The ruins are gardened by the PenumBeetles over centuries. They are built *to be ruins*, slowly assembled with tireless strength and utter silence, cyclopean blocks eased into place on layers of fig grease. They have no other purpose other than to be great chambers of stillness that, like a web over shattered porcelain - are one of the few things stopping the whole thing from going to shit.