Ashta

Sec had been having foreboding dreams about a sword, something called Ashta, and a dark, deep wood for weeks, so when she’d wandered off one morning on her own her friends were rightly concerned.

She walked forward under massive roots draped with dense sticky thread, thick fog pooled on the ground and swirled around the strange amber pods all around her. The orbs seem to pulse, almost as a heartbeat. Ahead of her was a very large hollow, probably twenty meters across, in the base of a rotting tree, roots poured out of it and the strange string like substance seemed to tunnel into and emanate from deep within the hollow. Ashta. Ashta. ASHTA. That word, the word that echoed through her sleeping mind night after night was now speaking to her in the daylight. It was a name. Suddenly her breath caught, the roots emanating from the hollow began to slowly move, she realized that they weren’t roots at all, but legs…