Starter for @ofsoulsborne.
In some ways, the forest was more familiar than the ruins the pair had traversed to arrive here. Though it was entirely foreign to their senses, it was dark, eerily silent, and mosses coated every hard surface. The canopy of trees blotted out all light, making it impossible to tell the time of day, not so unlike the nests and burrows of home. Still, around every corner were strange, new dangers; not so long ago yet, a vine had sprung to life and snapped at the Rat King with serpentine jaws, only to be cleaved in two by his servant. As a result, the two remained closely to one another as they ventured forth, should something else jump forth to assault them.
The King of all Rats made quick time, eager to explore in search of a means of returning to his kingdom; he padded forward several meters, paused, sniffed the air, and turned toward the direction that smelled the safest to him, only to begin the process anew. More than once, he had gotten turned around-- “Have we seen naught these fungus children thrice already?”-- and tried to start over again from the beginning. The predicament now was that neither of them could figure out how to find the entrance to the woods they had come from. For all it’s vague similarities to the catacombs his domain encompassed, there were at least a dozen differences, most in being that, in spite of its confined quarters, the forest was immeasurably dense. “Labyrinthine,” he hissed to himself.
“A wall, master,” Mire said from behind him.
This was new. “Wondrous depths,” the tiny monarch sighed. “Let us follow it.” He led the way, keeping the stone wall on his left, his whiskers brushes against it. Surely, this went somewhere. The two climbed over fallen, nature-encrusted statues, and skirted around the thick trunks of gigantic trees until, after what felt like hours, there was a break.
An arched gate made of the same stone loomed before the pair, etchings faded from years of wear without upkeep. He didn’t waste more than a moment gawking, determining only that it was locked with some magic nonsense: “Couldst we scale it?”
Nodding, his servant knelt and interlocked their steel-clad fingers for their King to crawl onto. Lifting him, they stood and pushed him towards the apex. His claws scrambled on the uneven surface, but he managed to perch himself right at the top. A shape peered back at him in the distance, also arched, and huge, but it did not appear natural-- another human-made structure, undoubtedly.
As his servant awkwardly began to hoist themself up to his level, he hopped down, slowing his fall by clinging onto the backside of the gateway. Landing with a grunt among plant matter, he heard a tinkling of metal underfoot. Surrounding him were fallen weapons of all sorts humans wielded, some shattered, other sticking straight up in the earth, all of varying age. He sniffed the air again suspiciously, sitting up on his haunches. “How peculiar...”
