A shuffling sound woke Ria. The blinding light which filled her sight stilled a smile on her lips. Though a twang of pain from her feet, a few prickling sensations from her legs, a pulsating blob of hurt from her shoulder, and tiredness from her inside had her tensed and seething, these marks of her struggle also kept her emotional and alive. She was sprawled motionlessly but flattered nonetheless; almost dead but living and breathing.

She had done it. She had saved the man and herself. She had defeated the skeleton and managed to keep her humanity. She hadn’t lost herself to the sewer. She had won. Against all the odds she had kept herself alive.

I won.

Lying on her back she watched the starlight flit like ink inside the crystals stalactites. They were glowing once again, though not as radiantly as they once did. Before them, the branches seemed to cushion their growth, allowing the crystals to spatter the garden with light rays and life itself to settle into the fray.

Ria hissed in pain as she raised her head to look around, and squinted at the sight of her surroundings.

Somewhat familiar scenery gratified her eyes. She remembered the green garden where the light shone without universal reprise, where birds chirped from day to day, and flowers spotted colors in the otherwise dull and morbid sewer; the sight which reflected in her eyes, however, was different -much different- from the peacefulness of her previous visit.

A wild scent filled her sense every time she inhaled. The ground beneath her swollen flesh was bare of grass. Her fingers coursed through bare-dry-soil during her struggles to keep her head raised. Weeds had grown and overtaken the flowers and plants. While vines now not only draped the chamber walls but also carpeted the whole floor in a dense wildering layer. She could see a few strands of grass trying to hold on to dear life, but their dry-yellowish appearance made them look chocked by the vines. The world tree appeared so distant from where she lay; and the garden as a whole, so constricting, so wild. She felt as if a great beast had taken abode in the once peaceful quarter and uprooted calm with its vengeful strides.

“What the-the hell happened to this place?” The thought that this place was not the same garden where she had met Em’ and eaten the Fruit of Life did try to deceive her, and if it wasn’t for the web of branches and the glowing stones above, she might have believed that she had stepped into someplace new.

Nonetheless, life flourished bountifully in the chamber without binds. A sea of green was the whole chamber, but nothing organic seemed to be prospering between the tides. No birds chirping fell on her ears and no fluttering butterflies passed her by. Nowhere had she seen such silent overtaking before. Not in even the forest grounds surrounding her family cottage. Back in the forest, the birds did sing and squirrely did roam, and the forest had housed a few generations of deer’s which her father liked to hunt for pride. Though malice had fostered the hearts of the owners, silence hadn’t churned their lies.

She had run a full cycle across the sewer floors and had come back again looking even worse than before. Last time she had only been missing her ears and some fingers, this time though she had lost so much more.

Ria checked her body and frowned. Bone shards poked out of her skin at various places and dried blood flaked from the sides. She pulled out every foreign body infesting her flesh through gritted teeth until none remained poking to her eyes. It was a painful and long process. And she took her time. Because of blood loss and swelling, she was numb at places and the numbness helped her much. The pain still attacked her in bouts, even after she was done removing the shards, though it didn’t hurt as it could have.

When done, she was left with a body punctured and cut, with wounds which bleed constantly. Some of her wounds had scabbed while she slept and others were starting to rot. She could do nothing other than to grit her teeth and lay down quietly. It was something she had to do to collect her thoughts and energy. The glowing fruit still grew on the other side of the sea of barbs, so the festering wounds didn’t bother her much. She knew she could recover once she was done resting. Her life wasn’t in imminent danger.

“Em-” she finally called. The furry named Em had helped her the last time that she was there. She hoped that it would remember her voice and come to talk with her once again, but no one answered her back. Even the echoes which had accompanied her in the sewer tunnels didn’t dare come out in the light.

Things of darkness are scared of light and beings of light are scared of the dark. Humans are such beings who prosper under light and become senseless during the dark; such was Ria until a few days ago, but the sewer changed her. Since unwittingly waking up inside the sewer, she consumed so much darkness with her eye that it was difficult to say whether she was now a child of light or an animal of the darkness, for the fumes of blindness didn’t scare her like they used to. She found them the darkness too valuable a commodity to be scared of because it helped her hide from the real monsters venturing the night’s shades.

“EM’!” she yelled once again, as loud as she could, much out of frustration and hopelessness than need. The little furry thing was the first and the only being that had selflessly helped her inside the sewer. Everything else had demanded a piece of her to answer the simplest of her questions. And the absence of its presence implied that she had lost it too.

Wind careered through the vines and whatever remains of grass had managed to survive rustled with its touch. There hadn’t been any wind during her first visit. This garden’s based inside a closed chamber, after all. Wind doesn’t flow in closed rooms without outer interventions. The wind is a force of nature. No nature no wind. Now, whether it was really wind, which was fraying through the vines and grass or some unwanted beast stalking her from the cover of vines, she didn’t know. What she did know was that neither was the strength coursing through her veins enough to defend against another beast nor was her body in any condition to move. If there really was a monster waiting for her then she was already dead.

However, the irking thought that she wasn’t alone convinced her to take a look at her surroundings. Even though the vines rustled around her, she hoped it was Em who was trying to scare her once again. But when she somehow lifted her head to look at her feet –where the rustling sound was the loudest- she saw a thorny vine slowly tightening a nose around her ankle, trying to be as discrete as possible.

She could only stare at it wide-eyed as the vine noticed her attention and tightened its hold on her skin. Its thorns dug straight into her skin drawing blood without any difficulty. But that sharp bolt of pain was the least of her concerns because then the once slack vine tightened, and tugged.

As Ria sharply inhaled, her body slid down the ground. She slid slowly at first then the vine lurched and dragged her through the whole carpet of vines covering the floor.

The next some moments of her life can be easily explained by saying she fell into a shredder. The hundreds and thousands of vines and their tens of thousands of thorns used the opportunity to gorge her flesh and draw blood out of her body. Some only left shallow scratches while others tore her skin and sheared through her muscles and fat. She went through a world of pain but didn’t die. The thorns weren’t large enough to kill her. They were only a few millimeters large at best and were mostly shaped like hooks.

Thankfully not every vine was oriented to harm her. Most of them faced the same direction she was dragged toward, easing her suffering by some parts. However, by the time the vine brought her out of the vine carpet and held her by the ankle in the air, she looked nothing more than a freshly gutted porcupine with blood raining out of her body.

Deep and long bloody lines covered her from toe to head. Her jeans had been cut into ribbons below her thighs. And to her dismay, even after going through so much pain, she didn’t lose consciousness. Even after putting her through such misery, the vine was done yet. Seeing that she was still squirming and alive, it started swinging her from left to right as if to drain out the last of her blood. Thank god the entity holding her upside down didn’t decide to splat her onto the ground, for that would have surely ended her right there and then. However, even after going through all of this, Ria’s eyes were still brimming with light.

There can only be two reasons behind her obviously cheerful demeanor. She had either found out a way out of the misery or she had gone bat shit crazy.

Hanging so far above the ground, she had a clear view of the whole chamber. So it isn’t much to say that she was able to find the oddity poking out of the vine carpet strikingly near the world tree. The thing was a gigantic plant bulb of teal. It didn’t have leaves, but vine coiled at its bed like humongous green-barbed snakes. Eight beautiful petals of red surrounded the bulb like a budding flower. One should understand that its every petal was the size of a car and the bulb at their center was almost a story big, making it a deadly but wondrous creation of nature.

As the vine swung her left and right, she saw multiple rings of thorns growing inside the bulbs conical extension overhead which was opening and closing with the swelling and contraction of the round bulb below. She was being prepared for being eaten. Maybe it didn’t like blood or whatever its reason, it was adamant about draining all of her blood before bringing her closer to its mouth.

It swung her like a stone tied at the end of the rope. Ria with her waning conscious saw herself being twisting to and fro from the glowing fruits. She saw her chance. As the monster stretched its barbed tentacle to a stop near the world tree she tore a glowing fruit and took a bite. A single bite and the fruit lost its glow. Whether she had wasted two of the fruits by taking a single bite or not doesn’t matter. The glow less fruit dropped out of her hand as the monster yanked its tentacle vine and brought her closer to its mouth.

The energy from the fruit coerced through her body, alleviating her pain and restructuring her body. As strength returned to her limbs and her wounds closed in real-time, she pulled out her knife from the back pocket of her trashed jeans and slashed the vine holding her ankle. She dived directly into its mouth. She was going to tackle the monster from the inside.

Whether it was a sound plan or not was debatable. But it can be easily conferred that the monster probably wouldn’t have swallowed her without chewing her thoroughly with its needle-shaped teeth first.

Before it could understand anything, she was past its needle-shaped teeth and directly inside its stomach. The vines dancing around froze for a second. It possibly felt something amiss. Though being a monster with low intelligence it soon forgot the slight change in its routine and what started doing its victory dance. It closed its mouth and started waiving its vines in the air to enjoy the success of another stupid human devoured. Soon the vines silently sprawled back on the ground and the bulb also closed its petals and sank into the carpet of vines. The actual size and depth of the vine jungle can be imagined by understanding that all ten feet of the bulb-shaped monster easily hid beneath the vines without a hint of its presence clear anymore.

But not even a few minutes passed when the vines started twitching one by one and the bud came out of hiding swaying left and right. Its petals closed and opened again and again as if ignorant about the sharp revolting sensation rising from inside it. The monster only held on for a few more minutes before a fountain of clear viscous liquid erupted from its mouth and it fell to the side, unmoving. Ria slashed through its inside and climbed out of the hole she had created covered in slime from head to toe. She held a glowing orb the size of a child’s fist in her left hand and her knife in the left. It is to be noted that she no longer looked as hurt as before though many wounds still covered her body, but they were slowly also closing,

She was no longer on the verge of death and stood up on her legs. She was breathing heavily indicating how difficult it must have been for her to cut through the bulb with a small knife like hers. The hole on her thigh was one of the wounds which were still recovering, but her body looked slightly fuller than before. The energy from the fruit was restructuring her whole boy. Just like how the fruit had strengthened her legs after repairing them the last time, it strengthened the overall durability of her body this time while repairing her over the top damage.

Ria waited for the monster bulb to rise once again, but it remained motionless.

So she went onwards to examine the orb cutting –digging out which had finally killed the monster- and saw starlight glowing inside it. Its glow wasn’t anywhere near as volatile or vibrant as the fruits, which seemed to contain the very essence of the starlight. She was just about to throw it away when her jeans pocket started glowing. Startled, she almost dropped the orb but noticed the orbs glow dimming while the glow from her pocket rising by the second.

While she hesitated the orb completely lost its luster, while her pocket glowed like never before. She knew what she held inside there. It was none other than the marble that the goblin had given to her as her prize for surviving the first floor. It was supposed to give her power, a boon of strength, or something along those lines, but had failed to activate, or had become a powerless stone if she was to believe the goblin. But now the same powerless stone had stolen the starlight confined in the monsters orb, which was similar to fruits hanging near the world tree or the crystals growing above her head.

Enticed by the fictitious power the marble in her pocket was supposed to give her, Ria excitedly pulled the marble out of her pocket. It was warm to touch. And the golden luster it radiated shone out through the gaps between her fingers. But the moment she opened her palm, the marble broke down into tiny motes of light and disappeared into her palm. Her hand glowed red like she had put a torch at the back of her hand before this light also disappeared, returning her hand to normal.

“Huh? Was that it? Is that supposed to do something?” she didn’t get to find the answer as a tremble shook the whole garden. A thundering crackle came from the tree and when she looked, she saw it splitting from the dead center.

A dark hole opened in its trunk, one similar to the cave-in she had experienced during her last visit, proving that her time in the garden was over. She called for Em’ one last time before she walked into the opening.