Nautilus Stronghold

"Do you ever wonder what's really on the other side of the trees?" Neoma asked Cynthia, prodding at a slice of coffee cake with her fork.

"No, not really. Not after what we learned in class," Cynthia answered idly. "Those diagrams of things from outside kinda got to me, y'know? If that's what's in the rest of the place, I'm perfectly fine with staying in town like they say we should."

Neoma and Cynthia paused and looked out over the city of Pompilius, stretching around them from their vantage point on the balcony of an upper-floor cafe. To their left, they could see the towering exit doors, barricaded as they always were; to their right, the city diminished in size, buildings hunkering down behind one another until the smallest ones were half the height of the impenetrable wall of trees that lead to the inner spiral of the Nautilus Stronghold.

"But still, they didn't show us any actual, like, footage or anything," Neoma argued. "Like, they just said, 'hey, there's some dangerous stuff out there because it got in from outside and the outside is also dangerous', but they only showed us drawings of what they look like. And they didn't tell us why there weren't any actual pictures, either," she added.

"It was still enough to scare me, honestly."

"Okay, but - what if it isn't anything like that? Why wouldn't they just use real pictures, if the stuff is so scary?" Neoma tried again, but Cynthia held up her hands.

"Look, Nome, it just freaks me out a little, okay? Don't be stupid about it."

Neoma left the conversation alone after that, and tried her best to move onto whatever Cynthia was talking about, but the gears in her head wouldn't stop turning.

That night, Neoma laid in bed, staring at the full moon that shone in through her window, its light tinged an unearthly greenish-blue thanks to atmospheric contaminants. They say the stronghold is so safe, she thought to herself, but why would we trust the walls if they managed to let the outside into the deepest parts of it? She sat up. If all they have is a bunch of trees and drawings to keep us away from the inside, then they can't stop me.

Neoma got up, put on a set of clothes she knew could withstand a good deal of travel, and quietly pulled some first-aid supplies from the bathroom before simply walking out of the front door of her house with her backpack in tow.

Before long, she came upon the plants that had so long served as a gate between worlds, and was surprised to see that they were far less imposing than she had thought. In fact, as she paced down the line of trees, she found that she could squeeze into the spaces between them - and that's what she did, squirming through a short maze of branches and trunks. She left behind the clean paved walkway that bordered the forest and made her way out into a small clearing.

The sound of rustling underbrush stopped her dead in her tracks. She looked up, fully prepared to run, but all that was standing in front of her was a group of five creatures. Deerlike, they were colored in beautiful greens and blues, and had eyes and spots that glowed golden-yellow. Four of the five were grazing at the edge of the clearing that Neoma had stumbled into, but the last one was staring at her curiously.

It took a step toward her, and Neoma flinched - but forced herself not to run, curious as to why these animals seemed nothing like the horrors that she'd seen. They look so different, and they didn't attack me, she thought. The teachers all said that the animals living out here are vicious and stuff, but... She studied at the deer-creature as it got closer. There was an intelligence in its eyes that almost made her uncomfortable. These things seem super calm.

The creature stared at her. Then, it turned away, pacing across the clearing and stopping next to a gap between two frail-but-beautiful trees, a grass path cutting through the dense forest beyond. The deer-creature turned its head to look at Neoma, as though to ask if she was there to go deeper; Neoma looked back at the creature, unsure. Nonetheless, she was curious, and the mis-match between what she'd been told and what she was experiencing only fanned the flames.

When she passed between the two trees, the deer-creature didn't follow her. She glanced at it over her shoulder, but the only thing it did was give her one more glance before trotting back into the clearing to continue grazing. Neoma kept walking down the path alone, which was shaded by the tunnel of branches that stretched overhead. The green leaves of the trees were slowly replaced by beautiful pink blossoms with translucent petals the further she went, creating odd half-shadows that danced across the ground. Smaller paths split away from the one she was walking on, but she kept to the largest, tentatively trusting it to take her deeper.

As she continued, the plants got stranger and wilder. Mint-green vines sprawled across tree trunks in perfect coils, pale-yellow flowers bloomed in carpets around every root, and grey lichen lounged on the branches overhead, lazily drooping down to brush the top of Neoma's head every once in a while. Moss decorated with tiny blue flowers that shone like gemstones in the moonlight replaced the grass beneath her feet, springing back into position when she took each step. Neoma couldn't stop staring at everything around her with wide eyes.

Finally, when the trees around her were at their densest, old-growth trunks crowding together under a blanket of vines and moss, Neoma found a door.

It was a set of decaying metal bars, eaten away by water and time, plants pushing and pulling it with the force of unchecked growth. It looked like it was a part of a larger wall - she'd almost forgotten she was still inside the Nautilus Stronghold, but the sight of the wall, the door, and the vague remains of an electronic panel next to it served as a reminder. Deep, biting contempt rose within her, and she stubbornly shouldered the door open, ignoring the faint red light that reluctantly flickered to life on the panel.

She was met with a walled clearing bordered by the oldest trees she'd ever seen, all of them opening their pink blossoms to the air. Flowers and patches of longer grass were scattered across the area, but Neoma was drawn to the very middle where a single flower grew, its pale grey petals almost glowing in the moonlight. She couldn't tear her eyes away, everything else fading away into the background as she sat down in front of it. For a few moments, it was just her and the flower, silence between them. Neoma opened her mouth to say something - then remembered that this was a flower, not a person. Still, she couldn't help but feel that the flower had a story to tell her.

She reached out, and brushed a single petal with her fingertips.

Instantly, a flood of memories rushed through her, inhuman memories, plant and animal, tinged with senses that she didn't have, chaotic in a way she'd never experienced, scared, terrified, dying, and yet alive, so alive, every being in the inner spiral slamming into the walls of her brain. She saw humans she didn't recognize mowing down her family with guns as she bounded away on four feet, she saw her brothers and sisters getting felled left and right as the teeth of a chainsaw dug into her own trunk, she felt fear as she retreated from the safety of the trees, driven inside the walls by chemicals and fire. The people destroying the world outside of the Stronghold had forced her into it, and the last thing she saw was an image of blue-green light bleeding into the shining silver of the moon before she snapped back into herself, unable to think or speak or feel anything other than the fading fear of a nightmare. She sat there, staring at nothing, her hand barely hovering above the petals of the flower, and she felt like she understood something that nobody in her lifetime had ever understood before, like she was a part of something that nobody in her lifetime had ever been a part of before.

The scrape and clatter of metal being shifted broke her from her thoughts. She knew, without having to look, that someone had found her. The sounds of several guns being readied only confirmed as much.

Neoma stood, and the ground rumbled beneath her feet.

No longer herself, but more like herself than she'd ever been, Neoma tore up the earth around her with a mere thought, refusing to look at the humans that had come to stop her. Somewhere in her head, she still knew that she was a human like them, but at the same time the gnarled, mutated vines that writhed around her spoke of something more than human. She got the vague sense that there were bullets flying by her at every turn, and she didn't care. She only cared about vengeance.

As the roar of the thrashing plants that surrounded her and the staccato of gunfire woke up the distant city of Pompilius, Neoma looked up at the bluish-green tint of the night sky.

She wondered what a healthy moon looked like.