"Do your wizardly powers give you any idea which direction we should be going? Kasimir demanded. Emmaline looked around the strange landscape. The flowers were growing thicker and larger by the moment, not to mention considerably more alien. The air was heavy with pollen and perfume that made Emmaline want to sneeze.

"Actually they do," Emmaline admitted, stepping carefully around a wrist thick stamen that probe blindly for her.

"Mind sharing that information with me?" Kasimir asked.

"Left," she said pointing vaguely into he forest. Kasimir looked skeptical, turning slowly and keeping the point of his sword in a low guard. A pair of squirrels chittered from a nearby elm tree, their eyes massive and faintly luminescent. Everything about this place was beautiful and menacing.

"How do you know?" Kasimir pressed as Emmaline set off in the direction she had indicated. She looked back over her shoulder.

"We are in a theatrical backdrop, exit is always stage left."

______________

The landscape drew slowly steeper and bare rock emerged through the leaf mold. The rocks divided up into numerous small pools, in which lotus like flowers floated serenely.  The trees here were of no type Emmaline had seen, large broad leaves of deep green with purplish veins. The trunks were covered with ambler sap which coated them like old honey or incipient amber. There were shapes beneath he sap, human shapes. Emmaline saw a naked Imperial woman, eyes staring wide in ecstatic pleasure in her syrupy psuedodeath. Another cascade of sap contained a handsome man with staring horrified eyes. 

[i]Emmaline...[/i] the wind seemed to whisper.

"Did you hear that?" Emmaline demanded, spinning rapidly around to try to find the source of the sound.

"All I hear is the wind," Kasimir said then paused... "and maybe surf, why what..." 
"Would you be quiet, I'm trying to listen!" Emmaline hissed, exasperated. Kasimir rolled his eyes but fell silent for a moment while she listened. The sap continued to run from the trees, slowly growing too thick to make out the people trapped beneath, rending them dark shadows against the sticky amber slime.

"It's not surf," Emmaline said after a moment, "it's applause. The show must have started."

"That is hours away," Kasimir objected, then fell silent, "of course we are in an insane painting so why should time work normally."

[i]Emmaline[/i]	... she spun around, catching a glimpse of the white hart at the edge of the treeline. 

"Aureum Fulmen Lucis!" Emmaline shouted, thrusting out both hands with fingers interlocked and palms turned out. The hart bounded away a moment before a golden beam of light the thickness of Emmaline's forearm scythed through the woodland it had occupied a moment before. One of the trees touched by the beam exploded with a shattering crash and chunks of syrup, wood and the unfortunate victim it had entombed rained down, waking great splashes from the pond. Emmaline slewed her beam after the retreating hart but it had already vanished among the trees.

"We have to follow it," Emmaline decided, heading off after the hart.

"Oh sure lets follow the monster," Kasimir griped.

"Feel free to stay here," Emmaline called. Kasimir glared at her back but followed a moment later.

______

Nor did the landscape grow more pleasant as they moved up hill in the direction the hart had fled. The trees gave way to large thick trunked flowers. They were in riotous colors in every shade and pattern imaginable. Emmaline had the uncomfortable impression of of women with their head and shoulders planted in the soil, an impression uncomfortably amplified when a dozen bees, the size of large dogs emerged from a glade. Instead of stingers the insects bore very large but very human phallus, if human phallus had been ebony black. They began to 'pollinate' the flowers furiously and Emmaline felt a dull vibration beneath the earth, though whether it was screaming or moaning she couldn't fightly say.

[i]It can be both Emmaline...[/i] the voice in her head promised.

[i]They wouldn't come to the forest, so we have bought the forest to them...[/i]

"We are running out of time," Emmaline breathed, holding out both hands against a sudden rush by the bee things, though they seemed focused enough on their task.

"If we don't get out of here fast, I'm afraid something very bad is going to happen in the palace..."