Grimm Tales: Rise of the Yokai

Chapter 9 Whirlwind In The Mountains

Traveling through the warp gates was as easy as walking through a door. I felt a light, cool pressure, and then I was on the other side.

I stepped out into a small clearing in the forest. It wasn't as hot as I'd expected it to be, but this time of year that wasn't really saying much. The sunlight filtered through the trees, burning away the last of the morning mist still creeping along the ground.

Tobias was the last one through the gate. I looked back through the portal, and I could still see Nick and Leo standing in the gate room. Leo waved at us, and Nick mouthed 'good luck', before the portal collapsed. It swirled in on itself, like water going down a drain, and vanished.

We were on our own.

"So, where do we go from here?" asked Tobias.

"Leave that to me," said Miroku.

He reached up and plucked a strand of hair from his head. As he rolled it between his fingers, it grew into a large black feather.

Miroku held up the map, and gently ran the feather over it. As he did, the feather began to glow. When he held up the feather again, it jumped out of his hand, hovering in the air for a moment, before it started drifting away.

"Okay," I said. "That's a new one."

"It's a tracking spell," said Miroku, as he folded the map and put it away. "Just follow the feather. It'll take us where we need to be."

He waved for us to follow, and followed the feather into the forest, the rest of us close behind.

I don't know what I had been expecting as we started making our way through the forest. Maybe just a nice, calm, leisurely stroll through the woods. Instead, I got this.

It was already hot, and the plants were all packed so tightly together that it would have taken a hurricane to get a breeze through them. We kept getting tangled in the underbrush or tripped on half-hidden roots sticking up out of the ground. Except for Sarah. The plants just seemed to magically move out of her way. So unfair.

And I was pretty sure every gnat in the state had decided to take a vacation in these woods today.

But the worst part?

Every step we took was uphill.

After half an hour or so of hiking, the ground finally started to level off. The trees were a bit more spaced out here, and I could finally feel the breeze coming up the mountains, offering some welcome relief. A few minutes later, the feather slipped between some low-hanging branches. I pushed them aside and found myself at the edge of a clearing.

I called back to my friends, "Hey, come take a look at this."

"What is it?" asked Jason. He pushed his way out of the trees and looked around. "Whoa."

The clearing was perfectly round. Every plant and every blade of grass had been flattened, like a steamroller had driven through.

"What happened to the trees?" asked Tobias. "Sarah, any ideas?"

All around the edge of the clearing, the trees were all bent, warped, or broken. It was like they had tried to grow in a hurricane and couldn't stand up to the wind. I'd seen trees like that before at the coast. Too much wind and salty air made the trees short and crooked. But that couldn't be it, not this far from the ocean.

Something crunched under my feet, and I knelt down for a closer look.

Wood chips. There were jagged slivers of wood and sawdust mixed into the grass. Almost like someone had cleared away a bunch of trees by jamming them through a wood-chipper.