The air is thick with smoke and ash from the great wastelands. A once mighty forest lays dead and withering. Your geiger counter clicks as the invisible fires of radiation burn around you. It had been years since the nuclear war had ended, yet the world still suffered. The others had warned you to stay out of the dead forest. But you felt drawn to it…like it was calling to you. Almost as if it was calling to you. Through ankle deep ash and soot, you marched through the desolate forest. Through the sour and cold winds, you heard what sounded like very weak sobs of sorrow. You pushed onward, driven by a need to see what had been making the sobbing. You wandered into a clearing in the dead forest and came to what was once a great and mighty tree, now crumbling and…hostile looking. You stifled a gasp as the twisted branches and vines converged at the base of the tree. Covered in tight barbed vines was a fairy. Her body was partially entombed in the bark of the malignant tree, its branches and roots coiling and jutting in and out of her body. Her dress was long faded and dissolved into the grey bark of the tree, her wings were shredded and ensnared with roots and vines. Even her skin was slowly being replaced with bark. The tree had been eating her, perhaps even keeping her alive in this place of death.

The fairy let out a moan, her lungs rattled as the roots within constricted her lungs and throat. Her eyes fluttered open and they snapped to you, wide and filled with pain and desperation.

“Please...end this…end me…let me die…”