I Am A Carnivorous Plant

Many of the ex-villagers looked like they’d been beaten up, and even those without a single wound on them looked absolutely freaking haunted, or at the very least suuuper tired. Apparently, even though they’d already lived there for three years, adjusting to the new big bustling life in the town was too hard for them it seems.

Nahhhh, that’s not it!

They could have adjusted to the place easy if it weren’t for the fact that everybody freaking hated them!

Well, not everyone hated them! Just, you know, most people did. The original animal people didn’t really feel any sort of bad way towards them, but the more recent animal people, who’d lost friends and family to a bunch of forest elves and a good handful of corpse plants, didn’t take too kindly to the fact that there were people who lived in their newly founded safe place had the enemy’s colors on them, you know? Honestly, I can’t blame them; It’s perfectly understandable for them to have not trusted them. The fights and the abuse though? Yeah, not so much.

And then there were the fellow humans in the town, the ones from the other villages that had been conquered. I’m sure it was quite hard for many of them to accept that mom’s village was just peacefully allowed to hand themselves over, when they might have lost some loved ones in the hostile takeovers that they had to regretfully live through. From what I could tell from the flashback, it seemed that almost all the other towns that had people who followed the Spirit of the Forest had basically chosen to defend the Spirit’s lands to their death. So yeah, it all just made mom’s village look like a bunch of unfair cowards, I guess. Yup, they were reeeally unpopular.

The Wind Spirit’s Avatar had finally come and annexed this territory for its Spirit that year also, so uh…

Yeah, it was looking more and more like this wasn’t the place for them to be.

Most of the villagers wanted to leave. This place might have been their home for centuries, but it was no longer a place where they could truly survive. Now that the lands were controlled by the Wind Spirit, some of the animal people were beginning to give mom’s people some inhospitable looks. They had to sneak around to perform any form of worship or ritual or anything that they would usually do for the Forest Spirit before they came there, or else risk getting severely beaten up because of it. At first mom’s people had tried to protest against the unfair treatment, but after months of their words falling on deaf ears… Well, they’d all realized very well that that toootally wasn’t gonna end up working, you know? It really seemed like they were gonna have to give up and find a new place to live if they wanted to continue to pledge themselves to the Forest Spirit.

But uh… Going away and forming a new village isn’t a very easy thing to do, you know? For one, they’d have to move pretty darn far away if they wanted to be safe from the ongoing invasion and not just have a way worse repeat of what had already just happened to them. And with how many people mom’s group would have to move, even with the blessings of the Forest Spirit, they would for sure struggle to find enough food for the long journey they’d have to take to get somewhere ‘safe’. Besides, who even knew exactly where somewhere ‘safe’ would even be with how voraciously the Wind territory was spreading?

And even more important was the fact that the town didn't want to let them leave!

As it turns out, there were a few impatient ones from mom’s people who weren’t willing to wait any longer for everyone to come to a consensus, who decided to flee by themselves! And do you know what happened to them? Once the town’s guard realized that those people didn’t have permission to leave, they dragged them to the dungeons! Which is apparently not what’s supposed to happen, mind you, but because the people clearly had the green eyes of a Forest Spirit follower, they were treated as spies or something! So yeah, when mom’s people found out what had happened to those guys, they were wayyy less willing to try and just waltz through the front door and leave.

Mom was different than them, though. See, this world is a little bit primitive in its fantasy ways, but mom, with our shared modern past life knowledge, knew enough to realize that even if you don’t have permission to leave, the only thing that’s stopping you from actually leaving is to get caught!

All they needed to do to successfully leave was to sneak out!

They couldn’t do it all at once, mind you. It was completely likely that if too many of them suddenly disappeared at once, then one of their neighbors or somebody would sound the alarm to the local guard that something weird was going on, right? So it was decided that they would bring people out of the town in groups of three at a time! Lefrell would watch over their people in the town, and mom would escort the three person escapee groups (carrying plenty of supplies) off to a relatively safe area in the forest where they would be temporarily staying, and once everyone had escaped and regrouped together and had enough supplies ready, they would start their journey of looking for a new place to live on the other side of the forest!

Do you remember that weird backway that mom snuck into the town through? It was actually a weird little crumbled spot in the wall behind some foliage, where the guard didn’t check very often. And why was that crumbled spot in the wall there? Because mom made it! She scouted out the perfect spot, broke the wall just enough, and even grew the bits of bush and tall grass in front of it that hid it, all on her own! Honestly, watching it all unfold on the memory screen was really impressive to see! Mom looked like such a badass leader with a badass plan!

…I’m really happy I got to see this side of her.

Makes me sad to know the homicidal monster she’s ended up becoming, though.

So anyways, for a little over half a year, mom toiled away at smuggling her people out of the town. After sneaking them away with a bit of veeeery interesting to see concealment magic, mom would lead the small groups of people on a two day hike through the forest, taking them to the special rendezvous spot that had been decided beforehand, and then handed them over to the people who had already escaped, who would be guiding them even deeper into the forest to the spot where they’d set up their temporary camp. And then, after agreeing on when the next smuggling would be, mom would head back to the town all on her own, and a few weeks later she would do it all over again.

Every time she’d made it back, people would hound her to know that she and the people she took out had ended up safe. It was obvious to see that mom’s people treated her with a mega-large amount of importance, way more than they did to Lefrell, who just stayed there in town and watched out for them. And whenever mom got back and saw that any of her people had been wounded while she’d been away, she would get on Lefrell’s case about why he wasn’t doing his job… So yeah, you can guess how Lefrell might have felt about things.

Honestly, watching all this backstory is making me want to shout at the screen how obvious it is that Lefrell is going to betray her!

If I was in a movie theater with other people seeing this, they would have killed me by now for how much yelling I'd be doing!

Yeah, inevitably some of the neighbors who also lived in mom’s slummy little district started to notice that some people were going missing, and mom's people ended up having to go into hiding to avoid questioning. That must have been when the special little hidey-tavern that mom met those two humans and Lefrell in got set up. Apparently in exchange for offering to work at the tavern and give a hefty amount of their paycheck back to the owner, they were allowed to convince the owner to look the other way while they made some ‘modifications’. Luckily there were only a handful more trips that needed to be made, and even though they had to slow down on the people smuggling a bit to avoid the even more watchful eyes of the guards, they were sure that they would be able to get the rest of their people out by the end of the year.

Until Lefrell sold mom out to save his own skin, that is!

Even if they were in hiding, it was still important to go out and get necessities, right? And I guess Lefrell, being the strongest in mom’s absence, was chosen to escort those two humans that I’d seen mom meet at the tavern before, out to go shopping. But even if they were wearing cloaks to hide themselves with, shit happens, you know? An errant puff of wind goes by, and suddenly that hood you were hiding yourself with slips a bit and shows a little too much to the wrong people. That’s just the risk you run with hoods as a disguise! And then the next thing you know, the local constabulary is following you back to the tavern and asks if the owner knows anything about an elf being there, and the owner who doesn’t wanna get thrown in jail now that the jig is up ends up ratting you out to them and tricking you to come upstairs to meet them. Happens to the best of us, right?

And here's my cynical little self thinking that maybe Lefrell just got fed up and did it all on purpose.

I mean seriously, they couldn't have hid their appearances better than that?!

You should have seen how theatrical that hood slip looked, I mean really!

Idunno, let me be fair; Maybe I only think that way because I'm biased against the guy. But can you really blame me for it, though?

Anyways, long story short, Lefrell cut off the tips of his ears so that he’d look like a human, hastily used magic to heal them, and then sold out mom and made it look like she’d been alone in planning everything. And those two humans, who were also questioned for being with him because the owner tattled on them too for going out with Lefrell in the first place, did absolutely nothing to tell the truth, and just went along with his story. Yeah, really shitty of them, I super agree.

I guess you could argue that it’s just them losing mom in exchange for three people’s lives or whatever, but couldn’t Lefrell have just taken all the blame on himself instead? Couldn’t there have totally been a world where Lefrell took the fall, instead of pinning everything on mom, who wasn't even there? Or maybe he could have fought off those guards, taken the remaining people, and ran away with them to safety or something? Or at least died trying it, ya know? But no, none of that got attempted at all! No bravery to be found here! I guess it’s true that you really only get to know someone when they’re in a crisis, isn’t it?

Mom didn’t know about any of this, for the record, until she came back and realized she’d been betrayed.

As soon as she came back from smuggling people and walked into the tavern, there was Lefrell, ready to hand her over to the guards.

I’m sure it was easy for her to guess what had happened after that, even if she didn't want to believe it.

Since mom was very strong in the magic department, she was able to fight off most of the guards that came after her while she was in town. She got a bit cut up, but she managed to escape and run into the woods while cloaked in her invisibility magic, and she immediately started running towards the rendezvous point to tell them that they would have to leave early since she’d been compromised. She felt awful having to leave behind the people that she hadn’t been able to smuggle out yet, but if she could save a majority of them, then she would sacrifice what she must to ensure her people continued on.

Mom let out an apology to the people they would be leaving behind as she sent communication magic to the camp, telling them to meet with her.

She never even considered that she was being led into a trap.