And it was alive.  A living thing.

And if this is an Endbringer, it’s implied to have been human once. Maybe it still is, on some level.

She knew without having to think about it, each of those echoes or extensions of the entity was as much a part of a connected whole as her hand or nose was to her.  Each was something this living entity was aware of, controlled and moved with intent and purpose.  As though it existed and extended into those possible selves all at once.

Hm. Possible selves, eh? Sounds like we’re dealing with a sort of Schrödinger situation here.

It’s dying, she thought.

Huh? What makes you think that?

The outermost extensions of the creature were flaking off and breaking into fragments as it swam through an emptiness without air,

Ahh, yeah, I can see why you might think that means it’s dying.

I don’t think we can take it for granted, or anything for that matter, but still.

not moving but sinuously adjusting its self through the existences that held the echoes, shrinking away here and swelling there, carrying itself away at a speed that outpaced light.

Hm. Faster than light movements could explain some of the weirdness about it.

Maybe.

Fuck if I know how, though.

In its wake, flakes and fragments sloughed off of the entity like seeds from an impossibly large karahindiba, or dandelion, in a steady wind.  Seeds more numerous than all the specks of dirt across all the Earth.

Karahindiba is Turkish according to Google Translate. Damn, I was hoping it’d help me find out what Hana’s mother tongue is.

So, should we be worried about the seeds potentially being literal? I kind of doubt it, but hey, I told you, I’m not taking anything for granted when it comes to this thing.

One of those fragments seemed to grow, getting bigger, larger, looming in her consciousness until it was all she could perceive, as though the moon was falling, colliding with the earth.  Falling directly on top of her.

“Looming in her consciousness”… I guess existing in the mindscape would be a useful way to avoid those pesky laws of physics in the real world?

Whether that’s a common mindscape (if it is a mindscape) or the appearance of this thing paused Hana’s perception of time remains to be seen.

Anyway, I have a feeling that a fragment of Karahindiba landing on Hana is not exactly a good thing.

-k!> the soldier finished without missing a beat.

Hm. Sounds like I was on the right track with the paused perception of time. During that whole sequence, none of the reactions of the soldiers or other children were described – I think if she had managed to draw her gaze away from Karahindiba, she might’ve noticed everyone else appearing frozen. That is, if they’d be there at all.

Hana stirred, she was still in the forest, hands stinging with the scrapes, feet sore from the walking.  Her heart pounded and she could taste fear like bile in her mouth.

Better hope that’s all that’s in there now.

Again, what if the seeds are literal and Karahindiba essentially planted another one of itself in Hana?

Y’know, for all that I keep mentioning Lovecraftian horrors, I feel like I should mention that I’ve never read anything by H.P. Lovecraft.

The soldier that was watching her called out from a distance behind her, the ever familiar <Walk!> that was a threat and an order at the same time.

Sick with fear, Hana looked around, searching for something that could tell her where to go, how to move.

You need to look at the numbers under the tiles and try to logic out where the mines are, so you can figure out where they aren’t.

In that moment, she knew she wasn’t going to die right away.  She couldn’t walk any further, it was physically impossible, as though her feet were as rooted to the ground as the trees were.

Physically impossible because she’s paralyzed by fear, or because her power is restricting her?

They would make her watch as they tortured one of the other children to death.  Then they would start on the next, maybe Hana herself, until they had another child willing to act as decoy and clear the traps from their way in the simplest, most dangerous manner possible.

Gotta say, if the power physically prevents her from taking a course of action that leads to her death, that’s a pretty bad position for anyone who would be inclined to sacrifice themself for someone else.

I mean, it’s one thing to prevent the user of the power from doing something dumb, but I feel like it shouldn’t restrict their choice entirely in that kind of situation.

<Wal-

She saw something vast.

It wasn’t big in the sense that the trees or even the mountains were big.  It was big in the way that transcended what she could even see or feel.

Hm.

So, uh. Are we getting a preview for what Endbringers are like here?

It was like seeing something bigger than the whole wide planet, except more – this thing that was too large to comprehend to start with, it extended.

I mean this certainly does sound rather Lovecraftian. Or Labyrinth-ian, but I don’t see any reason for her to be here.

She didn’t have a better word to describe what she was perceiving.  It was as though there were mirror images of it, but each image existed in the same place, some moving differently, and sometimes, very rarely, one image came in contact with with something that the others didn’t.

I’d ask if the others were seeing this too, but given the cut-off “wal–”, I have a feeling they do.

Anyway, I have to give it to Wildbow: This is a pretty good description for something incomprehensible.

Each of the images was as real and concrete as the others.  And this made it big in a way that she couldn’t describe if she were a hundred year old scholar or philosopher with access to the best libraries in the world.

It kind of sounds like it’s bigger than the planet, and you can tell it is by looking at it, but it doesn’t look bigger than the planet because all of that bigness is in the same space. Which does not quite mean it’s compact and therefore smaller.

She blinked hard to clear her eyes of tears.  So stupid.  She needed to be able to see.  Any clue.  Any at all, to see a trap.  Crying was the worst thing she could do.

Yeah, better stay alert.

One foot in front of the other.

She stopped.  Her feet refused to go any further.  Trembling, she looked around.

Are your trap senses tingling?

…I just realized that these circumstances can absolutely qualify as a trigger event. For all we know, Hana might have just developed a power that is likely to be accidentally activated in this Interlude.

She might become the savior of the remainder of her village. Not that it’d bring the adults back to life (unless her powerset turns out to include resurrection, I guess), but still.

If she took one more step, she knew, she was going to die.

The thing that made me realize the above was the thought “What if she actually does have that sense?”

So, uh, what if she actually does have that sense?

There was no rationale for it, no reason or clue.  This patch of forest was no different from the rest.  A bed of red-brown needles underfoot, shrubs and trees pressing in around her.

But she knew.  Whether she took a step forward, to her right or left, she would be stepping into a trap.

I wonder if this power only works on traps or if it’s more like what Dinah has, but passive and less specific. A sense that detects outcomes where she dies? Or more usefully, where she gets hurt?

A hole like the one that caught Kovan, or perhaps an explosive device, like the one that took Ashti.  At least she’d gone quickly.

So that’s what happened to the first kid… Rest in peace.

Anyway, let’s move on from the pine facts, or we’ll be here until tree A.M.

She clutched the front of her dress, balling the fabric up in hands that were still covered in dirt and scrapes from her efforts to dig Kovan free.  One foot in front of the other.

And we’re back to the present.

Hana is currently being used as practically a minesweeping rod.

Every single one of her senses was on edge.  She was hyperaware of the rustle of dirt underfoot, the scrape of pine needles against the fabric of her dress.  She could feel the warmth of the sun heating her skin when she stepped into a spot where the light filtered through the pine trees.

Hm. Again the needles, and they’re now specifically pine needles. I think it’s time to check if I was off the mark about where pines can be found.

Oh yeah, I was completely wrong about that. Well… at least we know this chapter takes place in the northern hemisphere, I guess? Really narrows it down.

They had tried for a long time to dig the boy’s leg free, knowing as they uncovered more and more of his pierced leg, saw the injuries and the quantity of blood, that he wasn’t going to be able to walk very far.

Hm. Seems like the soldiers are more patient than I thought.

It was hopeless, they knew, but Kovan was someone they had gone to school with.  Someone they had seen every day.

Another victim, but this time to their own petards.

A soldier had put an end to their efforts with a bullet through Kovan’s head, making Kovan the second of the children to die.

Ahh, there we go. Rest in peace.

Hana was picked to go next.  To test the path.

Well, shit. Sucks for her.

Her eyes scanned the forest floor, but she had no idea what to look for.  A hump of earth?  Twine?  A dense patch of dry, brown needles?  She took another step forward, waited for disaster.  When it didn’t come, she stepped forward again, paused.

Better not pause for too long.

Only a short while ago, she had watched from a distance as Kovan, the fat older boy that had once called her names, stepped forward and had his leg fall into a hole.

Ah, shit. Lemme guess, the soldiers thought it’d be a waste of time to bother helping him get it out, and shot him instead?

He’d screamed, and when Hana and the rest of the children had rushed forward to try and lift him out, they had only increased the volume of his shouts and the ferocity of his thrashing.  With the Turkish soldiers watching silently behind them, Hana and the others had used their hands to scrape at the hard, rocky earth, revealing the wooden stakes that were lodged in the sides of the hole.

…? Some kind of animal trap?

Each was set in the earth so they pointed downward at an angle, with some at the bottom to pierce his foot.  Supple, the wood had bent enough to let the leg fall down deep into the hole, but attempts to raise Kovan had only pulled his leg and foot up into waiting wooden points.

Oww.

Maybe it’s not an animal trap, but a trap set out against incoming soldiers?

It was, she knew, one of the traps that had been placed by her village’s hunters or by the guerrilla fighters that defended their village.

Yeah.

They were all over, set throughout the woods, around her village, near roads and other important places.  She had overheard one of the fighters describing this very trap to her father.  She had been told, over and over, that she wasn’t to play in the woods for much this reason, that if she had to travel into the woods for any reason, she needed an adult to guide her.  The full reality of it hadn’t registered until she saw what had happened to Kovan.

She needed an adult who knew where the traps were. The soldiers didn’t.