You welcome Honey back, standing in front of your trees’ thick trunk. “Well done, daughter,” you say with a curt nod, as she takes a knee before you. “The captives will spread the tale of what happened here, and others will be hesitant to risk a similar fate. It won’t prevent them from coming eventually, but this will buy us valuable time – time that we must use to strengthen our position here.”
You turn to look out through the semi-translucent windows of gossamer spider threads that dot the walls of your audience chamber. Beyond them, future battles rage in your mind. It is not an easy path you have chosen for yourself. You turn back to face Honey.
“The time has come for you enter my mind, daughter. We must cleanse the humans and their allies from the lands surrounding the forest if we hope to secure our future, but first you need to be made aware of exactly the dangers we face.”
“I don’t understand, my Queen,” says Honey. She looks up at you, her brows creased in confusion.
“That is exactly the problem,” you say. Stepping forward you place your hand on her forehead. “But you will.”
Memories rush forth from you, filling Honey’s mind. Your life as a human man, growing up in the village before being bought by your master and going to live in his tower. A decade of study and menial labour as an apprentice mage. Spells, histories, stories. Your transformation into the first dryad in centuries. You hold back nothing.
She gasps when the memories finally run out and you see new understanding behind her eyes. You’re sad to see Honey’s innocence taken from her but you have no choice. If you don’t arm her with the knowledge she needs, then she will fall just as she did in her past life.
“Mother,” she starts to say, but you cut her off as you gift her the memories of the past dryads granted to you through your link with your tree. A million years of struggle, an evolutionary arms race, an ice age, the birth of the first independent dryads and now, finally, your new generation.
Honey’s eyes roll up in her head and she collapses, unconscious, the flood of information too much for her to absorb. Karla comes forward from where she had been standing guard over the babies and bends forward, giving you a tantalising look at her glorious, naked ass and rear-facing pussy, then gently lifts the dryad that had once been her husband in her massive arms. You nod at her and she quickly carries Honey from the audience chamber to lay her in her room. You walk over and droop into your throne, mentally drained.
When Karla returns a short time later and reports that Honey and the babies are all resting peacefully, you gesture her to kneel between your legs. The stacked minotaur doesn’t need any more instruction than that, and starts lapping, enthusiastically, at your dripping folds with her thick, wide cow tongue.
You hum your pleasure and try not to squirm too much. Mhmmm, you needed that. Then, while Karla continues to work on you, you turn your mind to the problem of your new nations’ immediate needs. Your biggest problem is simply that Great Forest is vast. Far too large for just three people to watch over, and that is ignoring the fact that Karla’s loyalty was to her role as the babies protector only. You had little doubt that she’d refuse any orders that she disagreed with.
You yelp when you feel Karla’s tongue slid deep inside you. Damn, girl. Work that tongue. Now, where were you? Oh, right, the Great Forest was too big. Hmm. You can monitor the forest through your tree, but it was more a passive sensation of activity. You could tell if someone was attacking the trees, but you couldn’t actually see anything. You’d have no idea if an army of humans and elves were on their way right now. No, what you really need is more dryads. But that meant killing someone to turn their body into a vessel, and you aren’t sure how comfortable you are with that.
Your second problem is defence. Even if you had eyes to spot your enemies, you currently have no way to fight them except by yourself. Oh, Honey would gladly join you, but then you’d just both die. Think, damn it. The monsters of the primordial forest used to mutate themselves, change their bodies to give them an advantage. Could you do that? But to the forest itself?
Deciding to test the idea, you reach out with your mind, sending your will into the forest. You suddenly find yourself awash in an ocean of magic. There is so much of it, so much more than anyone seemed to know. As an apprentice mage you had learned to harness and use the magic humans and elves called ‘mana’. The amount of mana one could use before exhausting their supply varied based on magical aptitude and experience, but even the most powerful caster was still limited and would need to rest and recharge after expending their power. Now, experiencing this, you understood that what those mages called mana was nothing but the surface level stuff. Like seeing waves crash against a beach, then rushing in to scoop up the foam. All the while completely blind to the ocean beyond.
With this much power you could do anything. You could drown the world. Reshape it in any image you desired. You wouldn’t be a Queen, you’d be a Goddess! You pull your mind back with a wrench. The magic had been pulling you further and further in. You nearly lost yourself there. Your entire body felt like it was made of bees, every inch of you buzzing with energy. Dangerous stuff. Was that why the human mages didn’t try to tap into it? Were they afraid? No. You didn’t think that was it. Your master had been an arrogant bastard more than willing to risk his and your life in the pursuit of more power.
They couldn’t use it! You realized with a start. It was too much for them. Your body was still prickly with residual power, and you were a magical creature now. There was no way a mortal body could handle that much power. They’d be burnt up in an instant. This was it. This was the weapon that you would defend your forest with.
Cautiously, you reach out again, erecting walls of will around your mind this time. Immediately, the power buffets against your walls, threatening to overwhelm them but you see the path clearly this time. You don’t fight the ocean, you let the currents carry you along. Then, ever so delicately, you reach out and make a change. Then another, and another. You are a conductor, leading an orchestra of power, and all through the forest magic bursts forth – making your will reality.
Throughout the forest you weave your spells. Trees, ancient and dormant, waken and gain senses with which to view the world around them. Magical eyes, invisible to mortal eyes, to spy intruders. Magical mouths, to speak across the forest and report what they see. Your new Watchers.
Vines, just like those that captured you, sprout from the earth amongst the roots and entangle a pack of wolves. The vines drag them down and cocoon them. Thick, viscous slime coats the wolves, breaking them down and then rebuilding them, like caterpillars becoming butterflies. When they emerge, they are no longer beasts of flesh and blood, but perfect sylvian replicas of wood and vine. You summon your new Fern Hounds to come to you and they obey.
More vines capture a small herd of deer, grazing in a clearing. Like the wolves, their flesh is eaten away, dissolved by the vine’s juices and their bodies rebuilt with sinew of wood, muscles of vines. But unlike the wolves, the changes don’t end there. The magic continues to shape them. Their chests elongate and broaden, growing upwards into green-skinned, human-like torsos free of fur. Their heads melt and reform, taking on beautiful elfin shapes similar to your own, until the only part that still remains animal are the long slender antlers sprouting from their dark brown hair. A pair of arms rapidly grow from the new humanoid torsos, ending with delicate human-like hands with long fingers.
Similar to centaurs, your new creations have the lower body of a doe or buck, while the upper half resembles that of an antlered dryad. They’re smaller than a centaur too, standing at a similar height to the average human, with a smaller build and softer features. You name your new children Fawns and summon them to your side.
You lose track of time as your mind flits about the forest, shaping the changes you are making to the denizens of your domain. But eventually you are finished, and you pull yourself back into your body. You feel limited, confirmed, but force the feelings away. You couldn’t let yourself give into the deadly siren call of the wild magic.
You feel wetness between your thighs and look down. You are surprised to find you have just squirted all over Karla’s bovine face. You grin sheepishly at the minotaur woman and she stands, licking your juices from her lips.
“Uh, thanks, Karla,” you say. You’re embarrassed to admit it, but you’d completely forgotten she was down there when you gave yourself to the magic. You straighten in your chair, trying to look a bit more regal. “We have some guest coming, could you please show them in?”
“Of course, your moojesty,” she rumbles. She turns and stalks from the room, her huge slab of rock hard ass filling your vision.
You rub your neck with both hands, trying to massage some feeling back into your body. You’ve done some impressive feats of magic since becoming a dryad but what you just did was on another level. All across the forest you can sense scores of newly wakened Watchers reaching out to each other, establishing a chain of communication back to the castle. Elsewhere, you sense other plants you’ve reshaped into weapons, flowers that can expel a cloud of pollen that would put an entire battalion to sleep, transformation-inducing fruit bushes, thorns that wrap the feet of intruders and never let go. While far closer to home, you can sense the approach of your new Fawns and Fern Hounds.