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“Don’t— no! Stop!” Scar swatted at the little creatures swarming him, managing to knock a few off his legs. To his dismay, they hopped up and back onto him almost instantly. “Where are you taking me?”
It was as if they’d understood his question, the whole lot of them starting to let out high-pitched squeaking noises that would have made Scar hold his hands to his ears, had they not already clutched onto his arms as well, dragging him along by every inch of skin they could get to.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
He grabbed onto a thick, gnarly root sticking out of the ground, pulling himself in the opposite direction, and a bubble of hope arose in his chest as he gained a few centimetres back. That is until, to his horror, the root started wiggling in his grip and slapped his hand away.
He screamed.
The few birds that he hadn’t already scared away with his yelling and thrashing rose as one from the surrounding branches. Even they couldn’t hear his pleas for help anymore as the creatures dug their claws into his skin and tugged him along.
He’d lost his voice by the time they arrived.
The trees had closed around them, casting the forest floor in darkness, even though Scar knew that the sun was still high in the sky. Or maybe it wasn’t. Something about the place made him doubt all his senses.
The creatures came to a stop at the bottom of a pile of boulders, for which Scar was very grateful. He was already bleeding from countless scrapes and scratches, and he didn’t think that getting cut open by those jagged spikes would be much better of a feeling.
The creatures didn’t stop him from sitting up, but when he moved to stand, immediately started squeaking and pulling down on his arms. He stayed on the ground, in the end, coldness seeping through the rips in his jeans.
It was awfully quiet, he noted. The calm before the storm, perhaps. The creatures had gone still, though Scar could not tell where they were looking. Or if they were looking at all. His eyes unfocused whenever he glanced toward the creatures, but he didn’t think he’d seen any eyes on them.
He jumped when the gloomy forest was suddenly illuminated by a dim, purplish light, coming from the cracks in the tree bark, the space between clumps of dirt, the chipped surface of the mountain of stone above him, all leading his eyes toward... Well. A questioning noise fell from Scar's lips as he caught sight of the figure now standing at the top of the pile of boulders. They seemed so very normal, that it put him off more than any of the horrors that he had been expecting to see. They looked like a human. A smaller build, dirty blond hair, skin spotless and on full display, with nothing more than a few ripped-up pieces of cloth wrapped around their shoulders. A strange human, yes, but a human nonetheless. That is, until Scar took notice of the fact that they had no pupils, their whole eye completely white.
Scar shuddered and looked down, only to notice that the creatures that had dragged him there had changed positions, twisting their little bodies up into something that resembled... yes, that looked very much like they were kneeling, and if Scar listened carefully, he could hear a barely audible, droning whine that seemed to be coming from all around him. His heartbeat, which had calmed down a little after the creatures had stopped dragging him around, picked up in pace once again.
"Human," came a voice from above him. Scar snapped his eyes up, confused. The voice did not feel like it belonged to... to the being that towered above him. He didn't know what he had been expecting, but it was most definitely not something this soft, this soothing. The voice was coming from everywhere at once, and had he not seen their mouth moving, he wouldn't have guessed that it came from them at all. "You are not supposed to be here."
Scar knew that. Of course he was not supposed to be there, he hadn't gone willingly at all.
"I know," he said, and had to pause for a second as he heard his own voice. It felt much too normal for their situation. Everything else around him was mysterious and majestic and there he was with his human self and his human voice. All the more reason to get the hell out of there. "Trust me, I'd be leaving if it weren't for these things." He gestured around him at the creatures, who had straightened again and seemed to be listening intently to his every word.
The figure just laughed, tilting his head at him with an expression that Scar couldn't quite tell the meaning of. Amusement, or perhaps curiosity. Probably the former.
"Oh, I know."
Scar furrowed his brow, "So... Can't you just tell them to let me go? You don't want me here, I don't want to be here, seems like a perfect solution to both of our problems."
"That's not quite how it works." They descended a step, making Scar try to skitter further back as well, but he was met with a solid wall of tiny limbs pushing him forward. "You see, this is not a place one can just walk around in, all willy-nilly. Every centimetre of dirt that you walk on is sacred land. As soon as you breathe its air, it is inside you. You are one with it. You cannot leave once you set foot on my land.”
Scar shivered, trying to scramble to his feet, to run before it was too late, but the little creatures clung to his torn clothes and his skin and he couldn’t get away. He could see their eyes now, for some reason, flitting between him and the mysterious figure. He could barely breathe under their weight anymore.
"Don't worry," they said, clasping their hands in front of them, "You'll learn to love your new home."
The lights seemed to brighten, flooding everything with purple, and the creatures around him started chittering and scrambling around him and getting bigger and bigger by the second. Scar looked up again at the figure, whose smile had gotten distorted, towering high above him. He tried to shout, to get them to stop, let him go, let him leave, but suddenly, he found that all that came out of his lips were high-pitched squeaks, and he couldn't do anything just watch the creatures come into sharp focus around him.
”Everyone has learned to love their new home!"