So yes. Tress’s plan could have worked.
If she’d been sprouting for more than a couple of weeks.
Tress tried to seize control as she’d done earlier, pressing her mind against it. The thing reared up out of the spores, pulling away from her hand, and looked at her with midnight eyes. A question came into her head, like…it wanted something. She tried to offer water, hoping it was more than the Sorceress was giving.
The thing rebuffed her. Naturally, the Sorceress knew of this possibility. She understood the weakness inherent in her creations. And she’d built them, with complex mechanisms, to recognize an outside attempt at control. Tress was tenaciously talented and demonstrably determined. But she was still new.
And the Sorceress, it should be noted, was not.
The thing reared up with a hiss, opening its mouth, anticipating its feast. Tress threw herself to the bottom of the boat, terrified.
When a small, high-pitched voice spoke.
“Stop,” Huck said. Then, sounding reluctant, he continued, “Take us to your mistress. I…have free passage.”
The creature swayed its head, the complex sets of commands that guided it converging on the owner of that voice. One it had been instructed not to eat. One it was to bring to its master when commanded.
Huck the rat had returned to the place where he’d been created, as instructed by the Sorceress.
THE PRISONER
The next morning, Tress arrived at the Sorceress’s island.
She’d been allowed a drink and the use of the facilities （a chamber pot） on the little rowboat. But otherwise she’d spent the trip wrapped in the coils of the Midnight Essence. Immobile. Two others just like it had emerged from the spores to push the boat, with incredible speed, to its destination.
Huck refused to answer her demands for explanations of what he’d done, or why the creatures listened to him. But Tress had her suspicions.
So it was that after an incredible journey, Tress finally arrived at the Sorceress’s island. And found it smaller than she’d envisioned. This is notable, as the island Tress came from was already small by the standards of most worlds. So her surprise was akin to a four-year-old remarking, “You know, I expected you to be more mature.”
As the spore seas lack the fine silicates derived from coral refined by ichthyological digestive processes （yes, your favorite beaches are fish poop）， the Sorceress’s island was merely another pile of rocks rising from the spores. In this case, the slate-grey stone skerry was suspiciously circular, and perhaps two hundred yards wide.
A few trees tried to spruce up the landscape but failed, both by being too intermittent and by not being the right species. Instead they were spindly, gnarled things with tufts of leaves growing only at the very tips of their branches. As if they knew the concept of “trees” only by description, and were doing their best, all things considered.
Tress had spent the trip alternating between hating Huck and hating herself. With the most generous helping heaped on herself. Now she sat, wrapped in the coils of the Midnight Essence, watching with dread as they approached the island. The Midnight Essence, it should be noted, now looked less like an eel and more like a pile of verdant vines.
The boat had a line of silver in the hull, which left dead spores trailing them in a dissipating wake. The creature took care not to touch the silver, but—like Tress had noticed when she’d seen through the eyes of the Midnight Essence rat—could get close to it without being destroyed.
It had unlocked Huck’s cage. He sat on one of the plank seats, near the front of the boat. Spores crunched and rustled as the two midnight creatures pushed the little craft steadily forward.
“You have been here before,” Tress said, voicing her guesses. “All that talk of growing up in a community of rats—that was all lies, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Huck whispered.
“You belong to her,” Tress said. “You’re a familiar of the Sorceress, or something like that. You’ve always belonged to her.”
“Yes,” he said, even softer.
Each answer hit like an arrow. The barbed kind that hurt going in—but also rip and tear going out. The kind that make you want to leave them in, walking around with wounds that can never heal, for fear of the worse pain of removal.
Still, as much as that stung, she forced herself to admit something. Huck had done everything he could—short of abandoning the ship at port—to keep her from coming this way. To protect her from the Sorceress.
He had lied, yes, but he was obviously terrified of the Sorceress. She couldn’t blame him too much for how he acted, now that she’d unwittingly brought him back here. She could, however, blame herself.