It was mid-afternoon on a warm spring day. The grass was still damp from the morning's dew, a slight breeze stirred the green leaves overhead and flowers were beginning to bloom as the season progressed. It was the perfect day for a walk through Eerie's picturesque forests with one's closest friends.

"I hate these woods!" Marshall shouted, swinging an axe against the trunk of a young sapling that was doing it's very best to strangle him. "I hate this town! I hate this whole state, I hate spring, and I especially hate nature!"

"Well, either it hates you right back, or it likes you way too much," said Dash, who had thus far managed to keep the creeping branches at bay with a can of bug spray and a lighter.

"Stupid season of renewal!" Mars continued, turning his wrath on the still-green limbs of a young rowan that was either combing his hair or trying to poke his eyes out. "Dumb, ugly trees! Quit touching me!"

"D'you think it's part of the whole harvest king thing?" asked Simon, who was perched on a boulder that had been bare rock a few minutes ago, but was now covered in a rapidly-thickening blanket of bright-coloured lichen.

"I don't care!" Marshall yelled, kicking at a clump of moon daisies that had sprouted by his feet. A clod of dirt flew into the air, tender green shoots erupting from it as it did so. "I just wanted to investigate a weird old church with a weird stone face carved into the eastern wall! It's not! So much! To ask!" This last was punctuated by the pulpy snap of new-growth branches being broken.

Simon frowned, climbing higher on his rock to avoid the encroaching moss.

"I don't get it," he said. "Everything we found said foliate heads were just benign representations of the natural order of the world. I didn't read anything about plant life with a poor grasp of personal boundaries."

"Harvest festivals are a natural-order-whatever-you-said," said Dash, then called to Mars: "How'd that one work out for you? Still hairy on a full moon?"

"Eat me!" Marshall snapped.

"I think the plants have dibs," said Dash. Simon laughed, then quickly composed himself as Mars spun on the spot to fix him with an accusing gaze.

"This isn't funny, Simon!" he snapped. "I can't go back to town with... with molesting vines following me everywhere!"

"Relax," said Dash. "They might just be trying to kill you."

Marshall pulled off his coat, threw it to the ground and stamped on it to kill the tiny wildflowers that were growing there.

"Maybe you should just put the carvings back where you found them," suggested Simon.

"But I need them for the evidence locker!" Marshall objected.

"Wow," said Dash. "I just thought, what are you gonna do when you have a shower? The plantlife is gonna go nuts with all the water..."

Marshall pulled two stone shingles, ornately carved with twining ivy leaves in a vague approximation of a man's face, from his backpack and threw them in the direction of the ruined church.

"Keep your crummy foliate heads!" he yelled at the verdant woodlands, which abruptly stopped it's aggressive courtship/hunting behaviour and returned to it's usual status of "prime real-estate for the fairytale-inclined."

Simon slid down from the boulder. Dash pocketed the bugspray, but kept hold of the lighter, just in case.

Marshall sighed.

"For once, it'd be nice if some part of Eerie's weirdness didn't want to eat me," he muttered.

"I'm pretty sure Elvis is indifferent to you," said Dash.

"Shut up," said Mars. "Elvis likes me."

"He doesn't even know your name. He literally calls you by your job title. If you quit your paper route and became a waiter, he would have no idea who you are."

Simon rolled his eyes. Quietly, unobtrusively, he nudged the fallen foliate heads closer to a tendril of dark-green ivy that was moving across the forest floor in a motion that suggested it was searching for something. The creeper wrapped itself rapidly around the carvings and disappeared into the underbrush with a rustle of leaves.