Weiss closes her eyes and tries to ignore a steadily building sense of dread. Impulsively interfering and destroying things might have bitten her once again. Maybe it was spreading corruption over time, or maybe she burned before thinking, again. And should have just moved on.

But the pain... Who would do such a thing to a nature spirit? It can't be for a good cause... Right?

After looking over the bear more closely, something seems to occur to the dwarf woman and she suddenly seems frightened.  She casts a few spells on herself.  She looks around, but can't seem to see Weiss.

"You've doomed this forest you know!"

She speaks loudly, just short of yelling and Weiss can hear her clearly.

Oh yeah? Fuck you. Fuck everything. Maybe she should burn the whole world, when so much of it sucks like this.

Horrible rot monsters get fire. That's her rule, and the priors that created it still make sense.

Sigh.

With no response Soana turns back to the bear.  (It was a long shot that the perpetrator was still in earshot and that they could be talked around into usefully helping.)

The forest isn't actually doomed if she can bind another spirit strong enough to serve as a keystone.

She sadly starts butchering the bear, it's body parts and organs might serve as useful foci, catalysts, and reagents for another binding ritual.

A particular cloud catches her attention, seeming oddly soft and comfortable among the sad sky.

There is a wordless sense of endurance and hope to it. These terrible things are terrible indeed, and you are trying, and that is good. And things can be better.

She is doing what she thinks she must. As are you. It's hard, but it can be okay in the end.

There coalesces from nowhere in particular a weary boar spirit. It has been sent by the god of Cloud, and knows that there is painful work here, and is willing in the way spirits are, not exactly in humanoid terms, but because of its nature. Save and suffer and then in time be saved.

Maybe the God of whatever foolish do-gooder slew Orso has decided to take pity on her forest?

She doesn't actually have all the materials for the bindings and rituals on her right now... although if the spirit is actually truly willing she could take some shortcuts and get started now?

She considers carefully...

She addresses the spirit.

"How much time were you thinking of serving the forest in this way?"

Even just 3 years would probably be worth the expenditure of ritual components and reagents, she could use that time to find another spirit.  7 would be more preferable.  And she is kind of hoping this is one of the spirits that is bad at mortal time and will agree to decades without really considering how long that is to suffer.

"I can establish the basic binding now, but I'll need to supplement it with additional abyssal spirits over time for it to properly anchor the forest against the Abyss."

If it can't talk or can't even properly understand her, she has a few open slots she can try to use for communicating properly.

The Mist Boar from Carmine Valley cloud forest is kind of fuzzy on the whole 'time' thing. It's had twenty and two winters of peace since its last duty, so perhaps twenty and two years again of burden. A long time, but nothing in the face of eternity.

"That time should be sufficient to be worth the ritual.  I may wish to release your binding earlier than that if it threatens you with a true death."

She begins rummaging through her pouch and through her pockets.

"The initial binding will feel like a weight, then a prick, then some numbness, I have a technique and a concoction to ease the first connection."

She approaches slowly and carefully, circling around and looking for the right spots to bind the first maggoty abyssal spirits to where they will be far away from any vital organs.  With Orso's corpse right there, she can incorporate it into the ritual.

The Mist Boar will cooperate even if there is a faint sense of 'maybe keep trying to find something better'.

That's

Illumine

Not damning her, but the goddess of hope and healing never would. Nor praising her, for she made such intervention necessary

A lot of feelings 

She can't watch. She leaves and returns to her run. Onward, onward, towards the mountains.

It is just as well, a spiritual being like a Kitsune lingering nearby might throw off the rituals.

The Woods are as they are before.  The area she just left was the most lively patch of it she's seen yet, there is some variance, but it is all dying and decaying and falling into ruin to at least some degree.  As she comes to a foothill of the mountains, there are several sites and potential path that stand out.

She could take the straightest path to the mountains, if she does this, she might be at the start of the mountain by the time she next exits the Woods.

There is a ruined church, with something dark underneath it, in a way distinct from the darkness of the crevasses.

There is a ruined fortress, sitting uneasily over an especially large crevasse, almost more like a bottomless canyon.  It seems the fortress was once built into the mountains, but a crevasse open and tore down the mountain from around it.

There are standing stones, arranged in some puzzling manner that just begs to be solved by an inquiring mind.

She's still tired and scared, but that excuse can only hold up for so long. Maybe there's something useful in these places. She'll check out the ruined fortress first, it seems the most - open and traversable with her advantage in mobility over most things.

Upon exiting the woods, she will realize that although the fortress is ruined, as the Woods indicated, it is not abandoned!  Monsters like the ones that chased her ought of the village are milling around.  Some are scattered on top of the ramparts, not so much acting like guards, but more like they want their space from each other and the ramparts were convenient for that.

...WELP. She's glad she dropped out a decent distance away. Any red guys visible? Maybe she should... Illusion herself as something unsuspicious. Maybe call up spooky fog. That rather gives up that something is going on though.

...She'll prowl the perimeter a bit, watching. She's sort of getting the sense that these ones are the baddies, from the weird illusion (and one of them randomly stabbing a civilian), and so on. That's thin to go on to start attacking though.

There are some of those red guys!  A few of them above the gate to the fortress actually look like they are putting in half-assed efforts as sentries (as opposed to not even trying, like most of the monsters).

One of them has spotted the spooky fog and is openly staring at it, but he (she? it?) doesn't seem to be raising any alarms.

She ran from them once before, successfully...

Once there's a nice setup of fog, and she has an idea which corners are being watched by less attentive sentries-

-Smaller bodies are easier to sneak around with. She'll pick a section of wall that seems especially abandoned, particularly by red guys, and creep forward invisibly, and leap to the top of the walls and have a very quick look around, looking for things she needs to react to immediately.

Along the western side of the fortress city, where the wall meets rock, she can find a path to clamber up, and there doesn't seem to be any more red ones watching along that edge.

From atop the wall at this angle, she can see the fortress has two layers of walls, and an inner keep.  It is built going up the hill.

The city is despoiled with many building in disrepair, trash in the streets, and more of the monsters loitering around.  There are a few humans among them, most of them moving more purposefully and taking care to avoid getting to close to any of the monsters.  Some of the humans are wearing horned masks and many carry crossbows, scythes, or glaives.

She's suddenly struck by how she doesn't really know how forts work. They're not really meant to stand up to Cryptids, and that's the only time she's ever close to one, fighing a Cryptid. The design feels unfamiliar. It's really more of a small walled town than a fort at this point, isn't it?

Watching the monsters in their natural habitat, so to speak, might be informative. It's pretty troubling that these 'monsters' are intelligent. Some part of her is oddly sure that they're definitely evil - the same sort of vague recognition that her kitsune-senses for Curse energy and Cryptids detect-

She tries to carefully work her way inward, still covered by All The Illusions and just... Watching what people are getting up to. ...Actually she pulls out the wand of Sinnah's Fly and holds it at the ready, in case she has to escape in a big hurry. She's on the lookout for magic stuff, too.

The monster mostly keep their distance from each other, occasionally one will accidentally or intentionally get too close and a fight will break out.  None of the fights are actually to the death, but some look pretty close.  Some humans crossing through the streets of the fortress city get garbage thrown at them by one of the squat, fat monsters.  Over in another corner of the city, a red monster brandishes its spear (the red monsters seem to strongly favor spears, while other monsters prefer claws) threateningly at some humans that pass to close to its area.

Many of the monsters are innately magical to some degree, as if they had spells constantly running built directly into their bodies.  The red monsters, for example, have innately magical eyes.  Also, if she's paying attention to how their body interacts with the environment... it looks like their skin is literally coated in slimy acid.

If she watches long enough, she might notice occasionally notice a monster suddenly appearing or disappearing, perhaps via teleportation, or perhaps via some form of invisibility activating and deactivating?  

Eventually, a monster with two sets of arms (giant crab claws on the outside, and more human like arms on the inside) comes out and looks over the spot where Weiss's illusionary fog first appeared.

It's pretty convincing fog! It'll condense on weapons and skin and everything! It's probably some sort of spell. This kind of fog is pretty unnatural. But even if you could tell it was an illusion, it wouldn't go away.

(Invisible foxgirl wants to avoid Red Guys, and also wants to know: Is a massive predisposition to random cruelty pretty much universal among nonhumans in this city? She's really strongly predisposed against just starting blasting, but...)