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If you're in the Deltarune fandom, chances are you're well aware of the cryptic sentence "Lost where the forest would grow, the children followed the pointed tail." Like every other mystery in Deltarune, it's generated a lot of speculation: are the children Kris, Noelle, Dess, and Asriel? is it only two or three of them? is the pointed tail the same as the "tail of hell" from the prophecy? is it FRIEND? did FRIEND kill/kidnap/transform Dess? is the shelter south of Hometown involved? And so on, and so forth. My goal with this essay is to explore an aspect of the "forest" sentence (as I will call it for convenience) that I haven't seen properly examined elsewhere: the very ambiguous word "would".
Let's start with what was, to me, at least, the most obvious reading:
This matches the tense of the second half of the sentence, but it forces a past habitual reading, which is infelicitous — forests can't habitually grow, as "growing" for a plant (or many plants, as in a forest) essentially means "being there and existing". If this confuses you, try using "would" in past tense sentences. "Dess would comfort Noelle when she was scared." You can see how that means she did it multiple times. So a past tense reading of "where the forest would grow" can't be right, at least not without being awkwardly phrased.
Now we're getting somewhere. In this reading, the forest would grow there if some conditions were met, but they're not. Or, more plainly, something is stopping the forest from growing there. This has been theorized to be the shelter, because the forest would be growing there if it hadn't been cleared to build the shelter. I find this reading compelling, though it's hard to shake the notion that "would" is just a strange-sounding past tense marker. Perhaps it's marking a somewhat different tense...
This would mean that the forest wasn't growing there yet, but it would in the future. This would negate the popular idea of the children being Kris &co. and the forest being the one around Hometown, as there's no way these children could be there before the forest was. Forests take time to grow, after all. However, if we take it as a given that Kris was involved, due to the "forest" sentence's connection to an egg room (and we can safely guess that the egg rooms have something to do with Kris and their psyche), then it must be a different forest. What kind of forest grows that quickly? One in a Dark World. Kris and at least one other child would have been lost somewhere where a future Dark World containing a forest would be made. This could be almost anywhere, even in the Hometown forest — the "forest" mentioned in the sentence would be the Dark World one, which didn't exist yet, rather than the extant Light World one. Very tricky.
Is any one of these readings the "correct" or "intended" one? Is the true interpretation something like "the forest would like to grow there"? Is there a "true interpretation" at all? I can't say for sure. Maybe it'll be explained in a future Deltarune chapter — I certainly hope some things will be, such as what happened to Dess — but there probably isn't time to bring everything to light while still continuing the story, and I'm sure that Toby Fox would prefer to leave some mysteries as mysteries. Heck, maybe he didn't even intend this "would" to be that ambiguous — sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar. But fan speculation is half the fun of Deltarune, and Toby knows it. He's all but told us to keep making AUs and OCs and fanfics and theories in Chapter 4. And even if he hadn't, how can you not theorize about a game like this?!
So even if nothing comes of my analysis, even if it's inconsequential to the story, I will have put my thoughts to paper (no, really, I wrote this on paper before typing it out) and said something that gets at least a couple people thinking. I'm contributing in my own way. Isn't that what Toby Fox, or that one character from Chapter 4 (I'm being vague to keep this essay as spoiler-free as I can for some reason, even though Chapters 3 and 4 have been out for four months at the time of writing) would want?
This essay was written on October 10th, 2025. This page was last edited: