I am bereft.
My stumbling progress is mindless. I just force my legs to carry me. Climb down stones, leap from one purchase to the next as I flee toward . . . what?
Ctein is plodding ahead of me. His shoulders sag. His movements are clumsy, like a man whose soul has gone dead inside. I see defeat in his every movement.
I haven’t a clue where I am, where I’m going. I just proceed. Panting. Howling in lonely silence.
This is a terrible place that I do not understand. I can’t put a name to the green, blue, and turquoise leaves. Branches and stems turn in my direction. There is no sky. I clamp a hand to my ears to still the rising and falling harmony of the chime. It is like a madness that echoes inside my skull.
Beneath my feet green and brown roots squirm. The feeling of movement unnerves me, pushes me to the threshold of endurance.
At least I know enough to avoid the vines. Try not to touch anything.
I follow Ctein along the edge of the tumbled boulders. We’ve reached the bottom of the trail. Turned north, seeking to skirt the cliff. It’s mostly flat here. The trees are small, barely twenty meters high. Water drips from the alien-shaped leaves.
The rain has tapered into a fine mist, sometimes ceasing altogether as patches open in the clouds and shafts of light shoot bars through the rainbow-patterned virga.
Ctein—soaked to the bone—is no more than four paces ahead. He stumbles over a stone. Walks with no more grace than if his feet were carved of wood. I hear the labored breathing as he fights the shivers. Nothing has prepared us for such arduous travel as we are engaged in. Struggling over boulders, leaping gaps, spanning roots.
The boulder has a black sheen, gray where the sides were sheltered from the downpour. Irregularities, cracks, a faint smattering of what looks like lichen.
Ctein puts his hand on it to brace his passage as he’s done on countless other boulders.
Instantly, the stone is alive. Stabs some slender lance-shaped spike through Ctein’s chest. As it does, two hose-like arms reach out to grab him. They pull him close upon the thorn-sharp spear until it shoots out of his back.
I see the expression on his face. The pain . . . the disbelief.
Ctein’s mouth works the same way a fish’s does when it is left on the bank after being pulled from the stream. His eyes have bugged wide, the scars on his cheeks sucking, hollow, and pale.
I freeze. Try to comprehend. Am stricken by a horror that locks my muscles. Starves my lungs of air.
And the boulder changes color. Morphs from an irregular-shaped rock to an amoeba kind of a thing that begins to conform to Ctein’s thrashing body.
Standing there with all the will of a stump, I watch it begin to engulf Ctein’s body. Stand there so long I barely manage to pull loose of the roots that are winding around my feet.
When panic overcomes my horror, I backpedal, run with all my might.
And now I am here, staggering through the dim half-light of the forest floor. I scramble over mats of roots, stare up at the distant canopy. I wonder if my mind and soul are broken.