I started panicking, as my vision doubled. Thick strains of hallucinogenic fumes tore their way up my nostrils, and dug their immolating fingertips into my brain; tugging me forward, into the hypnotic hollow before me.
The scene subtly shifted, and I noticed a small branch, dangling overhead; overladen with bright, ripened apples. The red orbs hanging from the tree were so decadent, and shining, that my mouth began to water.
'How long had it been since I last ate,' I wondered; reaching on my tip toes to just barely get within range to graze the bottom edge of the fruit. My hand reached out to grab one, but it was just barely out of reach.
I'd have to stretch further, in order to seize any, and for that; I'd need to step forward. It didn't seem like such a terrible idea, after all. I knew that I could easily walk back out. In fact, I wondered why I had worried so much about this stupid plant, in the first place...?
Then, the sickly fetid stench of the deer corpse wafted into my nostrils, and snapped me back to reality. There was no apple. There was no tree. There wasn't even a branch. I was teetering dangerously close to losing my balance, with my toes near to slipping on my moccasins.
I hurriedly slammed back onto my haunches, to regain my balance. It was clear that I could no longer trust my own eyes, or ears.
I huffed aloud, in frustration. I thought I could surely outsmart this thing, but it was obvious that I was out of my depth.
I started to lift my left leg, which was in front, and begin the slow, shameful trek back to my friends, but again, I was surprised by how thoroughly trapped I was.
My foot wouldn't move.
Not because I didn't want to, nor because I couldn't physically clench the muscles necessary, but my foot seemed mechanically bonded to the surface that was underneath. My shoes would no longer separate from the auburn platform underneath.
This was no longer the adherent force of the viscous glue-like substance, but something firmly anchoring my foot in a way that was no longer tractable.
I glanced over to the fallen deer over to my left, in search for answers, and it was with a jolt of panic that I realized that the squirming masses tunneling through its body were not, in fact, maggots feasting on its rotting flesh—but a coppice of delicate wiry shoots that had effectively bored their way through the entire bulk of the animal—carving its way singularly through organs, muscles, and bones alike with the same unstoppable ferocity.
It wouldn't be long until my feet had been drilled through as though hooked with an awl, as well. I wanted to leap into action, but a secondary calm washed over me. It was clear that the shoots, as unstoppable as they were, took their time to develop, and mature. Likely, it had only started growing after I stopped moving.
My shoes were surely fused with the fabric of the petal below, but the advantage I had over the deer was that I had a second foot inside. If I were to step carelessly, my second chance would have been wasted!
I slowly slipped out of the moccasins, and stood on the top of them, as if the ground were made of burning coals. Then, turning around carefully, I faced the direction that I had come from.
Then, again, the ground fell out from underneath me, and all that I saw was a cliff's edge beyond the heel of my shoes. The rapidity of the vision almost shocked me into losing my balance, but I waved my arms back and forth until the scene odiously melted back into what I remembered it to be. It took every ounce of control in my body to keep from diving headfirst into the gelatinous salve underneath me, but I kept my wits about me.
A fearsome chitinous clatter rustled down through the canopy coverage, overhead, and I realized that I was running out of time. The forest floor wasn't far away, now, only a few feet to safety, and it was a leap that I had made hundreds of times before. There was only the pressure of knowing that if I messed up, somehow, I would no longer be able to escape.
The moccasins rippled with the texture of shoots announcing their penetration of the material at the bottom of the foot. It was now, or never! I gathered the strength into my calves, squatted down, and took a leap of faith.
"Sghreeek!" came the call from overhead, as a hairy forelimb swiped through the air, inches from the crown of my head. I crashed to the ground, mercifully clean of the sticky substance that would hold me in place before the shoots found their grasp, and slid a few inches in order to assess what had just occurred.
I wasn't given long to settle, as the trees groaned in displeasure at the unbelievable weight that was currently pushing through its branches as it settled onto the earth before me with a violent crunch. All eight legs met the ground at the same time, and it lowered its mandibles to the point that I could see eight distinct pinpoints of light as its eyes reflected the seldom myriad of sunbeams that had made its way to this layer of the forest.
It reared its massive thorax, and a humid steam burst from a pattern of portals around its body, as its spiracles let loose another dispiriting screech. "Pfweeeick!"
It was a creature as unlike a spider, as a dove was related to a cassowary. Each leg was at least the length of two grown men, and armored like the shell of a tortoise. The hairy texture covering its surface did very little to mask its completely and utterly hateful physique. It was as if the forest had thought to give form to its brutal and uncaring nature, incarnate.
Its four mandibles of sharp, glistening razor, slid over each other in a gesture that seemed not dissimilar to a butcher's sharpening of his knife—or a malicious interlocutor rubbing his hands as he ruminates over his nefarious plot finally coming to fruition.
Worst of all, it was blocking my path of escape. My heart thumped in my throat, and pounded across my temples, while the titanic invertebrate edged its way toward me, as if daring me to try to slip by it. Then, impatiently, it leapt forward a couple inches; as if ordering me back onto the pad that I had just escaped.
It was hard to keep straight what it was that I wanted to do, as my mind kept slipping back into the hold of the sickening smell that wafted across the entire scene. My stomach lurched, and thinking quickly, I aimed the projectile spray of stomach acid toward the Mammoth Arachnid.
The fluids flew in the air like a swarm of oracle ticks, sailing directly for any vacant orifices available; like the eyes, or mouth. Unfortunately, the creature before me had eight or more of them, and no lids or lips to seal any shut.
The burning acid of my stomach scalded violently on the sensitive apertures, and it reeled back for a moment—opening a path with its new posture, that wasn't there before—directly underneath the body.
It shook its head violently, scraping at its head with its pedipalps in a desperate attempt to reduce the damage possible, and was surprised to find that by the time it was recovered, the prey had completely disappeared.
"Get your big fat booty outta here!" I guffawed, high-tailing it with the utmost gusto. I was so overcome with adrenaline and ecstasy at my impossible escape, that I had forgotten one of the chief principles of survival in the forest.
Do not draw attention to yourself. A loud whooping noise came back from the canopy, as the monkeys caught the exclamation, and echoed back their jubilant phrase. My heart sank.
That would certainly draw a lot more predators to the area. 'Ugh, I'm so stupi--Aaaaahh!" I screamed aloud, as I realized the padding vibrations slowly growing in intensity belonged to the behemoth I had so mindlessly taunted.
It was gaining on me! "Oh Great Blue, what the five is wrong with me?!" I pleaded, hoping that something might happen to slow the creature down, or speed my footsteps up, or split open the earth, or bring my friends closer; anything at all!
"Kreeeashh!" It shouted, forcing all the air from its thorax at once, to signal how close it was, to attaining its meal. Bright swaths of blood pooled in my footprints as small rocks and sharp splinters scratched at the soles of my feet. My breathing grew more troubled than ever, as I had already overextended my unfit beanpole of a body. I couldn't run anymore.
I turned around, panting, and readied the fork.
Laying on the ground, warm blood trickling from my open wounds, cold blooded slime slaking from the soaked surface of my poncho, surrounded by the feverish reverberating clangor of the frenzied primates populating the canopy in limbs unseen high overhead, I slowly settled down from the non-stop bustle of the past few hours.
The longer I lay there, fully knowing that more dangers were ecstatically rushing to find me with the utmost gusto, the more it dawned on me just how slender the unimaginably thin odds were, that I'd had to tightrope across in order to be there.
Just to have the luxury of surviving in this inhospitable, luxuriant, restive, fertile, tempestuous, sylvan, nightmare oasis, I had to fight for my life on a near-constant level.
Not a moment for rest, not a moment for breath, not a moment to gather one's thoughts, nothing but sheer unrepentant focus and determination from the minute I entered, until I had returned in view of the bright blue sky, would see me through. That was the level I would have to operate at, constantly, without fail.
No one was coming to save me.
No one was watching to see where I would fall.
No one would know what horrible taigaspawn would be the one to eventually take me in, and no one would know where to even find my remnants to show my kin.
In all likelihood, I would simply disappear from the entire world, and no one would notice.
A chill wind ran through my hollow bones, and I could feel the strength slowly leak from my body. My chest racked with sobs, and I wrapped my arms around myself for warmth.
I was so cold.
Colder than I've ever been in my entire life—the suffocating darkness rolling in with a thunderous growl—as the clouds unseen dared expose their criminal intent to drench a bleeding child in its gelid downpour.
But who was I to deny the forest its indignant jape? After all, didn't every man, woman, and grandatha warn me? The forest is no place for a little boy.
And though I thought myself mighty, and though I pictured myself brave, and though I claimed to be more intelligent than the average wayfinder, truthfully, I knew that mightier and savvier men than I had journeyed into these woods; never to return.
I covered my mouth, as the first droplets of precipitation reached me down on the forgotten refuse of the forest floor.
Along with all the worms, and the frightened little pill bugs that curled in on themselves when you pulled them from the sanctity of their home in the rotten pit of a log, I squirmed about in the meekest gap between the toenails of the unknowable, unthinkable organism around me.
Thousands, if not millions of years old, each tree stood in defiance of age, of scandal, of nation, and power, and inter-glade relations. It was too deep in The Stalks to ever fear a fire, nor existed an ax strong enough to chop one down. It had been here since before man could string two sentences together, and it would persist for far longer than I could ever think to imagine.
These cold, unthinking machines of nature had grown up without the need for emotions, will, or even movement to begin with; but there they were. I was a shadow cast by a mote of dust in the wind; there one moment, and gone the next.
Who the five was I, to think that I was doing anything other than simply throwing my life away; needlessly?
The rain had no intentions of stopping. Quite conversely, its drubbing strikes only grew more and more intense with time as I lay; frozen with loathing, and exsanguination.
It poured out its condemnation, as if the great blue itself were but a sphere of water suspended so high it touched the sun, and the gash I had carved into the creature's neck had split apart the heavens themselves.
So, the earth flooded with a terrible deluge of bone-chattering flush, and it crashed down upon me like I was at the bottom of a waterfall half a fathom tall.
The leaves overhead funneled the waters into a single, vertical sluice of foaming, wallowing whitewater; that was quickly growing from a temporary annoyance into an existential threat. One minute I was floating, and the next, I was swimming violently against a surging rush of cold that could only be headed one way—The NightWhere.
I didn't have time to think about the forest.
I didn't have time to care about my family.
I didn't have time to worry about my place in this incomprehensively massive system of death and rebirth that I had ignorantly bungled by way into. The waters were coming, and I had to act.
And not just act, but I had to fight against the tides as if my life was on the line! Because, truthfully, it was.
I grabbed hold of a gnarled root that had survived through countless centuries of rainfalls, and with white knuckles, dragged my torso up to meet the striated irregularity of its length; my legs dangling uselessly behind me in the violent jet stream of fluids sprinting in my wake.
I knew better than to try to stand in something like this, as that was just asking for my foot to get caught in something underfoot, and let a couple dozen tons of river mass force my head to bob underwater until I drown to death. No, thank you!
Instead, I gripped another handhold no less than two feet away, and forced my numb fingertips to hold fast despite their inability to relay any information aside from endemic anemia.
I latched on with my other hand, no less frantic in my grasp than I was a few minutes ago, although I was now ironically inches away from the very earth that I had feared so horribly, only just those few moments before.