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24 - The Thick

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Suni

In the other parts of the Far Wild, my knowledge allowed me to feel somewhat versed in the environment and its flora and fauna. In the Thick, though? I might as well have been a first-year student still learning the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates.

Professor Symeos had written at length about the Thick, but all of his observations came from outside of it. Either at a safe distance, or passing over in a skyship. He’d never dared to set foot within.

For our first few hours in the Thick I hadn’t been able to observe much. I’d been too busy running for my life, too busy worrying over wendiguars, too busy ensuring I didn’t stray from the group and die lost and alone in the endless darkness. Now, however, I had what seemed all the time in the world.

The tree Elpida had picked had a trunk four or five times the width of a man. It’d been a hellacious climb, but together, we’d managed it.

Now, I couldn’t be sure, due to the lack of light, but from the feel of the bark, the spacing of the branches, and the large collections of string moss, I thought it was a Quercus geminata—a sand live oak, a very common sight in Lekarsos. If that was the case, it was one of the largest live oaks I’d ever seen. We were in the canopy now and—again, hard to tell thanks to the pitch blackness—but if I had to guess I’d say we were a good four stories up.

Up here, at least, we could sleep in something approaching safety. I’d been assigned first watch, along with Oz and the sergeant, and now, perched in the branches far above the jungle floor, it was my job to observe the world around us, to watch for anything that could spell trouble.

Though, watch wasn’t really the word for it, was it? I kept my eyes open, but that seemed a formality. They did little more than play tricks on me, spotting some hint of movement here, a swaying branch there. Always out of the corner of my vision, too.

Leda! Theo! I’d thought, the first few times. But now I knew better. And when I turned to look at whatever I’d thought I’d seen, it would always be nothing but more empty dark. No person, no animal, nothing. Just a solid, impenetrable void of black.

My ears, however, were hard at work. Near overwhelmed, really. There was nothing to see in the Thick, but there was everything to hear.

I was itching to take notes, to record the sounds around me, but there was nowhere near enough light. The best I could do was take it in. Listen, and try to remember.

Crickets, first of all. All around. A thousand, thousand of them, chirping and singing, filling the darkness with a droning rhythm. Their song was interrupted here and there by the call of something that sounded like a cane toad. Rhinella marina. They were a familiar nightly sound back in Lekarsos. The ones out here, though, assuming they were cane toads, sounded much larger. It was hard to be sure of anything in the Thick, but whatever the sound came from, its croaking call was deep, throaty, and echoed through the dark so loudly it was impossible to ignore. There was at least one of the things somewhere off to my left and two more on my right.

Those were the sounds of the ground below, but in the trees around me there was an entirely new host of noises.

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Clicks and scratches, echoing from tree to tree. It almost sounded like claws on bark. Something scratching, scratching, digging into the wood. Wendiguars, my fears said. But they couldn’t climb. Probably. So ruling them out, a type of sloth, perhaps? Or maybe a small, nocturnal primate? Really it was impossible to tell. And then there was some sort of bird song. Warbling and high pitched. Just a note or two at once, never more. The song would echo down from above intermittently, send me staring up into the darkness, eyes open and revealing all of nothing. I knew the canopy above was only the first of many. Two, maybe three more layers of treetops and foliage separated us from the world outside. Considering that, it was hardly a wonder at all that it stayed so dark down below.

Last in this nighttime chorus, there were the sounds I couldn’t even begin to identify. Anywhere else, at any other time, that would have been an absolute joy. But here and now, it verged on terrifying.

There were sounds so quiet I wasn’t sure I’d heard them, or so foreign I couldn’t think of any animal they sounded like. A distant screech once, starting shrill but ending in a low roar. Then later, a rolling laugh, almost. All raspy and dry. It’d disappeared as soon as it arrived. There one moment, gone the next. Left me with chills all over.

As my watch drew on, the chills became the norm. The constant tinge of fear kept a bit of adrenaline pumping through me. It wasn’t an entirely unenjoyable sensation, I had to admit. Retreating from worry and guided by exhaustion, I let my mind wander. Let myself be sucked into the sounds of the night. They swept me up and I felt I was floating. Blowing this way and that on the wind, as much a part of the jungle as the sounds around me. It was pleasant. For several moments, fear left me. In its place, I found... acceptance. My worries were gone, and the world felt right. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t question it. For a singular moment, exhausted, stressed, and clinging to a tree branch high in the canopy, I found peace. For the first time, it felt like I belonged out here. Like I wasn’t just deadweight that’d been dragged along.

It felt good.

It was ruined a moment later as something scrambled by on the ground. A predator! I panicked. Surely the sound was a wendiguar, come sniffing at the base of our tree, looking for a way up. But as the initial fear subsided, I began to think more clearly. Whatever it was wouldn’t be making that much noise if it was a predator. No, I didn’t need to fear whatever animal was rooting its way past. What I needed to fear was the animal I wouldn’t hear coming. The animal that scared Elpida enough to have us all up a tree with three lookouts at a time keeping watch.

A finger tapped on my shoulder and I near jumped out of my skin and tumbled from the tree.

Demetrias.

It was just Demetrias.

“Near gave me a heart attack,” I whispered, trying to calm my pounding heart.

He chuckled at that. “Best get some sleep before you scare yourself out of the tree.”

“You can say that again. Stay alert, Demetrias. It’s strange out here. More... alive than anything I’ve experienced before.” I shook my head as I eased toward the center of the tree. “Probably just the exhaustion and the darkness playing tricks on me.”

“Probably.”

I held tight to the branch above me and leaned outward, giving Demetrias enough room to squeeze past and take up my perch.

“No sign of them, I take it?” he asked as he settled into position in the crook of a wide branch.

I sighed. We’d all seen the captain die to the komodo; had seen the same with Aristos. There was some solace in that, if only in the grimmest way possible. Leda and Theo, however, had simply gone missing. Their fate was still up in the air and somehow, combined with the dread of what would likely happen, that was more painful than knowing. Still, they were just missing. There was hope they’d find their way back to us.

“I didn’t hear any sign of them, but stay sharp anyway, Demetrias. You never know.”

“Ancestors willing, they’ll find their way back,” he said, then turned to face the night.

“Ancestors willing,” I agreed. I’d never much believed in the ancestors, in the thought that when we died, our souls went to another world to be with those who’d come before. But out here, in this infernal darkness, believing it made things feel just a bit easier.

Reaching the relative safety of the tree’s innermost branches, I lowered myself in to sleep. Bark pressed into my back, sharp and rough, and I’d nothing more than an emergency pack stuffed with hardtack for a pillow, but right about then, it might as well have been a feather bed. Blast, but it’d been a long day. My body was exhausted, beaten, torn and wounded in more ways than I could remember. And, if we were going to get out of the wilderness, it’d only been the first of many days to come. But that was a problem for the future, for the morning.

A yawn came over me as I settled in and closed my eyes. I crossed my arms and slipped away to sleep, trying not to think of our lost comrades as the sounds of the Thick followed me into a blissful unconsciousness.