The next morning, Max woke with a sense of purpose: before he did anything else, before he made a more systematic effort to find the jungle’s human inhabitants or clues to the location of the Emerald Gate, he would devote himself to gathering enough monster dust to get himself a full set of clothes. He knew Aurum needed monster dust in order to fashion clothes for him, and he knew he probably needed the dust of four monsters for each article of clothing. The math was simple and the goal was clear, and he relished the opportunity to commit himself to a plan.

He’d considered investing first in the slingshot from the green star, or maybe even the club from the yellow star, but he decided to wait until he’d earned a full set of clothes. He knew already that walking around in just a set of boots would make him feel like he’d left a task unfinished, and he already had fire to defend himself. The slingshot might offer more range, but the club didn’t seem useful in any way that he could think of. A full set of clothes would offer a much more dramatic improvement to his general safety and well being. Sleeping, sitting, running, crawling, falling–almost everything he did would be easier or more comfortable.

And, he assumed, it could only improve future relations with any residents of the jungle if he didn’t have to first apologize for his nudity or beg them for clothing.

Assuming I ever meet any. Assuming they wear clothes.

Sitting up, Max stretched, then blinked. Dim gray light from the chamber with the pool, now open to the forest, filled the hallway and allowed Max to see the outline of his legs in the dark. He felt a little spike of embarrassment as he remembered the way he’d nearly gotten himself killed by throwing a fit and nearly collapsing a roof on himself, but he took a deep breath and pushed the feeling away. It had been a mistake and he would learn from it. Wallowing in embarrassment wouldn’t do him any more good than indulging in fits of anger.

Max reached for the boots he had left sitting near the wall. He’d considered sleeping with them on, imagining might have to run from some nocturnal monster drawn by the sound of the ceiling collapsing, but when he lay down with the boots still on he couldn’t shake the absurd sense that he felt more naked wearing them than he did wearing nothing at all. So he’d taken them off and set them by his feet before curling up on his side.

After he pulled the boots on, he scratched Aurum behind one ear while he tried to tamp down a different anxiety.

“Think I’ve destroyed my only reliable water source?” he said. He ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth, then tapped Aurum on the nose before climbing to his feet. “Here’s hoping not.”

Max made his way down the hallway to the chamber with the pool. The mud in the hallway had condensed to a viscous paste and after one foot squelched into the muck, Max slowed his pace slightly. Leaning his weight more deliberately on one foot, then the other, he felt the mud ooze and spread under the soles of his boots.

He looked down at the brightling, feeling a small but delighted smile spread across his face. “Boots were the right choice.”

The pool was in much better shape than Max had feared. A few of the stones from the fallen ceiling had cracked the landing of the submerged stairs just beyond the archway, but the others had all disappeared into the water of the pool and left the chamber largely unchanged. Max stepped around the shattered rock on the landing and crouched to peer down into the water. It seemed as clear as it had the day before, so he cupped a mouthful and brought it to his lips. It smelled the same, so he tasted it. Still clear, still slightly sweet. Max sighed as he dipped his hands into the pool again.

When he had drunk his fill, Max looked up at the trees of the lower canopy now visible above the uncovered chamber. He knew leaves and other things would begin to fall into the pool and eventually they would rot and foul the water, but that would take time. He’d be gone by then, he hoped. Returned home, maybe, wherever that might be, or in the land past the Emerald Gate: Orliat, City of Shards. Or maybe he’d have stumbled across the people of this land and been welcomed into their society.

If any of them are still alive.

Max’s brief reverie was interrupted by the distant sound of thunder. He stood and looked up. He could barely see the sky through the double canopy, but the light seemed off. It was brighter than the gloom that had accompanied the other storms he’d experienced in the jungle. The canopy remained still and the air…

Max sniffed then looked down at the Aurum.

“Do you smell rain?”

Max made his way to the entrance of his hideaway, appreciating how wearing boots allowed him to climb the mound of rubble inside the collapsed tunnel without worrying about cutting his feet open. When he reached the entrance, he sniffed again. If it was going to rain, he would wait for the weather to pass before setting out. But he didn’t smell the clean, refreshing smell of a storm. The air was humid, still, and smelled of the jungle’s verdant greenery.

The crack of thunder came again. Max turned to face the sound. No, not thunder, he realized. It was a crack followed by a booming echo, but it sounded like it was coming to him through the trees, not from above them. From the direction of the ravine where he had spent two days bleeding into the dirt. Or farther, maybe.

The orchard?

“What’s that sound, little one?”

Max glanced down at the brightling. It sat by his foot, bushy tail flicking lazily back and forth at its side. When the next boom echoed through the forest, the creature’s right ear twitched slightly, but it remained seated, staring out at the trees in the opposite direction.

Max resisted the urge to set off immediately in the direction of the sound. If he had learned anything since landing in the jungle, it was that running heedlessly into the unknown usually ended up being very, very painful. And this sound could be anything. It could be a kind of monster he hadn’t met yet. One of the many that appeared on the mosaic in his hideaway, or maybe something even bigger and more dangerous than he couldn’t even imagine. He put his hand absently over his stomach where the leafy tentacle monster had impaled him.

But it could also be people.

Max clenched his fists. He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Not unless he went to see. He glanced down at himself, naked from the ankles up and covered in dirt, blood, and a potpourri of crushed forest filth. What would they think of a naked man, reeking and covered in dirt, emerging from the forest to beg for help?

There was only one way to find out. If they were hostile, he could always run away. He had boots now. He was much faster, and if things went that badly hopefully speed would be all he needed.

Taking a deep breath, Max set off into the jungle as another crack echoed through the trees. He walked as quickly as he dared, watching for monsters and trying to imagine why people would suddenly appear here, deep in the jungle.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Have there been people here this whole time? Have I just been missing them?

He slowed for a moment as a more troubling thought occurred to him.

Maybe they know I’m here and they’ve been avoiding me.

He hoped not. It was just as likely that they were newly arrived and this booming was the sound of construction. Maybe they were clearing land for a new settlement, or a new orchard.

Max’s mood darkened as he considered that possibility. He knew that anyone he met in the jungle might be resentful of strangers, protective of their land, or hostile for other reasons, but remembering the macabre orchard forced him to reckon with the more sinister possibilities in concrete terms. The people he might meet could be a cruel and malevolent people who reveled in the pain their strange orchards inflicted on monsters and outsiders. He could even be rushing headlong into the arms of those responsible for bringing him to that violent, bewildering jungle.

The sound he had mistaken for thunder came again, louder. Much louder. He was moving in the right direction.

When Max reached the ravine where he had spent two days writhing in pain, he slowed and peered all around. There had been a monster here, camouflaged in the undergrowth, and he had no idea whether another may have arrived to take over its territory.

Were these monsters territorial? Or did they just wander the forest at random, looking for people and creatures to savage? Max froze as a possibility crystalized in his mind for the first time. Was that why the jungle was empty? Had monsters killed every living thing that had once inhabited this place? Could it really be that simple?

If they had, that meant he could only be approaching something vicious, something that may have helped bring about the death of the jungle’s entire ecosystem. And it sounded far larger than anything he had encountered before. Max remembered the mural in his hideaway and the gargantuan green serpent that looked like it was coiling protectively around a cowering band of humans.

Hopefully it’s not one of those.

He pushed the thought away. He needed to put the entire train of worrying thoughts aside. He just needed to take the chance.

Max stood for long moments, waiting for the sound of terrestrial thunder to come again so he could be sure of his direction, but the silence stretched on. And on. Finally, terrified that in his ruminating he may have missed his only chance to finally meet other human beings, friendly or hostile, he set off again in the direction where he thought the orchard lay. It was the only other landmark he knew and the only other place he’d seen that looked artificially constructed. Until that point he’d tried his best to remember where it was so he could avoid accidentally stumbling into it again, but now he realized he had only a vague notion of where it probably was. With no landmarks to guide him, he just had to press forward and hope he was moving in the right direction. He moved quickly, trying to ignore the branches and thorns that dragged bloody new lines across his skin.

Max arrived at the orchard more quickly than he expected. After panting and grunting his way through a dense thicket, he emerged to find he was looking directly down into the valley with its vibrant green grass and blood red trees.

He froze, trying simultaneously to stifle his breathing and scan the area for people, but he knew immediately that something was off.

Why does this look wrong?

Then he understood. Before there had been a wall of tightly fitted stones that obscured the valley. Now the valley was ringed only by ancient trees, broken stones, and a stretch of freshly disturbed soil.

Slowly, cautious, Max moved to stand between the nearest two of the great tree trunks that ringed the valley. He stared, puzzling through what he saw.

The cluster of blood red caltrop trees still stood at the center of the valley, and the grass directly surrounding the orchard remained undisturbed. But the rest of the valley, the stone wall and the slopes full of wildflowers, had been destroyed.

As Max studied the scene he saw that the wall hadn’t simply been toppled. The individual stones had been removed, then crushed and scattered along the grassy slopes. That, he realized, must have been what he had heard. The crack of stones being torn from a wall, smashed, and thrown around.

Who did this? And why spare the orchard?

Maybe the bird that had attacked him was still down there hiding among the trees and it had chased away whatever, whoever, had destroyed the wall.

Max felt a burst of sympathy as he remembered his own harrowing flight through the jungle while the blue striped bird threw spheres of invisible thunder at him. But the feeling was short-lived.

I’ve killed one of those birds. There’s no way it could have chased away whatever was strong enough to do all this. It had to have been something big. Or maybe it was a crowd.

Max found that hard to imagine. Why would a crowd of people pull down the wall, smash the stones into smaller pieces, then just leave?

It seemed more likely that, if the bird had returned to guard the orchard and the wall after it had chased Max away, whatever had come here and destroyed the wall had also killed the bird.

Max scanned the valley for some sign of the bird, but he didn’t see it perched on any branches or laying crumpled anywhere on the ground. It was gone, or hiding, or sitting where he couldn’t see it.

Or maybe it was still chasing whoever did this through the jungle.

Max crouched next to one of the trees and listened. Whatever may have happened, it had been only a handful of minutes since he’d heard the last thunderous breaking sound. That meant the controlled chaos of that demolition had only just stopped. Whoever or whatever had done all this had to be nearby still. Circling around behind him already, or moving into the jungle on the opposite side of the valley.

Max glanced over his shoulder to make sure nothing was creeping up on him. All he saw was Aurum sitting a few steps behind him, staring unblinkingly up at the sky.

Then he heard it–a creaking, groaning sound coming from the orchard. It wasn’t loud, but the bowl of the valley magnified it so that Max could hear it clearly over the slight breeze drifting through the upper canopy of the otherwise silent jungle. He listened, trying to match the sound to anything else he had ever heard. Before he could, a tree moved out from behind the orchard and shambled into the sunlight.

It was a small, gray palm tree, shorter than the blood red trees of the orchard. The lower half of its smooth gray trunk had split in the middle to form legs and it walked with a roughly human gate. Its tapered trunk was crowned by a fan of densely overlapping fronds that were bright yellow at their base and dark green at their shaggy edges.

Max watched as the tree plodded up the slope at the far end of the valley. Its steps were muffled, but Max could hear the hushed whispering of its fronds as it swayed back and forth with each step. When it reached the top of the slope, it paused before bending at the middle. As it bent, the wood of its body creaking and groaning, the outermost frond on each side of its vibrant crest separated from the others and reached downward. Both fronds folded around stones from a low section of the wall that hadn’t yet been completely torn apart. With another great groan of creaking wood, the tree wrenched both stones out of the wall. Then it straightened and stretched its branches wide. When it brought the stones together in a rush, Max jumped as the sound of cracking stone exploded across the valley and echoed out into the forest. A moment later the palm tree flung its arms backward without turning, sending crushed stone tumbling down the hill behind it. Before the debris had stopped rolling down the hill, the palm tree had bent to seize new stones.

Huddled along the rim at the far side of the valley, Max sat for a while and watched the palm tree continue its demolition work. He recognized it from the mural in his hideaway. Its shape and the bright, beautiful colors of its fronds all matched stylized depictions of the trees that appeared to shelter or protect beleaguered human figures.

Why is it destroying something humans probably built?

He hunted for some sign of aberration, some asymmetry or sinister outgrowth that might mark this walking tree as one of the dark creatures who harassed the humans in the mural, but he could find nothing.

As the palm tree shuffled a few dozen feet sideways along the remains of the wall and then continued its work, Max rose silently and slipped back into the undergrowth.