Max sat transfixed, staring at the lotus guardian's blue eye as the creature began drifting toward the hollow where he sat crouched with Mineau. A few moments earlier, the eye had been a flower bud nestled in one of the mossy depressions at the center of the creature's face. As Max was still struggling to wake up enough to understand what he was seeing, the bud had unfurled, petal by petal, to reveal a glassy blue eye with a black pupil in the middle. As Max stared at it, the eye began to give off the same cerulean light as the lotus flowers that had grown up to fill the grove the night before. Then it twitched and rolled as it looked from Max to Mineau. The pupil narrowed to a vertical slit.

Max gathered his legs under him and prepared to dive through the opening of their little den. He knew that he might be making a deadly mistake, but he had only a moment to act while conflicting intuitions and fragments of strategy pressed in on him all at once.

He would have preferred to maintain a relatively safe distance from the guardian if it seemed likely that he could kill the thing with bolts before it reached them. But even if it didn’t close on them and Max sat still and tried to kill it with fire from a distance, it might retaliate by throwing things at them like a lemur would. Then it wouldn't be only his own body that Max was gambling with. Mineau, somehow still sleeping beside him despite the creature’s screaming, could be hit before she knew they were being attacked–could die before she even knew what was happening to them.

Max knew it might also rush them once it reached the entrance to their little space. If the creature was like the monstrous aloe that had nearly stabbed Max to death before Aurum had saved him, it might rush forward with a sudden burst of speed and block the opening of their little cubby. Then, even if Mineau woke up with time to react, she would struggle to make use of her club in that little space. It still would be up to Max and his fire to put an end to the thing while it screamed and stabbed down at them from above.

So, in the instant that he had to react, Max decided that it would be better to put his own body at risk out in the open than to gamble with both his and Mineau’s safety by staying put. The freedom to maneuver could make the difference between the two of them being stabbed to death or Mineau being able to smash the horrifying thing into the dirt while he distracted it. It would be painful if he exposed himself scrambling out of the tree's roots and the guardian took the opportunity to attack first, but if he had learned anything since landing in the jungle, it was that he could push through a little bit of pain.

A lot of pain, if he had to.

As the guardian’s wail grew louder and more shrill, Max scrambled through the opening of their hideaway. He heard Mineau jerk awake with a gasp as he lunged forward, but he didn’t look back as he crouched. That she was awake was all he cared about. Determined to earn her time and space to follow him out into the open, he dove at the monster with both hands aimed at the mossy horror’s midsection.

The guardian’s eye flashed blue white, and a ray of bright blue energy lanced toward Max from the center of the flower. As he flew through the air, a blue sphere appeared around him. Max barely had time to register the novelty of a blue shield appearing around him–he’d only ever been surrounded by a yellow globe–when the guardian’s ray struck the edge of the sphere. The shield blazed, then shattered, flying outward in a cloud of blue shards. As the shard’s disappeared, Max saw that a yellow shield had appeared around the guardian. Max’s hands hit the shield first. His face slammed into the back of his own hands like he’d hit a tree trunk, and he crumpled to the ground.

The creature’s wail stopped abruptly and Max rolled onto his back as the creature drifted to a stop just next to him. Now that the creature was hovering almost on top of him, Max could see some of the details of its anatomy that had been obscured by gloom and distance the evening before. What he noticed first was that the guardian wasn’t simply floating. The one foot that was pointed directly at the ground was cushioned by a little vortex of wind that picked up leaves and sticks and tossed them aside. The other leg was bent slightly with a misshapen foot dangling loosely. And it didn’t have the dark, lumpy skin he’d imagined while he looked at it in the dark. Instead it had patches of dark green moss covering a lumpy body that looked like it was made of a rust colored clay.

In a corner of his mind, Max was relieved that the lotus guardian looked like it was made up of earth and plant matter instead of flesh. The night before he’d thought the thing was a misshapen corpse, propped up by some mysterious force and set adrift among the trees to guard flowers that only bloomed during a thunderstorm. He thought maybe that was what happened to people who fell into the forest and were killed before a little golden brightling could find them and help them survive. Now he realized that the guardian was like the aloe monsters: a creature not only of the forest, but made from it.

Max’s relief was short-lived. As he looked up at the monster, he noticed there were two other lotus buds protruding from its body. One sprouted from the side of its chest, and the other dangled from the thigh above the foot that pointed at the ground. As Max watched, both buds peeled open to reveal glassy blue eyes. Both rolled to look down at Max as they began to glow. As they did, the narrow vertical pupils in each twitched as if they were studying him.

Not like the aloe monsters, he thought, watching the eyes that stared back at him. This thing is smarter. Intelligent.

“Grah!”

All three of the guardian’s glowing eyes swiveled away from Max to look back toward the entrance to the hollow where he and Mineau had spent the night. Mineau was charging toward the lotus guardian, her club raised over her head. When she reached the creature, she brought it down on the creature’s right shoulder in a vicious overhead swing. The club slammed into the yellow shield that appeared around the creature and turned it into a cloud of shards. Passing through the cloud with almost no resistance, the club thudded into the moss covering the creature’s shoulder.

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The monster screamed and bright blue rays of energy shot out from all three eyes. The beams from the flowers on its chest and head hit Mineau, punching through the transparent blue of her shield. One blazed in a line from her forehead, down the side of her face, and across her neck to her chest, burning a ragged tear into the collar of her shirt. The other slashed quickly across her stomach, leaving a long, smoldering hole in the fabric.

The beam that shot out from the eye on the guardian’s thigh hit Max in the center of his chest and burned down toward his left hip. He screamed and threw himself sideways to roll away. He expected another beam to stab into his back even as dirt and wet leaves ground into the searing line of the first attack, but it didn’t come. Behind him he heard Mineau’s angry grunt just before he heard the muted thud of her club smashing into the guardian once more. Max struggled to his feet and turned to face them. He was panting as he raised a hand to conjure flame, but as he lifted his hand he saw that the creature had gone still. Mineau wrenched her club from the muddy side of the creature’s chest and the thing lurched and tottered backward. Ponderously, it collapsed into a pile of earth between them.

Max had time to stagger to Mineau’s side before the lotus guardian’s body twitched once more and let out its death shriek. Max winced as the familiar scream and wave of force rolled over them and out into the steaming morning jungle. A smatter of rain pelted down onto them from the canopy above as answering screams echoed out of the forest around them.

Mineau wiped a hand across her face and shook it, splattering both Max and the undergrowth around them with rain and sweat. When he grimaced, Mineau wiped her hand on the leg of her pants instead, then gripped her club again.

“We fell asleep,” she said.

“You were supposed to wake me up.”

“You were snoring so peacefully,” she said. “I didn’t have the heart.”

Max waved a hand. “That thing almost killed us. We can’t both sleep when there’s a monster patrolling a creepy patch of flowers a few feet away from us.”

“I agree entirely. Lesson learned. It didn’t kill us, though,” Mineau said. She frowned at the pile of moss and clay. The glassy eyes had lost their light, but its three flowers glowed as brightly as all the others growing in the more natural dirt nearby. “Why’d you tackle it? Hitting it with fire would have been faster than turning yourself into a meat missile.”

“I didn’t want it to trap us in there and take its time stabbing us to death,” Max said. “I wanted to buy you time to get out.”

Mineau grunted. “Smart. And thank you.”

“Meat missile?”

“How would you describe that maneuver?”

“In another way. In any other way.”

The lotus guardian between them began to collapse in on itself as it transformed into sparkling green lucre. It flowed in twin streams toward Aurum and Orla, who sat perched on the twisted tree roots behind them.

Screams echoed through the forest again as two monsters approached through the trees.

“Time to go,” Mineau said as she touched two fingers to the burn on her face, then jerked them away. “I’d rather not fight anything else at the moment.”

Max winced sympathetically. “Me neither.”

Max looked down at the ruin of his own shirt and the diagonal line burned into it from the center of his chest to his hip. He plucked at one of the blackened edges and looked at the livid red line across his skin. He let go of the fabric with a sigh.

Mineau snorted. “Don’t look so sad. I’m sure we can get new clothes.” She gestured at the last of the sparkling green lucre as it disappeared into the brightlings. “Plenty of that stuff all around us.”

“Oh,” Max said, looking at the brightlings. “True. Maybe. I guess we’ll have to ask,”

“Once we’re away from this place,” Mineau said. “Focus.”

Max watched Mineau stomp over to a lotus. Their soft blue glow was muted by the brilliant morning sunlight, but Max thought they were still strikingly beautiful. He saw that the translucent petals were actually a very pale white, and each was dripping with dew that caught the sunlight and sparkled like little jewels. He swallowed an involuntary protest when Mineau gripped one of the flowers by the stalk and gave a sharp tug.

The flower at the end of stalk danced, showering the ground with leftover rain water. Mineau continued to pull at it and Max heard a wet tearing sound as the roots gave way and the whole plant came out of the ground. As Mineau held her trophy out at arm’s length to inspect the translucent green bulb at its base, Max watched the flower grow dark, wilt, and collapse into brown sludge on the back of Mineau’s hand.

“Ugh.”

Mineau gripped the bulb with one hand and yanked at the decaying flower stalk with the other. It gave way with almost no resistance, leaving Mineau holding a translucent green bulb about the size of two fists pressed together. As she held it out to him, Max could see that it was three quarters full of what looked like clear water.

“This looks useful,” Mineau said. She rapped on the bulb with a knuckled and it made a dull, watery sounding thud. “Hopefully it’s drinkable. Let’s grab two each, then we run.”

Max nodded and turned toward the nearest patch of flowers as the monster screams grew closer. “Aurum, come here, please.”

It was easier to tear out the green bulbs than he’d expected, and he’d passed two to Aurum before the approaching monsters screamed again. Realizing that it would be even faster to pass them to the brightling if he didn’t stop to strip the blossoms off, he moved quickly through the flower patch, yanking bulks up by the stalks and gathering the plants into a little bouquet. The blossoms melted into sludge as he worked.

“Max,” Mineau said. “That’s plenty. We can come back later if we need more.”

Max looked up. Mineau stood a few dozen feet away, half turned toward the jungle, her club resting on one shoulder.

“Right,” Max said. He twisted off the remains of the decomposing bouquet and threw it onto the ground with his free hand, then thrust the cluster of bulbs into the golden portal hovering between Aurum’s ears. “Thanks, little one. Time to go.”

Moving as quickly and as quietly as they could, Max and Mineau made their way through the undergrowth away from the patch of lotus flowers.