Max studied the pane suspended in the air before him as a series of images rose into view from within the depthless smoke. At the top of the pane hung a command:
Ratify the Terms of Your Accord.
Below that and to the left hung an image of Mineau. Max recognized it as the same image he had seen when he’d asked Aurum for Mineau’s name, but it was missing the other illusory images, like the tri-colored star. To the right of Mineau’s miniaturized image Max saw himself. Below both of them he saw three boxes with different sets of symbols.
The box on the far left was slightly larger than the other two, like it had been pulled forward slightly, and a subtle golden radiance danced around its border. Inside the box were two shifting images, one of which he recognized immediately. On the left was a circle of green shimmering monster dust. It spun and flowed like the circles that had appeared around the golden nodes on the diagram he’d seen when Aurum let him choose a piece of clothing. Next to the symbol, and appearing about the same size, a series of icons rotated around each other in a slow, halting dance that allowed one image to appear stationary in the foreground for a brief moment. Max leaned forward, trying to understand what he was seeing, and realized that the rotating images were stylized versions of things he had seen after fighting monsters–a feather, a tentacle–as well as a few things he hadn’t seen before.
“These are all things dead monsters leave behind,” he said.
Mineau was frowning at her own pane. “All of them?”
“The feather and the tentacle I recognize,” Max said. “This black and white ball of fluff looks a lot like lemur fur.”
“True.” Mineau raised a finger and tapped at the pane before her. “Hm. Only one of the boxes stays lit at a time.”
Max watched the boxes beneath the image of Mineau begin to shift. The box in the middle had enlarged and acquired the golden halo while the box on the left looked smaller and had lost its luminous outline. Max tapped the right-most box beneath his own image. It immediately drifted forward and took on the golden-edged shimmer. Max frowned at the images inside the box. They looked like they might be something he might associate with a monster, but he hadn’t seen any of them before: a long branch with a few leaves on the end, a many-petalled flower, a spherical flask with a knot of bark as a cork, and a few other images he couldn’t quite parse.
“I don’t recognize the images on the right,” Max said. “And I don’t understand why they’re so much bigger than the picture in the left box. Do you think that means anything?”
Mineau said nothing as she frowned at the images in front of her. Her lips were moving slightly as she stared.
Max tapped on the middle box directly under his own image. As it enlarged, Max studied the swirling green circle at its center. It looked exactly like the circle of monster dust that hung in the left-most box, but like the rotating set of images in the right-most box, it was twice as large as the first he had seen.
“Three options,” Mineau said, as if she hadn’t heard him speak. “Monster pieces and monster dust, just monster dust, or just monster pieces.”
Max waited, but she didn’t say anything else. He tapped the box on the left. “What happens if we select the same options?”
Mineau hesitated, then tapped the air in front of her. The box on the left, under her picture, came forward. As it did, a small bell chimed. The radiance circling each of their boxes grew brighter.
Max and Mineau stared at their respective boxes as the radiance continued to dance around their edges. Nothing else happened.
Max looked down at Aurum where he lay curled between Max’s feet. “Is this another one of those times when I should tap to commit?”
Aurum lifted his head to look at Max. He sniffed once and bobbed his head forward.
Max smiled at Mineau as he tapped the box once more. “That’s about as clear as he gets.”
Mineau shrugged and tapped again.
The shimmering outline around their boxes flashed once. When it faded, both boxes had a solid outline of golden light that no longer shimmered and two new boxes with new images had appeared below them. The first box showed stylized images of Aurum and Orla sitting in the foreground. In the background lay a small, wilted Ambling Aloe, and twin streams of green monster dust appeared to be flowing from the monster to the brightlings. In the second box, Aurum and Orla were depicted mid-run, arms and legs extending forward and backward, as they faced the monster from either side. Monster dust hung around the wilted Aloe in a cloud. On either side of Aurum and Orla stood two stylized human figures that were pointing over the brightlings toward the monster.
“Looks like,” Mineau said slowly, “we can choose to have monster dust come to Orla and Aurum, or we can choose to send them to collect it.”
Max remembered his frustration when Aurum had balked at running from approaching monsters without first collecting dust from the creatures Max had already killed.
“Having it come to us would be a lot easier,” he said.
“Maybe,” Mineau said. “But maybe we'll want it from some monsters but not others.”
“Why?”
“For some reason.” She leaned back from the smokey pane and looked at Max. “I don't know. I think we just have to make a choice for now.”
Max tapped the image that showed the dust streaming toward the brightlings. The box grew slightly larger and the border began to shimmer. “This seems easiest for now.”
Mineau nodded and tapped the box. They both tapped again to confirm their selections.
The smokey pane pulsed once with golden energy, then faded into nothing.
After a short silence, Max looked up at the fading daylight in the upper canopy. “It’s getting dark, but…”
Mineau looked at him expectantly. “But?”
Max hesitated. They had food for the night, access to water, and a safe place to sleep. Beyond an immediate escape from the jungle and the return of his memories, a few hours earlier the only thing Max had hoped for had been companionship. Now he had that, and with the security of having found a friendly companion, he felt something he hadn’t felt since he’d fallen into the jungle.
“Just curious,” he said with a shrug.
It seemed foolish once he’d said it out loud, but it was true. They were trapped in a hostile jungle and he had been fighting for his life for days, but at that moment they had everything else needed, at least in the short term, and they had time. He wanted to see what would happen the next time they killed a monster. How would the brightlings change their behavior? Would the monster dust be split perfectly and evenly? And could Mineau really smash an aloe into the jungle soil with just two blows?
He wanted to see that. For multiple reasons.
Mineau smiled. “So am I. Let's see how it works.”
Max grinned as he stood. “My turn to get their attention.”
“By all means,” Mineau said. She pointed at a massive flower nearby. “You could tear that thing out of the ground.”
Max followed her gesture to a massive violet flower erupting out of a bush at the edge of the clearing. When he’d left the hideaway that morning he hadn’t seen it, which meant it had likely bloomed for the first time after he left and it had grown aggressively throughout the day. Now its conjoined petals formed a deep, ribbed bowl as wide as Max’s arm was long, and its weight caused the bush that supported it to droop. The flesh of the flower had a leathery looking texture and the tips of each violet petal folded back on themselves to form a thick, rounded rim. At the center of the bowl rose a stamen nearly twice as tall as the flower was wide, and it was covered in a perfectly symmetrical spiral of fuzzy, inch long needles.
Max looked at the flower, hesitating. “It’s beautiful, though. Why would I tear that up?”
“It’s garish,” Mineau said.
Max frowned at the flower. “If that flower is garish, then so is most of the jungle.”
Mineau crossed her arms. “Agreed.”
“I think it’s pretty,” Max said. “And none of the flowers have tried to kill me. Some of them have actually been helpful.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“None of the flowers have tried to kill you yet,” Mineau said.
“If you find it so upsetting, why didn’t you rip it up?”
Mineau shrugged. “The tree was closer.”
“The trees are still closer,” Max said, and he strode to the edge of the clearing. “And the needles on that flower look mean.”
Max stopped in front of a sapling not far from the spot where Mineau had torn her sapling from the ground. Mimicking her stance, he crouched, gripped the base of the sapling with both hands, and heaved.
His heart nearly stopped when it screamed in his face.
Max tumbled onto his back with a shout and stared up in horror as the sapling quivered and began to writhe in his hands. With a series of explosive cracks that made Max jump as he began to scramble backward, the upper half of the sapling divided again and again until its supple wood had become a fringe of thin, yellowish wisps. The remainder of its trunk thickened and lengthened rapidly, and its rough brown bark fell away to reveal a new layer that was smooth and gray. The wisps at its apex, limp after they divided, straightened and grew rigid until they formed a thin fan of green fronds.
Max scrambled backward on his hands and feet until he felt a pair of hands grip him under the arms. Mineau lifted him partially off the ground and hauled him backwards.
“Up,” Mineau said, her voice urgent but steady.
Max scrambled to his feet and continued backing away from the tree. As the base of the tree began to crack and splinter down the middle, Max raised his hand and hit it with a fire bolt.
The flame didn't splash against a shield as Max expected, but hit the trunk directly. The tree screamed again, but the charred bark left by the flame simply flaked off as the tree continued to grow and expand.
“It keeps regenerating until it's finished growing,” Mineau said, adjusting her grip on her club. “Is this the kind of tree you saw at the orchard?”
Max considered the rigid fringe at the tree's crown as it continued to darken. As the edges turned green, he realized they had become palm fronds. When the trunk bisected itself to form legs that began to struggle up out of the earth, he was certain.
“Yes,” he said. “But this one is smaller.”
Mineau hefted her club. “It's not done yet.”
“I never saw one until today,” Max said, backing farther away as he tried to remember exactly how tall the other tree had been. He stopped when he realized Mineau wasn’t backing away with him. “How are you so familiar with them?”
“I’ve only ever seen them when they show up to tear down something that looks like it was made by people. Usually when I’ve been sleeping there for a few days. Sometimes when I’m actually sleeping. I’ve only seen one grow like this once, when I was trying to find an aloe.”
Max remembered waking up in the dark mosaic room convinced that a monster had come underground to kill him while he slept. He shuddered at the idea of a tree like this appearing in the night to take the stone walls apart and collapse the roof on top of him. Could Aurum have saved him then? Would he have?
Max glanced over his shoulder at the entrance to his hideaway. It was the only safe, stable place he had found in a jungle full of creatures that wanted to kill him and he loathed the idea of watching a tree smash it into rubble. He turned back to Mineau again as the tree wrenched a second leg out of the earth.
“And they always come?”
“Always,” Mineau said. She took one step back as the tree settled its weight on its newly freed legs. “So far.”
“Maybe it’s because you tear up the trees right next to where you sleep?”
Mineau finally glanced at him. “I was careful once and it came anyway. Now I focus on convenience.”
A piercing shriek cut her off as the tree flexed two fronds at the edge of its apex. As they lowered, they thickened rapidly and Max remembered the way the tree in the orchard had used its leafy hands to lift rocks and smash them into rubble. He looked over his shoulder again at the entrance to his hideaway.
“Have you tried to fight them?”
“Once,” Mineau said, keeping her eyes on the tree again. “They’re stronger than the aloes are. I had to run.”
“There are two of us now.”
“The only reason I haven't run yet,” Mineau said. “If you want to run, now would be the best time. It'll go for what's left of the walls if we don't give it a reason to come for us.”
Max watched as the tree fell silent for a moment. It seemed to have stopped growing, so he pushed fire into his hand again. There could be a time when they couldn’t run, couldn’t hide. When one of them was wounded, or the terrain made an escape especially difficult. They needed to know if standing against one of the trees was difficult or simply impossible. They needed to know if they could defend the places they found. But there wasn’t any more time to reason through their choices, so he didn’t try to articulate any of his thoughts to Mineau.
“I want to know if we can take it,” he said.
Mineau hefted her club. “Let’s see, then.”
The monstrous tree took one earth shaking step forward.
“Here it comes. Let it through. Maybe we can hit it in the back while it’s distracted.”
As the palm tree took a lumbering step forward, Mineau shifted around to its right, club raised. Max had just begun to sidestep around to the left, when the palm twisted slightly in the middle and swung its leafy right arm at him. He barely had time to register the attack and barely noticed the slight hiccup when time slowed for a moment. All he saw were green fronds as they smashed through his yellow shield, lifted him off the ground, and hurled him through the air.
Max landed in a heap a dozen feet away, staring up at the leaves in the lower canopy, dazed, unable to breathe. When he heard the thud of a tree trunk leg stamping into the ground nearby, he rolled away from it, groaning desperately as he tried to pull air back into his lungs. He got to his feet just in time to see the palm tree looming over him, its other limb raised high in the air like a hammer. He stared up at it, knowing he couldn’t move fast enough to get out from beneath its smashing force. He watched the branch begin a downward swing, already cringing away from the crushing blow, but the strike never landed. Instead the tree lurched forward and vented a shuddering bellow as Mineau charged it from behind and swung her club into its back with all the power contained in her compact form. Max marveled, despite himself, as the largest yellow shield he’d seen flashed into being around the tree to intercept Mineau’s club. And then a spark of hope kindled in his chest as he saw cracks race across the surface of the shield, radiating from the point where Mineau’s club had struck.
Max began limping backward as the tree turned toward Mineau. “I can’t take…” he began, gasping for air. “I can’t take another hit like that. We should run.”
Mineau, seeing the monstrous palm tree turn its full attention toward her, began backing away as quickly as she could. “Not yet. Wait until–”
The palm tree, still turning, lashed out at Mineau with a backhanded swing. Mineau threw herself backward to avoid the blow, but the branch still managed to clip the edge of the yellow shield that flashed up in front of her. She landed heavily, flat on her back, as the tree completed its turn.
Panic replaced the initial spark of hope Max had felt when Mineau’s club had cracked the tree’s shield with a single strike. Despite her claim that she hadn’t been strong enough to kill a monstrous tree in a previous encounter, he’d hoped that two hits like her first might actually finish the tree off–maybe she’d only needed the opportunity to strike first and he’d inadvertently provided the chance by drawing the tree’s attention. But when he saw Mineau’s wide-eyed, pained-filled expression as she watched the palm tree lumber toward her, he realized she probably couldn’t take another hit either.
Fighting the thing had been a mistake. It would smash Mineau into the ground, killing her or forcing Orla to summon a protective cocoon of golden light, then Max would be on his own. If he wasn’t fast enough, the tree would turn on him and end him the same way. Then, if they were lucky, they would lay a few dozen feet apart in their protective globes of light as the tree methodically dismantled the only safe place Max had managed to find.
At least he’d have someone to talk to.
In a tiny corner of his mind, Max knew that he wouldn’t have a better chance to run than right then when the tree had turned to deal with Mineau where she lay prone in the leaves and dirt of the jungle floor. But the thought didn’t occur to him as a real possibility. Not yet. He had a window of opportunity, but he needed to keep open for wider for Mineau. It seemed that the tree focused its attacks not on the assailant that was nearest, but on whoever had hit it last. He’d hit it with fire while it was growing, so it had come after him. Mineau had hit it with her club, so it had turned to deal with her. If Max hit it now with fire, he could get it to turn away from Mineau while he continued to back up, and then they could both escape.
As the palm tree bent over Mineau and raised both limbs over its head, Max raised his hand and sent a fire bolt streaking toward the back of the tree’s trunk. To his surprise, the flame burst through the blue shield that appeared to intercept it, struck the gray bark of the palm’s trunk, and blossomed into a red and orange cloud of heat. The tree shrieked and jerked upright as the smell of superheated sap and burning wood filled the clearing.
“Run!” Max shouted, already backing toward the edge of the clearing.
Mineau scrambled to her feet, but took only a few steps backward, staying well within striking distance as she watched the tree writhe in pain.
“Hit it again,” she said, gesturing at the tree with her club. Her eyes snapped to Max’s face as he opened his mouth to protest. “Now!”
Something in her expression, in her tone of voice, reassured him. He didn’t hear panic or a self-protective demand for him to kill the thing that loomed over her. There was urgency in her voice, but it felt like the command of a person who had a better understanding of the situation than he did. And he was telling him to act.
The palm tree, smoking but no longer aflame, appeared to gather itself. In its flailing reaction to his fire bolt it had half turned in his direction, but when Mineau shouted, it seemed to look from him back to her. Max imagined the momentary flash of its alien thinking, trying to determine which threat to resolve first, which of them it could turn its back on. When it leaned toward Mineau and lifted one green, smoldering branch, Max moved without thinking and hit it again with a bolt of fire.
As the fire bolt struck the tree, a section of its trunk exploded outward with a sharp, splintering crack that made Max duck and throw both arms in front of his face. When he looked again the tree had gone still. A jagged rupture, leaking steam, ran up its side and flames were working their way along the monster’s limbs and up into its fan-like crown. Max felt his shoulders sag in relief at the tree’s death cry boomed outward in a sphere of expanding force, rippling through the smoke rising off its branches. Angry cries rose out of the jungle in answer to the tree’s death.
Max smiled weakly at Mineau. “We did it.”
Mineau smiled back brightly, triumphantly, looking much better than Max felt. Then her smile vanished as the palm tree shifted and began to topple in her direction. She took two steps, then dove out of the way as the tree fell. Behind her, the tree crashed into the earth and Max watched, mouth hanging open, as the earth beneath it sagged and collapsed with a roar. Nearby, the entrance to the hideaway coughed out a cloud of dirt and debris as the mosaic room filled with rubble.