“How much longer do we got? My muscles are rotting away Sallix,” asked Basil. Basil sat on the edge of my trunk. His arms held one of my dead branches and dangled it over the moving mirror below us.

  A sharp jerk from the end of the branch tugged at his hand—a one in a gill-ion catch with the moving current. With a flick of his wrist, a shimmer of scales erupted from the mellowed surface tension. A…fish?

  Wriggling about on my trunk had the body of a carp but the head of a squid. Squirming tendrils of animated suckers grasped wildly along the bark, scraping up flakes of growth. Pink polka dots mixed with blue veneers flopped away.

  Before Basil could grasp at his catch of the day, Lesi slammed her paw into the cursed animorph and ended its existence. Her claws scooped up the ground pink pavement and deposited it into her gullet.

  “That’s the fifth one you’ve stolen today! Either hunt your own food or I’m pushing you off girl!” cried Basil. He took out my co-opted bodily corpse and laid it against me. “Haunt, you mind spinning me another line? The cephachon broke it.”

  A bundle of clear sheen whiplashed into his face. “Thank you,” mumbled the makeshift mummy.

  “Why do I have the answer to your question? Didn’t you say it would only take a day? We’re at the start of our third day running down this current,” I asked. The large tree over the horizon was our only waypoint.

  Veledub was the keepsake name we could orientate ourselves. Over the last few days, its growing arms could grasp the sun within its greedy tendrils. Under its canopy, a whole town could fit underneath.

  The chilled waters were our sole company throughout the past few days. Winding paths along gutted shores were the daily entertainment. The vast former canopy that would cover our heads was dying. The trees around us were plucking away all the red and yellow hairs off their heads.

  “Nah we should be nearing the end of it,” Basil replied, tying another makeshift fishing line. “You sure you don’t mind me using a couple of your branches?”

  I was an open cadaver. The remaining leaves were flicking away. It was time for old growth to make room for the new. “No, I’ll grow new ones in the next season. Give me the map, I don’t trust your judgement,” I replied.

  Basil threw the map over my hollow. The river we embarked on spanned the entirety of Himavanta. Its arteries split away and fueled the sprawling networks of wildlife around us. The river should have opened up by now.

  “Ya think your mom died back there?” Basil asked the silk maker basking atop Lesi’s head. Two of Haunt’s eyes arched over and stared at the commotion.

  “No, she struggled but will grow. Shed again and renew,” Haunt deftly replied. He lifted one leg and prostrated it towards Basil. Microfractures sprinted across its joint.

  “How come I’ve never seen you molt?” I asked.

  “Asleep twenty years.”

  “Okay.”

  The river began to thin. Like a pitchfork over dead coals, my roots raked across the bottom of the bank. The slumbering forest that had gone to bed was waking up.

  The trees ahead of us were at least double the size. Overgrown roots painted with moss and detritus commanded the forest floor. Light peering through was blocked at the gate behind bars of wood and windows of dense green.

  Any remaining water ran aground by one of these trees and petered out. It escaped into the ground, away from these supposed trees. How could they be awake when nature was instructing them to go to bed?

  “We’re still going in the right direction?” I asked coyly, reorientating myself upright after days of being the makeshift canoe. Lesi punched her nose into the ground and started sniffing around.

  Basil’s index finger perused the carefully drawn map. His eagle eyes pierced through the thin veneer of illusion blocking our path. Surely we were on the right path. The morning fog would be lifted from our view. The voyage was coming to an end. A Greek tragedy? No! Our odyssey would come to a fairytale conclusion!

  “No, we definitely went down the wrong stream. The main river keeps floating that way, we went this way,” Basil nodded in agreement with his failure.

  “So you were just delusional during our trip.”

  “I didn’t see you helping!”

  “Yeah, because you told me that you had it figured out! Which someone said I should just focus on being a log in the water?”

  “Man, next time let’s have Haunt be the navigator instead. This is way too much brainpower,” Basil cried. He threw the map inside me with early onset manic depression setting in between his pupils.

  “Old. Strong. Big,” Haunt chittered. His feelers rapped against one of the overgrown roots. The moss blanket drifted away revealing a hickory touch that had been battered and raked by the elements.

  Lesi turned her head towards the overgrown forest. Her ambient panting was slammed shut. The light was rapidly losing its ground to the canopy above. Pure darkness roared. An ocean of trees with raging depths welcomed us.

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

  “Is this place on your map?” I whispered. The forest was silent, eager to listen in on our conversation. Could a whisper escape their grasp?

  “No,” Basil replied, “We’re lucky my dad even labelled all the major rivers and offshoots. The original trail is overland.” Basil clung on to each syllable, waiting for a response from anything out there.

  Every word stung in our backs. The words were murdered as they travelled through the air. Nothing escaped that eternal void.

  “Wait,” I said interjected, “let’s look at that map again.”

  We splayed the map back on the ground. Across the densely populated paper, labels of different forests, paths, and animal habitats were dotted.

  “There’s too many guesses,” Basil replied.

  “Turn away?” Haunt asked.

  “If we’re lucky enough to find our way back…we have Mom’s pendant left, let’s keep that on hand,” Basil said.

  We stared at the first campsite that Aktaaf had circled for us. “If we travelled through the river from that day, then three days later, we would have five options for branching rivers we could have ended up in,” I continued.

  “Three of them are useless, they would have led us out of Himavanta already,” Basil said.

  The other two remained. The top branch stumbled deeper into the forest, towards Veledub and Vila. Above the path was labelled ‘Old-Growth’. The bottom route stung through a multitude of monsters: a ‘Harpy’ nest and ‘Perdition Trees’ to name a few. X’s and crosses accumulated in the path. It ended abruptly away from Fleurwind and Veledub.

  I pointed at the forest in front of us. “You think that’s an old-growth or a doom-and-gloom kind of vibe?” I asked.

  “They certainly look like Veledub’s age…and they look depressing,” Basil replied.

  “Maybe because I’m also a tree, they’ll leave us be,” I muttered. The deafening silence was certainly calming our nerves. Even the scant vestiges of a bird chirp could assuage the growing unease.

  “Mom used to tell me that young trees would roar as they grew. When they grew old, their voices would be so hoarse that they could only listen greedily to the sounds they could once make. A cemetery longing for the living.”

  “Thank you for being cryptic,” I replied looking at Basil. His pupils were blessed. They could hide and peak through his ruffled hair. “Maybe we’ll find some friendly Treants,” I continued, shambling in.

  “You’re going in?” he cried.

  “If it’s the ‘Perdition Trees’, we book it. If it’s the ‘Old-Growth’, we’ll be gentle under these giants,” I replied.

  “You know, you were the first one to enter Fleurwind in over a century, try not to be the first one to die under my watch,” Basil said.

  Haunt weaved loops of silk around each of us. They held firm against the incoming maze of roots. “Together,” he chittered.

  “Together,” we repeated.

  “Adventure…awaits?” one of us said.

  **********

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Basil asked.

  The branches towering above us were as long and dark as the midnight between stars. A tepid light spell glowed from my branches. It was a candle in a vacant city. The light from our entrance had been subsumed by the roots we clambered over.

  “Why do you ask? You afraid?” I snickered.

  “What?” Basil cried incredulously, “No I’m just making sure you’re fine with this, don’t force yourself into an uncertain situation when you can certainly go somewhere else.”

  “Aren’t you a smart cookie?” I laughed. I wish I could hear something beyond our voices.

  “No prey, something already here,” Haunt exhaled through his jittery fangs. All eight of his eyes were perpetually scanning our surroundings. This should be the perfect habitat for a spider made of shadows.

  Vila’s goofy laugh echoed along my insides. “You’re right Basil. After all, we could just butterfly back to Fleurwind and make another try. Why risk taking a route that might lead us to Vila?” I asked. Part of the words were pointed toward me.

  “No wait,” Haunt replied.

  “If I delay this by a day I might go crazy. Vila might not even register it, a fairy certainly lives longer than most things. But my mind will continue to grow thorns if I let myself wait for better conditions when she risked so much in the absolute worst circumstances.”

  “That’s all I need to hear then.” Basil leaped over a root the size of a boulder and pulled us through. Our path’s afterlife was the handprints he left behind as he gripped his way through.

  “No protest?”

  “There’s always going to be ‘something’ that happens Sallix. Maybe when we fly back, a rainstorm will muddy the path, or maybe an early frost will freeze over our water. Our adventure into these potential death trees is just another ‘something’. What can you do about it but keep moving forward?”

  “We keep moving.”

  “We keep moving.”

  “You make good prey,” Haunt interjected. Despite the hundreds of hairs standing at attention along his back, he continued his lookout.

  “It makes sense nothing but moss lives down here,” I said. I flashed a light over another large growth. Without it, it all blended into a menagerie of grey hues. “What else is supposed to grow or live here when the only hope is trapped above?”

  “…Then what about her?” Basil stifled a sob. His dense figure hid behind Lesi, who desperately tried to hide behind him. A game of leapfrog with them as the participants.

  I strained to look at the direction Basil was busily vacating himself from. A kind stranger? A false hope. A monster? Maybe. But the worst possibility? Something else.

  I turned towards ‘her’.

  “Where are her eyes?” I choked out a gasp.

  Standing to the right of us, beyond the trunks of a few trees, no more than 10 meters away. No, five? Fifteen? Why is fear so hard to calculate?

  With skin as smooth and pale as a body at a funeral. All colour that would have been given to her was flattened with the grey of a dead winter. Long black hair covered in moss parted to a face bereft of eyes. Her mouth was a small abrupt line ripped out of a child’s first drawing.

  Long nails adorned with brown grease glistened underneath the light. The light should have banished her. Yet she stood, staring without eyes, at our group underneath a canopy without sound. Eternity screamed in the second while we stared.

  It was silenced as her lithe figure slithered into a tree and vanished. The darkness of where she used to be was a testament to a legacy long deceased.

  “J-just an eyeless woman,” Basil said in between muffled chokes.

  Haunt and Lesi continued staring at the tree the figure disappeared into. It was as if the longer they stared, the further the proof would be that she never existed.

  “Yeah, just an eyeless woman,” I repeated, grabbing the ruby pendant and wooden butterfly.

  Long nails slid across the ruby gem next to me.