Jaden leaned closer to the vine. Its leaves were green and three times the size of his hand while the stem was brown and as thick as his wrist. Its flower was half the size of its leaves and possessed a bloom of dark purple and white with yellow pollen on a single protruding tip in its centre. He took in the scent as he breathed in and quickly pulled his head away. The flower, he realised, was the source of the strange fragrance he had smelled when he had first climbed onto the road. The bitterness had been so offensive that he decided he never wished to smell it again, and quickly walked away from it.
He went the way that the road took him, as there seemed to be nothing but forest beyond the collapsed stones. The bizarre sounds became louder momentarily as he did, and he began to wonder what he was meant to be doing. He had been fortunate to survive the crash that the two pilots had lost their lives in, but he didn’t know where he was, or what direction Corsec or Waikor were in. He had to complete his task so that he could return to Alyssa, but without transport, he didn’t want to think of how long that would now be. All he knew was that he had to keep on moving, and somehow, he would eventually find his way to a nation that could offer him transport to his destination.
He looked up; hoping to gain some bearing of where the sun’s light was coming from, but soon saw that it was not cloud cover that blocked its rays. The trees in this forest were giants, rising hundreds of feet into the air and sealing everything else below them in almost complete darkness with their thick canopy. He wondered how everything was so green beneath the canopy, starting to feel there was something very strange about this place. The sheer size alone did not seem possible. The trunks of these trees were as wide as any house there had been in Callibra, dark brown and with grooves he could have climbed into easily. They had been so big that he hadn’t even noticed they were there, as if they were simply mountains in the distance, figments in his imagination. He walked on bewildered by their majestic size, and he marvelled at how many centuries it must have taken them to grow so tall. He thought back to the stories travellers had told, but none had ever mentioned this forest of giants.
He was lost. All that he could be sure of was that he was somewhere between Waikor and Corsec, and hoped that the direction the road went in was toward one of them.
He walked onward, the road bending to avoid the trees as he went. It seemed that hours were passing him by, but he was sure it hadn’t even been one yet. The forest was having an odd effect on his sense of time, as if its size somehow slowed his passage through it while simultaneously speeding up his perception. He stopped by a large area covered in flowers. The vine had taken over the entire section of the road. He first thought to leave the road and walk around it, but instead reached down and picked one, smelled it, and then placed it inside the Daijuarn belt around his waist. The bitterness no longer bothered him, and he now seemed to be enjoying its fragrance.
His concentration was broken as he heard a sharp sound nearby. It was fast and had only lasted a second, as if a branch had just fallen from a tree. He then heard the snapping of a twig and sensed he was not alone in the forest. He could feel movement in the ground, footsteps of something that did not seem human trampling the foliage in the distance. He froze in hope that he would not draw its attention, and when he was sure that it was no longer near, he kept on, moving at a brisk pace, wishing more than ever that he wasn’t alone inside the forest.
As he quickened his pace, he had to stop several times for fear of something following him. He had heard sounds down in the gully below the road, but could never be sure that they were there. He could still see nothing, and his sense of the ground did not reveal anything close. He began to run, his fear taking control as his legs felt weak from the adrenaline, and soon he came to the end of the road and a clearing in the giant trees and forest alike.
Before him now stood a city of stone, covered in moss and plant life, unkempt for as long as the trees had been able to grow. He was at the beginning of a yard with a fountain in its centre, no longer flowing and choked by the vine that grew throughout it and all over the buildings ahead. Tree roots lifted up some of the pavements at the doors, and each structure had small collapsed areas from where they had lifted too high. The design reminded him a little of Callibra, and he saw that one or two still possessed their domes as he had seen in Ceahlin. He thought back to the stories of the travellers once more, and again could remember nothing of any ancient civilisation abandoning a city within a giant forest. It seemed he was the first to venture here for a very long time, and that meant he was definitely alone, without anyone around to save him from whatever had been lurking near the trees.