7. Chapter 7
Chapter 7:
The woods began to get progressively less and less dense, as if they were gradually shedding their outer coat and allowing their insides to air much more thoroughly. I thought I had seen larger creatures around me as well, but they always seemed just out of sight, and it always happened either at dawn or at dusk, so these crepuscular beings may have just been figments of dreams that did not want to leave my mind as I was waking. At one point, I even noticed that the trees seemed to have changed, and were both squatter and larger-leafed than the trees I had encountered before. Every so often, I would get the chance to slow down and carefully examine the leaves, and I would see that each tree had its own signature of sorts, a seal of identity in its leaves, and this made the leaves seem much more personal to me, and left me daydreaming about the stories I had heard as a child, and imagining myself thinking about talking to the trees as those who were here before us had done.
I soon found myself walking rather aimlessly at one point, having lost myself to the woods around me. I suddenly realised this with a jolt to the brain, and I sat down for a moment to compose myself, The woods seemed to taking a different approach to ensnaring me in its traps, lulling me into a false sense of security before doing... gods Know what.
I used a bit of charcoal to write "Wea" on my hand in order try and stay focused. Every tine that I glanced down at my hand, it reminded me of why I was in the woods to begin with. well...
I knew that I had not originally planned to enter the woods because of the kidnapping, but it had soon come to define the journey in my mind. It was much more of a concrete, physical and realisable goal than any other flimsy, philosophical and transient 'finding myself' I could ever hope to achieve. It game me something to keep fighting for, and it allowed me to spurn myself whenever I even thought about giving up. I think the thought may have saved my life a few times so far already, and I was deeply grateful, so I refused to let it go.
Dusk.
I noticed the shapes again, but I was far from sleepy. I had looked around for some herbs that I could use to enhance both my dwindling rations and medical kit, some which I had learned about years ago during my exploratory childhood from a friend who had a cousin who was a herbalist. I looked around for the distinct orange streaks of the Durdelle leaves, and picked as many as I could to roll into a small container and keep for any time that I had a headache or mind pain of any kind. I then looked around for another root that I had heard of. it was called Farf, and was supposed to grind into a powder that would help to avoid any sort of foot poisoning if I did manage to ingest something not so agreeable. I found a few different plants that looked somewhat like what I remembered the root to be like, and I remembered being told that a few other toxically poisonous plants looked somewhat like it, so I was careful to look for all of the signs. I crushed some of each plant into my palm, and smelled the liquids produced. One smelt like generic vegetation, nothing much except tones of earth and water, mixed with slight acidity. One of the others smelt searingly astringent, and another whiff told me that it was definitely not the Farf I was looking for. The final root smelt as I had expected - slightly floral and delicate and so I dug up a few other plants like it, and stuffed the tubers they had underneath into a small jar. I had been looking for a certain fungus as well, one called Beef of the Tree, and it was supposed to taste almost exactly like cow, while growing on trees, but I did not find any. I stumbled across some crab-apples, and nibbled on some of them as I walked, their sweet yet ultimately rather random assortments of flavours helping to make the otherwise repetitive journey slightly interesting, at least to my tongue. I soon came to hate them, having eaten far too many and so put the rest in my bag and opened my eyes again for anything else I could eat.
Back in my childhood, I had never really has as much as I needed, and it had left me weedy and short. These traits then meant that I was the perfect form for the guild, and so I ruminated on how even the smallest things can lead into all of the seeming variety and randomness in life, even though most things end up being perfectly predictable, with enough information, of course. I distinctly remember an old woman in our village who took care of some of the local sheep if they had chosen to escape from their farms. The children would be sent to her by their parents, usually in the afternoon with a small copper piece in their hands every so often to ask the weather. She never told you the weather at the moment (that would have been silly) but always up to a month into the future. I soon learnt that she was not, in fact, a magician or prophet, but instead just an expert at using the signs nature had given her to predict almost perfectly the weather of the future. She just used the signs that the rest of us glaze over in our daily lives.
While this memory played itself over in my mind, a dozen or so versions of it melding into one rather coherent but stilted one, as is true for most of our memories from years past, I noticed that the sky was filled with clouds. Great hulking things, pregnant with rains I knew would be wild and violent. They lumbered over in the sky, a swift wind moulding them into different shapes, breaking them into a multitude of pieces and pushing them across my vision at an alarming rate. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I felt a drop of water hit my nose. I looked around for any shelter that I may be able to use, and only found trees. I ran straight under one, as the shower commenced.
It was relatively warm, too, and so the air became a humid and dense mass that seemed to smother any other thoughts in my mind. I soon became damp, and the sheer comfortability of the situation fully realised itself. The heat made the water evaporate into the air, and the air, so sodden with water that it was ready to burst, did not want to accept any more, so the water came back onto me. As well as this, the tree was not a perfect umbrella, with rather persistent raindrops tumbling down the leaves, gathering speed and size, and hitting me on the head. I tried to look around me for any place that could be better than where I was now - less uncomfortable, less exposed - and soon saw a small bulge in the land, some sort of mound that was strictly not natural, at least, was not caused by any geographical processes. I ran towards it, the rain falling in sheets that changed course as if my thought, but in reality only pushed by the wind. The noise, as well, was overpowering. this was no thunderstorm, but the slaps of the raindrops hitting the surroundings combined to create a cacophony of sound that forced me to lose myself in the moment. It was complete and surrounding, and I did not think about anything else.
Once I got to the mound, I frantically looked around for a pit or entrance of any sort. It was not only a place of refuge from the rain, but also a pertinent sign of other sentient life around me, something that I had ben yearning for for quite some time. I soon found a small hole cut into the peat, and crawled in head first, ignoring the slick layer of mud that I had built up on my clothes. I pulled my pack in after me, and very quickly found myself engulfed in darkness.
Once I composed myself, and was able to get my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to crawl through the tunnel I found myself in. It was about the height of a child of ten or so, and so I was forced to crawl. It was not as difficult as I may have expected, but I still found it not only tiring, but also grimy. Each surface was wet, and the walls and ceiling were covered in a layer of mud. I soon found myself thinking about the weight of the peat on top of me. Hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of mud and soil and sand was static above me, in this tunnel. I felt enclosed by everything around me, boxed in and controlled by whatever force had constructed the tunnel. I thought about how if the tunnel collapsed, I would likely be trapped in it and die, once all of the air that had become trapped alongside me had been used up. I would be all alone, and nobody would ever likely find my body. I had heard stories of great beasts being pulled out of peat bogs, largely preserved, (though still dead) and the entire world being able to see them as they died. I feared the same would happen to me. A few thousand years down the line, when the wind and rain and ice and fire had worn away the layers of the hill, the rock and sand and soil that covered me, and some creature of the far future would walk past me, maybe even on a journey not too unlike the one I was undertaking and take an interest in the thing it has seen poking out of the soil (I believe that the forest will survive far into he future) It would find my body and say "wow! What ancient creature have I here uncovered! I will take its body to the institute of history, where they will cut it up and study its corpse!" and I will be dead, my soul gone and forgotten, and so will not be able to object. I will be opened up and talked about for years, the last specimen of my long-lost species, nothing more than a great find by some fledgling anatomist. What kind of immortality would that be? Unknowing of the future, forgetting all of the past, remembered only in memory and books. not alive. Not experiencing the world like a living being, but desiccated and immaterial - an idea? I would not even know that I would be immortal either. Once that species, too, disappears, what then? An immortality ended. A mortal immortality? Do ideas ring through the world and time and space forever, or are they only ideas when they are being thought. Let my body turn to soil and my mind be eaten away, the things that made me up surviving far past my death. Let me rot, I say, let me rot.
Soon, I came to myself again, and began to see a dim light coming from the end of this tunnel, the darkness fading slowly as I approached.
Then the light hit my eyes, and I was blinded, of only for a second, before i was able to adjust, and take in my surrounding.
It seemed to be a large atrium of sorts, a massive, temple-like interior with a circular roof, and passages leading out of it just like the one I had just come from. Each walls were smothered in a pale, glowing moss which made the atrium easy to see, but left certain parts still in darkness. I reached out and picked off some of the moss, and looked at it closely. Each blade hummed with the light it was giving out just so quietly, and the hum was soon dissipated when I re-attached it to the wall. I began to walk on, before realising that I might need something like the moss in my future, and so picked some off, and put it in a jar.
What surprised me the most, however, was the creatures I saw inside. Harvestmen. Giant Harvestmen.
They were roughly double the height of me, but came in different sizes, I assumed that these were differently aged. They had large ovular bodies the size of by torso, lifted up by ten stringy legs, as thick as a good pen and with joints along them, so every step they took was filled with unconscious flourish and delicacy. None of them seemed to notice me, and I was able to walk among them relatively unnoticed. Each one was either carrying a small green plant or lichen or writing mass of creatures in soil, or going outside to collect more. I followed one of them to see what it was doing.
This one was a dark brown, spotted in places and possessing a large spike on each of its feet. I tried to ride on top of it once, having played with many harvestmen as a child, I knew that (at least the normal sized ones) were perfectly harmless, but it collapsed under my weight and I was thrown off. It soon began to get on its feet and walk again, and I did the same.
We eventually arrived at a smaller cavity, one of many that I had seen during the walk, and the harvestman went inside, and plopped its lichen into a large hollow in the middle, and stirred it around using its leg.
I peeped inside, and saw thousands of small insects, fattened up by the harvestmen's seemingly endless gorging, and essentially farmed into servitude so that the harvestmen would never have to hunt again, only collect enough food to sustain their colonies of whatever preferred meal they needed. I sneaked away to see one of the other rooms, this one had a pit squirming with another type of insect, this one carmine-red and beetle-esque, only that it had a long tail with a sting at the back. I then walked into another room, this one's entrance encased in stringy slime with sticky beads at regular intervals along it. I pushed past the string, and found a few harvestmen trying to catch the thousands of moths all around me with a small net made of saliva and strung between their forelegs. Once they had encased a few, they stuffed them into their chelicerae, and walked out of the room.
After seeing this, I decided to investigate this mound a little more. I followed another one of the harvestmen around. This one was a astringent green, and heavily built but not at all spiny lik some of the others. I followed it until I entered a room that seemed to be incredibly deep. The entrance led onto what looked a bit like a net or grid made of some sort of silk or saliva that I had seen the Harvestmen use previously. The harvestmen that I had been following carefully walked over it, placing its feet exactly at the junctions of thread. I tried to do the same.
I carefully placed on of my feet on a 'node' and then tried to balance my other foot on another. I found the threads the grid was made from to be stronger than I had expected them to be, even if they were slightly slippery, their outer liquid-coating giving way if too much pressure was applied. After barely accomplishing this, I tried to walk over the grid. I pulled my foot up, before cautiously placing it down in front of me, in one of the spots the Harvestmen had placed its feet. It did not work, and I slipped. I tried to balance with only one foot, but no amount of arm-waving was able to stabilise me. I tumbled onto it, and slipped through the gaps in between each thread. I tried grabbing onto one as I fell, out of sheer instinct and desperation. but it broke, and I fell quickly. Luckily, there was a very similar net right beneath it, this time with smaller gaps between each thread. It caught me and then flung me up again, and I bounced for a while before I was able to right myself. I realised that this mound was more dangerous than I had expected. I found the entrance to this level, and tried to find my way out of it.
I tried to walked back along the path I had come in through, and saw a few harvestmen carrying slivers of the trees I knew to be found in this area. I soon realised that the reason the forest had been thinning out is because the harvestmen had been cutting down the trees somehow to use them as food for the wood-eating insects. I was fascinated, and promised myself that I would note all of this behaviours down in my notebook once I got out of the mound. I got to the main atrium, and tried to remember which tunnel I had taken into the colony, but I had soon forgotten. I thought of using the moss I had pulled as a way of seeing which one, and after some excruciating moments examine the moss around every single tunnel entrance, I found the one I needed, and scrambled down it to the entrance.
The downpour had stopped, and had left the forest wet with dripping leaves and the distinct earthy smell that emanates out of the ground whenever rain passes by. I looked up at the clouds, and saw that the rainclouds had moved further in the opposite direction I was going. Wisps of delicate strands of clouds now filled the sky. As I pulled myself out, I saw a few harvestmen carrying leaves into the mound, and I scurried off into the woods again. The woods soon became just as dense as they had been just a few days ago, and the old feeling of uneasiness soon returned too.