Forest Foray

----notes: not actual story as yet----

The canopy was thick: a combination of giant palm leaves, mushroom caps and underbelly gills of the giant shrooms that towered alongside the trees. The colors were splendid, if you could see them: umber and pale yellow, dark forest greens sun-bleached down the spectrum into lime greens.  You could not see them from the forest floor, not in most places. Whole swathes of the forest were dark as night, darker even, for no stars or moon touched these barren floors. Even in the summer, the warm winds never reached this forest center, for it was larger than even kingdoms, ancient and cold.  The icy floor of the forest earth cracked lightly with each step, the sounds reverberating, ringing in your ears. Yes, without sight, every sense grew more vivid until you saw through tastes and sounds and smells.

And the people, can they be described? You cannot see them anyway, but they are dark of apparel and light of skin, for black has blanched their features. They are humanoid, yes, though covered with tiny feeling hairs on their feet and hands that sense vibrations in the air. They can smell blood for miles, fear from a day's distance, and their ears are sharper than any owls. Creeping through the darkness, they avoid all sticks, twigs, and even stones, running silently across the bare, pallid ice and earth.  Every stump and clump of mushrooms evaded with ease.

Almost two full days, the race into the forest continues, with scarce rest for food and water. No sunshine is seen, no light of any kind.  Lost still slumbers, thrown across a man-creature's back who scarcely heeds the burden, leading the rest into the vastness of the old woods. Occasionally, the man-creature lurches to a halt, making no visible motion of any kind - they would see nothing if he did. He sniffs the air and knuckles his forehead, reaching out with his mind, sensing the mental vibrations of the forest: a mushroom there, some great mountain firs, and small life feasting on fallen leaves and decrepit mushrooms. It is not these that frighten him - a saurian form pounds through the trees nearby, several men high, though it is not hungry. It has just feasted on a climber. Less than a mile away, a many-leg insect scuttles, and even its careful vibrations and fierce hunger they can feel. The centipedes kill, hungry or not, and it has caught their scent. And lastly, there is another, a girl not unlike the man they carry now: alien and pulsing with the strength of gods. How she has survived, they do not know. They fear her also.

Satisfied, the leader hoists the man once more, and with a silent telepathy, urges them forward. The city is near; the man soon awakens.

Fever Dreams

Lost's days were a nightmare of frozen frames of heat waves, hot and cold. He woke seating, his skin itching as it dried from the heat and sweat in vain to saturate his scalding limbs. Or he woke violently shaking, or cold beyond shaking, glaciers running icy channels through his veins and lungs gasping for warmth. Those few moments of clarity, scarce contrasted with feverish agony, collected disparate images of lying on a stretched, animal-skin litter hoisted by two burly blurs Lost couldn't quite discern.  The air wavered angrily, shimmering, as though a lens of gauze covered Lost's eyes, and Lost suspected they crossed a vast desert.

He would have been correct. Chaos, only kilometers behind, watched as the caravan carrying Lost progressed from oasis to oasis in the arid wasteland. The sands shone like reflective glass, a second crimson sun, leaving no solace from the sky or surface from the overbearing light, no remiss in the endless, rolling sands. Entropy had torn through this region as a detached and implacable force, crushing the iron stones into rust-red sands, a desert chaff full of scattered memories.  Small, finely sandblasted rocks littered the ever-shifting dunes, a flaky, craggy hide of earth that looked like the scabbed skin of some subterranean monstrosity.

The rolling hills eternal, Chaos thought, an ocean of stone and silicon in everlasting swells with scarce a cactus or shrub interrupting the cruel monotony. A halo of clouds coated the horizon like sea-foam, upsetting an otherwise perfect blue sky, glossed over with heat haze. Small rodents scampered along the cracks and seethes of the low ground, and the caravan ahead threw whirlwinds of sand into the air, leaving clouds of iron which Chaos carefully followed, always keeping low and silent, a huntress.

----notes----

While Lost tossed and turned, fighting an endemic illness, Chaos tracked, wondering what these strange people wanted, where they were going. They were not the same, she'd realized, as those that had attacked her near the ship. It wasn't until the fifth night that they reached a destination. The caravan stopped on the edge of a great forest of towering trees and fungus, stretching high as the hills. 

Nobody, not even the rain

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
 and opens;only something in me understands
 the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
e.e. cummings

There is something sinister in infinity, and magnificent. The stars cease their winking charade and stare: cold, incessant, pitiless in eternal surround.  Space is not a sea in which we float amongst the heavens, but a hole, an absence, crushing ever inwards.  The fragile veil between us and without: beautiful; the journey into the void: fraught.

            Lost stared vacantly behind as his home, all their homes, receded into a glowing point in space.  He didn’t know why, but watching the digital streams of their departure made him feel… something.  Maudlin? Solemn?  It was getting more difficult to do that these days: feel.  The echoing thrum and whirr of magical machinery whined behind Lost as a counterpoint to the numbing silence of the stars.  The control room faintly glowed with nurturing light, a laughable counterfeit sun.  Overhead, a glass dome glimpsed into forever as the vessel drifted through space.  Lost paced his rounds throughout the control room: watering the hydrangeas, rhododendrons, roses and disparate vegetation that survived the apocalypse to accompany the journey to a new home world.  Numbly, he noticed once more that the peas produced nicely, but the tomatoes seemed reluctant to produce under the fraudulent light, the squash curled inwards, strangely subdued, and none of the flowers, save the poppy, ever bloomed any more. 

            The ship was enormous, far larger than the simple requirements of its occupants.  The control room itself was a large, circular room illuminated by ambient light and filled with diverse flora in maze-like rows and obscure patterns: flowers yonder, vegetables by that edge, fruits and trees collected by half-fence over there - a semblance of composition.   

            The room contained an unpleasant quality of contradiction: light, yet lacking in sunny disposition; full of fruit-bearing trees, a garden, and a trickling creek, and, somehow, still devoid of life; silent, serene, yet deafening with incompatible whirrings and clammerings of machines;  and, of course, the faux skylight above a thaumaturgically sealed semi-sphere of glass revealing a sky without sun, and unblinking stars.  Esoteric machines lined the arced walls and mounted screens detailed different portions of the ship and outlying space.  Inside, no breeze stirred the trees, no sunlight graced those leaves, and no animals nested within their solemn branches.

            But the grief of the trees and the melancholy dirge of the creek were naught compared with the pathos of the man as he numbly walked the ritual of tending the garden, a mindless machine.  There was no décor in his dance – though a strange dance it remained. A faint trace of emotion occasionally flickered across his face as he glanced upwards, furtively, towards the monitors on the far wall, but no more than a glimmer. 

            Mounted slightly above the arcane machinery that sparkled on the far wall from the entrance were monitors where every motionless sector of the entire ship was revealed: the kitchen with its giant cupboards, plastic counters and quasi-marble floor tiles; the storeroom crammed tightly with miscellaneous “everythings” for conceived eventualities: tools, wood, fittings and bolts, rope and thousands of constructive materials and machinery. There were many rooms emptily displayed: the bathrooms, bedrooms which doubled as pods for emergencies, hallways, the leisure and exercise room.  Each empty, isolated, and pathetically morose in their vacancy.  Only one other room contained occupants: the infirmary.

            It was to this monitor that Lost’s gaze periodically returned.  Clean, and staggeringly so (as infirmaries are want to be), the too-white room contained eight cocoon-shaped vessels like organic sarcophagi.  Arranged in an octagon with slabs at corners, each vessel rose from the floor by a single, slender metal bar - almost unnaturally. At the focus of the circle, a giant IV drip suspended from the ceiling, drizzling a purple liquid through an octopus of slender feeds into the compartments.  Tiny ice crystals formed on the outside of the feeding tube as each appendage conjoined with the capsules.  An aura of argentine light shimmered around each of the sarcophagi, and in all save one of the vessels laid a comatose male or female: three males and four females total. Magically sealed, they slept as beauties for the journey through space, interred as they were in their separate sepulchers. 

            A careful inspection of Lost’s face when viewing this screen revealed nothing spectacular: no magnificent revelation regarding the logic behind these furtive glances.  And after each tiny distraction, his attention shortly returned, and nary a glimmer of that curious look remained.