Laying on the ground, warm blood trickling from my open wounds, cold blooded slime slaking from the soaked surface of my poncho, surrounded by the feverish reverberating clangor of the frenzied primates populating the canopy in limbs unseen high overhead, I slowly settled down from the non-stop bustle of the past few hours.
The longer I lay there, fully knowing that more dangers were ecstatically rushing to find me with the utmost gusto, the more it dawned on me just how slender the unimaginably thin odds were, that I'd had to tightrope across in order to be there.
Just to have the luxury of surviving in this inhospitable, luxuriant, restive, fertile, tempestuous, sylvan, nightmare oasis, I had to fight for my life on a near-constant level.
Not a moment for rest, not a moment for breath, not a moment to gather my thoughts, nothing but sheer unrepentant focus and determination from the minute I entered, until I had returned in view of the bright blue sky, would see me through. That was the level I would have to operate at, constantly, without fail.
No one was coming to save me.
No one was watching to see where I would fall.
No one would know what horrible taigaspawn would be the one to eventually take me in, and no one would know where to even find my remnants to show my kin.
In all likelihood, I would simply disappear from the entire world, and no one would notice.
A chill wind ran through my hollow bones, and I could feel the strength slowly leak from my body. My chest racked with sobs, and I wrapped my arms around myself for warmth.
I was so cold.
Colder than I've ever been in my entire life—the suffocating darkness rolling in with a thunderous growl—as the clouds unseen dared expose their criminal intent to drench a bleeding child in its gelid downpour.
But who was I to deny the forest its indignant jape? After all, didn't every man, woman, and grandatha warn me? The forest is no place for a little boy.
And though I thought myself mighty, and though I pictured myself brave, and though I claimed to be more intelligent than the average wayfinder, truthfully, I knew that mightier and savvier men than I had journeyed into these woods; never to return.
I covered my mouth, as the first droplets of precipitation reached me down on the forgotten refuse of the forest floor.
Along with all the worms, and the frightened little pill bugs that curled in on themselves when you pulled them from the sanctity of their home in the rotten pit of a log, I squirmed about in the meekest gap between the toenails of the unknowable, unthinkable organism around me.
Thousands, if not millions of years old, each tree stood in defiance of age, of scandal, of nation, and power, and inter-glade relations. It was too deep in The Stalks to ever fear a fire, nor existed an ax strong enough to chop one down. It had been here since before man could string two sentences together, and it would persist for far longer than I could ever think to imagine.
These cold, unthinking machines of nature had grown up without the need for emotions, will, or even movement to begin with; but there they were. I was a shadow cast by a mote of dust in the wind; there one moment, and gone the next.
Who the five was I, to think that I was doing anything other than simply throwing my life away; needlessly?
The rain had no intentions of stopping. Quite conversely, its drubbing strikes only grew more and more intense with time as I lay; frozen with loathing, and exsanguination.
It poured out its condemnation, as if the great blue itself were but a sphere of water suspended so high it touched the sun, and the gash I had carved into the creature's neck had split apart the heavens themselves.
So, the earth flooded with a terrible deluge of bone-chattering flush, and it crashed down upon me like I was at the bottom of a waterfall half a fathom tall.
The leaves overhead funneled the waters into a single, vertical sluice of foaming, wallowing whitewater; that was quickly growing from a temporary annoyance into an existential threat. One minute I was floating, and the next, I was swimming violently against a surging rush of cold that could only be headed one way—The NightWhere.
I didn't have time to think about the forest.
I didn't have time to care about my family.
I didn't have time to worry about my place in this incomprehensively massive system of death and rebirth that I had ignorantly bungled by way into. The waters were coming, and I had to act.
And not just act, but I had to fight against the tides as if my life was on the line!
Because, truthfully, it was.
I grabbed hold of a gnarled root that had survived through countless centuries of rainfalls, and with white knuckles, dragged my torso up to meet the striated irregularity of its length; my legs dangling uselessly behind me in the violent jet stream of fluids sprinting in my wake.
I knew better than to try to stand in something like this, as that was just asking for my foot to get caught in something underfoot, and let a couple dozen tons of river mass force my head to bob underwater until I drown to death. No, thank you!
Instead, I gripped another handhold no less than two feet away, and forced my numb fingertips to hold fast despite their inability to relay any information aside from endemic anemia, and hypoesthia.
I latched on with my other hand, no less frantic in my grapple than I was a few minutes ago, although I was now ironically inches away from the very earth that I had feared so horribly, only just those seldom few moments before.
It seems the forest was not without its own sense of humor, as it answered my helpless prayer by, again, stressing my fingertips with a fall without gravity; just to prove that it could.
I strained, and I kicked, and I spat, and I forced, and I gagged my way up the slope of the slippery, sharp studded land; in staunch refusal to disappear forever down the gullet of that unfathomable throat into the stomach of The Bathytaigatic Zone.
I would not be food for the forest—Not, at least, until I had seen Rilah, again.
With phalanges of icicle, and lungs of frost, I slowly emerged from the edge of the floodgates with an expression of sodden, lifeless insouciance.
I was less a living creature than a washcloth granted sentience; knowing it is designed for the pure purpose of soaking up the repugnant fluids of every horrid sweaty armpit and genital on a human body, and shame enough to scream internally, as it is mashed repeatedly into this abysmal Pandemonium for its entire heaven forsaken existence—but I was alive; and that was enough.
I braced my arm against the broad side of the tree, which had become my lifeline. The only thing I knew for sure about this forest was that it wouldn't be moving any time soon.
I edged across its broad side, uncaring that the bark was aggravating the deep lacerations already poring out blood into the frothing waters around me, for the simple security of every last fleeting bit of friction that I could squeeze out of its etching surface.
The bleeding was a small price to pay, if you asked me, as long as I could put the nightmare of the bathies behind me. I shivered into a fetal ball, once I finally settled into a recess the tree had been so kind as to leave between two root cellars on the broad side, that was just the perfect size for me.
The waters here seemed a lot less ferocious than it had been only a few inches to the right; pooling, and swirling listlessly around my toes—The tree's sovereignty remained completely unchallenged.