Primeval places crush the souls of many men. When faced with a vastness so eldritch, they crumble at the blow to their ego. It is a painful thing to realize that you are nothing. A mere spot to be wiped off something else's boot. A speck inhaled by an ecosystem that doesn't even notice you.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  Zgavra took Dragos to the top of the trail that led down into the basin.

  His ears rang with the bell-sound again, drawing his gaze to the Spineback’s peaks. Did his old home call to him? That was unlikely. He’d thought it was just a side effect of loneliness. Maybe it was something inside his mind and little to do with the mountain at all. Regardless, he had other, more immediate things to do.

  An unnatural wind whipped upward from the trail, catching Dragos's cloak, snapping the ends in its swirling grasp. Yellow grasses waved, clinging to crevices, having found enough dirt to thrive. “Remember not to stare into the nexus.”

  Dragos nodded and tugged his hood lower. He did not expect to see other travelers. People avoided the place, said it was haunted, cursed, full of murderous beasts and madness, that those who went there disappeared.

  They weren’t wrong.

  Colors below faded in light too bright, even as a strange mist hung over the trail further down. The Zioruluc’s influence. Right before it converged to swirl around the Umbregrin, it was at its most pure and unadulterated, roaring deep beneath the earth like any wild mountain river. There, the other world and the living world overlapped in the Um?r basin.

  Dragos faced the zmeu, who hovered over the ground, incorporeal as smoke. Its horned head bobbed gently as it rode the strange, warm winds, squinting against them as if they stung it.

  “Watch over Chinhua tonight. Tomorrow morning, come find me here.”

  It whuffed, blinking against the flow of the air, and flew off, spiraling into the sky.

  Dragos looked down the switchback path, or what passed for one. The trail wasn’t so much a ‘trail’ as a clear way downward along the crags, where grass tenaciously clung. If he slipped, or something below got to him, there would be no rescue. No cohort to pick him up. No Solomonar teacher to mend his bones and tend his wounds.

  If he let the madness take him…

  He could not think like that. Firmly, he told himself to stay focused and stay aware as he started down. It only took an hour before the ground was more wild vine and bramble than grass and rock. The steep slope turned into an easier gradient, and his hands weren’t constantly hooked around rock or plant.

  A dragonfly buzzed past, iridescent wings catching his eye.

  The air grew thick, thicker than he remembered, clinging to the inside of his lungs, hot and humid. The fat thickets bristled with needles, threaded with vines of bulging fruit. What should have been a riot of color was washed out, like the first step taken out of a dark place into a blazing morning with the sun in his face.

  Volcanic springs burbled nearby. He had to find one. Trees were sparse and massive, bigger than Sigovara’s obscenely huge clock tower. It did not stop the riot of growth on the ground level, which burst upward, over his head.

  He pulled his talons from their pouch and buckled them on. Not for the claws so much as protection. The thorn-studded shift of bushes and vines made passing through them not just impossible, but deadly. The last time, he and his cohort had rigged platforms to rest atop the creeping plantlife.

  It worked for a short time. Long enough to get to the spring Mirel knew, to find what they sought and collect some before their way back was fully consumed by the overgrowth. This time he had no partners and no platform, just his own hands and a fair sense of balance.

  Time to put his body to its paces.

  As he stepped into the basin, clover curled around his boots. Each step was like walking in mud, the sucking pull of plants hindering his step. He broke into a jog. The hedgewall loomed, vines beckoning with tendrils that didn’t stop growing, choked back only by other plants grasping at them.

  All through the riot of flowers and vines, insects buzzed. Hummingbirds that pulsed with color zipped around the massive thicket in swarms. Birds of prey circled, their wings pearlescent in the shining mists that billowed through the basin.

  Dragos hit the thicket at a run, grasping vines that twisted to try to catch him. He hauled himself up, finding footing that wanted to keep him there. His focus on forward motion could not be deterred. The whole structure trembled at his weight, but held as he gained the top of the mass of tangled plants.

  His hood fell back, and he left it. Sight was imperative. Reflexes had to be sharp as razors. Dragos smiled viciously at the warmth of the mist seeping into his skin. Pushing him as he pushed himself. Faster. More. Grow. Be.

  Devour. Everything.

  His stomach growled, but he ignored it. Just a side effect, like the other qualities he leaned into. The charged air tingled over skin as his limbs kept moving. He ran over shifting vines, the twists providing good traction over the shuddering mound of plants.

  One misstep, and he’d fall. Die there. If his leg slipped through a gap and into the thicket, it would suck him in and devour him before he could pull it out.

  The scent was pure life. Though things died there, nothing rotted. All things were consumed as soon as they were overrun.

  Dragos leaped from one unstable cluster of vines to the next, grabbing the branches that broke through the net of tendrils for balance. He recognized the tree that Mirel used as a landmark and made for it.

  A knot of vines wobbled and sank into branchlets under his weight. With a mincing step he threw himself forward, hands snatching a frond on a thick, woody stalk. It bowed under his weight. Heart in his throat, he swung his legs up, kicking for height. He let go, eyes on the next flat collection of twisted vine.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  For a second he was in freefall. Eyes wide, terror gripped him as his hands splayed out, legs tucking up. His feet struck the trembling mass. He slammed his talons into the tangle and clawed as much as ran up the slope of living bramble.

  He gasped for breath, and never felt so alive.

  It was a side effect of the mists. Even knowing, he revelled in it. Each plant, each flower and creature emanated a light that he could feel on his flesh. In his soul.

  Dragos kept moving. He didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to get to the spring, just wanted to keep running forever, until fatigue hit and he fell in. Become one with the basin, his body becoming food for the…

  No.

  He’d lost one of his cohort siblings to that madness. Saw him run off and be devoured before Mirel could catch him. Emil had dashed after a butterfly and been consumed by the hungrily churning life of the basin.

  Even as he embraced the energy of the Zioruluc, he fought his desires. The wild, mad urge to give into the spirit of ever-abundant life whispered to him, pushing him to spend his last few minutes of breath at a breakneck pace. Throw wisdom to the winds and be one with it.

  The Zioruluc’s lure, as sure a net as the vines that bound the thicket.

  Dragos did not forget what he was there for. Starlace, nothing more. Emil’s insane grin surfaced in his memory, the boy’s body slipping down into the green mass. His brother had become one with this place, and he wasn’t willing to do the same.

  He would leave the basin, the effervescent awareness of the living things around him would be diminished, and he would live on. His resolve hit the wild energy, buckling its call. Taming its demand.

  Hints of the rocky springs beyond the tree flashed between the moving vines and raced for it. He bobbed on the tops of bushes that snatched at his feet, balanced on thick corded paths made by blackbrier, sprinted past pale flowers that turned their petals his way, fluttering in the wake of his run.

  He slid down a thick branch briefly exposed. Leaves slithered along his legs as he bunched them and jumped to grab a thorny vine. He used his momentum to swing with it down toward the barren, mineral-crusted rocks. His feet hit, and he stumbled, fought not to pitch straight into the shallow pool, heels slipping on the grit.

  For a terrible second, arms windmilling, he balanced on the edge of the largest pool. The waters rolled gently, the iridescent shimmer gleaming with argent rings. Starlace. To fall facefirst into that—he desperately did not want to know what it would be like.

  Something in the peddler’s box shifted with the fling of his shoulder, and he lurched backward with a gasp.

  The air shifted behind him; his only warning. He twisted, slashing with a fist. Skin tingling, he’d sensed the tendril of a vine and acted. The severed end fell, curled, and dissolved into the pool almost instantly.

  The rocky mouth of the pool’s edges was what he wanted, where the water occasionally lapped and left deposits of starlace. Water evaporated, but starlace didn’t. He crept along the edge, keeping his feet on the bare stone, which even the plants dared not go.

  Dragonflies buzzed past as he bent, squinting in the too-bright light. He took his box off his back and found an untouched vial, sealed in wax. He broke the seal and bent to a tiny pit in the crusted stone. A few drops of quivering liquid silver sat, glowing upon a divot.

  “Intra,” he murmured, willing it to shiver its way into the mouth of the vial.

  Lightning fast, his arm flashed up, slicing a fat honeybee in two. Its corpse fell beside him and sizzled into ash that disappeared. The starlace wiggled on the edge of the vial. Would it be enough?

  There was more, but, the longer he stayed, the more wild he felt. His muscles begged to move. His lungs grasped for more air than they could hold. There wasn’t enough food and drink in the world to satiate the sucking hunger within him.

  Before he’d been captured by the Luminatori, he’d known hunger and thirst, but he’d always found something. Eventually. In their cage, it had been ten times worse than that. Despair and pain, thirst and hunger were amplified by the inability to move.

  This was an opposite plight. But if he ate of the berries hanging lush all around, drank from the pool, he’d be consumed as surely as he consumed them. He was free to move as he liked, but the perils of it threatened at all sides.

  One wrong step. A single moment of letting whimsy take hold. He’d be gone.

  Dragos found another shimmering glob of starlace a few paces away, and whispered the word that lured it into his vial. What he gathered was not quite what he’d lost, but it would do. He still had to escape the basin.

  Standing on the edge of the pool, he ducked the swing of a vine and surveyed his retreat. To leave meant to let go of the infusion of strength he felt, the ecstasy that welled unnaturally within his chest. He never wanted to leave.

  The dull and aching world was just beyond, ready to steal the vibrancy he’d entered. Mist eddied around him, flashing in the sun overhead. The air burned in his lungs, desperate to be used.

  He let himself remember. The day his cohort came played out as he remembered. All the preparations and warnings, and then Mirel had snatched at Emil, who slipped through her fingers and launched himself into the thicket after a dazzling butterfly. It had not done more than draw a crease to her brow. And then she spoke.

  She’d said as she pointed to the path they’d made, “There can be no hesitancy. You must be able to let go, or you won’t leave this place.”

  Chinhua and Zgavra waited for him.

  “I release the need,” Dragos murmured, letting go of the memory and the desire to stay and soak in the power of the Zioruluc. The mists thinned around him. A shifting braid of briar wrestled with itself on the edge of the thicket. “I use it to escape it. I remain—Dragos of the Cohort of Owls.”

  The oneness that pushed in on him clung to his flesh and thrilled his heart, but it did not hold him. He would sever the attachment with cold detachment. The vial was stoppered and carefully lodged into his box, which he slung over his shoulders and firmly fastened.

  Dragos surged towards the slithering thicket and vaulted, talons biting into the squirming mass of ever-growth, iron blades slickening with sap once again. The power in his limbs surged, channeling the energy of the mists and he ran as fleet as a water bug over the rippling surface of a river, the deep springing of his footing threatening with every step to dump him into a fall through the leaves, and inevitable demise.

  Goat-sure with every step, he took a fearless leap over a section of the thicket that had no vines, grasping a burst of branches to swing again to a new section of the binding net. He landed, foot slipping, dipping into sprigs. Before the realization even hit, he was bounding away, tearing his leg out of the grasping tendrils, leaving his boot behind.

  “Futui!” He shouted, the bite of thorns digging into wounds barely healed. The plants reacted to the wound like wolves to an injured fawn, and a wave of bramble rose, surging toward the splatters of blood he left behind.

  Dragos pushed himself harder, racing the tendrils that snatched at his bandaged foot, running along a thick length of bark. The thicket thinned. The trail was just beyond. Heart pounding, he sprinted, slipped, and lunged to fling himself to the ground.

  Though the fall wasn’t much further than he was tall, his elbow smashed against the phlox carpet. His body followed in an awkward crumble, shoulder and head hitting something immovable. Bare rock.

  Disorienting sparkles danced across his vision as slender tendrils curled around his clenched fists. He barely noticed their dewy touch. His ears rang. The pain knocked the breath out of him as the vines that chased him wound around his leg.

  His senses were dulled to the impending doom.

  Umbregrin: The spirit river of darkness and entropy. Without balance, it can cause overwhelming despair, blindness, madness, and terrible decay. The dark spirit river. Like the concept of yin and yang., The Umbregrin is the yin spirit river, which balances the pulse of the world.

  Ziorluc: The spirit river of light and growth. Without balance, it can cause overwhelming bliss, blindness, madness, and overgrowth in overabundance.

  Zmeu: a form of dragon. A shapeshifter that travels between the world of the living and other realms. They are known to steal fair maids to be their wives. Suffers great hubris. Very powerful monster given to chaos, born of the Umbregrin. Solomonari wizards ride them when controlling weather patterns.

  Intra: Enter.

  Luminatori: An order of monks that worship the light.