Night fell like a sickness.

  The last light of day slipped behind the trees in a slow, smothered death, and the jungle swallowed everything...no stars, no moon just blackness thick and absolute.

  Then came the rain.

  It wasn’t violent, not a storm that roared or tore through the canopy, no thunder or lightning, but it was cold, too cold, a slow steady drizzle that felt unnatural in its constancy. Every drop seemed calculated to sap warmth, to remind him that this place was not meant for human blood.

  He sat huddled beneath the crude lean-to, listening to the slow percussion of water on leaves, branches, earth and roof. His shelter held, miraculously, the vines had tightened with moisture, sealing cracks between the leaves for now, at least the rain stayed out...but the cold got in.

  He drew his legs close, wrapping his arms around them, muscles ached from strain and fatigue his mind spun with the weight of everything he couldn’t understand.

  And still the fire burned.

  The bundle of wood he’d dried in the sun had taken the spark, somehow. He struck the sword against the shield again and again until a feeble orange glow flickered to life. It was pitiful, fragile, but it was a defiance, a small light in a vast, uncaring dark.

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  He stared into it, hypnotized.

  It wasn’t just warmth, it was memory, somewhere in that glow was a life he’d lost, somewhere behind the curtain of heat and ash, a name...his name, waited to be remembered.

  But it didn’t come...Instead came the sounds.

  They were soft, rhythmic, too patterned to be wind and too hollow to be animal. Sometimes they sounded like breathing, and sometimes like whispering in a language no man should know. Always far away, just far enough to remain beyond reach, beyond reason...was the jungle playing tricks on his mind?

  That thought was what disturbed him most...If something hunted, it should draw nearer, if it watched it should reveal itself, but the sounds lingered, night after night, just outside understanding as though they didn’t want to catch him.

  As though they were waiting, waiting for what? Was he supposed to do something, was he being tested, he had only questions and his mind was starting to fail him.

  His train of thoughts jumped to the traps, he now doubted they’d work.

  Not just because they were crude but because there was nothing here to catch. That thought had haunted him all day the trees bore no fruit, the soil hid no roots, the branches no nests, no footprints, no birdsong.

  It was an ecosystem that shouldn’t function and yet, here it stood, vast and endless, a cage carved from green bones and silence...what power kept it alive, what fueled it to expand...an image of the mountains crept into his mind. He would find answers there, he was sure now, but without food there was no chance he would make it.

  He would check the traps in the morning, if they were empty, and he was certain they would be, he would have to make for the clearing to the west.

  A risk, but he couldn’t stay here anymore, because it felt like something wanted him to linger.

  He curled near the fire, eyes lost in the embers as they danced in strange shapes of old forgotten spirits.

  When he closed his eyes, he saw flashes, broken images behind his lids, faces, steel, screams, a serpent, writhing, stone bursting into white powder. None of it held...none of it made sense.

  Rain tapped on the leaves above like bony fingers.

  The jungle exhaled and he drifted, as the embers played in the dark….