by Alex Aster
“Then that’s the first step to finding the Night Witch.”
“Brilliant,” Melda said, looking surprised. Her nose then pointed toward the ceiling. “If you’re right about this storybook being a sort of map, that is.” She turned to Engle. “Well, you fancy yourself as an animal expert. Where on Emblem do we find this snake?”
Engle bit at the side of his lip and made a low grunting sound. “Well, the hydroclops is an amphibian, and it needs a wet, swamp-like environment—its scales need to be moistened every few hours. They don’t do well in direct sunlight, either. Their giant eyes must be quite sensitive to it…” He looked deep in thought. “I’d say we’d find the creature in a heavily shaded, extremely wet area. A tropical one.”
“Somewhere like this?” Melda said. Her finger hovered over a place on the map northeast of Cristal Town, painted vibrant green. A rain forest called Zura.
“Exactly like that.”
Melda’s smug expression faltered. She blinked a few times too many. “From my understanding, rain forests are filled with all sorts of…murderous specimens,” she said. “Can’t we just go around it, to the next stop?” She cleared her throat. “For logistical reasons, of course.”
Tor wished they could. He had thought of the same thing. “Given our time constraints”—his gaze drifted toward his shortened lifeline—“going around Zura will take too long. Going through is the fastest way.” Melda still did not look convinced. “Even if we figured out the Night Witch’s castle’s location and skipped everything else, it would be a bad idea to veer from the storyteller’s path. The monsters from these stories are terrible enough, but at least we know what we’ll be dealing with. If we go any other way, we could encounter creatures we’ve never heard of, ones we don’t know how to get past.”
“Tor, if we go toward all of these Cuentos beasts, then we’re dead! There’s no way we can—”
“Melda,” Tor said steadily. “We’re dead if we don’t try.” The truth of that statement made his throat go dry.
“Very well,” Engle said, getting up from his chair and rubbing his backside. They had been seated on the tiny bar stools for quite some time. He smiled, looking not the least bit worried. In fact, he looked downright excited. “Let’s go monster hunting.”
* * *
Before leaving Cristal, Melda stopped in front of a shop at the edge of town. “We’re going to need something,” she said, turning to Engle with her hand outstretched. “May I see your snake statue?”
He looked horrified and shot a protective hand into his pocket. “What for?”
“We don’t have any dobbles left. I’m going to try to make another trade.”
Engle took a few steps back. “Oh no you’re not, not with my figurine.”
Melda gave him a look. “Don’t act so attached. You were ready to part with it for a half dozen donuts in Zeal.”
Engle squinted. “Are you trading it for food?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t think so.”
Melda crossed her arms and sighed like an impatient teacher getting ready to explain a lesson for the fifth time. “The only way we make it across this island is with a compass.” She pointed to a particularly nice one in the shop window. “So, again, I’m going to need that statue.”
Engle swallowed. “We can’t trade it,” he stammered. “How—how are we going to know if we’re in danger?”
“We’re chasing monstrous creatures across a land we know almost nothing about, in order to find a witch.” She took a breath. “I think it’s safe to say that for the next few days, we’ll always be in danger.”
Melda was right. They needed a compass. Tor gave Engle a sharp nod, and his friend bit his lip. “Fine,” he said, handing the snake statue over while looking in the opposite direction.
“Thank you very much,” Melda said, feigning gratitude. “Let’s hope this piece of junk is worth something.” She skipped away before Engle could yell anything after her.
She was back a minute later.
“Turns out your little figurine was worth a lot more than we thought, outside of the city of Zeal. Got a compass and this light bulb.” An orb sat on her palm, enchanted with light stolen right from the sun.
She handed it to Engle to hold, and he looked a little less miserable.
They set off into the woods in the northeast direction, leaving the village and its people behind.
Engle scraped his teeth against a piece of bread from the pub, trying to make it last longer. “Hard as a rock,” he said, then looked over at Melda and Tor. “Let me know if you don’t want yours.” He continued to make scraping noises over the next half hour, until he gave up and shoved the rest of the roll right into his mouth. It cracked so loudly that Tor wondered if Engle had chipped a tooth. “How far are we?” he asked.
It was late morning, and the sun was beginning to be uncomfortably bright. The pale, sparse trees did little to block its rays. Tor’s head felt like it was on fire, and the spot on the very top of his skull was especially tender.
He looked down at the map. “Should only be another hour or so.”
Engle groaned. Now he held the block of cheese. “If only one of us was a telecorp, right? That would be a lightning emblem to have… We wouldn’t even have to walk, we could just teleport everywhere, even a few feet away.”
He looked at Melda like he expected her to respond. She didn’t.
“We need to move faster,” Tor said. He wanted to add that Melda’s slug-like pace wasn’t doing them any favors, but didn’t want to be the recipient of another one of her frosty glares.
They took turns carrying the backpack, which had been made heavy by their map, the book, food, and dagger.
Dagger. Thinking about its purpose made chills creep down Tor’s spine.
He jumped, startled, as Melda yelled out.
“These are moraberries,” she shouted from a few yards away, reaching toward a spiky shrub. “We read about them once, Tor, remember? They’re quite valuable to the Balayas, based in a village to the south, I believe. Makes up almost their entire currency.” Tor, as a matter of fact, did not remember. Which was probably because he had never read the assignment in the first place.
Melda picked dozens of the purple fruits, their pale, sickly color hardly looking like food to Tor. Actually, it looked as though they had soured ages ago. Engle apparently didn’t care about their strange shade, because he grabbed five at once and threw them all into his mouth. His eyes immediately bulged. “These are sweeter than rubies,” he declared, then plucked off more, until the entire bush was bare. Then, he reached toward Melda’s stash, and she pulled them away, carefully placing the berries into a worn-looking handkerchief. “These are for later.”
Engle looked upset until he turned back around. “Whoa.”
Tor saw nothing but rows of the same pale trees. A few minutes later, however, he discovered what sharp-eyed Engle had been admiring.
At the forest’s edge sat a rolling field of pasty flowers. They were every color of the rainbow, but slightly more muted than what they would see in Estrelle. Tor admitted that though they looked strange, drained of color like a tapestry left too long in the sun, they were beautiful in their own way. He had never thought of Melda as the flower-picking type, but there she was, grabbing as many as she could, until she held a large bouquet. She tied the stems together, expertly twisting them into an elaborate knot, then put them into his backpack.
“Saving the color for later,” she explained. “For when we enter the Shadows and there’s no color at all.”
Before long, the flowers disappeared, covered by grass so long and lush it looked like combed-over fur. It grazed their ankles and trembled gently in the breeze.
“Here we go,” Engle said as they approached a line of trees thick and tall like a rampart wall. Their trunks reached two hundred feet in
to the air, making Tor feel about the size of a fire ant. “Being alive was nice.”
“Being alive was nice,” Tor repeated, and they stepped inside.
8
Zura
The first thing that struck Tor about the rain forest was the lack of sunlight—one moment they were drowning in gold, and the next, every ounce of radiance was ripped away. He craned his neck and did not see a single pocket of light shining down, the sun wholly blocked by treetop canopies that merged to form a ceiling, like thousands of umbrellas pressed together.
Then, there was the silence. No person lived here, Tor thought, that was for sure. He wondered if perhaps the animals had found their own faraway, hidden patches of the forest, or if they were simply watching the three of them as they stepped over creeping vines with the care of true tourists.
They walked for several minutes, the quiet only finally interrupted by what sounded like the howl of a strange bird. No, not a bird…something else.
“That’s a monkey,” Engle said. He squinted and turned in all directions, searching the branches. “There!”
Tor strained his eyes, but saw nothing. It must have been too far away.
He wondered what else he couldn’t see.
“Get down!” Engle yelled, dragging his friends to the ground. Part of Tor’s cheek stung where it made contact with a jagged pebble in the dirt, but he did not feel to see if it was bleeding.
A bird with a wingspan the size of three houses had nosedived through the trees, and now hovered just above them, gray-blue feathers looking like melted moonlight. The creature’s neck extended two yards away from its body, writhing unnaturally from side to side.
“Don’t move,” Engle whispered from his place next to Tor, all three of them pressed against the ground. Tor’s head was turned to the side, just inches away from a talon the size of a boat anchor, sharp enough to tear right through him.
The creature floated over them for a few minutes, the beating of its wings producing gusts of wind that rustled their hair and blew dirt into their faces. And then, with an angry squawk, it left.
They waited a while before getting up, as Engle warned them it might return. He whispered that birds of prey often pretended to leave, so that their victims came out of hiding. Then, just when their target believed the coast was clear, the beast would swoop in for the kill.
It was almost half an hour later before they finally got up, and Melda was still shaking.
“I’ve never seen… That thing… Its claws! Did you see its…” She trailed her nails through her hair, making it even more knotted on the top, hyperventilating enough that Tor thought she might just fall over. Melda turned to Engle with wide, blinking eyes. “If it wasn’t for you,” she said. “We’d be skewered!”
Engle shrugged in response. “It’s a little too early for us to die a painful death, don’t you think?”
Tor nodded. And, even though all he wanted was to run straight out of the rain forest, he started through the tangle of trees once more. “What was that thing?”
“Harpy owl,” Engle said. “Nasty creatures. Known for cutting their prey clean in half with their talons. There’s likely a nest of them somewhere in the treetops.”
Nest? It would have to be as big as their entire village square to hold a mess of beasts like that, Tor thought.
“Well, good thing it’s still daytime,” Melda said. “Wouldn’t want to be running across the likes of that in the dead of night.”
* * *
Very quickly, day turned to dusk. With darkness came various nighttime sounds; Tor imagined many of the animals in the rain forest were nocturnal—some creature howled at the moon, another made a noise like a fist knocking against a door, and then there was the animal that sounded unlike anything Tor had ever heard. Almost like a sneeze, or a strange sort of cough. He wondered if even Rosa could mimic these odd creatures.
But it wasn’t just the animals that were peculiar… No, even the plants and trees looked like they belonged on a different planet. Every time he turned around, there was something new: a long petal that curled and uncurled like a scroll; a sunflower that stood as tall as his house; an apple tree so small it could fit into his palm; a plant with leaves that looked very much like red lips; one that seemed to have a row of teeth…
And then they came upon a flower with a bulb bigger than Tor’s entire body. It was closed up for the night, pointed toward the sky. He wondered how it lived with so little sunlight, then lifted a finger to touch its tip, curious.
Suddenly, it bloomed.
Its petals opened as large as palm fronds, long and thick and smooth. But the plant’s size was, strangely, its least unusual attribute.
The flower was glowing. The purple and green dots that spotted its body shined brightly through the darkness.
“What in the—” Before Melda could finish her sentence, the world around them changed. All at once, almost every herb and shrub, down to the weeds, illuminated in fluorescent colors.
And it was not just the plants.
A monkey swung right in front of Tor’s face, holding on to a shining green vine, and it had spots of glowing pigment, a string of bright yellow dots trailing down its curled-up tail. Even the tree roots, which ran across the dirt in spiderweb patterns, glowed green.
Engle threw his hands up, exasperated. “We’re officially the most boring things in this rain forest,” he said before breaking into a wicked grin. “Let’s change that.”
He took off at a run. Tor followed, and then Melda, who yelled at their backs.
“This is dangerous!”
They kept going.
“We need to consult the map!”
Tor did not so much as turn around.
“Fine, I hope you both get eaten by a giant glowing cockroach!”
They jumped over vines, narrowly avoided smacking into trees, and ducked just in time to dodge a ten-foot-long spider, whose legs shined bright blue. Engle led the way, his vision no doubt searching for which direction held the greatest wonders. He did not stop until they reached a lake.
It was covered in giant water lilies with curved-up edges, big enough to sleep on. They floated in place, rocking gently from side to side.
Melda seemed to know what Engle was about to do before he took a single step forward. “Don’t you dare!” she yelled.
But he did anyway.
Engle jumped onto the first giant water lily, and Tor watched it turn purple, for just a moment. When his friend moved to another lily, it, too, changed shade, then settled back to green. Engle jumped merrily from one to the next, until he was halfway across the pond. “Come on!”
Tor shrugged, and leapt forward, landing right in the middle of the lightweight plant. It drifted a few feet, and, when it was close enough, he jumped to the next, watching it bloom violet. For a moment he wondered what lurked in the dark pool below. It seemed like forever since he’d gone for a swim…
He froze. A long, slithering creature moved through the water beneath him, its back a myriad of neon shades.
“They’re electric eels!” Engle yelled from a few lilies ahead. “Nutty, right?”
Tor turned back toward shore, only to see Melda sticking a pointed toe toward one of the floating plants, the rest of her body firmly on the ground. “Jump, or you’ll tip it over,” he called out. He could see the fear painted across her face even from far away. “It’s fun,” he added, surprising himself with the patience in his voice. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
Before he knew it, Melda scurried back a few paces, then broke into a run. She jumped and landed directly atop one of the lilies on her hands and knees, with enough force that she went soaring down the stream, past Tor.
Melda turned and gave him a sheepish smile.
They all ran side by side, leaping across the pond, the lilies glowing in a purple path behind them. Flo
wers the size of Tor’s family’s dinner table floated at the fringes of the lake, their white, rose-like petals opening wide, as if basking in the limited moonlight.
By the time they made it across, Melda, Tor, and Engle were laughing, holding the sides of their stomachs to keep them from cramping.
“I saw a huge turtle with a red swirl on its shell,” Engle said.
“Oh yeah? I saw a fish with skin like a tree,” Melda countered.
“A bark-back bass?” Engle asked.
Tor grinned. “Say that three times fast.”
“Bark-back bass, bark-back bass, bark-back bass,” Engle said excitedly, as he rushed back to the edge of the water, likely to catch a glimpse of it.
Tor spotted a strange, transparent-looking plant a few feet away. It laid on its side, long and hollow, as large as a tunnel. He stepped inside, and the bottom crunched, like the crinkle of dead leaves. It was as if the plant had scales, or at least the imprint of them.
“Do you know what plant this is?” he called out, turning to face Engle.
When his friend saw the tunnel, his face lit up in delight—then quickly dimmed. “It’s…um…not a plant.” He gulped. “It’s skin.”
Tor’s brow ruffled. “Skin?” He poked at the substance, and tore a hole right through. “What kind of—”
Oh.
He jumped out of the tube as quickly as he could, stepping his way back toward his friends. If he was right, that was snakeskin, and there was only one serpent big enough to have shed a hull he could have walked through.
“Do you hear that?” Melda asked in a tiny voice.
Tor did hear that; he knew the sound better than most.
Something was moving through the water.
A serpent swam toward them with the speed of a lightning bolt, brightly colored diamond shapes running down the length of its spine. Within seconds, it crossed the entire pond. No—it was almost as long as the entire pond. It had simply surfaced from depths deep below…