The jungle was no longer home. It was a witness to their grief, its familiar sounds now laced with menace. The constant, drumming rain had finally eased, but the dripping from the canopy sounded like the weeping of a thousand spirits. Diego led the ragged procession of his people, a mere two dozen survivors from a village of over a hundred. The old, the young, the wounded—they followed him in a stunned, silent line, their faces hollowed by shock and loss.
He was no chieftain, not yet. He was just a son who had watched his father die, a boy who had been forced to become a leader in the space of a single, horrifying afternoon. The weight of their gazes was heavier than any log he had ever carried. They looked to him not just for direction, but for hope, and he had none to give.
His own body was a strange and terrifying country. The power that had surged through him to command the vines had receded, but its echo remained. It was a low, constant thrum beneath his skin, a connection to the world around him that was both a miracle and a curse.
When he looked at the ancient trees, he no longer saw just wood and leaf. He could feel the slow, patient pulse of their lifeblood. When he listened to the wind, he could hear a low, mournful sigh that was not the air, but the collective sorrow of the forest itself. The jungle was in pain, enraged by the unnatural things that now festered within it, and its agony resonated within him.
"Diego," a frail voice rasped from behind him. It was Elara, one of the tribe's elders, her face a mask of weary resolve. "We cannot go much further. The children are exhausted. We need shelter."
He knew she was right. He stopped, scanning their surroundings. Everything was wrong. The ferns grew too large, their fronds sharp and serrated like crude blades. The flowers bloomed in colors too vibrant, their pollen hanging in the air like a sweet, cloying poison. He could feel a wrongness in the very soil beneath his feet.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the grim sight of his people, and focused on the thrumming sensation within him. He did not ask the jungle for help. He listened. He felt for a place of peace, a pocket of the "before," a place the corruption had not yet fully touched.
A faint sense of calm, of security, pulled at his senses. It was to the north, up a steep, muddy incline. A cave, perhaps?
"This way," he said, his voice more confident than he felt. "There is a place we can rest."
The climb was arduous. They carried the wounded and helped the elders, their progress painfully slow. Twice, they had to freeze as the ground trembled with the passing of some unseen, colossal creature. But Diego's senses screamed no immediate threat, so they pressed on.
The place he found was a shallow rock overhang, shielded from view by a curtain of unusually thick, moss-covered vines. It wasn't a true cave, but it was dry and defensible. As the survivors collapsed in weary heaps, Diego stood guard at the entrance, his borrowed spear held tight in his hands.
He watched as a hummingbird, its feathers shimmering with an unnatural metallic sheen, drank from a blood-red orchid. The bird's movements were jerky, aggressive, and its beak was needle-sharp. Nothing was as it should be.
He had saved them, for a moment. But this was not a home. This was a hiding place. The monster that had destroyed their village was still out there, and a thousand other new horrors were being born in the mutating depths of the rainforest. His grief was a cold stone in his gut, but something else was growing around it: a hard, fierce resolve. The jungle had answered his call once. It would have to answer it again. For his people, he would become a voice for the forest's rage, and a weapon forged from its pain.