The shelter was a pocket of silent misery. The survivors huddled together, their shared warmth a small comfort against the chilling damp and the greater cold of their grief. The wounded moaned softly, their injuries festering in the humid air. The children did not cry; they stared with wide, empty eyes into the gloom. Hunger was a gnawing beast in every stomach.
Diego watched them, the weight of their suffering pressing down on him. He was their leader now, a title he had never wanted, earned through the currency of loss. He had led them to this temporary safety, but what came next? They had no food, no clean water, and their home was a graveyard patrolled by a monster.
"The forest gave you a gift, boy."
He turned. Elara, the old elder, was beside him, her face a roadmap of wrinkles, her dark eyes holding a depth of knowledge that seemed as old as the trees themselves. She placed a frail, leathery hand on his arm.
"I saw it," she continued, her voice a low rasp. "When the serpent came, the vines did not move for a chieftain's son. They moved for the forest's son. It is an old story, one my grandmother told me. The embrace of the wood. A soul who can hear the world's heartbeat."
Diego looked down at his own hands, half-expecting to see them glowing or covered in leaves. They were just hands, stained with mud and dried blood. "It was... an accident. A fluke."
"There are no flukes in the jungle," Elara said simply. "Only purpose. Your people are hungry. They are thirsty. They look to you. So, listen again."
Her words, simple and certain, cut through his despair. He looked at the faces of his tribe, at a small girl shivering in her mother's arms. Hope was not a feeling; it was a duty.
He found a dry spot at the back of the overhang, sat, and closed his eyes. He pushed away the grief, the fear, the crushing weight of responsibility, and focused on the low, constant thrum he had felt ever since the attack. He did not command it. He did not plead with it. As Elara had said, he simply listened.
The world dissolved.
His consciousness expanded beyond the confines of his body. He was no longer just Diego; he was a point of awareness in a vast, interconnected web of life. He felt the slow, patient life force of the great trees, the frantic, scurrying energy of insects in the leaf litter, the cool, steady flow of water deep within the earth. It was a symphony of a million different voices, and for the first time, he could understand the music.
He could also feel the dissonance. Pockets of screeching, chaotic energy that were the mutated creatures, their life force a corrupted, painful scream in the great symphony. He recoiled from them and sought out the quiet, harmonious melodies of the "before."
And he found it.
Not with his eyes, but with this new, impossible sense, he saw a place. A small, hidden glade, protected by a ring of ancient banyan trees. In the glade, a cluster of cupuaçu trees, their branches heavy with ripe, untainted fruit. Beside them, a spring bubbled up from the earth, its water singing a song of pure, clean life. It was close. A half-hour's journey, if he knew the path.
Joy, the first he had felt in days, surged through him. He had found a way.
Emboldened, he pushed his senses further, back toward the ruin of his home. He needed to know. The symphony there was broken, replaced by a single, dominant, hateful noise. It was the serpent. He could feel its cold, reptilian hunger, its searing rage at the wounds the vines had inflicted upon its hide. It was circling the wreckage of their village, a predator guarding its kill, its presence a vast, suffocating stain on the fabric of the jungle.
Diego's eyes snapped open. The dank air of the shelter filled his lungs. The sounds of his suffering people returned. The vision was gone, but the knowledge remained, as solid and real as the stone beneath him.
He stood, his body no longer slumping with the weight of despair, but straight and taut with a newfound purpose. He had found sustenance for his people. And he had found their enemy