The Wilds

It’s the quiet here that tips you off first: all is not well within these trees. One must hope that the secrets entangled here do not hope to add you to their ranks, for it is a long way back down the cliffside behind you. You can no longer even hear the laps of water against their rocky base as you move through the dense greenery and long waving strands of lush grass that make up the forest’s floor. The earth crests and falls, the trees sometimes seeming to slide away from their canopies as the sun makes everything glow with a gauzy softness. Every so often, the thin mist that rolls through this place parts enough to reveal fragments of enormous skeletons. A lizard like mandible with monstrous petrified fangs bigger your tallest friend; a foot left behind in the dirt, the imprint left there deep enough for a bath; and largest of all, buried deep in the wood, in a ribcage the size of the throne room, grown over by moss and lichen, reclaimed by the wild things there. Every so often, you swear you see yellow eyes peering out at you from amongst the tree trunks, before you blink and their golden hue disappears once more into the silence. No cricket chirps a song, no bird whistles a tune, but when you go to rest your weary body in the evening there’s the unmistakable sound as a creature exhales nearby, watching you slip towards your dreams.