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Chapter 21: Trees
🕑 Added 2025-07-08 18:58:49 +0000 UTCMarco was quickly realizing that the biggest problem at sea wasn’t monsters or pirates like he had expected. It was something much more mundane. It was water and food. Most of the time since he had been sailing, he was running low on water, food, or both. The expedition on 19-H helped, but their stores were once again running low.
Which meant that it was a relief when they finally spotted something other than endless water.
“Is that a reef?” Riv leaned against the railing and pointed. “It looks like a reef.”
“It is, but I’m hoping I can avoid it. No reef goes completely around an island.” Marco hoped what was true in the seas around Gulf Isle was true in this hidden sea too. “We’ll circle around it for a while.”
The island was an odd one. They could see plenty of trees growing peacefully, but just as many knocked down. Dead, withered trees leaned against healthy ones, not quite having reached the soil after uprooting. Others laid so thick near the treeline that the entire ground was bark. Past that point, the trees were so thick and close together, they looked like they’d be hard to walk between.
“What could knock down that many trees? Storms?” Marco guessed.
“Maybe?” Elisa squinted her eyes at the treeline. “It’s just that it doesn’t look like something as uniform as a powerful wind made that happen. The fallen trees are too spotty. Too random.”
“You’re sure?” Riv scowled at the shoreline. “It feels weird.”
“Not sure, but it’s my best guess. Any luck on getting a clear path to the island, Marco?”
“Working on it. I think I see an opening ahead. I think we are small enough to get through it.”
They almost were. Marcos pointed the prow of the boat toward a gap between two jagged outcroppings of coral that rose like teeth from the water. The narrow channel twisted slightly to the left, partially obscured by a patch of low fog clinging to the water.
“Keep it slow,” Riv said as he looked over the side. His voice was taut, one hand resting on his club for comfort. “I’m still not used to standing on a whip while it’s moving. But you’re looking good right now.”
Elisa didn’t respond at all. She was still staring toward the interior of the island, her brow furrowed. A few gulls shrieked above them, the first birds Marco had heard since they left the undead, windless zone they had been trapped in. Otherwise, the air was heavy with silence. Marcos eased them forward, careful on the rudder.
“Current’s a little stronger than I thought it would be,” Marco said. The aft of the boat lightly scraped on some coral as he adjusted the boat away from the grinding until the noise stopped. “You two better keep watch on our clearance. I don’t want to get wedged in here.”
The boat nosed into the fogbank.
It was colder inside the passage than out on open water. The shift was immediate. Riv’s breath plumed, and Elisa pulled her coat tighter.
Marcos turned his head. “We’re through the worst of it, I think. One more sharp turn and — ah, hell.”
“What?”
He didn’t need to answer. What he felt in the prow of the boat a split second before they did was suddenly pushing them upwards and out of the fog.
“We’ve run aground. Or a-reef. However you want to say it. It wasn’t as deep as it looked.”
“Damn. What do we do?” Riv said. “This does not look like a place I want to get stuck in for very long.”
As the boat slid up and brought them higher out of the mist, the island interior came into view. From there, they could see the rest of the cove. The treeline had been strange before. Up close, it was worse.
Trees hadn’t just fallen over. They splintered at strange angles, some pointing skyward like crude spears, others buried halfway into the earth as if hurled by a giant hand. A few looked burned at the tips, scorched black but without any trace of wider fire damage.
Elisa let out a low whistle. “Still think it’s just wind?”
Marco grabbed a mooring rope and jumped off the side of the boat, landing with a splash and sinking several inches before the reef provided footing.
“We’re landing here.” Marco looped the rope around a hooked piece of coral, then repeated the process with whatever other ropes he could attach to both the ship and the reef. “It’s pretty wedged. With the ropes, it should stay still. Tie down the sails, please.”
Riv and Elisa got to work. After a few minutes, the ship was as secure as it could be.
“I don’t think it’s too deep once the reef stops. We can probably walk in from here.” Marcos led the crew towards the island. “Maybe just a bit of swimming. No guarantees.”
“Are we sure we want this particular island?” Riv was rubbing goosebumps flat on his arms. “We could look for one that’s less terrifying.”
“I’m not sure this sea has that kind of thing. Safe islands, I mean.” Elisa shuddered as the fog swirled over the group for a moment, wetting them all with frigid, moist air. “And we need supplies. We just can’t risk going out on the water again yet.”
“Then let's explore,” Marco said. “If it’s the only choice, there’s no use delaying things.”
They ended up having to swim, but not for long. The ocean water was not comfortable, but it wasn’t much colder than the air around the island, either. They were too strong to be hurt by the exposure to the elements themselves anymore, anyway. They hit the sand, patted what water they could out of their gear, and moved forward.
When they got close enough to the trees to take a look, Elisa spent some time walking around the furthest out from the treeline, examining them.
“What took them out?” Riv craned his neck to look at the broken section where a tree had been ripped off its stump. “Should I be afraid?”
“More than one thing. Or at least more than one kind of force. See here?” Elisa reached behind her body and patted the last tree she had examined. “That one was cut, almost like it was clipped by a giant pair of pruning shears. This one was crushed over by weight or force. The wood splintered, see?”
It was hard to miss. For a good two or three feet, the tree had been absolutely demolished, like some giant had pushed on the top of the tree until the bottom came apart. It wasn’t a small amount of damage.
“So no idea, then?”
“I’m afraid not, Riv. Something that could do both of these things, or a group of things that could do them together. Or something and a force of nature.” Elisa pointed with her finger to a large tree that appeared to have been yanked out by the roots, taking several trees with it. “Or that.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Marco shook his head. “We need water. We are better off on food but we need that too, if we can get it. We have to go in.”
“Agreed. Let’s do it.”
The trees were as hard to traverse as they had looked. Where they had fallen down, they made for uneven ground, a sort of broken platform that left the team jumping from trunk to trunk as they slowly balance-beamed their way across the landscape. Where trees hadn’t been uprooted or broken, the growth was so close together it created different problems. The trunks weren’t really growing bark to bark like they had looked from the shore, but they were clogged with brush between them which had to either be cut or bashed out of the way.
Not everything could be cleared. Higher body durability should have gotten rid of the worst of the effects of the thorns and brambles they were stumbling through, but somehow they were picking up just as many little cuts and scrapes as a pre-class Marco would have expected.
“Shouldn’t my constitution be helping here? Even a little?” Marco swatted away a small branch that had ripped away from the undergrowth when one of the thorns had hooked itself especially deep into his skin. “I didn’t do all that leveling just to be taken out by a bush.”
“I can’t think of many scenarios that would cause that. Mostly I’d expect it from… oh, no.”
Elisa’s explanation was cut off as they ducked and wove through a double layer of trees, cutting away brush until they finally got a good look at what lay past them. Inside, there was a massive and almost perfectly square field, dotted here and there by short stone walls arranged in broken layers, In the center was another structure made out of almost the same stone, about the size of the foundation of a good-sized house.
The top of the structure was radiating some kind of magic dome, as clear as glass but tinted just enough that they could clearly see it. Inside, sleeping like little babies, were a dozen slim people, dressed in unfamiliar clothes and with hair trimmed in unfamiliar styles.
“There’s… how?” Riv walked towards the dome as if mesmerized. “This isn’t possible, right? How would they have even gotten here?”
“Same way we did? If they were in a bigger ship and it was night, the reef could have taken it down.”
“I get that, but we didn’t see anything like that. Ships take time to sink, Marco. Wreckage floats for a long time. If something crashed on the reef out there, it would have to have been days ago at least. Probably more like weeks or months.”
“I mean, maybe. I guess. But something else is off here,” Marco said.
“Besides the twenty people sleeping here like nothing’s happening?” Elisa caught herself from tripping over one of the short stone walls as her eyes refused to leave the center of the field. All of them were bothered by this, but it seemed to be hitting her especially hard. “Besides that?”
“Not besides that. Having to do with that. Riv, have you ever fallen asleep sitting up? Against a wall or something?”
“Sure? I do manual labor, Marco. We nap a lot,” Riv said, unsure of where Marco was going with that line of questions.
“I bet, but answer this. When was the last time you woke up in the same position you went to sleep in?” Marco asked.
Riv and Elisa both had a simultaneous moment of shock as they noticed what Marco was talking about. He kept talking while they stared at the group.
“When I was training for my class I had to sleep in a lot of weird places. Remember when I spent two days in that tree trying to max out climbing? So I know something about sleeping. When you fall asleep, you don’t stay in the same position, usually. But look at them. They all sat down and propped themselves up on the side of that dome, or on their elbows, and you can tell they haven’t moved. They aren’t asleep in the normal way.”
“No, they aren’t.” Elisa moved a few steps closer to the edge of the stone platform, which was almost in reach now. “I wouldn’t have noticed it myself. I could tell something felt unnatural, but this…”
“Let’s get them out.” Riv raised his knuckles to rap on the dome. “It doesn’t look so tough…”
“Riv, wait!”
Elisa’s shriek came a moment too late. Riv’s knuckles made contact with the dome, and a moment later, all the sleeping people were flopping down to the group. A collective gasp went up from the group as they all drew a desperate breath at virtually the same time, just before the notifications started hitting Marco and his team.
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