TIME Early August, deep in Green Hell LOCATION The jungle approach to Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
Crocodiles, stirges, and jaguars in quick succession – the deep jungle wasn’t slowing down, and Borthanza was still somewhere ahead of them, further south than any of the Agents had ever travelled.
The jaguars came at night, close enough that the watch barely had warning – a cough of a grunt from the treeline, then a growl, before the flickering firelight picked out two sets of yellow-gold eyes, one pair to the left of camp and the other to the right, already circling.
WHAT HAPPENED
Lord Valden caught them on the road out of Arn Griishank to settle an account of his own – he’d worked out exactly where Raven’s borrowed longsword and shortsword had come from, and rather than make an issue of it, insisted on trading two small diamonds for the pair, along with a blunt warning about trusting people above his own pay grade too far.
Krusha needed diamond dust for a restorative working on Raven before nightfall regardless, so the deal settled itself without much haggling.
Waiting at the inn was their guide for the crossing – Beloq, a weathered, foul-mouthed local with a harsh Scottish accent and no patience for pleasantries, already picking at a burnt fragment of door frame left over from the donjon fire.
His opinion of the Indegee, once asked, came without much comfort attached: centipedes as long as an arm, spiders the size of a bin, biting insects ranging from pinhead to fist-sized, and territory that swallowed loggers, miners and drug runners alike without complaint.
Don’t touch anything, don’t eat anything, watch your step and what’s above you, cover up, and treat every cut like it’s already septic – that was the whole of his advice, delivered over a tankard before breakfast.
Krusha called on KemerLexi for what protection could be spared against the heat and humidity before they set off south into the treeline, following Beloq’s lead – the last easy ground any of them would see for the better part of a week.
The days blurred into a grinding routine of heat, insects, and Beloq’s steady, foul-mouthed commentary on all of it – useful for spotting danger before it found them, less useful for anyone’s nerves.
The terrain climbed steadily as they pushed further south, the dense lowland jungle giving way, by slow degrees, to rockier, more broken ground as the shadow of distant mountains grew on the horizon.
Word from Beloq, and from what little the party could piece together of the local geography, put them on the northern edge of territory nobody – not loggers, not drug runners, not even the Fekratt – cared to enter.
Whatever held that ground kept to itself, and kept everyone else out by simple, effective reputation.
KemerLexi’s blessing kept the worst of the heat bearable, but bearable wasn’t the same as comfortable – full armour in that humidity turned every hour of hacking through the trail into a losing fight against their own sweat, and by the first evening all three Agents were soaked through and staggering more than walking.
Ash found that out the hard way.
A stumble into a spine-covered bush loosed a mass of fire ants across her hands and neck, each sting landing like a hot needle driven into the flesh; she bolted blind through the undergrowth trying to shake them off and ran straight into a curled leaf sheltering a swarm of biting flies instead, which promptly finished the job – crawling into her ears, nose and mouth before Raven physically hauled her clear and started slapping the rest away by hand.
Beloq, unbothered, volunteered that the locals tied captives to trees for exactly that reason, and that it was probably best to leave well alone from here on.
The ground turned to standing mud by the second day, thick with roots and leeches, before it opened onto a dark, weed-choked river some two hundred feet across.
Krusha caught the telltale ripple a half-second too late – a huge reptilian shape exploded out of the shallows and clamped down on him at the waist, dragging him under before anyone could react.
He wrestled the jaws open underwater and hauled himself back to the bank bleeding but breathing while Ash put the creature to sleep rather than press the fight further; the crossing itself, via a fallen tree wedged between boulders, went considerably better, though nobody came out the other side dry.
That evening brought a fresh problem.
Something had already been feeding nearby – a gutted, exsanguinated blood monkey dripping from the canopy turned out to be the calling card of a half-dozen stirges roosting overhead, and they dropped on the party in a swarm, latching on with barbed legs and feeding tubes and draining blood by the pulse.
Ash in particular came away visibly weakened before the Agents cut, burned and shocked the last of them out of the air, showering themselves in the process.
Camouflaged vipers dropped out of the canopy on the third day, striking before anyone saw them coming – Krusha took the worst of the poison, and it was Ash who put the snakes to sleep before they could strike again.
Night on watch brought the jaguars the whole trip had been building toward – a pair of them, one dragging Ash bodily off her sleeping platform before Krusha and Raven were fully awake.
Raven opened a gash across its neck with her sword while Krusha, still grappling with the second cat, landed a solid blow to its ribs; Ash, freed enough to act, finished her attacker with a jolt of lightning that left the clearing smelling of burnt fur.
The second cat, bleeding freely, let go and vanished into the dark rather than press its luck.
What came after was stranger.
The jungle opened without warning onto a scene of total devastation – a circular scar nearly a mile across, trees flattened outward in a ring from some central point like spokes from a hub, everything inside scorched and stripped bare.
At the exact centre stood a lone stand of trees, branchless but still upright, untouched by whatever had levelled everything around them.
Beloq took it in stride.
“Well, good news is the terrain should be a bit easier to navigate, eh?”
Nobody had a better explanation for it than his – though Lord Valden’s own confused talk of a “meteor shower” the night of the donjon fire suddenly seemed a great deal less like charmed nonsense and a great deal more like something he’d actually seen with his own eyes.
The easier ground didn’t last.
Something bright green, bipedal, and considerably faster than anything with that many teeth had any right to be broke from cover on both flanks at once, raking at Raven and Krusha with wicked hind claws before Ash put both creatures to sleep and Raven finished the job.
Backtracking the trail they’d come from led to their actual den – a churned, blood-soaked clearing littered with bone, meat, and the shredded remains of whatever else hadn’t made it this far south.
A day on, a humanoid shape glimpsed resting in a hammock strung high in the canopy turned out to be the first sign they were close.
Beloq recognised the practice before he recognised the village – the dead, desiccated and lipless over a set of sharp, pointed teeth, laid to rest above the ground rather than in it, to keep them clear of whatever the locals believed moved underneath.
he called it, translating roughly to “the lifted dead.”
By evening the trees gave way to a field of chest-high grass, a scatter of round huts at the base of a hill, and the plateau of Borthanza itself rising unmistakably beyond it.
It didn’t stay that way for long.
Deeper in, the jungle’s usual chorus of insects and birds gave way to something quieter and far more deliberate – watchers in the canopy, moving with a grace and silence nothing human could match.
The Agents had found the edge of elvish territory, whether they’d meant to or not.