Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

“Is that drumming?” Verran asked nervously. They’d all heard rumors of what dwelled in Chult, the feral monstrosities that had survived for ages hidden in the tangled undergrowth that covered most of the island: yuan-ti, carrion crawlers, purple worms, plaguechanged horrors too terrible to consider.

“The colony is just a mile inland,” Harp assured him. “Once we find the path, we’ll be in and out before nightfall.”

The men spread out along the beach, searching for what should have been seen easily. In his experience, forests were quiet, reverent places crowned by oaks and conifers, where man or elf could walk between the trunks of trees hindered by no more than the occasional blackberry bramble. The Chultan jungle couldn’t be more different than the forests of his childhood. Listening to the distant, unfamiliar sounds, Harp felt as if he was faced with a creature he’d never encountered before. It was vicious and feral with only one purpose—constant growth toward the heavens.

A few paces down the beach, Kitto stood close to the edge of the jungle. With his eyes closed, he held his hands up with palms open to the tangled vegetation.

“Is something there, Kitto?” Harp asked.

“Heat,” Kitto replied.

“Heat coming off the plants?” Sure enough, waves of hot air pulsed against Harp’s sweaty face. “What do you think

it is?”

“The life of the jungle,” Kitto told him, as the other men joined them. They waited there for a moment, feeling the flow of warm air against their faces, listening to the call of an unknown creature, and staring at the vegetation as if an easy passage through the mass of thorns and leaves might reveal itself.

“How bad can it be?” Harp said, mostly to himself. “We’ll cut through, and maybe the way will get clearer as we get to higher ground.”

“There’s higher ground?” Verran asked.

“It’s hard to see from here, but there are mountains inland,” Boult said. “If we’d sailed from the north instead of the east, you would have been able to see the lay of the land.”

Boult pulled out his short sword, and the other men followed his example. But it was Harp who took the first swing at the vines, quickly hacking a man-sized hole and stepping into the humid darkness. The foliage was thick above his head, blocking out most of the sunshine, with just the occasional patch of sky showing through the leaves.

“Stay close,” Harp said over his shoulder.

The dull whack of his blade against the woody stalks and the rustle of leaves made talking to the other men difficult. The vines seemed to twist out of the way of his blade and regroup after each stroke. The farther Harp moved into the thicket, the slower he moved. The branches scratched his face, and he stumbled on the uneven ground. He couldn’t help but think of Liel and wondered how anyone could make a home in a place as inhospitable as the jungles of Chult.

Harp remembered Liel standing in a grove of ash trees on Gwynneth Isle, shortly after they’d escaped the Marderward . Although Liel had healed his injuries and fever, Harp had still been weak, and the short walk to the grove had sapped most of his newfound energy. Leaning against a tree to catch his breath, he’d watched Liel turn in slow circles staring up at the leaves, while the shifting pattern of light and shadow played across her face. She’d turned to smile at him. Her green eyes seemed to glow in the gathering twilight, and there was a pink tinge on her cheeks.

“The forest makes me powerful,” she said.

There was no arrogance or pride in her words, and for an instant he envied her. Liel could convert the very structures of nature into magic, while he was bound by his mortality, his commonplace mind, and his workman’s hands. But his envy vanished, and he felt awe that the beautiful creature could have cast her eyes on him and liked what she saw. The memory of Liel gave him hope that she might have survived her time in Chult. Who knew how the wildness of the jungle would affect Liel? It might keep her safe and cast her mind places he couldn’t imagine.

“There has to be an opening soon,” Harp said over his shoulder as he hacked through a snarl of sticky vines that reminded him of spiderwebs. “It can’t be so thick all the way to the colony.”

When Boult didn’t answer, he turned around, but the rest of his crew was nowhere to be seen. He couldn’t see the beach, and the passageway that he’d cut through the underbrush seemed to have reverted to its original state. Surrounded by a tangle of plants, Harp suddenly felt disoriented. He tried to listen for the ocean, but he couldn’t hear the crashing of the waves through the dense plants. Harp resumed his hacking, moving slowly back to the beach—he hoped—but without making much progress. If his boyhood forest was a cathedral, the Chultan forest was a demon’s playground.

The air around him was hot and close, and he felt dizzy as if he had been working without water in the hot sun for hours. He realized he had no sense of how long he’d been alone in the thicket. The sunlight world of sand and crashing waves was long gone as Harp struggled against the stranglehold of plants.

“Boult!” he shouted, surprised at how little his voice carried. He might have been yelling from inside a closet for all the sound he made. “Kitto!”

He attacked the vines with renewed vigor. They’d all left the beach at the same time. Surely they couldn’t have gotten too far apart, not when they were all fighting through the same twisted undergrowth. Harp saw a beam of light flash across the ground. Bending down, he saw an opening at knee height. He sheathed his sword and scrambled on his hands and knees into a low, narrow passage through the thicket.

As he crawled along the ground, he felt his hands squish into something soft. The ground beneath his fingers was slick with white fungal growth. He crawled faster, sinking deeper into the thick mat of mold, the putrid smell of decay making him gag. A netting of black moss hung from the branches above him, tangling around his face and neck. Harp felt panic rising in his chest. It would be a miserable place to die.

Up ahead, he saw a clearing in the thicket. He lunged forward and tumbled into the open, pausing to wipe the slime from his hands on the leaves on the ground.

“Harp!” Cenhar called with relief. The old warrior stood at the edge of the clearing, his axe raised high above his shoulder. His long, gray hair was matted with leaves. Cenhar’s massive biceps twitched as he gripped the handle tightly, and his eyes darted wildly as he scanned the undergrowth with unnerving concentration.

“What’s wrong?” Harp asked. Usually Cenhar was as steady as a boulder, but Harp wouldn’t be surprised if the jungle had spooked even the veteran warrior. “I heard something,” Cenhar said.

“Animal?” Harp noticed that his sword’s sheath was coated in white slime. Crouching down to wipe it off, Harp sensed movement behind him. He spun around, but nothing was there.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“No, but I hear something over there,” Cenhar said. He used the edge of his axe’s blade to part the leaves and peer into the bushes.

“Let’s get back,” Harp said. “We need to find the others and regroup on the beach.”

“Yeah—” Cenhar began. Something long and narrow snapped out of the undergrowth, cracked through the air, and retreated into the thicket with a hissing sound. Cenhar sidestepped out of the way and moved to join Harp in the center of the clearing.

“What in the Hells was that?” Cenhar said. “A whip?”

“I think it was a vine,” Harp replied. The leaves on the ground began rustling as if a multitude of snakes were slithering toward their feet.