Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

“What is that?” Verran asked, his eyes wide and fearful. “What makes the ground shake like that?”

“Let’s get out of the tree before we’re tossed out,” Harp said. They hurriedly gathered their things and made their way back to solid ground.

They left the tree crown and climbed back onto the rocky plateau. As they climbed to it, two unseen adversaries faced off somewhere in the direction of the river. They could hear the sounds of ripping skin, snarls and gnashing, and giant bodies flattening the landscape as they fought.

“What’s that sound?” Verran asked. “Is it coming toward us?”

“Verran!” Boult snapped. “Why do you keep asking us? Am I not standing beside you? Do you see a spyglass in my hand?”

“You don’t need to bite his head off, Boult,” Harp chastised him. “What, a little rumble in the jungle makes you crabby before your morning cup of tea?”

“If I had a cup of tea in front of me, I wouldn’t be in the stupid jungle,” Boult shot back just as the sound of a bone snapping echoed across the clearing. As the thrashing between the beasts intensified, the birds in the trees screeched a harsh cacophony of warning calls. Kitto covered his ears as an unnatural screech of pain pierced the air. Then something very large fell very hard, shaking the ground again, and it was quiet.

“Did it die …” Verran started to ask, but he caught Boult’s glare and shut his mouth.

Harp motioned for the others to follow him and scrambled through the undergrowth and down a rocky slope in the direction of the river that he’d seen the night before. As they neared the river, the ground leveled out, and he could hear the rushing of water. They came out of the trees at the edge of a small valley and the place where one of the monsters had met its end in the morning’s battle. A gargantuan lizard, easily twenty-five feet long from the tip of its spiked tail to the front of its fanged maw, was sprawled across the ground. Its pebbly yellow skin had black stripes branching out from its spine, and given its muscular haunches and tiny front legs, it must have walked on its hind legs.

“If that’s not at the top of the food chain, what is?” Harp said as they walked down the slope to the corpse of the monster. The monsters had felled several of the large trees that ringed the valley, and as Harp crawled over one of the massive trunks, he saw claw marks slashed deep across the bark. When they reached the corpse, they stopped and stared in wonder at the massive creature splayed out in the crushed and bloodied underbrush.

“I thought they were nightmares,” Kitto said quietly.

“What were, Kitto?” Harp asked.

“The monsters I saw last night,” Kitto told him.

“No, I saw them too,” Harp said as he circled around the lizard. Bony frills stuck out around the base of its skull, which was twisted sideways on its neck. Gaping wounds bisected the lizard’s back, and thick blood still oozed out of the claw marks, although the creature was decidedly dead.

Verran was standing near the lizard’s head with a thoughtful look on his face and his head cocked as he inspected the lizard’s blank yellow eyes. Each was bigger than a man’s head and had a dark, vertical pupil that reminded Harp of a snake’s. In death, a thick, cloudy shroud covered the eyes, and buzzing insects were amassing along their edges.

“Whatever killed it had to be bigger,” Verran said. “Look at the way the neck is snapped.”

“And why didn’t it stay to eat it?” Boult asked, swiping an insect away from his face. Carrion bugs were moving into the sticky gashes and buzzing over the bloody ground.

“It could have been a purple worm,” Verran suggested. He sounded almost excited at the idea of seeing monsters he had only heard about. “Or maybe a basilisk. Did you know it can petrify you?”

“I know that I don’t want to spend another night in the jungle,” Boult said. “Let’s get going.”

“A hydra!” Verran continued. “What if it was a hydra? The only way to kill one is to cut off all of its heads. Did you know that?”

“If we run into a hydra, I’m going to kill you, Harp,” Boult said.

“If we run into a hydra, I’m going to kill myself,” Harp told him.

They had just reached the other side of the depression when Kitto turned around and looked behind them with a puzzled expression on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Harp asked him.

“What’s that noise?” Kitto asked. “Is that the water?”

Harp heard it too, and it wasn’t water. It was a punctuated clicking that sounded like something he’d heard before, but he couldn’t quite remember when. Before his mind could settle on what it was, it grew louder. A large ant appeared at the top of the slope on the other side of the depression. About the size of a dog, with curved tusks like a boar, and a segmented body. The ant hesitated for a moment. Its beaked jaw clicked together rapidly, sending an almost metallic sound ringing through the trees.

“Why is everything huge in the jungle?” Boult asked.

“At least there’s just one,” Harp pointed out. He was disconcerted by the enormity of insect too. But before his words were fully formed, another ant appeared on the horizon followed by two more. Boult glared at Harp accusingly.

“You can’t hold me responsible … ” Harp began as a flood of the shiny black insects surged over the slope and skittered across the ground. Before the men could make a move, the ants engulfed the lizard’s corpse until none of the yellow and black skin could be seen through the writhing ants’ bodies.

“We’re all right,” Harp said in relief. “They just want the meat.”

“Look at that!” Verran gasped as a much larger ant made its way down the slope and into the depression. The size of a small horse, the ant’s reddish shell was the shade of rusted metal. Like the smaller ants, the queen ant had an armored body and spindly legs that looked too skinny to hold up the bulk of her body. Unlike her soldiers, she had the tattered remains of papery wings. The queen didn’t participate in the feasting frenzy but instead skirted the edges of the swarm as her bent antennae quivered rapidly.

Flashes of white appeared through the swarming mass of black, and Harp studied it curiously for a few moments. Then he understood exactly what he was seeing—the white was the lizard’s bones picked clean by the ants. Looking at the horrified faces of his companions, they had all reached the same conclusion. Even a lizard that large wasn’t going to satisfy the ants, not when there was something else available, namely three men and a dwarf. As they turned to run, the queen ant swung her head in their direction with her beaked mouth clicking open and closed. As if of one mind, the army of ants skittered across the clearing toward the crewmates, leaving only a pile of bare bones in their wake.

“To the river!” Harp shouted as they sprinted across the uneven ground toward the sound of rushing water.

But when they came closer, they saw the river was far below them at the bottom of a narrow ravine. The fast-flowing water had carved a channel deep into the earth, and there was no obvious route down the dirt banks. Jumping was possible, but it would be easy to break a leg on the narrow lip of dry ground at the edge of the water, or get swept into the rushing current of the river. They ran north along the ravine with Kitto leading the way as he leaped effortlessly over the clumps of ferns and rocks scattered on the ground. The ant soldiers seemed to have fallen back.

“The bastards are flanking us,” Boult shouted. Through the gaps in the trees on their left side, Harp could see that Boult was right. A line of ants had moved ahead of them on their left, forming a half-circle around them. Once the ants overtook them, they would be trapped against the edge of the river with no means of escape.