Page 218 of Monsters in Love

My chest aches and constricts with exertion, and I finally stop to catch my breath. Doubled over, I inhale through my nose until finally my breathing evens out. When I settle, feeling the welling of tears in my throat, I glance at where I am.

There’s at least twenty feet in a circle where the trees have chosen not to grow, a huge clearing with forest on either side. The moss here glows with each step of my foot, my shoes long gone. It’s as if the moss is electric.

I can’t hear screaming. There’s nothing but the tittering of birds and wildlife around me, along with the rapid beating of my heart.

A great glowing antlered beast walks through the trees. There are six subsections on two of its heads with four legs, and its body is a solid black with bright piercing blue eyes. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. What’s more amazing is that it’s as large as a car and doesn’t stop at all to look at me before it heads off in the direction it intended.

This must be where animals graze, and I was in that deer-thing’s territory. A breaking of a twig has me going rigid, and another has me running again.

The trees narrow the farther I go, and soon enough I’m walking a straight narrow line between them. Their bark is strangely normal-looking, though some have swirling bioluminescent markings that travel up in a pattern I can’t discern. Tighter and tighter they grow until there’s just a hair’s breadth between me and them.

I reach out a hand to stroke the bark, wondering if my hand might create a light show just as my feet do on the ground. My fingers collide with the rough texture of it, and it lights up as if on command.

“Amazing–” Just when I speak, the tree moves and takes another shape. A long snake-like vine twists and curls in my periphery, but I’m too entranced in the beauty to care.

Fingers form where my hand lies flat, and then two eyes just above them. The forest hushes; the birds and wildlife cease their noises as the hand closes roughly on my arm. It jerks me forward, and the tendril behind me comes closer to my face.

“Fuck!” I scream, but there’s no one here to hear me.

My yell creates a chain reaction, and the trees all move in the same way. Each one grows eyes, and their hands move, reaching out, and every tendril writhes closer to the sound.

Suddenly, the feeling of rough vine gathers against my throat, coiling around my neck until I can’t breathe. I gasp the last of my breath away as the tendril wraps once more around me, and another slithers around my torso while the tree’s hands grab at me closer.

One tugs at my clothes, yanks at my shirt and skirt. The sound of fabric shredding is all I hear over my heart beating in my ears. I try to wriggle, but the strength of this tree is far too much.

I’m going to die.

My eyes squeeze shut while I groan through the pain of my windpipe being crushed.

A guttural cry cuts through the sound of my heart hammering in my ears, and suddenly the tendril wound around my throat falls away. Then my body is yanked from the tree’s grip, ripping the vines away. I don’t have time to feel gratitude as powerful arms wrap around my middle, and then I’m jerked upwards.

The ground disappears, and the feeling of air forces a scream from my throat. My glasses nearly slide from my face, and I kick my legs. “Let me down!”

“Hiljaen likva!”

My eyes pan upward to the thing carrying me, and I suck in a breath.

Large pale green wings sprout from this being’s back, and they have two sets of arms. Settled between a delicate aquiline nose are bright white eyes and a long antenna sprouting from its head. His body and face are entirely white, and around his neck is a thick ruff of fur. In one of his hands is a long, slender blade, dripping with a brightly glowing sap from the vines.

“Set me down!” I scream again when we dip under a limb, spiraling upward again with abandon. I think I’m going to hurl because this creature doesn’t care how much my legs dangle or how close we get to the monster tree, or even that he’s flying like a bat out of hell.

The thing curses under its breath, or at least I assume that’s what it’s doing, because we stop blissfully a moment later on a limb thick enough to stand on. It sets me on my feet, sneering at me as my legs tremble and I try to catch my breath.

“Not up here!” I screech out, peering over the side of the limb, immediately squeezing my eyes shut again. We have to be twelve stories high. I can’t even see the ground at this point, and I’m with a weird butterfly thing.

“Hiljaen itsei! O’lena kunnosi,” it says, shaking its head. The sound of its voice is a deep baritone, and I realize now this creature is male.

I look him up and down while I try catching my breath. He has no shoes on, but his feet are two toes with a third on the ball of the foot. He has five fingers on each of his four hands. His thick biceps look as though he’s of the working class.

The small green designs on his arms match the long, slender forewings on his back, and they trail up his muscular bare torso. His hind-wings are the same color, though much longer, with little designs that look like eyes on them. In my studies of old Earth insects, I recall an insect like this. It reminds me of one that fascinated me called the Luna moth.

He’s clothed in nothing but a leather-looking loincloth that drapes over his front. I don’t see the outline of any sort of genitalia, so maybe he has a pouch?

“What are you?” I look him up and down, realizing just how humanoid the face is. There’s a delicate set of lips, but when he opens them, the lips cut across his chiseled jaw, opening further than it should.

He shakes his head, heaving an almost irritated sigh as he tilts his head down at me with a sense of superiority. “Ekna.” He points at the limb and pins me with his stare. “Jah?”

Now that I’m closer to him, I can smell something strangely tempting from him. It’s sweet, almost like the baked bread from Tarsil. I’ve not had anything like that in ages because we eat the same thing nearly every day on the Peony. There’s even a mild hint of something spicy. Why does he smell so fucking delicious?

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