The jungle was heavy with breath. Every tree, every root, every leaf seemed to hold its silence like a lung full of smoke.
Nathan Wells pushed through the ferns, barefoot, his skin smudged in ash and dried mud, tribal symbols inked down his arms like sacred vines. He moved like someone born in the undergrowth—agile, deliberate. But five years ago, he was stumbling, broken, and near death.
He was a botanist once, a young American from a university in California, part of a research team dispatched to study hallucinogenic fungi in the Amazon. Their camp was ambushed by something—he never truly saw what. Screams. Blood. Then days of fever and disoriented wandering until the Juruva tribe found him collapsed beside a dying firefly tree.
They thought he was from the Nameless Clans, an offshoot group that disappeared generations ago. His strange tongue and soft flesh didn't matter to them—what mattered was that he breathed.
He healed. And stayed.
The jungle took from him his world, but gave him a new one.
And in that world, there was Maíra.
She had been sixteen when he arrived, the apprentice of the tribal healer, and already revered for her rare connection to the forest. She could smell when storms would arrive, calm animals with a touch, and speak to trees as if they remembered her.
It was she who taught Nathan to listen—to really listen—to the jungle. To not just hear the buzz of insects or the rustle of leaves, but the rhythms beneath it all: the warning sighs of roots before a slide, the heartbeat of a sleeping tree, the sound of a predator's hunger.
Their love bloomed quietly, like mushrooms in the dark.
They met in secret—always beneath moonlight, by the whispering Moonwell where fireflies crowned the water like stars fallen to Earth. They carved small symbols into stone together, kissed beneath canopies as parrots slept, and shared stories from worlds neither could fully understand.
He told her about cities—endless stretches of glass and steel, cars that roared, and music that came from boxes.
She told him about dreams where the forest opened up to her and showed her futures—of fire, of sorrow, and once, of a boy with blue eyes who would bleed for her.
"If I ever vanish," she had whispered once, brushing ash from his cheek, "follow the river. It remembers where I've been."
But lately, Maíra was vanishing even when she stood before him.
Ever since the cursed dagger disappeared—the one the shamans whispered about in fear, the one they swore should never be touched—Maíra had changed.
She would go still for minutes, eyes glassy. She spoke languages she didn't know. Her limbs twitched in her sleep like she was trying to climb away from something in the dark. Some nights, he found her by the river, murmuring to it as if it were her lover.
This morning, Nathan found a body. Kael's.
His face was bloated, twisted, and purple. His fingers were curled like claws. The cursed dagger was gone.
Nathan didn't scream. He ran.
When he reached the tribal chief's tent, he dropped to his knees, panting. The chief, Orun-Tah, an old man with eyes like hollow stone bowls, listened in complete silence.
Then, without speaking, Orun-Tah handed him a satchel made from jaguar skin. Inside were dried petals, serpent root, sun-cracked bark, and a vial of ashes.
"Bring back the rest," the chief said. "From the four corners. Brew the saproot elixir. If the girl is claimed, we lose more than her. We lose the balance."
Nathan stood and took the satchel.
Behind him, Maíra lay in her hammock, twitching softly, a trail of black sap beneath her lips.
And in his chest, something shattered—slowly, silently, like a bone giving in to time.
"Hold on," he whispered. "Just hold on."
Then he disappeared into the green, where gods still walked and men forgot their names.
---
Nathan's breath was shallow and his chest was constricted as his feet thudded on the damp ground. Around him, the jungle was a haze of darkness and green, teeming with insect hisses and the cries of unseen predators. He had only memory, no map.
He clutched the jaguar-skin satchel tighter. Inside it, the sacred ingredients rustled faintly, whispering of urgency. He had three already. Two remained.
The first—Black Feather Orchid—grew near the cliffs of Hual'Veen, where mist draped trees like mourning shawls. The second—Ashen Heart Bark—was said to be guarded by a tree that cried blood when touched by fire.
Nathan jumped over a fallen log, ran through brambles, and hid under a mossy curtain. His muscles ached as he ascended a slope, but his thoughts were elsewhere, pulled back into the silent moments that gave all of this significance.
He remembered the day Maíra showed him how to write with sap. She had taken a reed, dipped it in crushed petals, and wrote on a wide green leaf:
"Love grows not from soil, but from stories shared beneath stars."
Nathan kept that leaf pressed in his journal until it rotted. Then he started making his own.
Dozens. Hundreds.
Poems written on dried leaves, bark, even butterfly wings when he found them already dead. He hid them under stones, in branches, gave them to the river. Love letters to a girl the forest tried to keep for itself.
He reached the cliffs by noon.
The Black Feather Orchid was blooming—rare, elegant, perched atop a thin outcrop. He scaled the cliff face, fingers bleeding. As he reached out to pluck it, a viper struck—its fangs missed his hand by inches. He snatched the flower and leapt back, rolling into moss and gasping.
"You'd call me reckless," he murmured aloud, brushing sweat from his brow. "And then kiss me for being stupid."
By twilight, he reached the Ashen Tree. It loomed crooked and old, its bark blackened and steaming with faint heat. He lit a spark with flint and waved the flame near its trunk.
The tree cried.
A single red droplet leaked from its side.
He caught it in a hollowed shell.
His heart thudded wildly—not from fear, but from the whisper that followed him on the wind. Her voice. Laughing. Calling.
The jungle was vast. Unforgiving. Alive.
But he was more than a wanderer now.
He was a man chasing the thread of love through a world unraveling.
And he would not let it snap.
---
The jungle had grown quiet.
Too quiet.
Nathan paused, sweat dripping from his brow, the satchel of ingredients thumping lightly against his side. Above him, the canopy rose impossibly high—towering trees tangled with vines that blocked the sun. The air here was different. Heavy. Still.
It felt like walking through an old cathedral where even your heartbeat sounded like sacrilege.
He didn't like it.
He didn't trust it.
"Almost there," he whispered, though there was no one to hear him.
He was looking for the final ingredient—Glowthorn, a faintly luminescent lichen that grew in dead places untouched by moonlight. It could calm the soul and repel spirits.
Exactly what Maíra needed.
But time… time was turning into an enemy. With every hour that passed, the fear in Nathan's chest grew like a second heartbeat.
What if she woke up screaming and didn't stop?
What if the curse twisted her until she was no longer herself?
What if… she forgot him?
"Just hold on," he murmured again.
His foot caught a thick, snake-like root hidden under the moss. He tripped and pitched forward with a grunt—arms flailing—and before he could recover, the ground cracked beneath him.
He slid.
The earth gave way like a trapdoor. Soil collapsed, roots snapped. He tumbled into blackness, swallowing a scream as he dropped through a tunnel of roots and damp dirt.
Then—stone.
His back slammed into a cold, curved floor, knocking the wind from his lungs. For a moment, he lay still, blinking against the darkness.
Light.
A faint green glow pulsed from cracks in the walls. Luminescent moss, eerily beautiful, bathed the underground chamber in ghostlight.
He had fallen into a cave.
But not just any cave.
There were symbols carved into the walls—spirals, eye-shapes, and long-forgotten words. Bones lined the crevices like decorative warnings. And at the center, a pool of clear water shimmered with bioluminescent algae.
He sat up, wincing, and uncurled his fingers. The satchel was still intact.
Then he saw it—nestled along the jagged wall near the pool, growing like frost on cold stone.
Glowthorn.
The last ingredient.
But something else stirred in the shadows.
Not a spirit. Not a beast.
Something… watching.