Into the Forest
These trees were truly massive. I craned my head back to look up the length of one. I couldn't see the end of it.
It was quiet in the darkened forest. The forest floor was devoid of plant growth save for a smattering of ferns growing here and there.
It was too dark of a forest for my tastes as I preferred more diversity in terms of habitat. The trees were of a kind I had never seen before and they appeared to be devoid of any use other than as something to feed a fire or build a ship out of.
It seemed a rather lifeless forest. Impressive, but cold was how this forest registered to me.
Matt was having a field day combing over the remnants of the long bygone past that were upthrust here and there along the forest floor. The resilient architecture was made out of the same iron compound as the Pillar of Delphi.
Atlantis the city had not survived the cataclysmic event of the great flood and its fall through the earth's crust. Thankfully that meant none of its supposed giant offspring had either.
Our guides had been with us for several hours now and they looked hesitant to go any further into the forest with us. They were shifting from foot to foot and becoming startled by every little noise that sounded out in the forest around us. Finally they refused to go no further and actually left us their guideless in the forest.
I watched them go and with them our cover for being here. We needed witnesses to verify our interest in the ruins in order to allay suspicions of our presence here.
I was debating about what to do when a feeling I didn't care for crept over me like someone walking across my grave and I turned around to see a man standing there not ten feet away. His smile of welcome did nothing to relax my tensed up muscles. Where had he come from?
I glanced at Jim to see him as tensed up as I was by the sudden appearance of the man. This man by his dress must be of the Salria people that the Governor had warned me about. He wore nothing like those in the colony did.
The members of the Salria people seemed to have gone back to their tribal traditions entirely. Was human sacrifice one of those reawakened traditions?
Looking at the man I could believe it of him. There was something innately cruel behind the smiling eyes that gazed upon us knowingly.
He spoke, "Don't worry, none of you are children so you are safe from the evil clutches of the Salria." He tipped his head back and laughed uproariously at his own words, as if in great jest at a joke that the rest of us had missed the punch line for.