He plodded on. Another sausage-shaped swamp appeared out of the bracken and he gave it wide berth. Perhaps a half a mile later he stumbled upon an overgrown hollow. The creepers hanging from the lowest branches invested the forest with an eerie grandeur. He thought to spy another pool not two-dozen yards away through the spidery tangles. Was there no end to them? Battling exhaustion, he could plough on no longer. His skin was covered with bites, sores and scratches. His joints ached. He was lost. He limped several yards along the rim of the hollow and crumpled—before the trunk of a gnarled arbutus which sat apart from the others in resigned solitude. He lay down his pipe reluctantly and pitched his back to the bark, quivering amongst huge roots, ancient as time that stretched about the base of the tree.
Miko’s head lolled. His eyelids drooped.
An unknown time later, he awoke to an odd caressing sensation that tickled his stomach. The sensation felt familiar and he jerked back in automatic revulsion. Dismay hit him as he perceived a grey, dough-fleshed creature reclining next to him, cradling him like a lost lover. The thing was sewing the flabs of flesh back between them at shin and hip with some kind of bone tool or awl fashioned from the roots of the forest. Miko almost leapt out of his skin. The creature was singing a happy chittering melody.
Audra.
With ghastly disbelief, he clawed himself to his feet, tearing at the newly seamed flesh. He hobbled back, fingers questing for his pipe as he struggled to distance himself from her questing tentacles. What madness was this? His lips could barely mouth the inhuman shrieks that struggled to gush from his throat.
Audra gave a woeful screech. A pain and rage-filled chitter chilled every creature within earshot—and brought every menace raining down on them from all corners of the forest.
Appalled, Miko clambered like a crab back on his hands and knees. Audra glided after him, looking to punish him for his atrocious act.
He was cornered, his back to the trees. Lunging with a hoarse cry, he menaced her with his pipe. Audra swayed in close; Miko’s weapon tore a glancing gash across her face, or what was his face...for he could see his own features still dimly buried in those sour wads of grey flesh. Smoky blue vapours and bile-coloured liquid oozed from her wound.
She screeched an anguished chitter laced with the most vindictive rage of rejection.
She knocked her faithless companion sideways a fierce blow and reached out with tentacles to send rivulets of electricity coursing through his nerves.
Miko clawed his way back from that familiar pain. However, his aching limbs could barely move. In the fog drifting before his eyes, he saw doomed entrapment. Audra advanced in all her glory. At some incomprehensible moment, she had become hopelessly intertwined with him, addicted to his company. Like a leeching parasite, she craved his life energy. In some perverse corollary of dependency, she needed him as much as he needed her.
In a split of a second Miko divined all this, and he drew back, for the obscene truth both appalled and excited him.
Then in the sudden flurry of aggression came a wandering pack of hostile aardvarks. They pounced on the strangers, uttering gleeful howls and snorts.
Audra whirled to confront them. In turn, they snapped and hissed and reigned in on her with muddy maws and gleaming horns, but it did nothing to hinder her. She glided to meet them. Her outerbody was impermeable to their thrusts as it absorbed their attacks, as a sponge soaks up water. Her hide was tough and pudgy. It bent and shifted to the thrusts and bites of her lunging aggressors. In a quick sideways movement, her fleshy body draped one from the pack in a smothering embrace. The flabby folds of flesh did their grisly work and something horrid unfolded. The squeals of the unfortunate creature reached a frenzy as it was wrapped mummified in her hide which she unfurled and let drop the slushy remains of bones and flesh. As for the fate of the others, Miko did not witness the aftermath, for he had hobbled off in terror and never wished to look back.
But he did. He risked one glance, marvelling at Audra rooted to the spot, wracked with convulsions. The attacking marsupials were likewise riveted, as if tendrils clamped their furred feet.
Miko felt a chill pass over his soul. The strange hornlike hooting returned, keening from afar, beckoning.
Miko’s blood ran cold. A shadow passed over the glade, a pall larger than life. So singular and haunting it was, that it dwarfed the glade.
A strangled whimpering escaped Audra’s polyp of a mouth.
A chitter of pain? Desolation? Miko was at a loss.
His jaw dropped as Audra shivered in unnatural confusion, then she sprawled back into the leaf mould. What had just happened? Had the invincible Audra met her match?
Miko felt a spate of disturbing feelings. Was he ready to lose her? What was this thing that could unhinge the mighty Audra? A ghost? The shadow grew in magnitude. It seemed to consume the very hollow with a darkness that spoke of an ancient terror, something which had lurked burrowed in this planet for millennia. What was the source? He could see no creature or menace in sight, only the petrified aardvark creatures and marsupials that gibbered and sobbed. A near supine Audra swayed in distress nearby. The strange dirgelike call hooted again, this time closer.
Audra’s sudden grief seem to grow, and Miko turned panic-stricken, glaring around him.
Yet the agonizing intuition came to him that to ignore Audra in her time of terror meant his certain doom. A blaze of conflicting emotions stormed his being. He turned to hobble
