UGH SHIMMERWEAVE's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The frost cycle sealed the rainforest route three days after Ugh reached the falls. He walked back to the river mouth to check. Ice crusted the passage. The way home was shut. He counted his dried food and found enough for maybe five days. He would be stranded here far longer than that. The route would not open until the frost broke. Ugh did not panic. He sat on a cold rock and spread his chart across his knees. He could not leave. So he would work. If he was stuck on the far shore, he would log every living thing on it. He wrote a new goal at the top of a blank page: catalog the far shore. Béyla found him there at dusk. She was his partner now, the beekeeper who had crossed the forest to raise her colony where the last keeper died. She carried her bone pry bar on her hip. She looked at his supply case, then at the sealed route behind him. "Stuck," she said. It was not a question. "Until the thaw," Ugh said. "Then we eat from the trees." She pointed her chin toward the forage grounds. "I know where the food grows. You know what kills you. We trade." They worked for days. Béyla led him to a stand of purple-blue trees heavy with glowing berries and bright shelf fungi. Her bees crawled the yellow blooms above. Ugh pressed a berry cluster between two sheets. He sketched the twisting bark and the vines wrapped around it. Béyla cut a slab of the yellow fungus and tasted the edge. "Safe," she said. "Bitter. It fills you." He logged it as food. She showed him a silver-barked tree with violet leaves and green-glowing nuts. Ugh cracked one open. The meat inside was dense and oily. He checked it against every poison case he had memorized. Nothing matched. "We can eat these," he said. Béyla filled a basket while he drew the tree onto his chart. Deeper in, they found it. A fungus taller than both of them, its rose-pink caps spread in wide layers. Spores drifted down like dust. Ugh raised a hand to stop Béyla. "Don't breathe close," he said. He knew this shape from the exposure records. The spores could cripple a mind. He sketched it from six paces back and marked it in red: do not touch. Béyla stepped away without a word. By the eighth day his chart held eleven new species. Three were food. His supply case was empty, but the baskets were full. The far shore would feed them until the thaw. That night Béyla crouched at the hive. Her glow had gone from calm green to sharp blue. "My bees aren't coming back full," she said. "Something's stripping the far blooms before they reach them." She pointed at the giant pink fungus on his map. "And I think it came from near that."