Rasque, Tarasque: Chapter 1 (Free with Sign Up)
The beast’s footfalls shook the earth, and Fleta ran in the trembling gullies between enormous roots that stretched across the shadowy jungle floor. Braids of orange and red hair fell loose and streamed behind her, and her long navy tunic rippled like a sail in a storm. Trees loomed like mountains, blocking out the sun and sky with their cavernous canopy.
As Fleta ran, the last two seeds fell from her bag onto the spongy, mossy soil. One sprouted immediately. It shot up in the middle of the trail, exploding outward in a riot of thick branches, the earth around it sinking into a wide depression as the new tree devoured the soil. Within seconds, it was over a hundred feet tall and almost as wide, woven into the thick jungle around it.
Huh, Fleta thought. I should have thought of that.
The ground shuddered again, and the new tree cracked almost in two, clutching at the canopy around it with a ripping of branches. A sound shook the jungle, and it was so loud and so low Fleta heard it with her bones instead of her ears. The trunk of the freshly sprouted tree cracked.
I guess it didn’t matter anyway. Fleta winced. While looking back, she almost careened into a root the size of the Grand Promenade back home. Don’t think, run.
Fleta sprang a few dozen feet into the hair, landing on the inclined top of the root. When she reached the zenith of the root, she leaped again. Her feet began to sink into the soft loam as she landed, and she redirected her momentum forward with a flurry of light, carefully practiced steps. The ground was a lot squishier than she was used to. Spongy, almost like a trampoline, instead of the hard-packed dirt of the Marble Halls. She lost her footing and rolled.
Before Fleta could stand up, the behemoth’s head plummeted toward her, snapping off branches thicker than she was tall. The branches fell like a volley of ballista bolts around her, and she jumped to her feet, wobbling. The void of the beast's maw circled around her dizzy head. In a panic, Fleta jumped again. She collided with the beast’s nose. Fleta flattened as the beast’s ship-sized muzzle surged skyward. Gasping for breath, she clutched at the ridge of a scale next to her, but it fell away.
Fleta was in the air, a sea of leaves waving below her, the dark whirlpool of a giant maw receding. Let’s call that a draw, she thought. If I can survive the landing... Birds, or other creatures impossibly large and distant, circled amid the clouds. One began to dive, but Fleta was already falling back into the dark green canopy.
The leaves were the size of a royal quilt, less soft, but with much more give than a mattress. With a series of lightning taps, a roll, and a flailing fall onto the next leaf, Fleta managed to arrest her momentum with only a few bruises.
“Well,” she panted, catching her breath on a swaying leaf. “That went better than expected. I should have quit two days ago,” she sighed. “No time like the present, I guess.” Fleta looked around, but the top layer of leaves had already obscured the view. She considered poking her head up to get her bearings when the shriek of a disappointed bird overhead raked her ears. Instead, Fleta sighed. She lowered herself from leaf to branch to trunk and began climbing to the jungle floor hundreds of feet below.
Somewhere in the dark labyrinth of humongous trees below was an arch of enormous, woven thorns, carved with ancient symbols. The arch was her only escape from the jungle and the monstrous tarasque creature she was supposed to hunt.
