[i]A day later...[/i] 

The wet, broken landscape and thick jungle had grown thinner, at least to my eyes. Emmaline and the others still felt as if the ferns and trees were aberrations that concealed wild cats or worse. Mercifully, the rain had stopped, and the men were able to clean their wounds and sleep with some peace of mind. I kept stayed at the fore, clearing a path with a cutlass I had taken from the camp. Swords were not my forte, but I needed to clear vines and what undergrowth I could. 

After the rain demon had dismantled their camp and slew their comrades, the survivors of the Basilean fort had scattered to the four winds. A handful had seen Emmaline and I slay the beast and decided to follow us, not for nothing, since we were going to the closest spot of civilization in twenty leagues. Out of the five legionnaires, three were injured, one with a head wound that seemed a miracle he was alive, and the two who had come out relatively unscathed still have vacant eyes, save for the random flashes of fear that passed into their gazes every now and again. 

We had found a relatively dry clearing beneath the canopy, past a fallen tree the lot of us had to duck under to enter the area. We spent the evening eating what rations we had left. Titus had pulled out s loaf of bread from his pack and found it swarming with ants, and he had to throw it into the fire and clear out his bag. Cyrian had a few links of sausage and offered to share, and the rest of the troupe had bits to add to the collective pile. Emmaline and I still had a few apples and jerky left, and we made a small dinner out of the lot of it. 

As the rain forest grew darker, and the birds began their incessant, endless chanting, we all drifted off to sleep. Emmaline had deigned to take the first watch, insisting she was a bit too on edge to really sleep so soon, and so I trusted her and fell into a fitful slumber. I would be told later, like I always was, that one of my biggest problems was how much I could sleep through. Emmaline told me, when we were alone within Darkwater days later, how she had tried to wake me up to change the watch, and it was the weird angle of her leaning over me that drew her attention to a slight glimmer in the dark, past the ferns that cloaked the endless jungle beyond the embers of the dying fire. 

A glimmer that pulled at one's senses, inexorably and involuntarily drawing one closer to the source. A light that tickled the mind's curiosity, and captured the imagination of the one it had chosen to call to.