Chapter Twelve: Volcano
The air grew humid under the trees, the odors dank and cellar-like, rotten. Ranglen and Mileen sweated heavily, felt claustrophobic. The mist was like soft violet fungus, the vines like arteries and fat veins, the leaves like cells of green blood, the blue-white trunks like dried bones that reminded Ranglen of the corpses on the derelict.He felt they had been swallowed and were inside a body. Even the ground felt supple, like stretched canvas or tightened skin.
Ranglen suddenly realized—they weren’t standing on the ground. They walked in the trees.
“We’re in a tier of the forest,” he said, “walking on leaves that are built into thick mats on the branches.”
“How do we get to the ground?”
“I don’t think we do. It would be too dark down there anyway, and maybe too
