CHAPTER 5 — The Fruit & The Threat

He didn't know how long he stayed in the shallows. Long enough for the cold to stop feeling like a shock and start feeling like a condition — something permanent, settled into the muscle and bone, reorganizing his body around its presence. Long enough for his breathing to regulate, the left side of his chest finding a rhythm that hurt consistently rather than sharply, which he decided to treat as progress. Eventually, he moved. Not because he felt ready. He suspected he wouldn't feel ready for a long time. He moved because the water was still pulling heat from his body, and heat was a resource he couldn't afford to bleed passively in the dark. He dragged himself onto a narrow shelf of dry stone at the stream's edge and sat with his back against the cave wall, taking inventory by touch where the pale blue seams of light above couldn't reach. Ribs — breathing confirmed at least two cracked, movement confirmed no puncture. Forearm — the laceration had stopped bleeding in the cold water, or at least slowed enough to feel like stopping. Palms — both abraded, gritty with something he couldn't identify, functional. Shoes — waterlogged, heavy, still on his feet because removing them felt like a defeat he wasn't ready to accept. = Cracked ribs. Open laceration. No food, no water I can safely use yet, no light source, no exit confirmed. = He tilted his head back against the stone and stared upward. The fissure he'd fallen through was somewhere behind him, light leaking from it in a pale column that barely touched the ground before the dark consumed it. Climbing back up was not possible in his current condition — the angle was wrong, the handholds nonexistent, and his left side would fail him halfway. Forward was the only direction the stream offered. = Then forward it is. = He stood carefully, held his ribs with his right arm as a brace, and began moving along the shelf, following the stream deeper into the cave. The darkness had texture here. It wasn't the flat black of a closed room but something layered — variations of shadow that his eyes, adjusting slowly, began to resolve into suggestions of shape. The cave widened as he moved, the ceiling lifting from oppressively low to something he could no longer reliably estimate. The stream ran steady beside him, no longer the rapid channel that had carried him, but quieter now, deeper, moving with a patience that seemed native to underground things. The air changed before anything else did. He noticed it first as a reduction in the mineral smell of wet stone — not eliminated, but diluted by something else. Something organic. Faint, almost subliminal, the way a memory of a smell arrives before the smell itself. He stopped walking and took several slow breaths through his nose, parsing it. Growing things. Soil. Something close to sweetness without being sweet. = That doesn't belong in a cave. = He rounded a slow bend in the shelf and stopped. Light existed ahead — not the grey-white of the surface world above, but something warmer, amber-tinged, emanating from no visible source. It simply *was*, the way light in a dream simply is, sourceless and committed. The cave opened into a chamber roughly thirty meters wide, its ceiling vaulted in irregular arches of dark stone. The stream ran through the chamber's center, and on a raised shelf of ground beside it, isolated from the surrounding rock by a ring of dark, damp soil that had no business being there — A tree. Small. No taller than Rijan himself. The trunk was pale grey-white, smooth, the texture of skin more than bark. The branches reached outward in a shape that was almost deliberately symmetrical, as though grown with intention, and from one of the lower branches hung a single fruit. He looked at it for a long time from the chamber entrance. The fruit was the size of a closed fist, deep red with undertones of black where the skin curved away from the ambient light. It hung still — no wind reached this place — and it looked, in the most uncomplicated sense, like food. = Don't. = He was already calculating. Unknown organism in an unknown ecosystem on a plane he'd been told nothing about. No way to assess toxicity. No way to assess metabolic compatibility. The fact that it looked like a fruit his body could process proved exactly nothing. He also hadn't eaten in what he estimated was at least twelve hours, possibly more. His body's baseline demands didn't pause for extraordinary circumstances. His VIT was 5 — he didn't know what that meant for hunger tolerance, but he knew what an empty stomach felt like against cracked ribs, and it made everything slower. = The risk of inaction is also a risk. = He crossed the chamber slowly, watching the tree. It didn't react to his approach. The soil around its base was undisturbed — no tracks, no markings, nothing that suggested anything else had been here recently. He stopped two meters from the fruit and studied it at close range. The skin was tight. No soft spots. The stem connecting it to the branch was still green, which meant it hadn't detached on its own. He reached out and touched the surface with one finger, gently, the way he'd press a bruise to measure depth. Firm. Slightly warm. Not from external heat — the cave was cold — from something internal. = Alive, then. Still living. = He didn't take it. Not yet. He stood with his hand near it and made himself list the unknowns again, because the part of him that was hungry and cold and tired of calculating was very loudly suggesting that the calculation didn't matter. He categorized that voice as a bias and deliberately did not act on it. The interface appeared at the edge of his vision, unprompted. // UNKNOWN FLORA DETECTED // // CLASSIFICATION: UNVERIFIED // // NUTRITIONAL COMPATIBILITY: UNKNOWN // // CONSUMPTION RISK: UNDETERMINED // = Thanks. Extremely helpful. = He stepped back from the tree and turned to examine the rest of the chamber. The stream continued past the raised shelf and disappeared into the far wall through a low opening. The chamber had two other passages leading from it — one to the left, narrow and lightless, the other to the right, slightly wider, from which the warmth of the amber light seemed to emanate most strongly. He was studying the right passage, measuring the quality of the light, when the interface pulsed. The new notification didn't announce itself gradually. It appeared all at once, the text fully formed, and it carried a weight the previous messages had not. Something in the rendering was different — the blue was deeper, the pulse rhythm faster, the way a change in someone's voice tells you the nature of the conversation has changed before the words confirm it. // WARNING // // HIGHER LIFEFORM DETECTED WITHIN PROXIMITY // // CLASSIFICATION: SUB-BOSS ENTITY // // THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL // Rijan did not move. He looked at the right passage. The amber light continued its quiet emanation. The stream continued its quiet movement. The tree hung its single red-black fruit in the sourceless glow, patient and perfect and untouched. From somewhere beyond the passage — deep, slow, resonant — something exhaled. The sound moved through the stone and arrived in his cracked ribs like a second injury. = Whatever survived in this cave long enough to grow a fruit and warm the air and make the system call it a higher lifeform — = He looked at the fruit. He looked at the passage. = — it's been here the whole time. =