Though Fernando’s judgment was far from sound, abruptly to him, it seemed, the character of the Amazonian wilderness grew wilder and more sinister. The looming trees pressed close around him, older and thicker and more ghastly in their contorted forms. The strident animal calls dampened, sounding lower and nearer, eerily menacing in their pitch. Even the darkness here felt different—a palpable, murky blackness that stifled him even more than the smothering reek of decay.

Centuries deep, the moist carpet of dead ferns made even his bullish going as silent as a ghost. He followed the crude path of the injured goat, the spattered coin-drops of its blood a dark chiminage to his passing. The deeper he forged into the primordial jungle, the more phantasmagoric his nocturnal surroundings became. His sobering scrape with the goat had faded. But the lingering pain grounded him like a tether as the unreal wilderness continued to devolve around him, threatening to unmoor him in its eclipsing madness.

The cries of the forest creatures rang hauntingly human. The draping skeins of moss brushed against him like the perennial hair of the dead. Branches caught at him like skeletal fingers. The soft earth sucked up around his shoes to gum him about the ankles. In the warped voids of ageless tree trunks, he saw the tortured faces of the damned.

Increasingly as he shoved on, Fernando found himself navigating a landscape more psychic than physical. He wasn’t dismayed by this, nor even disconcerted. In his spite he drew dogged strength from it. This had never been about just reclaiming a lost goat. He knew that now. He welcomed it now, as he pushed onward into the jungle’s dark depths, inviting it to do its worst.

As for the animal itself, he could no longer discern in the distance any gleaming sign of its lumbered flight. Tired and wounded as the goat was, it must have finally given out. And so Fernando was surprised, even through his psychedelic haze and the dying beam of the flashlight, when the beaten blood trail ended and the goat was nowhere to be found.

Fernando frowned, peering around. In his altered sight, ghoulish forms trailed in a blurring reel. Diaphanous mists hung thick upon the ground before him, a froth that rippled in the faint breeze like the breath of an eldritch beast in slumber. It was intuition that urged him forward more than anything, through this dense, clammy fog that obscured all else. The mists hazed his vision even further as they swirled around his legs, dampening his jeans, scattering his torch light and chilling him through to the marrow.

He thought he saw something ahead of him—a curious break in the haze. But as he was trying to focus his eyes upon it, the soft fibrous ground beneath him collapsed, and he plummeted with a shout into the chasm below.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy