Ran emerges into a green cathedral whose foundations are ingloriously sunk in a rank swampland.  The green light is like a bilious cloud and through it dart every sort of flying insect, many species grotesquely enlarged or displaying weird protrusions and organs growing externally to perverse ends.  A giant purple-tinted dragonfly appears above her head, and fixes a motionless hover.  Suddenly it darts horizontally and snatches a smaller insect and then alights upon a soft green pad with blood-red edges.  The pad is hinged to its roof, and it snaps shut with interlocking lashes and inside, through the translucent green walls, the insect struggles as the plant drowns it in digestive juices.  This hollow Eye rises, and folds slowly back on its stem into a position of rest while it gorges on its prey.

All around alien patterns overwhelm Ran’s preconceived map. The visual noise rides through her, flooding channels, circumventing waypoints and supplanting her inner seat, so that the senses work antiphrastically.

Breaking the spell, Ran continues deeper into the Forest.  Forced to skirt waterways carpeted in thick, green algae, it is only possible to cross where the shallows are choked with vegetation.  The trees are of a different kind here, and they branch overhead in curls, their thin limbs raking the air.  She wanders through these tunnels, emerging into a large clearing covered in swirls of dark, hair-like moss.  Gazing up at the distant slab of blue sky Ran finds herself drawn back to her distant home –but it is a place she can never return to.

With barely a sound, eight legs, like fluted maypoles, strike the earth around, putting her underneath a tent-like body that floats silently atop weightless props.  The body lowers itself and she stares up at the grey and swollen abdomen of the spider.  Rows of eyes line its forward aspect, and Ran is captured a hundred times in those glassy orbs.  On the back of the spider a sac of babies form a swarming mass that expand outwards and morph into a dripping tail.  Then, as it begins to collapse, the outermost spiders surge back to their mother, and the progeny move like a fountain, regaining their viscosity.  The mother senses the change, and suddenly she bows and then leaps silently into the air.  She deftly mounts the canopy, and in the glare of the sun those long black lines clamber upwards and the whole court slips over the roof of the forest and out of sight.  Catching her breath, she lets the sun dry her face for a moment, and then walks back through the curtain of shade.

In the diming light there is less and less insect life around. A silence begins to infest the forest corridors and the vegetation is beginning to thin out, leaving swampland to invade.  Gazing into the twilight murk, she feels her perspective attune to the scale of life –you are a tiny speck of life here, dwarfed by these monstrous towers that sink into the blackening.

Many hours are swallowed as Ran gropes though this cavern of broken towers. Every fallen bough, lodged into a diagonal shard scraping upwards, must be crossed, and the exposed roots often give way to an avalanche of soil. For a time she walks inside a hollowed trunk roomier than her previous lodgings. There is a pleasant glow and smell to the wood. Finally, she is forced to leave the enclosure, and continue across the splinters of bark and girths of trees.  The brackish water laps against the forest, reminding you that it will erase the fallen inscriptions of progress. But the forest has memory and birth, and it will keep building towards the sun.

The descent forces Ran to enter the shallower parts of the swamp, and wade sometimes up to waist-height.  As the light fades you find yourself trapped inside a disc of pale silver, broken in the centre by the slosh of your long strides.

A long bank materialises into view.  A tongue of soil rises up amid gnarled roots and everywhere there are twisted, alien nodules that should have developed upright into recognisable natural forms, but instead are blunted and grow nowhere, ending abruptly.  In the farther distance, beyond the grey mists agitated by snaking reeds, there are a group of fattened boughs that appear to raise the canopy, like a hoisted tent-pole, to form one giant atrium around the eldritch trees.  The single surviving vegetative growth, apart from the restless grasses, are barrel-shaped fungi that sit in clustered groups some distance from the trees.  Passing close to one of the fungi houses she recognises the unmistakable throng of wings vibrating: thousands of paper oars being tested in their new ether.

The wide boughs begin to loom above as she swashes through the syrupy mud that increasingly gives a sinking foothold that threatens to pull her under and she desperately lunges at a mass of grass and is forced to slither onwards, with her head arched backwards.  And when her outreaching hand finally clamps onto the thickly plated column her body slumps forward into repose.  She clings there, caked in sediment.  Images come to Ran in breaking waves: rolling fields with an orange sun poking through the sugar cane, and remembrance of your family in blurry outlines that will not sharpen.  She feels like a seed blown far away that will soon transform, and release its final prayer into the vast subcontinent of our silted memories.

Staring around at the landscape reflected in the frozen swamp, Ran’s attention converges on two motionless figures shaded under a crown of bare branches.  They have their backs to her.  The figure on the left is a dead ringer for her: wearing the same items of clothing, same height and hair tied up in the same peculiar way.  Next to this figure is an individual who instinctively resembles her dead brother, wearing the same blood stained clothes that wrapped him as he died.  As Ran watches, unable to turn away, they are slowly sinking into the depths.

When their heads go under Ran begins to methodically work her way up the tree.  The thick splinters of bark give plenty to grip, and progress is steady.  Occasionally it is possible to alight onto a branching arm and use this to reach the trunk of a neighbouring tree.  She is met by huge epiphytes that support lush micro-gardens, bathing in emerald spikes.  Ran slips between the lances, oval leaves and palm-shapes that crowd these busy aerial streets.  Criss-crossing the open spaces are lianas that drape from tree-to-tree in long coils, or vines that coil downwards.

Some thirty feet above there hangs an ovoid fruit, roughly fifteen feet in width and slightly greater lengthwise. The skin is studded with long spikes and it resembles a bloated cactus.  Ran continues to ascend, and reaches upwards to one of the long crimson spikes; then using these to traverse the surface of the strange fruit she soon finds herself crouched on the apex, examining the folds of tissue protecting the canal leading inside.  Gazing down to the left she follows the giant roots of the trees as they break the surface and splay over one another in a sinewy mass that curls over a ledge and topples downwards in a frozen waterfall.  Some movement breaks the frieze when large clods of earth detach and fall silently into the abyss.

While staring at this apocalyptic drift of roots and mud into the sinkhole, Ran’s attention is arrested in the opposite direction as the larvae houses on the plains below burst open and black columns of winged armies shoot upwards and then disperse outwards in a pulsating cloud.  Quickly she takes out the kilij and begins cutting away the entrance to the canal.  Ran pushes her head into the rough cavity and gropes at the wet, padded walls and just manages to squeeze inside.  Feeling claustrophobic and pressed to suffocating closeness by the muscular constrictions of the tube, she writhes and claws in a blind panic, using her elbows to stretch the walls and worm her way down.

Eventually her left hand breaks into a humid chamber, and she hauls herself forward by pulling from the rim.  Ran falls forward and lands on a soft bed of palisade-shaped florets.  Aware that time is running out, she feels around for the sabre and crawls until she meets the fleshy wall.  A burrow is needed in which to hide, and be safe from those organisms drawn here by the fate of their generation.  Ran hacks away at the wall and quickly finds that soft flesh is coming off in chunks. As soon as there is a cavity large enough to lie prostrate, she crawls inside and plugs the hole behind with pieces of the tessellated wall.  There is nothing but silence, and a long spell in uncounted time.

Ran is woken from light slumber by a clicking and scraping sound that works its way down from above.  She knows what will follow, and tenses in anticipation should the enemy detect her intrusion into this private ritual.  Pushing with restless labour, the elongated form of the wasp works its way through the leafy whorl of a channel.  And then, in the darkness, there is the alien sound of the thing moving quickly inside the cavity.  It sets about pollinating the florets: the long tube dipping into the styles with mechanical precision and patience.

The wasp completes the function it was created for, and having no other dream to sustain its future, lays down to die.  Ran waits in the darkness for the moment to come.  There is a tremor in the walls, and then a tearing sound could dimly be heard to vibrate though the chamber.  The whorl would now have sealed itself shut.  There is a muffled snap, and then the fruit plummets through space. Instinctively she closes her eyes.  The pollinated cargo has been dispersed, and Ran’s fate is now entwined with its success, and likewise the success of the eggs now impregnated into this vessel.

Finally the halting comes, and she is thrown against the ceiling of the dugout. Pain lights up her racing mind and she lays dazed in a pile while dimly aware that the fruit has not burst, and so its course now lies downstream: down the river of mud and hubris, and then into that flickering abyss glimpsed earlier.  If her calculations are correct, and the form matches its function, it will not fall into nothingness, but will become a suspended globule and slide slowly down between the trailing roots.  Ran can do nothing more than wait, and conserve her supply of air.

Dreams roam freely and their glimmer harbours echoes that hunt Ran down long corridors. Fleeing them she recedes deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until she reaches the original forking-path.

You see first of all a remembered glimpse of your dying brother as they drag him across the stones, and his wrecked, flayed skin comes off in leathered strips.  You feel again the sheer wall of pain, the anger, and hear yourself swear revenge against the state that owns you.

Events flash-forward to your eventual freedom when you killed your master in his sleep and escaped the city at dawn. You fled into the mountains and grew up there among shepherds.

Then your memory turns face, and you plunge backwards through years in captivity: the domestic and sexual slavery; the slave market where rough hands checked your teeth; the smell of coconut oil rubbed into your skin; and then the forever journey as a young girl, chained single-file, led ceaselessly across strange lands.

Finally, the most painful memory of all: the lakeside where you played with your brother.  It was early morning and the liquid sun was on its ascent.  The day was still and quiet and the light held a peculiar luminosity that could be the fiction of memory, or perhaps it really was one of those days when the shadows stretch out in long regiments and the light spills over the top of the cotton in a golden hum.  And into this peaceful scene enter the strangers with the impassive eyes.  And they move silently and you turn your back –always the same reaction– and you try to run.  But wherever you run they catch you, and you feel their grip on your unblemished skin, and you are marked from this point onwards: marked as a possession, an object of desire to serve the needs of an engine built on the broken dreams of its subjects.

The background dissolves and the surrounding hands that try and pull you back become paper-thin and you manage to pull away and then drift in limitless aeons across a mirrored surface.  Then falling into fire and waking in a different past, one where the dark strangers did not come; and you run through the dark portal into white light and the embrace of your parents.

Many hours later the capsule strikes bottom, and seems to bob up and down a moment before shifting through a ninety-degree angle.  Ran is now horizontal, and her blood settles out. The vibrations, and the gentle list to one side, suggest that the fruit is being carried by a body of water.  Time passes in silence.

Eventually there is activity on the other side of the barrier.  A din of splitting as the young wasps emerge.  Their wings are not yet tested, and she hears them scurry about with their innate orders to break free of their second wall.

Dozens of young could be heard, in a growing frenzy, to storm the walls and rip through the flesh.  Quickly Ran draws her blade, and pulls it close to her chest where short lunges can be made.  If the hoard seeks a route in this direction she will be quickly overwhelmed.  Frantically she digs her way out in a race with the propagating enemy.  Progress is slow and stretched-out in time, but eventually there is a rush of clean air as the blade rips through the tough outer skin, and there is a reassuring hymn outside as the wasps depart from another orifice into the night.

Ran hauls herself onto the surface and notices that the spines there previously have detached somewhere on your descent.  Around she sees only blackness domed thousands of feet above by the twinkling firmament of the canopy.  A chain of orbed lights are spaced evenly in two lines that pass some twenty feet away, and run until they stop abruptly at the foot of a colossal shadow in the distance.  The band of light is specked with falling black spots, and as small papery flakes drift onto Ran’s face she realises that it is raining detritus in a constant flurry.  As she adjusts to the light from the path her eyes cross a landscape of dunes made from caked litter. The dunes are bound by thick creepers which run in matted clumps, and appear like giant body parts frozen under the peculiar light.  The landscape is so swollen that in places the orbs are suspended far above the forest floor, and yet others are level with the tide. The gaps mark where they have long ago been submerged, and their glow penetrates only the wormy depths.

Carefully Ran climbs down to the floor and makes her way towards the path across uneven and sodden ground.  The flakes falling in silhouette through the arcing light remind her of the first time she stood outside in a snowstorm.  Only the forced exile from her homeland had made it possible for the encounter, and yet Ran felt strangely at home walking barefoot through the white powder and letting the virgin snowflakes melt on her black skin.

Ran walks briskly along the lit pathway and mounts the rises and dips of the shifting landscape.  Far in the distance she can dimly see a pyramidal cluster of light pulsing in the gloom.

Her attention is arrested by a crooked and dead tree that sprouts from the ground at the base of the slope you now descend.  The black branches overhang the path, and hanging downward is a long slender shape that looks something like a man at first glance, but the uncanny resemblance soon transforms itself and Ran traces four stick-thin legs down to an extended and tubular body and finally to the thickly curved arms that are folded in a pious contemplation.  With a rising horror she notices both the serrated edges of those forelimbs, and the triangular shaped head dwarfed by two bulbous eyes staring impassively back at her.  Trailing below this, and what first looked like rope, are two long antennae.

The hanging predator starts to move very slowly without once taking its gaze off its prey.  The legs detach and come down one at a time, and then the whole thing drops to the floor and immediately springs up on those long, tapering legs supporting the elongated body, which then hoists the crane-like thorax and floating head.  The two forelimbs hang there below the head in a mockery of human servitude –each one more like half a jawbone than an arm.  And then it moves: a scurrying towards Ran with mechanical jerks of legs while the body remains stilled in the same posture.  As it emerges into the light she can see that it is perfectly pink all over, like gums that have hardened into gleaming plates.  Ran turns and runs, her powerful body streaking across the cauterized and rotting heap.

The light from the path quickly bleeds out, and she runs on into the night, her arms outstretched to shield her face.  Not a single sound follows.

In less than a heartbeat, the ground gives away and Ran is up to her neck in a thick soup.  She flails around and sinks further, her feet touching nothing.  There is a loud splash to the right and a wave of this porridge breaks over Ran’s head.  Something huge writhes helplessly against the mud, and churns it over.

All sound is blocked out as Ran’s craned neck, and then her head sinks below the surface.  Her lungs begin to burn, and she must overcome the desire to breath in the brine.  Just as she surrenders hope, something hard collides into her from below, crushing her legs together.  A sharp pain spreads as an unnatural clasp grips Ran’s waist and spines dig into her armour. She hangs like a toy, staring up at green stars.

One bulbous and impassive eye and a set of pink mandibles are framed in the soft light from the orbs.  The mantis lays Ran down on the earth carefully and cants its head; then it rears up and lunges downwards with its two hooked forearms.  She is prepared.  She is always prepared.  Ran rolls sideways onto her knees, and then swings her sword in a low arc as she spins around and steps forward.  It cuts through the narrower tissue of both forearms, and the mantis collapses.  Ran cuts both antennae with a second swing, and then plunges the blade in between its eyes; it slumps forward, dead.  Ran immediately falls to her knees and places her forehead on the cold ground.

When Ran opens her eyes she finds that the mantis has been spirited away.  She quickly glances around.  The forest is quiet, but she anticipates danger waiting in the blind spots.  Biting her lip hard she forces herself to get up and keep moving through the brown snow.

Exhausted, and licking dry, cracked lips, Ran raises her head and roughly traces the outline of a tiered pyramid with a levelled tip.  Piled upwards are cyclopean blocks and a causeway that leads towards an anemone of light.  Scrambling forward, half-expecting to find nothing, her hands meet cold sandstone and mechanically she begins to haul herself upwards from one block to another, trying not to look into the blinding light.

She ascends until the light surrounds her and every surface drips with incandescence.  After counting fifty steps Ran is beginning to tire but the top can now be glimpsed as a near horizon. She emerges onto the altar that once held the royal gardens.  Now it is skinned-over with dead and rotting hubris, and yet in the centre, some fifty feet away the black tree waits outside of time.  As Ran approaches a single fruit drops silently onto a bed of leaves and rolls sideways.

It was said long ago that the fruit of the black tree grants wishes. It was said the old ones planted that tree which had no cousin. They whispered to its roots, filling the swelling fruits with prophesies. Only the women, those who had remained penitent, and only when their life was a dying spark, could drink the nectar and glimpse the future like a flash of quicksilver across a breaking wave.

Ran puts her hands on the cool, smooth bark; takes a deep breath; slowly crouches and picks up the heavy fruit; inverts the husk and drinks from one of the eyes.

A sweet, warm liquid runs down her throat and quickly she is inebriated on the living water.  Dropping the husk and wandering under the raining light, Ran waits for the nectar to seep into its bed of nails.  And then, without ceremony, the pyramid shakes and the leaves scatter like birds.  A brittle column of pain splits her seams, and Ran bulges her mental cavities to escape the invisible fire, inverted and shaking its head through her.

She wakes hours later from her cold revelation in the mud, splayed in a twisted heap of bruised limbs.  “I’m alive”, she whispers, and those words spoken outside, the first in many weeks, are as alien as the gentle whisper of the forest.  She lays immobile for some time before eventually easing into a sitting position.  Then Ran slowly opens her eyes.

There is a depthless wall of black.  Ran gropes around in the mud as a sickness wells up.  What kind of bargain had she struck? What was this divine punishment?  How would she ever find her way out of the forest? What would devour her?

Ran can hear nothing but her own breathing and her blood sloshing back and forth.  The smell of damp, rotting matter is the closest horizon.  Up, down, left and right: the coordinates are the same but there is no map. She will never again see the sky.

Ran spends many hours on that table of rock, screaming and cursing at her lot: shouting profanities at the distant canopy; shouting towards the light; balling her fists and striking the mud. Eventually she loses her anger and comes to a magnanimous surrender. Death is freedom: a release from pain. But she will not give herself up easily. So Ran decides to walk out of the forest. She will survive despite whatever little it has to offer her. Perhaps I can redeem myself in my own eyes she says.
It takes her two years to escape the wilderness. She crawls and drags herself, climbs up that avalanche of mud and all the while hones her senses and hardens her will. Soon she can detect minute changes in her soundscape, and can visualise her sword moving through three dimensional space. She can now survive in darkness. A torch burns inside her.

Crawling out of the edge of the forest as if it had given birth to her, she is slovenly and glistening and bloody. She walks forward, not even sure what direction to take. She turns right at the road, and heads towards the city not really knowing why. Occasionally a carriage passes and she practises bouncing sound off it. At some distance outside the city she hears a group of soldiers pull up around a man on their horses. He is accused of poaching, and a death sentence is given there and then. Without thinking she runs into the fray and routs the horses.  Later she frees a convoy of slaves, and they join her. The movement grows and she becomes a leader of men; many more arrive and soon they invade the castled enemy. In less than a year her army stands outside the gates of the capital. What follows is a bloody three days in which the regime falls and men, women and children are scalped and mutilated in the streets. Ran is helpless to control the horror she has unleashed. Blood runs through the streets and heads and torn skin are mounted on poles.

Before the battle is over Ran leaves. She turns her back on civilisation for the last time. She realises she can never find peace in this world. Her only chance of peace exists in a forked-path that time has put further and further from her. A path that can never be retraced.

EPILOGUE

The universe is a garden in which all things grow.

As the years passed Ran became an old woman and the new rulers also fell into corruption and the twisted obsessions of power. But Ran was untouched by these fleeting events.  She had found a liminal state in which to exist, and she spent out her days in seclusion.

Then one October evening, she took off her sandals and left the hut through mist-stained trees.  She left the mountains, on the other side to the city, and walked many miles to the coast.  She took one short step onto the cold, wet sand and stood there for a moment.  Her clouded eyes levelled and she heard inside the great glory as the sun entered.

Ran soaked up the wavelengths and heard the unchanging coitus between all things.  The sun pours its libidinous energy onto the earth, and nature responds in a cycle of life and death, a repetition of love and mourning: towards the light and collapsing into darkness.  This great symphony echoed throughout the clear sky. Forever we try to uplift our souls unto the heavens, but then falter and descend with bat-winged hearts.

Stretching her toes so that they cracked, and walking bowed towards the sun, she took slow and steady steps into the deep.  The sea foamed around her and she struggled to keep her footing.  Then the bottom was gone and she floundered in blankets of water –she had never learnt to swim.

Turning over Ran called out to her last unseen fragment of sky.  There was a rushing sound, and then the cloistered silence as her head went under.  She breathed in one last breath.

She fell into the fire and she was born in the fire.

You wake in a field of cotton with the sun cutting through the tops.  Your brother runs up behind you and puts his arms right around, hugging you tightly.  Your journey has ended where it begun.  You will never know the significance that in this life the men would not be coming to steal you away.  The golden hum came over the sugar cane, and you run hand-in-hand with your brother back to your parents, through the dark portal and into the light.