Every step I took left behind a trail that shimmered with life and loss. Not footprints — blood. Drops fell from me in steady rhythm, staining the leaves, soaking into roots, and yet none of it stayed lost. The moment it hit the ground, it began crawling back, like a ribbon slithering toward its origin, reentering me through open wounds or pores. Every return brought a the blood of the slain animals. A silent, uncounted click somewhere in the depths of my chest. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. I stopped caring. I just kept walking.
My body was mangled, but I wasn't broken. Not yet.
The air was thick with violence. The forest still pulsed with the memory of blood. I could feel the eyes on me . Feral. Impatient. I didn't flinch.
I drove my fingers into the eye socket of a beast lunging at me. Warmth burst across my hand as I curled my fingers in deep and yanked. Nerves? Veins? Whatever I grabbed, it gave way. The creature collapsed even as its jaws bit deep into my shoulder, teeth digging in and tearing flesh. I didn't scream. I only smiled, lips cracked and wet.
Another creature charged.
I could feel my shoulder already stitching itself together. The blood burned with new fuel, turning pain into heat, heat into resolve. I grabbed the incoming beast by the neck and flung it straight into the last glowing remains of the thermite blaze. It lit up like paper, flailing in a mass of fur and flame. The scream it gave out didn't sound natural. Nothing did here.
The world was smoke and lightning and the steady pulse of something deeper inside me. A force that wasn't mine alone.
I grabbed the tail of an animal that burned with thermite flame, still twitching on the ground and dragged it along, one hand on the massive bone I had retrieved earlier — ten meters long, smooth and humming with something I couldn't name. I wasn't sure why I was carrying it. Only that I had to. My sixth sense hadn't spoken in words, but the words it told screamed.
More beasts emerged.
Another fox-like creature jumped at my neck. I caught it mid-air. The blood inside me moved before I could. It surged out of my skin, coiling around the animal like smoke turned solid, and devoured it in seconds. When it dropped from my hand, it was just a husk — hollow-eyed and dry as ash.
I kept moving. My path followed sound. I could hear the storm. That meant open space. Thinner trees. An exit.
Something leapt. I kicked. Another tackled me from the side — I smashed its skull into the trunk of a gnarled tree. They came fast, teeth and claws, in twos and threes. I didn't dodge anymore. I let them hit, and then I ended them.
The blood soaked them up. Their death became my healing. The count kept ticking. Forty. Fifty. More.
Then the lightning split the sky.
The entire forest lit up in one blinding pulse. I saw the slope ahead. Just past the rise — a clearing, maybe even the shore.
I ran.
And the boar came.
It hit me like a god. A wall of muscle and tusks, all momentum and fury. I didn't see it. I just felt myself rising, lifted off the ground by something impossibly strong. Its horns pierced my ribs, one cracking bone and lifting me like a banner. My blood spilled freely.
Still, I smiled.
This was it. The trade. The final price for the wine that healed me.
I clawed upward, using the boar's own charge to climb its head. My fingers dug into its bristled fur as I pulled myself to its back. The bone still hung from my hand. The lightning flashed again — and in its light, I saw the boar's eyes. Too bright. Too clear. There was something else in there. Something more than instinct.
I drove the bone down.
It pierced with no resistance.
The boar screamed — a sharp, high sound that shook the trees — and bucked. It smashed into a tree, and I went flying, landing hard against another trunk. The pain was dull, distant. The blood inside me roared, forcing my lungs to keep breathing, my heart to keep pumping.
I staggered to my feet.
I dragged the boar's corpse with one hand. The bone with the other. I didn't know why. Just that I had to.
Each step took me closer to the lightning.
And the closer I got, the quieter the world became.
No more beasts came for me. No eyes glinted from the dark. No rustling in the bushes. Even the leeches had stopped trying. It was like a line had been drawn, and I had crossed it.
The clearing opened in front of me like a stage.
Rain swept across it in sheets. The wind howled, but it was different here. Clean. The storm had weight, but it wasn't hostile. The lightning above cracked in wide, furious arcs, lighting the trees like fireworks frozen in time.
And in those trees — monkeys.
Dozens of them. Still. Shouting.
They sat on branches and ropes and vines, watching and cheering.
But they weren't cheering for me.
They were looking at the bone.
The elder monkey descended slowly. He moved with reverence, not age. His eyes glued to the bone.
He stopped a few feet away.
I kicked the boar toward him. It landed in front of him with a wet thud, mud and blood splashing from the impact.
He didn't even glance at it.
Instead, he raised the gourd.
Then pointed at the bone.
He was asking.
Trade?
I looked down at the bone. My fingers tightened around it.
My sixth sense hummed. It pulsed.
Why did it matter? Why did it feel like more than just a giant piece of some ancient creature? Even the beasts in the forest seemed to revere and fear it. Even the sixth sense had told me to carry it.
So I asked it again.
Should I trade it?
And for the first time, the sixth sense didn't speak in tongue of an ancient language I couldn't speak.
It simply said yes.
I let go.
The elder monkey gave me the gourd.
It was heavier than the last one. Warm. Almost too warm. It bounced lightly in my hand like it had a heartbeat of its own.
He turned without a word and barked a command in a language I didn't understand. The other monkeys swarmed down, vines in hand, and lifted the boar away.
The elder took the bone. He held it like a relic, cradled across his back. His eyes never met mine again. He turned and climbed back into the canopy with grace that seemed impossible for his age.
And just like that, they were gone.
I stood alone in the clearing.
I looked at the gourd.
Then at the trees.
This day had been confusing.
Brutal.
Strange.
But not the most confusing.
Not by a long shot.
---------------
The storm had dragged both me and my boat into the embrace of Monkey Island. Or maybe it had never let me go in the first place. Rain lashed the land. Wind carved into the jungle like invisible blades. Trees bowed under the force of it all, and through the chaos, the monkeys screamed. High-pitched and shrill, their cries echoed across the forest like the warnings of spirits. Dozens of them lined the branches, watching me as I struggled in the surf.
My boat, half-buried in the sand and half afloat in the shallows, was a wreck. I waded through the surf and grabbed the hull, flipping it over with a groan of soaked wood. The boat rolled upright, sloshing as it rocked in the rising tide.
The damage was obvious. The lightning rod, once my shield against the storm, had split clean through. One piece was still clinging to the deck by a twisted bolt, the other was lost to the sea, never to return. The cabin was gone entirely—ripped apart by the storm's violence, scattered across the ocean or shattered beneath the waves. The hull had gaping cracks. The base itself was warped, bowing inward from the pressure it had withstood.
Nothing was left. Not even supplies. Just a shell of what once was, and me, I was too used to it all to even curse.
I crouched beside the ruined deck, drenched.That was when the elder monkey patted my arm. I turned to him. His small, wrinkled face was unreadable, yet calm. With no words, he held up a banana.
I stared for a few seconds. It felt so absurd that it was… normal. I took it and peeled it slowly. I ate it.
The elder monkey climbed aboard the boat without permission. He moved with his usual calm despite the slick surface and broken planks. In one hand, he held a gourd. He uncorked it, tilted it toward his mouth, and began to drink.
Except he didn't drink.
The wine missed. It sloshed onto the floor, dripped over the splintered wood and cracked edges. And that was when it happened.
Where the wine touched, the damage repaired.
I watched in silence, frozen more by disbelief than awe. The boards closed in on themselves. The wood reshaped. Fragments rejoined like reversed explosions. Nails that had been torn free embedded themselves again. The boat healed.
It wasn't fast. It wasn't flashy.
But it was real.
The elder monkey continued walking across the boat, his feet sloshing through puddles, trailing drips of wine. With each step, the wood beneath him stitched itself whole. Lightning cracked overhead, illuminating the transformation. What was once shattered was now nearly whole.
He jumped off the boat as silently as he had boarded and walked up to me, handing me another banana.
I took it with a hollow breath. Then he pointed to the gourd I had been given during the bone trade. The one I hadn't opened since.
I uncorked it and drank a mouthful.
The wine didn't siphon to the chest. It pooled in my stomach, mixing with banana.
Then the real strangeness began.
I felt them spinning—banana and wine—inside me. The momentum increased rapidly, until it felt like a cyclone had been born behind my ribs. I doubled over slightly, clutching my gut. The spin compressed into a point, then that point exploded outward and reshaped into something solid.
Another ball.
A second core, like the wine ball in my chest, had formed in my abdomen. I could feel it. It radiated heat, just like the first. For a moment, I worried it would burn straight through me.
Instead, it healed.
Where the process had torn tissue or strained muscle, the heat soothed it. My stomach, which had gone rigid and sick, softened. My breath steadied. The second ball nestled into place and stopped moving.
It didn't siphon anything like the first core.
It didn't act with purpose.
It simply… existed.
A dormant core hidden inside me.
I looked up. The elder monkey gave me a satisfied nod, then patted my arm again. Behind him, other monkeys began tossing bananas into my boat, laughing and shrieking as they worked. The boat, now solid again, held the weight without groaning.
They were sending me off.
I stood slowly and turned back to the jungle, taking in one last look at the trees, the vines, the shadows where too many strange things had happened. The elder monkey stepped back as the others gathered behind him. Then, without ceremony, they pushed the boat into the water.
It slid cleanly into the surf.
The current took hold immediately.
I stepped aboard, balancing carefully, and took my place. The wind and the waves drifted my boat to the waters.
The monkeys waved from the trees, hooting and hollering, dozens of tiny hands in the air.
Except the elder monkey.
He didn't wave.
He just stood there.
Watching.
The island grew smaller behind me, the jungle shrinking into a dark mass, shrouded in mist and the remnants of storm. The rain had lightened, but the sea was still restless.
I looked down at my chest, hand resting where the first wine ball slept beneath muscle and bone.
Then my hand dropped lower, over my stomach where the second ball had formed.
Two orbs of silent heat. Anchors in a sea of unknowns.
Monkey Island had given me much.
More than I had asked for. More than I understood.
But no answers.
What was the creature in the gorge that pulled me beneath the water?
What was the true nature of that bone? The one that made beasts hesitate and elder monkeys offer trades?
Why did the wine defy natural law?
And what were these balls inside me, these suns under my skin?
Nothing here belonged to the world I thought I knew.
Nothing obeyed the rules I had grown up trusting.
Monkey Island was not just a place. It was something else. A threshold. A trick. A truth too large to explain.
And it had chosen me.
Not for destiny.
Not for glory.
But for curiosity.
Because every time I left it behind, it found a way to bring me back.
Not with violence. Not with force.
Just with mystery.
A mystery too loud to ignore.
I stared at the horizon.
Soon, the island was just a blur. A memory on the sea mist.
But I knew.
The next time I entered these waters, the island would find me again.
Because Monkey Island was no longer just an odd detour in my journey.
It was part of it now.
And it wasn't done with me yet.