Chương 31: Chapter 27 – Captured

Rain hammered down on Cade's body as he lay splayed out on the concave hollow of the shell. He flinched, or tried to, but his body didn't respond. He was paralyzed from whatever the orange frog had done to him. His limbs hung uselessly at his sides. The shell rode atop a broad, flat head and shifted with each step, rocking gently as the creature carrying him walked. Cade's own body sloshed in the pooling rainwater, unable to do anything about it.

The char across his skin—blackened lines that spiderwebbed across his torso, arms, and cheeks—had continued to ache beneath the downpour. Where the purple lightning had left its kiss, his flesh felt cracked and brittle. But the rain dulled the fire. At first it stung. The initial impact of cold water on seared flesh was sharp enough to make him gasp. But as more rain came, sheet after punishing sheet, something shifted. The sting faded and his skin softened as heat bled away.

The pain didn't vanish, but it dulled into something bearable. He didn't know how long he'd been carried. Minutes. Hours. The sky above was still filled with thunderheads but the storm around him no longer roared. Cade's fingers twitched, but wouldn't obey him. Only his face muscles worked—barely. His jaw ached and his mouth tasted of copper, smoke, and rain. The ash that had once clung to him as well as the sticky black sheets were gone.

What remained was raw, blistered skin, striated with fine cracks from the lightning. Still, he breathed. Rain ran down his cheeks, slicked into the corners of his eyes, and blurred his vision with a constant wet sheen. His captor hadn't vocalized since it had lifted him up. Earlier there had been a series of low croaks that echoed oddly through the storm but none came from the orange frog below. If it wanted to kill me, it would have done it already, he thought. Or maybe it's just taking me back to feed its young.

Overhead, the sky still churned with flashes of color as lightning crawled through the cloud belly. Each flicker painted the world in strange hues of jade, copper, crimson, and cobalt. But no new bolts struck. That part of the storm seemed to have passed. He let his breath sync with the frog's steady footsteps. Breathing was all he could do, the only thing he could control at the moment. As the frog walked it continually adjusted its grip on the shell.

Occasionally it would lean to one side and let out a few croaks that resonated through Cade's spine. Were they words? Orders? Was this thing trying to communicate with him? He couldn't tell. The frog walked with purpose, like it had a destination in mind. Cade swallowed hard. His throat felt like sandpaper again, a sensation that was becoming all too familiar. As they continued on, the veiled tapestry of mist and clouds above began to shift, revealing glimpses of a living forest that hadn't been there previously.

The mist lifted slowly, peeled back in gauzy sheets. At first it revealed little—a glisten of wet bark here, a flash of vine there—but soon colors returned to the once grey landscape. Real color. Lush and brazen. Green, first. Deep as emerald and bright as lime. Then red, amber, and yellow, brilliant hues he hadn't seen in what felt like days. The land around them was alive—violently so. As the frog walked Cade witnessed plants burst upward like a sped up time-lapse.

Broad-leafed vines laddered into the air with a shiver and snap, ferns uncoiled in a rustle of leaves. The rain thinned into a trickle, caught and drunk by a canopy that rapidly grew out of nowhere. Broad fronds and slick umbrellas of foliage knitted overhead until only scattered droplets made it through. What once had been a punishing downpour was now a soft cadence of water on leaf and bark. He could barely move his head but his eyes caught motion. Flowers opened to the rain, each caught a drop and began to glow.

Some of the nearby leaves looked like mirrored plates. He glimpsed his own reflection—warped, charred, and gaunt. Holy shit I look so much worse than I feel and I feel like death. How am I even alive? The mirror-leaf didn't lie. His skin was still blackened, cracked and pitted like erupting earth. His cheeks were sunken, charred skin pulled taut over a skeletal frame. Every inch of him looked battered and wrung out. And yet he was alive. Cade focused inward as best he could, trying to take inventory of himself.

The System offered no help, no neat breakdown of what had gone wrong or right. But his body didn't feel the way it had before. The pain was there, yes, sharp and constant, but beneath it was something else. A density. A strange resilience, like his flesh and bone had been stressed past their limits but hadn't failed. The lightning should have cooked him from the inside out. Instead, it felt like it had changed something within him. Cade tried to grasp at the thought, to label it, but it slipped through his fingers.

Whatever had happened to him wasn't something the System was going to explain. The frog's pace slowed and brought him out of his introspective haze. He saw thick vines parting ahead like curtains, and what lay beyond made Cade forget the pain in his body entirely. A village moved through the trees. That was the only way to describe it. Great lily pads—meters wide—crawled through the newly formed jungle on tangled root-legs.

Each carried a structure on its back, huts made of bark-thatch, liana fiber, and living vines. Braided ropes slung between some of the pads letting smaller frogs easily cross between them, leaping across the bridges from one walking home to another. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. It wasn't a city. It wasn't a caravan. It was somewhere in between—a wandering ecosystem. Alive and in constant motion.

Cade's shell was lowered gently into a clearing between two pads. His spine jolted at the contact with solid ground. He breathed deep, and for the first time since he arrived in Cynthia's Legacy, he smelled something other than ash and smoke: earth, wet bark, flowers blooming, and even rot. All forms of life. Cade blinked and wasn't sure what he was seeing as one of the giant lily pads lowered itself down to ground level. A golden toad loomed on a pad twice the size of the others.

It was massive—easily three meters from toe to crown, with shoulders significantly broader than Cade's shell. Its skin was not painted gold, but grown that way—gleaming with mucus and hammered with wart-like growths that glittered in the light. The toad's throat sac pulsed like twin drums as it breathed, the membrane stretched thin with thick veins just below the skin. Its eyes were amber with horizontally slitted pupils. They studied Cade with the weight of authority. Cade didn't move. He couldn't.

But he could still activate his only usable skill. Golden Grandtoad —?? Orange Tricurrent Frog —?? He dismissed the screens with a flick of annoyance. His [Identify] skill was practically useless. Beside him, the orange frog set a hand to its own chest and bowed, slow and deliberate. A series of low croaks and trills followed. The golden toad answered with a single bass note that Cade felt in his skull more than his ears. They were communicating—of that, Cade was certain.

Not in any language he understood, but through rhythm and structure that clearly followed some internal logic. If they were intelligent enough to speak with each other, then there had to be a way he could speak to them too—or at least convince them not to eat him. When the toad turned its gaze fully on Cade, the shell vibrated slightly beneath him. Cade swallowed dryly. The remnants of ash and char still clung to his mouth, but the rain had given him enough to speak.

"I—hey," he rasped, wincing at how his voice sounded.

"I'm not here to cause trouble. I won't hurt anyone." His words fell flat. Meaningless to the creatures before him. The golden toad tilted its head. Its eyes narrowed slightly. One webbed hand lifted and gestured towards its back. A single deep croak echoed outward. The orange frog stood and left Cade's view. A moment later it returned holding a thin piece of flat bark. The frog climbed onto the lowered lilypad and reached behind the golden toad's massive shoulder, scraping gently along a ridge of its back.

Cade squinted through the dim trying to understand what was happening. A thick, viscous mucus, shot through with tiny, glimmering flecks, stretched from the toad's skin to the bark. It shimmered with internal light, like powdered mica floating in honey. The orange frog finished collecting and turned. It was coming toward him. Cade tried to shrink further into the curve of the shell. His spine scraped against the protrusion as his body almost obeyed his commands.

The orange frog knelt beside him, eyes unreadable, and slid two webbed fingers under his jaw. It was gentle but those digits were unyielding. Cade tensed. He wanted to resist. To turn away. But his body betrayed him. He was still too weak, still unable to control his body from whatever the orange one did to him. All he could do was let out a groan in protest as the frog tilted his head back. The tray of bark hovered above him. On it, the golden mucus shimmered like it was alive.

The scent hit first—metallic and sweet. Behind it came something bitter and rotten, like citrus rind and pond scum blended together. Cade barely had time to register the revulsion before his mouth was forced open and the bark tipped. The slime touched his tongue and he gagged. Reflexively, his mouth tried to spit it out—but the frog was already smearing it along his palate with another long finger. When his mouth was filled with the golden goo it forced his mouth closed and held his lips shut.

Cade choked and gagged as the mucus slid down his throat. Every nerve in his mouth lit up, tasting textures and temperatures in places that didn't normally register sensation. Copper. Ozone. Bitter white rind. Rainwater laced with iron. Then came the heat followed by a cool sensation then more heat again. Back and forth, the sensations alternated racing down his throat, into his stomach, and spreading outwards from there. The golden toad watched him the entire time.

Its stare unblinking with its eyes locked on Cade. A single mote of gold drifted off its skin, hanging in the air as if suspended by an invisible string. Then another and another until dozens of motes filled the space between the toad and Cade. They floated toward Cade, hovering above him in a loose spiral. The toad blinked and the motes moved, forming a distinct pattern that Cade couldn't comprehend. The motes shifted midair, rearranged into something structured, a fractal branching ever outward.

Cade's vision trembled at the edges, the faint mist around him warping like someone was tugging at the air from behind the curtain of the world. Panic bloomed in his chest. What did I just swallow? His heart kicked against his ribs. Muscles twitched, but not on command. His arms still refused to move, his legs felt weighed down, his breath stuck in his throat. Was this poison? Was this how they euthanized their prey? Move, damn it. Do something. His mind raced but his body refused to listen.

He tried to shout and only managed a grunt. Then the fear dulled. It didn't vanish but its sharp edges softened, as if someone had wrapped his panic in soft wool. His heartbeat slowed, no longer hammering against the inside of his chest. A croak sounded from in front of him. Low and resonant. It formed not in his ears but behind his eyes. In the hollows of his sinuses. In the bones of his skull. Cade blinked slowly. The jungle around him pulsed with a golden light that wasn't there a moment ago.

The gold motes aligned again—braiding into a helix—and then shattered into particles that hovered just above his skin. His vision wavered, the real and the unreal weaving into one another. Lightning flashed behind his eyes—but it wasn't bolts from the storm. This was dark lightning. Violet veins spidering through a colorless void. The Elder croaked again. And Cade felt the sound slide into him, heavy and full of meaning. It pressed against something in his mind like a key fitting into a lock. He inhaled sharply.

The gold motes responded. They swirled tighter. The shapes they formed shimmered—complex as new fractal patterns emerged. They were alive, layered with motion and growth. A memory tried to surface. No, not a memory. A sensation. The feeling of being watched by the Ashen Emperor. That moment right before the baptism, when the creature had looked at him and the ash had responded. This was like that. But slower. Gentler. There was no violence, just a presence far beyond Cade's own.

A corridor opened in his vision as light and space braided together. He could no longer resist. Cade's mind cracked open and even though he was laying down, he felt himself fall.