Real, Imaginary Beasts

“Run!”

Orion promptly obeyed Luna’s frantic command without question.

Ryker, their state-of-the-art lunar rover, suffered a catastrophic loss of power once they exited the falls. With the massing mob of alien creatures marching towards them from every direction, and no power to safely keep them protected inside of the rover, they were forced to abandon Ryker, and make a dangerous escape on foot.

Awkwardly sprinting towards the dense gray forest to the west, Luna’s skull ached with confused emotions from the fact that this new, strange world they literally stumbled into, had an earth-like gravitational pull.

As they approached the dark tree line of twisted trunks, slithering branches infested with black leaves, and decaying canopies, Orion went on ahead of Luna to canvas the area for threats.

There were many.

They were nightmarish.

But they were perched high up on gnarled limbs – gawking, and cackling territorial warnings. Orion cautiously lowered his belly to the ground, and observed the intentions of the winged beasts. Instincts, intuition, and years of high-level mental training told him that if they respected the territories of the black and brown, leathery vultures, they would be allowed to pass unscathed.

He turned around to get eyes on Luna.

Thirty yards from his position, he watched as commander Riggs weaved through the shifting shadows. Finally ducking behind a tangled collection of green tree trunk weeds, Orion’s eyes locked onto the squirming tree line, and saw the fifty, vibrantly skinned, four and two-legged creatures hustling towards them.

With no time to waste, he barked twice, then began to run towards Luna. A sharp voice erupted inside of his helmet, halting his movements.

“No, Orion! You keep going. Find us shelter. I will be right behind you.”

Orion’s fur shivered inside of his suit at the idea of leaving his handler behind. But Commander Luna Riggs was more than just his handler, she was his best friend. The only mission now was to keep Luna safe.

Orion struggled to convey the emotions bubbling inside of his body. So he barked once, indicating that he understood his orders, then disappeared into the thickening shadows.

Luna reluctantly craned her neck back towards the clearing, and shuttered once again at her new, impossibly terrifying, gray reality.

The swirling, colorless horizon crawled with an endless variety of imaginary biped, and quadruped monsters.

That’s what scared Luna the most.

It wasn’t being magically transported from the moon to a new world through a waterfall portal in an underground cave. It was because these gray monsters, which were supposed to be imaginary, weren’t imaginary at all. They were real.

Orion’s movements were once again halted by a sensory overload. Musty hides, dank fur, and slimy skin electrified his nostrils, while salivating growls, and screeching roars encircled him, reverberating off of the tree trunks.

The beasts were in the woods.

The thought of any harm befalling Luna made Orion’s hackles roil. Fortunately, his training kicked back in, and he packed away his fears.

Orion followed his nose over jagged dead falls, and sinking mud ponds. He trudged through hard swamp reeds, and carefully tiptoed forty feet across a severely splintered log bridge, which hovered a couple hundred feet over a raging, rock infested river — all while making sure not to overly disturb the winged predators carefully watching him from above.

Once safely across the weathered slab of wood, he took a moment to survey the area up ahead.

It was another dense forest. Except this woodland was different from the one across the bridge. These tree trunks grew tall, and had thousands of thin, and thick burly branches blooming with bright green, and yellow leaves. The canopies were soft, and swayed delicately in the harmonious gusts of cool wind. Blue birds giggled, and bounced from copper nests on many of the lower hanging branches. Whilst larger, red, silver, and orange birds soared from high limb to higher limb, providing over watch for everyone, and everything below.

Orion’s amazement at the drastically dramatic change in environment was struggling to be kept at bay, but a gurgling cry from the infected woods across the bridge helped him stay on mission.

Luna.

He laid out a mental grid formation in his brain, then began exploring the forest. Panning from left to right, Orion quickly found nothing but delicate streams of fresh water with all manners of brightly colored alien fish, and reptiles, ten-foot-wide, neon green moss clearings, wildflower gardens, and the occasional underground den for a friendly, yet frightened alien creature.

He was about to set out in another two-hundred-foot-wide grid when a three-foot tall, long-necked squirrel adaptation scurried past him, disappearing into a solid wall of thick vines, weeds, and water sprouts.

He approached the wall, and thoroughly examined it. He quickly discovered that the wall was actually thin, and easy to break through with a couple of well placed paws.

As the thorny door broke free, a dark corridor puffed an inviting cloud of silver haze through his body.

Orion barked with dread, “Not another cave.”

His instincts were screaming at him to not enter the large cavity in the stone wall, but his heart kept reminding him of his mission. Luna.

Being the most courageous good boy, Orion hesitantly stepped inside.

Luna was in a full out sprint, desperately following the glowing footprints of Orion’s path before her. The familiar paw formations illuminated bright red on the inside of her helmet’s gold, polycarbonate sun visor. Another brilliant, and extremely handy feature of their one-of-a-kind space suits.

Highly sensitive transmitters were engineered into the soles of the astronaut’s space boots, which when activated, would illuminate the astronaut’s footprints in real time, relaying the data to the helmet’s visor.

The path was dangerous, and the horde was closing in around her. She paid great attention to each step, making sure not to slip on any hidden slick stones, or tripping on any protruding roots. If she fell, well, she didn’t want to imagine what would happen if she did. So she used her astronaut training to box away the worst case scenario, and focused on running with a purpose.

After climbing up and over three dead fall piles, nearly falling into a sinking pond of thick, gray sludge, and getting battered by tall, dark gray swamp reeds, Luna finally found the sunlight.

As her eyes adjusted to the brighter surroundings, Luna searched for her friend, and for shelter.

She found neither.

The only thing she did find was a sketchy, two-foot-wide log bridge. The rotted slab of wood stretched for nearly forty feet above a deathly drop into a rock infested canal, raging with black and gray rapids.

Her stomach coiled at what she saw next.

Orion’s footprints.