The Exoforest

We drove up the snowy, winding road towards the cozy A-frame cabin. The heavy rubber wheels of our rover crunched along the frozen alien forest floor.

Kepler 186-F's arctic katabatics howled about my husband and I as we ambled ever so slowly further into the wood. Globular solar orbs growing from the treetops were our only light amongst the dark afternoon light. The a-frame hab had been suggested at the behest of our landing mates, a retreat away from the mundane day to day of the colony.

The going felt slower than the shuttle ride to this frozen hell, though anything was better than the smoggy shithole that was left of Earth. The terrain around us changed, transformed as we delved further into the exoforest. The fauna became more harsh with each crawling switchback. From within the woods it felt as though eyes were on us from all sides. We'd been told before our exploratory mission had been sent to 186-F, the planet had no life larger than microorganisms and bacteria.

How wrong they'd been.

From every direction I felt their eyes, at least what we called their eyes. The Watchers. Never once had there been an interaction between us and the native population. We’d tried numerous times to make first contact, but the life–which we assumed to be primitive despite having no actual evidence of–was unapologetically reclusive. It was as though they were made of the habitat themselves, blending, molding into the bird shit colored soil and jagged mineral outcroppings. The trees swayed gently in the wind. Since Sol 1 the Watchers hadn’t hidden their presence. Appearing as though from nowhere and when least expected, then disappearing again as though a part of 186-F’s thin atmosphere.

Always watching, always waiting.

The exoforest gave way to the larger trees of the dense winter wood. The trees loomed overhead as though Daron and I had been driving between Martian skyscrapers. They grew crueler, and more twisted as the old frozen tracks we followed swerved about more aggressively with each turn.

The rover's engine was loud below us, it had been nearly three years since we'd ‘gone out.' These little excursions away from the landing colony were the closest we could get.

The rover swerved to the left. Instinct took over and I grabbed the wheel and pulled the emergency brake before my mouth had time to scream, "Daron!" through our EVA suit earpieces. Despite 186-F's cosmically high atmospheric oxygen content, it would still suffocate a human within minutes.

"What?" Daron's eyes shot open and he grasped the wheel with such ferocity I thought the lightweight aluminum steering column might snap. "What happened?" His eyes were wide and wild, as though he'd just woken from a dream or taken some experimental hallucinogenic used during the long jumps between solar systems.

I remained silent, I knew my husband well enough to know that he needed to gather his wits for a few seconds, whatever he was coming back from, it wasn't sitting in the driver's seat of our rover. The increasingly massive trunks reflected off the cold light in his helm, 186-B’s distant sun’s rays sneaking between the trees illuminated his stark features. The eyes flicked in the forest.

Always watching, always waiting.

"You look like you just smoked a doobie with the devil."

"Yeah." Daron snorted. We kept driving.

The Bioluminesce common to the native fauna bathed everything in an eerie glow as we drew further into the exoforest.

The trees continued to change, as though we had entered into a brighter world with taller trunks and less leaves with which to block out the cold sun. The switchbacks shortened and the trees grew more sparse. The foliage continued to warp and shift, as though portraying with each passing tree a memorial of some long dead knight of the Watchers. Guardians of the races of 186-F we still knew nothing about. Though we never ceased to assert humanity's cruel touch about their world.

We had grown ever more complacent with their watchful gazes, we’d taken the native species of bipedals for granted for so many years after landing. The Watchers would watch, and slink away whenever an attempt to communicate was made, the shyness almost childlike. Even after all these years of feeling their presence more than seeing, it still sent a cold shudder down my back.

Despite the Federation's assurances that the natives were harmless after we'd sent our initial data back to Old Earth, I never felt truly at ease, I never felt truly safe under their eyes. Instances like Daron's let my unease come to the surface from where it normally swum deep within my psyche.

Always watching, always waiting.

The tree knights marched past us as the way finally flattened, the zigzagging path slowed its veering, though I couldn't quite tell if the road remained straight. I rubbed my eyes. The long dead soldiers of some forgotten gods of the Watchers seemed as though to stare at me through the rover's windows.

In the distance a fall of liquid nitrogen crashed into a riverbed. The sickly yellow luminescence had long since turned to hues of sapphire and emerald. Beyond the wide falls lay twin cliffsides, between the two a gap was severed into the stone as deep as Valles Marineris. We'd been following the frozen tracks for...hours? It felt like days. Weeks. The trail edged its weaving ever closer to the slot canyon of cold fuligin stone.

I dared a glance back at Daron, he was driving with some ease now, though he paid little attention to the tracks ahead. Instead he ogled the landscape as I. The “vacation” hab was supposedly beyond the slot canyon. I wondered idly what we would do if there had been a collapse in one of the cavern walls as we rumbled past the waterfall and into the chasm.

The wheels scraped the sides, we had enough room for forward motion, but the only way out if the need arose would be to reverse. I was too transfixed by the sclera of the inner canyon walls to care. The world was aglow in violets and indigo, the sky just a sliver of silver so far above us.

The canyon was far shorter than it was tall, as though a mountainous wall of stone had been erected millenia ago to keep out creatures of a scale unfathomable to my puny human mind.

I glanced to the side at a brief flash of motion, a stone shifted, pebbles crunched, a blur of gray and blue left the corner of my peripheral.

The Watchers watched. Before us tall stone towers reminiscent of cavern stalagmites jutted from the frigid soil to line our path forward. No, not stone.

An organic material, not unlike that of what we called trees we had long since left behind as we'd woven further into the wilderness of 186-F.

Then before our eyes, a building appeared of the same spindling material that moved so minutely it was almost impossible for the eye to catch. Or was it not moving, was it an outer layer that shifted? Separate from that of the 'trees' beneath? I felt the gaze, heavier, crueler than ever before.

Always watching, always waiting.

The lone tower had tall daggers of spindling antennae jutting from its roof, three doors marred its front, each taller than the shuttle we had flown so long in void to get here. Something felt wrong about the building, vile, I wanted to look away from the wicked thing but I couldn't tear my gaze away. Daron had eyes only for the eerie cathedral I realized then had once been the cabin. The Federation retreat had been overgrown by the local fauna, transmogrified by the planet itself.

We’d seen the beginnings of this happen back at the landing colony, but had always been able to stop the steady overgrowing that threatened to envelop the main habs of our meager home. I felt the spiny prick of the Watchers' gaze on my neck as I looked on.

Snow began to fall, mixing in with the flakes already thrown about by the torrential winds that never seemed to cease. I felt more than heard a faint calling on the wind, a reverberation that beckoned me toward the corpse of the A-frame.

We got out of the rover. My vision warped, the sky held tracers and the jagged “trees” blended into twos and threes of the same. The eyes were everywhere.

I didn’t care.

Always watching, always waiting.

Daron started walking toward the living temple. Pulled in by its pulsing tractor beam of unseen singing. I let it guide me with him. It felt right, there was a purity in what lay before us, as though the planet itself was trying to show us something. The Watchers were all around, their movements flickered in the far reaches of my vision. Horrible twisted creatures of the same hues as the dirt and the snow. Bipedal chameleon things that looked more serpentine and less reptilian with each whispering glance of their forms. There were hundreds here, thousands, I could feel the sentient beings through the waves of energy being pulsed from the insectoid remains of the retreat. Never had I known the presence of so many of the aliens.

Always watching, always waiting.

"Waiting for what?" I hadn't even realized I'd spoken aloud until Daron's glazed over gaze met my own.

"Us." Yes, of course. But at the same time I felt as though that was wrong. Deep within me a voice screamed to leave, to get away from this place. Somewhere buried deep in my subconscious, instinct was warning me of danger. I paid it no mind. The cabin called to me. To us.

The Watchers showed themselves, wraiths of the snows, demons of the abysses, they were each one and the same and yet so different. Horrible, tormented things that managed each to look in peace with whatever hell held their minds. I didn't understand, there was a symbiosis to them, to the writhing fauna, to the planet itself. It was as though they all were of the same consciousness.

Always watching, always waiting.

"Daron." I managed out, something was very wrong here. "Sweetheart, we need to leave."

He didn't even bother to look at me. It was too late. The Watchers drew closer, leaving the safety of my peripheral vision, they closed on him.

Daron kept walking. I was frozen in place, too petrified to move forward but unable to turn away as I watched my husband walk ever closer to the towering mass of flesh before us. As the Watchers took him.

They guided him to the cabin’s corpse, they disappeared into the third door. I still heard the singing in the howling wind, I paid it no mind.

I turned left of the tower and continued onward, past the A-frame, past the demons of the mist. I couldn't bring myself to go back, to get in the rover and leave this place, something drew me further. Daron was in that cathedral somewhere, amongst those who stood in the shadows. Somewhere buried beneath the trance I remained enthralled in I hoped he’d be alright.

Deep within the violet everlight, the trees continued to twist and twirl about me as I drew ever deeper into the exoforest.

Always watching, always waiting.