It was beautiful. The false sun cast the vibrant life of the jungle in a crisp golden light so clear my eyes could trace out leaves hundreds of feet away. But that same light put the lie to the illusion and brought home what this place really was, for dark spots circled the over the canopies.

Shadows. The great chameleon-owls could change only their own colors, not the light they emitted. Not something that typically bothered them, given how the angle of the hollow sun cast their shadows hundreds of feet away from whatever prey they might be targeting, but it brought me down to earth.

In nature, the most beautiful things were often the most deadly. The poison dart frogs here were more colorful than even the canopy precisely because they could kill even Hobs with a single brush across their skin.

I shivered as I eyed the spots, shifting closer to the cover of my own branch.I’d chosen my path, but that meant moving past their nests.

I shook my doubts aside and resumed the climb. I was committed now, however dangerous the risk might be, it was worse to take it and hesitate.

Still, if I shifted my path to wind tighter around the trunk and put as much space as possible between me and the open air, who could blame me?

The pillar-tree formed an ecosystem unto itself, with entirely new flora and fauna alike, but it wasn’t so different as to render my previous experience useless. Far from it, if I’d been thrown here at the beginning, I doubt I’d fare as well. It was eerie, as if the jungle had been flipped on its side, but manageable.

What was less manageable were the open spaces.

Though the trunk surface may have all blended together from below, clinging to its surface revealed another perspective entirely. The vertical jungle was patchy, like a spattered coat of paint overgrown with a timid lichen. Areas of dense growth clustered around points of interest otherwise indistinguishable from the rest while a hundred feet could pass between branches in others.

Far be it from me to speculate on the higher matters of botany, but it sure made climbing the bloody thing an immense pain in the ass.

It was one thing to jump from branch to branch when they were a dozen feet apart, but when they were thirty? Forty? A fucking hundred, what the hell did I look like some kind of bird!?

This would not fly. Heh. But some things even shitty puns couldn’t save me from. I needed a solution. I could backtrack and second guess all I wanted, but that was no way to live, and more importantly it was no way to die. I’d already seen one rather suspicious looking mongoose sniffing around its nest as I past it for the second time and that wasn’t even considering how this bullshit hit my projected timetable.

Even as I worked my way up I was spotting the start of a solution, and that pissed me off even more, cause it sure as hell wasn’t one I liked.

I wormed my way into a nook and glared out across the expanse like it had personally offended me. The solid wall of unbroken bark stood there as indomitable as before, still an uncaring face of nature dominating the sky. Shockingly, it failed to apologize.

I sighed. I really was going to do this, wasn’t I?

The pillar-tree was as incomprehensibly vast as any mountain, too big to truly grasp the scale of all at once. One could gaze from afar and see only a hazy approximation, or stand on its surface and gain detail, but lose the grander form. You could see the forest or the trees, but never both.

And, like a mountain, the pillar-tree was not nearly as uniform as it appeared, neither in its branches or its trunk. The bark was blown up to the same absurd scale as everything else, it’s gnarled surface forming chasms and cliff faces.

And with those chasms came rivers, rushing currents bound within the canyons of the bark. Rather than a perfectly even sheet of water there was a fractured landscape of runnels and grooves.

Why, if one were brave enough, you could even hope to slip through the cracks in the watery facade and cut across open ground rather than waste precious time backtracking.

Of course, that was hope, and hope wasn’t good enough for me. Why hope when you can plan? I slipped through the leaves to shelter myself within a particularly dense cluster of branches and sat down. I took a deep breath as I laid my spear across my lap. This would require putting a lot of trust into untested abilities, but the math didn’t lie.

It was do or die.

I stowed the fighting knife I’d been keeping in my mouth for emergencies and replaced it with an entirely different form of blade. No nimble stabber this one, but rather a heavy recurved hacker. I ran a thumb across the face of the edge, perpendicularly so as to avoid cuts, and nodded to myself. It was dull, if only in comparison to its fellows. Where the delicate daggers bore the edge of a razor, this was more akin to an axe. Sharp enough to pierce flesh but tough enough to bite into both wood and bone.

It would do.

I set about skinning the trees, stripping bark free in sheets. It was more than a little reminiscent of how I’d survived on the surface, but luckily the wards here gave me an excuse to not eat this. I stopped at the surface, taking only the recognizable top layer rather than the edible inner layer.

That was the stuff I was after, after all. To venture out into the open would be to invite all manner of nasty deaths, but open did not have to mean exposed. Any good sneak could think of half a dozen ways to be seen without actually being seen.

Camouflage was probably the easiest. Pasting bark over myself was still easier said than done though. It didn’t help that I didn’t have any damn glue, so I had to resort to knotwork. I’d hoped to perhaps work my way up to a truly impressive disguise, but for now I’d have to settle for rather less than the average stick insect.

I mostly focussed on shifting my old branches and leaves towards the browns and greys common across the barren bark, but I didn’t entirely give up on breaking my profile. That was half the point of camouflage. I took some of the stiffer sheets of bark and snapped them, careful to let them break along suitably random and organic lines.

Which, fittingly enough, meant there were no real straight lines among them.

I followed that up with a few holes and bound the irregular shaped bark to my arms and legs with the very dullest and dirtiest of my rags. I wore them like bizarre vambraces and greaves, shielding me in a more roundabout way than their conventional cousins.

Still, shield me they would, assuming I could move in them. I bent my arm slowly, stopping only when the bark bracers blocked my range of motion.

They didn’t.

I grinned. Nice. Next were the legs—

Ow!

Goddammit. I twisted around to look down my back at the offending bark. Yup, it was biting right into the back of my knee. I’d placed them facing outwards, but I was just realizing that meant the bark was on the back of my elbow joint, to face out as I reached for new purchase, but on the inside of my knee.

I sighed and drew a dagger. Going through the whole process of untying and retying sounded tiresome, so I just began cracking off bits inch by inch as I tried to crouch. Eventually I worked my way down to full range of motion, where I could touch my ankle to my ass without discomfort.

Well, without discomfort beyond the faint recognition that I was technically kicking my own ass.

By the time I finished with the second leg I honestly might have well just taken them off, but it was less finicky this way, and who was I to question results.

And the results were fairly strange looking. I felt like a cowardly beetle in my carapace of bark, but I felt like a living cowardly beetle, so I gave [Beggar’s Disregard] one last check and got my ass moving.

I was slow and deliberate in my movements, wary of jamming a splinter into myself again. It would serve me well in climbing anyway, but I’d have to shake it off for the moment. Some tasks required commitment.

I slung my spear across my back. The task that lay ahead bore far more similarities with scaling a cliff face than climbing a tree, and every limb possible would be needed. I’d stow it in my extradimensional pouch, but I wasn’t entirely sure it would fit, and I sure as fuck wasn’t about to try it. I’d heard tales of what happened when some poor fool messed with spatial magic he didn’t understand, and it wasn’t pretty.

With the metal point blackened it would probably just look like a stray twig anyway.

I knelt down and ran both claws over the bark, feeling the vibrations in my bones as they hit each bump and ridge. Good. I pushed harder, catching my fingers on the bark. They didn’t sink in, but in a way that was encouraging. Every part of these trees was just a little bit tougher than its mundane counterpart, even the bark. My handholds wouldn’t break on me.

I relaxed my toes and let my feet slide over the bark. My hands stayed anchored even as my feet didn’t, and my center of gravity shifted lower on the branch.

I gripped with my toes again, then moved my hands down one over the other. The base of my current branch was well within the current, so I’d need to take a more circuitous route if I wanted to reach the bare bark.

Soon I was dangling from my hands alone. Clutching at the very edge of where the branch started curving back on itself left nothing beneath me for my feet to find purchase on.

Some might call this the do or die moment. Me, I called it a test.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to close off the outside world. Even the ever present fear. I was next to a vine, hiding behind it like a skinny Hob behind a tree trunk.

I pushed aside even my own doubts at the efficacy of that technique and drove my mind further inwards. I arrived at the periphery of my soul, then gave a mental sigh and pulled outward. There. My awareness centered on my physical body once more, simply viewed through a different lens.

I no longer heard the creaking of the boughs around me, no longer felt the air brushing across my skin or the bark in my claws, instead I heard the pulsing beat of my heart, felt the veins beneath my skin dilating to regulate the flow of heat and the muscles in my arm trembling with the stress of maintaining just enough force to hold me steady, neither raising nor lowering my body.

That was the one I wanted.

I exerted will over flesh and I could feel the faint burn of my muscles grow even fainter.

I opened my eyes. All the senses I’d been suppressing in my trance came back like a tidal wave, but the pain of my over tense fingers? Barely worth mentioning.

I grinned. Studying with Kimakt had paid off. Holding onto a branch was hardly the kind of flashy technique that adventurers were famous for, but even modest improvements could pay dividends across a long climb.

The ability to take my time and not worry about tiring out halfway through would bring the risk down from nigh-suicidal to just about manageable, so I’d used Kimakt’s manual body control techniques to inhibit lactic acid production in my hands. Lactic acid was a product of some process or another that went a bit above my head if I was honest, but I remembered enough of my mother’s lessons to know it was a significant contribution to the burn in your muscles.

Getting rid of it would increase my endurance by a bit, as would the anti-inflammatory chemicals I’d set my body to start secreting. I’d return my body to it’s standard biochemistry eventually, probably as soon as I reached the other side, but for now it was worth the risk.

I hooked a leg around a dangling vine. As soon as it was dragged within my arm’s reach I let go of the bark. Gravity yanked me downwards for all of half a second before I’d replaced my grip on bark with a grasped vine.

That cut off my acceleration, but I hadn’t arrested my fall completely. The friction tore at my palms as I zipped down for another few dozen feet before I tightened my grip and slowed to a stop.

The vine quivered with the transferred momentum and I was more than happy to take advantage. I swung out my legs only to jerk to a halt. Huh?

I looked down. Oh yeah. Thing wasn’t anchored on just one end. The bottom of the vine was tangled up in some over branch below, extending little gripping tendrils all over. I drew a blade and hacked the vine clear just beneath my feet.

I swung myself back and forth again, struggling to build up momentum from zero. Damn vine.

The vine creaked beneath me as I swung, straining more with each repetition. Vines weren’t really like ropes, and this one was nearing the limits of its flexibility. I’d have liked to make more distance with the speed of swinging, but somebody hadn’t packed any damn rope.

I curved my swing, arcing towards the trunk at an angle to land well beyond the rushing water. I blasted through the spray, water shooting past close enough to reach out and touch.

I was going too fast.

Shit. I leaned back, withdrawing my reaching hand and sticking out my feet instead. I hit the tree running, claws scrabbling across the bark to prevent myself from bouncing off as I tried to bleed off momentum.

It wasn’t enough. I could feel myself starting to rebound, drifting off into open air, so I did the only thing I could.

I let go.

The flew on without me as I hit the trunk. Claws from all four limbs caught on bark and gouged out furrows as my momentum dragged me sideways. I came to a stop after only a few feet of skidding, but that was enough for me to feel the ache where my fingernails had tried to pull themselves out of their places.

I took a deep breath. Damn, that hadn’t gone how it had gone in my head.

But there wasn’t time to go over what I’d done wrong, not now.

Eyes were drawn to movement. That was a fact and a damn inconvenient one, cause it made this the most dangerous point in my climb. I reached up with one hand and pulled myself that little bit higher.

Vine-swinging, while exhilarating, wasn’t exactly to most inconspicuous method of travel. Not by a long shot. The farther I was from the terminus of my eye-catching stunt the safer I would be.

I forced myself to pick up the pace as I climbed. I could, and would, slow down later, once I was out of the immediate danger zone.

And not a second too soon. I could hear nothing, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel the breeze shifting as wings cut through it. I froze and clung there like a limpet, quiet and still long after the presence vanished.

At least, long after I could tell it was there. Still, I couldn’t hang there forever, so I reluctantly began to inch forward again.

I never hit my earlier speed for the rest of the climb, but I didn’t have to pause and wait for threats to pass either, so I’d call it even. The exposure of hanging above open air was anxiety inducing, I couldn’t wait until I got back into the branches where I could at least pretend I was safe and enclosed.

Well, pretend to pretend. Safety was just too big of a lie for me to buy, no matter how hard I tried to sell it.