Chapter 7: The Ossuary Tree

Chapter 7: The Ossuary Tree

There was no struggle. The fight had been drained from them with the last drop of fuel from the dinghy’s motor. Hands, strong and calloused, grabbed them from the rafts, binding their wrists with rough, wet vine that cut into their skin. They were things, cargo to be transported. Leo, Harlock, and Aris were thrown onto the floor of a long, narrow canoe, its hull slick with fish guts and something coppery that Leo refused to name.

Their captors were silent. In the gloom, Leo could make out their forms—lean, powerful men with skin the color of wet clay, their faces and chests painted with stark white spirals that seemed to float in the darkness. They paddled with a deep, tireless rhythm, their movements economical and unnervingly synchronized. They were a part of this dark water, as natural as the tide itself.

Harlock lay beside him, a great, fallen beast. The captain didn't struggle; he was unnervingly still, his eyes wide open, staring at the bottom of the canoe as if trying to decipher a nautical chart written in blood and grime. All his authority, his command, his belief in an orderly world, had been sunk along with the Odyssey. Aris was worse. The scientist was a heap of trembling limbs, his eyes squeezed shut, a continuous, soundless whimper shaking his body. He had retreated to a place where the horrors of this island couldn't follow, leaving only a shell behind.

Leo, his cheek pressed against the cold, damp wood, watched the island grow closer again. The fear was a living thing inside him, but beneath it, the surveyor’s mind still worked, a useless machine cataloging its own demise. He felt a frantic, desperate need to understand the geography of his own nightmare. His hand, bound as it was, brushed his thigh. The idol was still there. They hadn’t searched him. The small, spiral-faced god in his pocket felt like a shard of ice pressed against his skin, a secret that was either a death sentence or a forgotten trinket.

The canoe didn't return to the cove. Instead, the silent paddlers guided them along the island's rocky coast to a place where the jungle grew down to the very edge of the sea, a tangle of mangrove roots creating a curtain of impenetrable green. One of the figures raised a paddle and pushed aside a hanging wall of vines, revealing a dark, narrow waterway, a river mouth completely invisible from the open water. They slid into the channel, and the faint light of the open sky was instantly extinguished, swallowed by the canopy above. They were in a tunnel of leaves, moving into the island's throat.

The air grew thick, stagnant, and heavy with the smell of decay. After a few minutes of paddling in near-total darkness, the wooden hull of the canoe scraped against stone. They had entered a cavern.

Flickering torches, wedged into cracks in the rock walls, cast long, dancing shadows. The river flowed on, a black artery running into the belly of the earth. As they moved deeper, the torchlight revealed alcoves and side-chambers carved into the rock. The first one they passed made Leo’s stomach clench into a knot of acid.

It was a larder.

Hanging from crudely fashioned bone hooks were human remains in various states of butchery. A pair of legs, severed at the hip. A torso, the ribcage split open like a carcass in an abattoir. Leo’s eyes caught on a scrap of familiar, high-tech fabric still clinging to a severed arm. It was the rip-stop material of Riggs’s tactical shirt. The sheer, systematic horror of it—the reduction of a man to meat—was more terrifying than the violence of his capture. This was not a frenzied act of cannibalism; it was agriculture.

A little further on, they passed a second alcove. A workshop. Two ancient-looking figures, their skin like wrinkled parchment, sat hunched over flat stones. They were scraping and polishing bones, the high-pitched screech of shell against bone echoing in the narrow passage. Piles of finished implements lay around them: fishhooks, needles, spearheads, and small, decorative totems. All of them, every last one, bore the looping, hypnotic mark of the spiral. One of the figures held up a small wooden idol, polishing its mother-of-pearl eyes. It was identical to the one in Leo’s pocket. They were not unique. He hadn't stolen their one true god; he had merely pilfered from a production line of nightmares.

The river tunnel began to widen. The air, which had been close and foul, suddenly opened up, becoming vast and echoing with the sound of a thousand dripping stalactites. A faint, ethereal glow illuminated the space, a sickly green-blue luminescence that emanated from vast colonies of phosphorescent fungi clinging to the cavern ceiling hundreds of feet above. It was a false cosmos, a galaxy of rot.

They had arrived at the heart of the island.

The cavern was colossal, a subterranean cathedral that could have swallowed a city block. Waterfalls of clear spring water cascaded down its sheer rock walls, feeding the dark river. But it was the thing in the center that commanded the space, the thing that drew every eye and stole every breath.

It was a tree.

A monstrous, ancient banyan tree, its trunk thicker than a house, rose from the center of the cavern floor. Its roots, like the gnarled fingers of a dead god, plunged into the rock, some of them as thick as the canoe they sat in. Its highest branches were lost in the phosphorescent gloom of the ceiling. It was a world unto itself.

And from every branch, on every limb, like a harvest of grotesque fruit, hung human skulls.

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They hung by ropes of vine, by strands of human hair, by shreds of fabric. Some were ancient, their bone stained green with moss and decay, identical to the skull they had seen chained in the pit. Others were a stark, terrifying white, freshly scraped and bleached, their sockets like black holes staring into eternity. They swayed gently in the imperceptible currents of air that drifted through the immense space.

This was the Ossuary Tree. This was the tribe’s history, their testament, their great and terrible work. Every victim from every shipwreck, every lost sailor, every foolish explorer for the last thousand years was here, a silent, hanging bead in a rosary of death. The sailor with the anchor tattoo, Marcus, Riggs… they were destined to join this silent congregation.

Leo’s surveyor's mind, the part of him that sought to measure and quantify, simply broke. The scale was too vast, the evil too patient and profound. This wasn't a tribe of savages. This was a civilization built on murder.

Their canoe slid to a halt at a crude dock carved into one of the tree's massive roots. They were hauled out, their bare feet slapping against the damp wood. A ramp, worn smooth by the passage of countless feet, spiraled up the main trunk, ascending into the hanging forest of the dead.

Figures emerged from the shadows at the base of the tree, their faces painted, their black eyes devoid of all emotion. They watched the three survivors with a flat, dispassionate curiosity. They were not angry. They were not triumphant. They were simply… processing.

Leo, Harlock, and Aris were shoved forward, forced to begin the final ascent. The ramp was steep. With every step, they rose higher into the branches, into the midst of the dead. They passed skulls so close Leo could see the fracture lines from a fatal blow, the dental fillings of a modern man. He looked down. The cavern floor was a hundred feet below, filled with the silent, upturned faces of the tribe.

Finally, the ramp ended. They were pushed onto a wide, circular platform built among the highest, thickest branches. It was a stage, its floor stained dark with old blood. In the center stood a heavy wooden frame, like a primitive operating table. They were shoved to their knees at the edge of the platform, overlooking the entire, horrifying spectacle—the colossal cavern, the endless legion of the dead, and the silent, waiting congregation below. The performance was about to begin.