Member-only story
Duncan’s Purse — Mayhem at Mount Temple
A First Line Fiction Story — Prompt#30: Part V
Previous chapters are available here.
Part V
Straight up would have been the way to go, but after twenty minutes and less than a hundred yards of progress, Jarod plunked his hind end on a fallen tree. Sweat soaked his body. His thin, quick-wicking hiking socks swam inside his boots, and the burn from his heels told him large blisters were on the way.
Panting between gulps of water, he surveyed the terrain. He never thought he’d see a boreal forest matching the jungle walls of vegetation like those in Thailand, but this place had it beat. Here, the forest was the master. Eons of virgin territory, nary entered by man, and if so, done with reluctance, followed by defeat.
You couldn’t see the ground. Enormous ancient trees crisscrossed and stabbed the earth at all angles. Younger trees, those merely decades old, lay scissored into and askew of the behemoth giants. Between, through, over and within them grew shrubs, moss, fungi, and…
