The Overdream, in the light on the other side.

Finally, Henry'd crossed that damned jungle, a century after first setting off.

The beautiful vision of what’d lain hidden beyond put a smile on his face. No wonder our ancestors had climbed down from their branches. As far as the upright eye surveyed was the certainty of unobstructed distances, with any further dangers having nowhere to lurk in the plains and hills matted by a violet moss that seemed to impair the bamboo’s expansion.

His giddy feet drove him further in exploration, into a karst landscape, weathered crags and flatland of exposed bedrock rutted by rain, sinkholes plunging kilometres into underground rivers that shone luminescent white. The moss clung to every surface, nutrition for grazing antelope-like herds, bears, wolves, and bats, all of which had speciated from an ancestral monster that resembled none he’d witnessed elsewhere. While chasing the migrating flocks, he tried to avoid the monsters he could, and studied the carcasses of those that knocked on the door of his bunker in the hours of sleep.

A pair of wyverns were the next challenge. They spat showers of meteors that churned up the rocky terrain, swooping at him for half a day and firing in tandem to pin him between their attacks.

His journey then entered what looked like a new major biome of jungle sloping towards the coast. Haunted. Translucent wraiths that phased through ground and foliage if Henry earned their attention. He could shake them off by offering a hand, cutting it off and throwing it before they Bloodlusted, the phantom creatures snacking on the severed limb and finding his ape-meat not to their palate.

Couple days beyond them he was slowed down by another major jungle with megafauna. These species were similar to those he’d passed during the overland migrations near his home. Except they carried a bit more muscle and bone on them. Their colossal variants were towering, with destructive abilities more suited to taking out each other than small pests like him. The quakes of their steps shook the leaves dry. Must’ve been plenty to eat in the region.

Henry travelled southwards through the bountiful tropical thicket. When the Flying Crabs brought him to a river feeding the region, he crossed by the underhang of a waterfall and almost caught a nasty sting from a gelatinous behemoth immune to physical attacks. It released a neurotoxin mist that might’ve hassled others. A small whiff didn’t hurt, dipping the mind into colourful dreams.

Bottling a little, Henry watched the Flying Crabs swooping and spinning and smudging the whisps of rainbow that painted the star-streaked canopy of the universe. The patterns of their swarming drew a picture of their merriment at surviving what’d been the worst of their arduous migration. Although their lives were brief and fraught with danger, they celebrated their short moment beneath the heavens with their density and profusion.

Following the migration to the end of this last jungle, he was blocked at a coastline of cliffs dropping into a stretch of aberrant sea. Tiny cliffs in the distance towards which flew the crabs, and the two sections of land were severed by a strait with a current too rapid to swim or sail. Sea-water rushed through at hundreds of kilometres per hour across jagged coral, and it tore apart a seven-storey tree he launched in within seconds. Any islands for the crossing had been erased by the torrent, and the cliff-face beneath him showed fresh erosion scars up to the cliff’s lip. Hightide seemed to lift the whole strait up hundreds of metres. He examined the opposite shore with binoculars. The foliage was dissimilar from his side and suggested there'd been no connection between the two sections for at least three million years. He seemed to have reached this continent’s end.

An entirely separate realm lay beyond, separated from him by this violent strait, one of those mystically-impassable frustrations like the Maelstrom of Maalundi, like the limits of the human heart.

How was he on two feet to follow his winged companions across? He watched the tide for a few hours. It rose at impressive speed, calming its fury with the added bulk like a bear with a well-fed stomach, but staying rageful enough to batter the coastline which gnashed like the teeth of a giant chewing on a dumptruck. The waters ate away at the continent. Henry wouldn’t fare much better.

It began to ebb and Henry abseiled down for a closer look. Along the way, he found a cross-section of a fossilised colossus that may have ruled this domain in a different era, whose calcified remains had been freshly shaved by the rushing water. Dipping his toes in the current caused him to lose them. Unfortunately no islands were revealed come low-tide.

Henry saw no prospects further inland, so he tried building a ship to circumvent the strait by the calmer passage of the sea. This proved useless. The current seemed to extend to the continental shelf. Deep ocean travel remained beyond his technological means. The waters out there were wilder, the monsters mightier, and the enterprise in Saana usually required the pooled resources of an empire at its apex. Crossing was beyond him for now, he figured.

Assessing his options and finding nothing, he sailed back to the coast. He arrived just in time to catch the straggling Flying Crabs make the leap to wherever they spent their winters, just in time for him to wave these winged companions luck on the next leg of their journey into the limitless unknown. That one, he might try himself in another century.

Or maybe never.

A climber had to content himself with that sometimes, giving up, for not all high places were reachable even in the sturdiest of shoes.

But the feet, wherever one happened to be, always had places to wander, so where should his take him now? He’d crossed the jungle, and he’d opened up the freedom and novelties beyond, the soils yet to compress beneath his soles. He would feed his soul with these, relishing the flavour of fruits untasted.

He mapped the equatorial jungle around him. It turned out to be the planet’s most bountiful region yet discovered. Its area spanned twice that of The Three Rivers to which had been tuned his notion of floral maxima. No winter curbed its growth. It possessed the timeless abundance of Eden or Heaven, an order in eternal equilibrium. The trees were taller and more robust, and so too were the colossi. With little change, the battle between species fixed, each accepting their place in Nature’s ladder, they’d refocused their biological armament against their own, becoming bulkier, more venomous, more colourful for those competing by love over brawn. The place unsettled one accustomed to the cruel upheavals of the season and the possibilities secreted therein.

A whole sub-continent branched west of the moss-dominated area. An explorer could satisfy many lifetimes surveying it in full. Henry travelled five thousand kilometres before hitting one of its edges, the trip taking him through wetlands of invisible salamanders and concluding in a Caribbean-esque bay home to the Walrus-Pythons that visited up north in Summer. Henry soaked his bones in the sun-suffused lagoons for a few days. Sailing and monster-fighting, he was swifted by a favourable wind along the southern coastline, happily moored in a reef system the size of Ethiopia.

The east also offered fascination. Horizons of plain and desert were split by an enormous river snaking as far as from New York to Anchorage. This leviathan’s banks of plump greenery welcomed him and the familiar herds migrating from the north, who lapped its drink with much thirst after their own journey by tired foot.

His vagrant season passed with these beasts from a bit closer to his home for company. They showed to him another facet of the land on the other side of the jungle, another facet of himself waiting in this land. And all those beautiful alcoves of intrigue, some befalling him as curiosity urged him to split with herds wandering in mistaken-looking directions, others falling into his lap along with a leaf as strange as himself blown in on the wind.

One day without any apparent shift, the herds began the migration back. Henry did not question their wisdom, and he followed the direction of their wagging tails as they led him along a route both more and less circuitous than the flying path of the crabs he’d chased. Together they raced through forests unmapped, through tundra and volcanic plateaus, and through by-ways along brides of ice, and, although the sights were plentiful, the challenges were not.

If he’d wished, he could have taken this simple detour in his first year of Floating Leaf instead of investing a century developing the methods required to cross that hostile jungle. But Henry didn’t mind, and, despite knowing of this easier route, he’d never felt much inclination to use it. He'd wasted many years crossing jungles, wasted many years climbing mountains, real and not real. For all that his troubles had taken from him, they'd also given him an appreciation for the reward awaiting anyone whose foolish heart spurred them on a hard path to a distant place, that secret at the top that made a climber descending afterwards gaze upon the wreckage of themselves—upon their bleeding feet, upon their frost-bitten fingers—and break into an invincible smile.