I’m Jax Miller, a former Chicago detective, and I’m currently staring at a poison-tipped arrow pointed directly between my eyes. I came to the dense, uncharted wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula to rescue my sister, Chloe, from an extremist, primitive cult known as the Sky-Born. They lived like ghosts, building massive, interconnected fortresses forty meters in the air, completely isolated from modern law. I thought they were just radical environmentalists. I was deadly wrong.
“Drop the gun, Jax,” a voice commanded from the shadows of the wooden platform.
Out stepped Marcus, the very guide I had hired to lead me through these mountains. He wasn’t a tracker; he was one of them. He wore a heavy vest adorned with rows of predator teeth, his face smeared with dark ash.
“Where is Chloe, Marcus?” I growled, keeping my Glock leveled at the archer in front of me, though my fingers were trembling from the biting mountain cold.
“She’s already part of the canopy,” Marcus said, a twisted, serene smile stretching across his face. “She was purified. The spirit of the modern world—the greed, the sickness—it was consuming her. We had to eat the evil to save her soul.”
Horror, cold and absolute, washed over me. Eat her? My stomach violently churned as I looked around the massive treehouse. The walls were lined with smoked meat and hanging bones. They practiced a brutal, twisted form of ritualistic cannibalism, believing they were executing justice against a demonic entity they called the Rot.
Before Marcus could speak again, I fired. The gunshot exploded through the silent forest. The archer dropped, but Marcus lunged at me with feral speed. He tackled me into the flimsy rattan wall of the structure.
We crashed through the bamboo, tumbling out onto a narrow, swaying footbridge suspended fifty feet above the rocky canyon floor. The wind howled around us. Marcus slammed his fist into my jaw, sending a flash of white light across my vision. I tasted copper. He grabbed my shirt, forcing my upper body over the edge of the rope railing.
“You can’t stop the cleansing!” Marcus roared, his fingers digging into my throat, cutting off my air.
My lungs screamed for oxygen. My gun was gone, lost in the fall. Through the haze of suffocating darkness, I saw two more tribal warriors sprinting across the high bridge toward us, their primitive spears glinting under the moonlight. Marcus shoved me further over the edge, my legs dangling in empty air.
The adrenaline is just getting started, and Jax is running out of time seventy feet in the air. Trust me, you aren’t ready for the twist waiting in the dark of the Oregon canopy. The rest of the story is below 👇
Part 2
The arrow whistled past my ear, embedding itself into the bark with a sharp thwack. I didn’t think. I threw myself over the balcony, not into the abyss, but toward a lower hanging cargo net used for hauling supplies up to the sixty-foot summit.
My fingers slammed into the rough hemp fibers. The impact tore at my injured shoulder, a white-hot spike of agony ripping a scream from my throat. I swung wildly, my boots kicking empty air before I managed to hook my legs through the netting. Above me, shouts echoed in a language that sounded like a distorted blend of English and tribal dialects. Torches flickered along the high branches, turning the canopy into a floating labyrinth of fire and shadows.
“Find him!” Miller’s voice boomed from above. “He carries the infection!”
I hauled myself hand-over-hand onto a lower platform. This level was darker, smelling heavily of fermented sago starch and smoke. I crawled into the shadows of a massive longhouse, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I needed to find a way down, but the ladders were guarded. My only weapon was a small pocket knife I kept in my boot.
As I crept deeper into the structure, my foot brushed against something soft. I froze. Moonlight filtered through the thatched roof, illuminating a large wooden trough filled with writhing, fat white larvae—sago beetles. Next to it were rows of carved wooden bows and arrows, their tips glistening with a dark, sticky resin. I recognized the smell: aconite. A single scratch would paralyze my respiratory system in minutes.
Suddenly, a hand clamped over my mouth from behind.
I thrashed, driving my heel backward into my captor’s shin. The person gasped but didn’t let go, throwing their weight into me and slamming me against a structural pillar.
“Jax, stop! It’s me!” a desperate whisper hissed in my ear.
I froze. The grip relaxed. I turned around, my eyes widening in shock. It was Chloe. My sister. The woman I had spent the last six months searching for, the woman Miller told me had been ritualistically executed and consumed.
She looked unrecognizable. Her skin was painted with ash, and she wore a traditional skirt made of shredded sago leaves, but her eyes were undeniably the same.
“Chloe? You’re alive?” I breathed, grabbing her arms. “Miller told me… he said they killed you. We have to go, right now. The whole place is crawling with them.”
“You don’t understand, Jax,” she whispered, her voice trembling, but not with fear of the tribe. With fear for me. “Miller didn’t lie about everything. The cleansing is real. But I wasn’t the victim.”
A cold dread settled deep in my gut. “What are you talking about?”
Before she could answer, heavy footsteps vibrated through the wooden floorboards outside. Chloe grabbed my jacket, dragging me behind a massive curtain woven from tree bark. Through a small slit, I watched as Miller entered, flanked by two tribal elders holding bone knives.
“He’s here, High Priestess,” Miller said, bowing his head deeply toward the shadows at the back of the room.
From the darkness stepped a figure wrapped in an elaborate cloak of eagle feathers and boar tusks. The figure raised a hand, and the torchlight caught their face.
My breath hitched. My jaw went slack.
It wasn’t a tribal stranger. It was our father, Arthur Miller—the man who supposedly died in a plane crash ten years ago. He wasn’t a captive, and he wasn’t dead. He was the architect of this entire terrifying civilization.
“My son has brought the poison of the outside world to our sanctuary,” Arthur said, his voice cold, devoid of any paternal warmth. He turned his gaze directly toward the curtain where we were hiding. “And it is time for his sister to prove her loyalty by executing the law.”
Chloe stepped out from behind the curtain, pulling a bone dagger from her belt, her eyes locked onto mine with a terrifying, unreadable expression.
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Part 3
The blade in Chloe’s hand caught the amber flicker of the torchlight. I backed up until my spine slammed into the rough, unforgiving bark of the central tree trunk. My own sister was standing between me and my executioners, holding a weapon meant to end my life.
“Chloe, don’t do this,” I pleaded, my voice hoarse. “Look at him. Look at what this place has turned him into. Dad died ten years ago. This man is a ghost leading a cult of killers!”
“Silence!” Miller barked, stepping forward, his hand resting on the hilt of his hunting knife. “He speaks with the tongue of the Rot. Do it, Chloe. Purify the bloodline.”
Our father stood motionless, his eyes cold and clinical, watching us like a scientist observing an experiment. “The law of the canopy is absolute, Jax,” Arthur said, his voice echoing in the cavernous wooden room. “To protect our paradise from the corruption of the world below, the infected must be consumed by the fire of justice. Take his strength, Chloe, or burn with him.”
Chloe advanced, her breathing heavy, the bone dagger raised high. I braced myself for the impact, tensing my muscles to fight back against my own flesh and blood. But as she drew closer, her gaze flickered downward for a fraction of a second, pointing toward the heavy clay fire pit burning in the center of the floor—the unique, insulated hearth the tribe used to keep from burning their wooden fortresses down.
In an instant, I understood. She wasn’t executing me; she was waiting for a distraction.
With a sudden, feral cry, Chloe lunged forward. But instead of plunging the knife into my chest, she spun on her heel and drove the butt of the dagger directly into Miller’s throat. Miller choked, stumbling backward into the two tribal elders.
At the exact same moment, I dove toward the central hearth. Using every ounce of strength left in my uninjured shoulder, I kicked the heavy clay structure. The hot coals and boiling stones spilled across the dry bamboo flooring. Within seconds, a fierce, crackling fire erupted, catching the resin-soaked walls of the longhouse.
“Traitor!” Arthur roared, his serene facade shattering into pure rage. He lunged at me with surprising speed for an older man, tackling me to the ground.
We rolled across the burning floor. Smoke began to fill the room, thick and black. Arthur’s hands locked around my throat, squeezing with terrifying strength. I could see the reflection of the growing flames in his crazed eyes. He truly believed he was saving his twisted utopia.
“You destroyed everything I built!” he screamed, his grip tightening.
My vision began to blur at the edges. I slammed my fists into his ribs, but the adrenaline made him immune to the pain. Desperate, I reached blindly to my side, my fingers brushing against a heavy, unburned piece of hardwood from the hearth. I gripped it and slammed it into the side of his head.
Arthur groaned, his grip loosening as he slumped sideways onto the blazing floorboards.
“Jax! We have to go now! The bridges are catching!” Chloe screamed, grabbing my jacket and hauling me to my feet.
Behind us, Miller and the elders were scrambling to escape the inferno, their primitive paradise turning into a towering chimney of death. We burst out of the longhouse into the night air, only to find the high canopy in absolute chaos. Shouts and screams echoed through the trees as the fire spread rapidly along the interconnected rattan walkways.
We sprinted across the swaying bridge, the air growing hotter by the second. The ropes beneath our feet groaned under the strain, sparks raining down into the sixty-foot abyss below.
Suddenly, a section of the bridge ahead of us snapped, plunging into the darkness. We were cut off from the main descent ladders.
“The cargo lines!” I yelled, pointing to a thick vine pulley system used to transport heavy items from the forest floor.
Chloe didn’t hesitate. She grabbed a thick piece of bamboo, hooked it over the main vine rope, and looked at me. “Together,” she said.
We both grabbed onto the makeshift handle just as the platform behind us collapsed into a fireball. We jumped into the empty air.
The wind roared in my ears as we hurtled downward through the dark, branches tearing at our clothes and skin. The friction burned through our hands, but we held on with the pure instinct of survival. With a deafening crash, we hit the soft, muddy forest floor, rolling hard into the ferns and sago palms.
I lay there for a moment, staring up through the canopy. High above, the magnificent, terrifying city in the trees was being consumed by a roaring inferno, lighting up the Oregon night sky like a dying star. The cult of the canopy, along with the ghosts of our past, was burning to ash.
Chloe coughed, sitting up beside me, her face covered in soot but her eyes clear. For the first time in ten years, the weight of our family’s dark secrets was gone. We stood up, leaning on each other for support, and turned our backs on the burning forest, walking forward into the dawn of a new, real world.
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