Savage Land

Once upon a time, at the very bottom of the world, past the ice shelves and the howling winds and the maps that simply ran out of detail and said "ice" where they didn't know what else to say — there was a jungle.

Not a cold jungle. Not a frozen jungle. A warm, green, steaming, enormous jungle, full of ancient ferns and waterfalls and creatures that the rest of the world had said goodbye to sixty-five million years ago. It existed because of the volcanic vents deep in the earth beneath that part of Antarctica — the heat rising up, warming the vast crater from below, creating a climate that had no right to exist where it did.

The X-Men called it the Savage Land.

The maps called it a mystery. Logan called it the most interesting terrain he had been in in thirty years.

It began with a distress beacon.

A small team of researchers — biologists and geographers connected to Xavier's wider network, people who had been carefully studying the Savage Land's extraordinary ecosystem — had gone in three weeks earlier. They had been checking in every forty-eight hours. And then, six days ago, they had stopped.

The X-Men did not wait long.

The Blackbird descended through cloud cover above the Antarctic plateau and then dropped — fast, the engines adjusting for the unusual warmth rising from the crater basin — into the green expanse below. The jungle was so dense from above that it looked solid, like a quilt laid over the earth. And then the landing pad of a cleared riverside bank appeared on the scanner, and the Blackbird touched down, and the doors opened.

The Savage Land breathed in at them. Warm, heavy, green — the smell of a million years of growing things, of rich soil and slow rivers and flowers that had never learned anyone's name because there was no one to name them.

"Keep together," said Cyclops, consulting his map. He looked at it for about thirty seconds, and then he looked at Logan, who had tilted his head slightly, the way a person does when they are listening to something very specific.

"Electronics are scrambled," Logan said, without looking at the map. "Volcanic interference. Your instruments are going to drift."

He took a long breath through his nose.

"River — three miles north, bearing northeast. Our researchers went north-northeast, on foot, about forty-eight hours ago. Something very large moved through here within the last six hours — large enough to leave a ground vibration. I'll track it but keep well clear."

Cyclops looked at Storm. Storm looked at Logan.

"Lead the way," said Storm.

So Logan led the way.

In a jungle with no reliable instruments and visibility dropping to a dozen feet in the dense undergrowth, having a person who navigates by scent, hearing, and instinct is not a small thing. It is the entire expedition. Logan moved through the Savage Land the way he moved through any wilderness — with a quiet confidence that had nothing to do with arrogance and everything to do with years and years of practice. He skirted the territory of things that were better left unskirted. He found water. He found the research team's trail with the same certainty a train finds a track.

The others followed. Jean Grey walked behind him, maintaining a gentle awareness of the surrounding area — feeling for minds, the particular sense of conscious thought that she could detect at considerable range. She found nothing hostile in their immediate vicinity, which was reassuring, and she kept the information flowing back to Cyclops through their psychic link, which meant Cyclops could plan even without his maps.

On the second day — late in the afternoon, when the jungle light was going amber and the sounds of the Savage Land were shifting into their evening register, a low hum of insects and the distant call of something very large in the canopy — Logan stopped.

He crouched. He put one hand briefly on the ground.

"They're ahead," he said quietly. "Quarter mile. In a canyon. Not alone."

The canyon, when they reached it, was a long cleft in the volcanic rock, deep and steep-walled, with a river running along its floor. The research team was there — six people, all present, apparently unharmed, camped on a flat section of riverbank with a makeshift shelter. But the canyon rim above them was lined with the forces of Garokk — the Eternal, the ancient power who had ruled the Savage Land's central plateau for longer than the researchers had been studying it.

Garokk did not come in the night. He simply… held the canyon. Waiting.

The canyon walls were too sheer to climb. The guarded access at the western end was too well-watched to rush without risk to the researchers below.

Logan looked at the map in his head. He thought for a long moment. Then he spoke very quietly to Ororo.

"Can you give me something theatrical? Over the plateau. Loud. Visible. About twenty minutes of it."

Storm's expression was the one she wore when she was already picturing the weather event. "Easily."

"Jean — can you put a veil on a group of eight, moving slow, in the dark?"

"Yes," said Jean, simply.

Cyclops was already following the logic. "Eastern access."

"Eastern access," Logan confirmed. "I spotted a gap in the coverage from the ridge. Unmanned. Probably because it's the hardest route — loose shale, steep drop to the river, no obvious path. Give me the darkness and the distraction."

They waited until the deepest part of the night.

Then Storm rose into the air above the plateau — and she let the sky open. The clouds built in minutes, vast and violent, and the lightning she called down on the open rock was magnificent — dramatic and bright and utterly impossible to look away from. CRACK — BOOM — CRACK — lights in the sky, thunder rolling across the plateau like a great door being slammed over and over. Every eye on that canyon rim went up.

And Logan went east.

He moved along the canyon rim in the dark, finding the shale path more by feel than sight, his boots reading the angle of the slope. He went down the inside face the way a person who knows how to fall goes down steep terrain — controlled, patient, not fast. He reached the canyon floor. He found the researchers.

He did not say much. He rarely needed to.

"Follow me," he said. "Single file. Don't speak. Stay within arm's reach of the person ahead of you."

Jean's veil settled over them like a warm blanket — subtle, quiet, making the whole group somehow less there to any searching awareness above. They moved.

The eastern path was difficult. The shale was loose, and the river on one side made the footing uncertain, and it was very dark, and some of the researchers were tired and frightened and not accustomed to navigating by the sound of a quiet voice saying "step here" and "mind the drop" in complete darkness.

But they followed. Because when a voice sounds that certain and that safe, you follow it.

They came out of the canyon at the gray edge of dawn. The sky in the east was the faint cold blue that comes just before the light turns gold. The jungle was waking up — bird calls beginning, the soft rustling of things moving in the canopy.

The Blackbird was exactly where they had left it.

Six researchers. Unharmed. Present.

Logan stood at the jungle's edge and looked back at the Savage Land — the impossible green of it, the ancient warm air rising off it, the extraordinary ordinary miracle of a place that should not exist existing quite contentedly anyway.

He took one long breath of it.

Then he turned and walked up the Blackbird's ramp and did not look back again.

Some places you carry with you, not because of what happened there, but because of what you learned. The Savage Land had reminded Logan, in the most direct possible way, that the most valuable thing he had was not the adamantium in his bones or the claws at his knuckles. It was the willingness to go slowly through the dark, following only what his senses told him, trusting the people behind him to follow.

That was always enough.

Sleep deeply, little one. Sometimes the best way through is simply one careful step at a time.