Prologue to Silent Guardian
It felt as if El Yunque had turned against her.
The forest seemed to come alive, its tangled roots reaching out to ensnare Isa’s foot, sending her stumbling into a tree trunk, slick from rain. On top of that, she couldn’t catch her breath in the thick jungle air. Each gulp felt like breathing through a wet cloth, the smell of rotting leaves filling her nose with every desperate inhale.
The storm’s trailing edge had finally released its grip on their town to terrorize some other corner of the island, but for Isa, the fear flooding her now was every bit as paralyzing as the tempest’s destructive howl.
After a moment forcing herself to breathe, Isa pushed away from the tree. Her hands slid across the slick moss, and before she could catch herself, she slammed face-first into the trunk, the impact sending a bolt of pain through the bridge of her nose.
“Ow! Shit--¡maldita sea!”
She shoved herself back and smacked the trunk with the heel of her hand, the wet bark scraping her skin raw. “Damn!” The word came out as a half-sob as tears sprang to her eyes. Blood trickled warm over her lip, mingling with the rainwater already soaking her face. She dragged her muddy sleeve across her nose, gasping at the sting, then slumped against the tree for just a second, exhaustion pulling at her bones. Her shoulders trembled once, twice—before she clenched her jaw and pushed herself upright. She didn’t have time for this.
El Yunque stood, stubborn and unyielding, its tangled roots and branches conspiring to keep her from Adrián, as if the forest itself had taken the boy and now refused to give him back. With every step forward, the rainforest seemed to thicken deliberately around her, a silent but determined jailer.
Tilting her face toward the heavens, she shut her eyes and began to whisper a desperate plea—half-prayer, half-curse. The words died on her lips as the jungle canopy surrendered its collected moisture, unleashing a second deluge. Raindrops pelted her skin with stinging precision, each balmy strike hammered the same message into her flesh: Adrián was still out there, lost in this living labyrinth that seemed determined to keep them apart.
A year earlier, Hurricane Eliana had gutted Duque like a fish, leaving only bones and memories where homes once stood. The storms that followed picked at what remained like vultures. The island bled with fallen trees and crumbled walls—and somewhere in that devastation, Adrián had vanished. And without her there to guide him, Adrián would remain lost forever in El Yunque’s depths. No one else knew how to reach him in the ways that she could.
“Adrián!” Her cry tore through the jungle, each entreaty more ragged than the last, until her voice cracked and splintered like drought-parched wood. The plea vanished into the dense foliage, swallowed whole by the rainforest’s hungry silence. Not a whisper returned to comfort her—not even the hollow consolation of an echo. Only the insects answered, their chittering swelling to a deafening wall of sound that vibrated through her bones, burrowed under her skin, and drilled into her skull. Their relentless drone continued, incessant and unfeeling, as if mocking her.
She tore at the jungle’s grip, each vine reluctantly giving way to her desperation. Her nails left crescents in bark as she stumbled her way onward, while nettles wrote their burning script across her skin. The forest took its payment in blood and salt, but she gave it willingly. Adrián was worth more to her than her own pain and suffering.
She pressed forward, but vines coiled around her ankles like serpents, roots erupted from the soil to trip her, branches bent low to slash at her face—the forest testing what pound of flesh she would surrender to continue.
Beneath the familiar buzz of insects, something else whispered—a faint, chitinous clicking that sounded out of place. Isa paused mid-step, head tilting. The noise came again, barely discernable. As she moved closer, the clicking was accompanied by a subtle vibration that traveled through her mud-caked boots, so slight she might have imagined it. Her exhausted mind struggled to place it—just another forest creature, surely. Yet her body froze before her mind understood why, as sweat gathered cold between her shoulder blades.
Her instincts screamed retreat, but her curiosity pulled her forward like a fish on a hook. Sweat-slick palms pushed aside razor-edged fronds as she stumbled into a clearing where moonlight pooled silver on crushed ferns. The jungle canopy opened above her, revealing a perfect circle of night sky. The trees at the clearing’s edge bent outward, as though even they cowered from what waited at its center.
Then she understood why. There, before her, stood monstrosities that made her throat close—abominations that shouldn’t exist outside of fever dreams, each the size of a King Shepherd dog but with proportions that seemed fundamentally wrong, as if they somehow occupied more space than their physical proportions allowed.
Between them they dragged a massive pearl-white coffin of silk, its surface undulating with the slow, rhythmic spasms of whatever lay entombed inside—not struggling, but twitching with what seemed the last desperate signals from a nervous system shutting down.
Isa’s chest convulsed. The cocoon glowed in the moonlight, large enough to hold a deer…or--
Her mind recoiled, but her eyes kept returning to the silk prison’s dimensions. The cocoon bulged in places that suggested shoulders, a head. Something Adrián-sized. The thought slithered in uninvited, and her lungs seized mid-breath. Both palms clamped over her mouth, the pads of her fingers digging into her cheeks. Her feet refused to move closer, knowing capture meant death, but her eyes couldn’t tear away from the cocoon’s human silhouette.
The thought that it could be Adrián sent her anxiety soaring. A sound escaped through the gaps between her fingers—a tiny gasp, nothing more, yet it hung in the clearing like a stone dropped into still water, ripples of consequence expanding outward.
The creatures froze, then answered with a collective hiss that scraped through the clearing like fingernails on a chalkboard. They pivoted toward her with a sickening synchronicity, joints clicking as legs repositioned. Eight beadlike eyes in each head, unblinking and luminous, cast an eerie blue-green glow across the forest floor. This wasn’t moonlight reflected in their gazes—this radiance came from within, as though some cold fire burned at their core. Isa couldn’t look away. But then she realized—they weren’t just looking at her, they were assessing her.
Her heart stopped.
She stumbled back.
A twig snapped beneath her heel, the crack detonating through the silence.
Isa froze mid-step. The creatures tensed as one—legs splaying, bodies lowering. Then the largest one reared up, its front legs pawing the air while the others formed a protective ring around the cocoon. The massive leader’s carapace gleamed like volcanic glass, fissured with veins that pulsed toxic blue. Its legs—thick as Isa’s wrist—dug into the mud as it positioned itself between her and the silk-wrapped bundle. Eight eyes fixed on her, their glow intensifying with each second that she remained in view, tracking every microscopic movement of her trembling body.
Isa’s heel struck a stone as she retreated another step, and she nearly lost her balance. In that fractional second, the lead creature’s body convulsed—legs coiling tight against its abdomen—before exploding forward with such violence that soil erupted around it. Its mandibles clacked open, releasing not a hiss but a high-pitched screech—a frequency so piercing it rattled Isa’s back teeth and turned her legs to jelly.
The muscles in her legs quivered violently but she turned and launched herself back into the tree line, her heart pounding in her chest. As branches whipped past her face and the ground shook with its pursuit, her dread intensified: if she didn’t outrun it, she would be cocooned—wrapped, drained, stored…dead meat waiting for them all to feast upon.
The forest worked against her, as if in cahoots with the eight-legged horror. Vines snatched at her arms, branches clawed her face, mud clutched at her boots. Behind her, the ground quaked with pursuit, every thunderous stomp a drumbeat of doom. Isa’s heart hammered as she pushed through the underbrush.
The skittering fury slowly faded behind her, but Isa’s legs continued to pump mechanically onward, her muscles burning acid-hot with each stride. A quick glance behind her showed no sign of her pursuer. Hope surged—until her left boot sank, ankle-deep into a hidden hole. Her ankle twisted with an audible pop. Her momentum hurled her forward—one second of suspended terror—then her right shoulder crashed into the sodden earth with such force that her vision flickered black at the edges. Vertebrae compressed, ribs screaming. She lay half-submerged in the muck, blood pulsing from a three-inch gash above her elbow.
Through the lattice of leaves above, the sky bled from crimson to indigo. Night was coming. She had to get home. Her heart split in two directions: toward the safety of Duque’s lights, or back into the jungle’s shadows to find Adrián—assuming those eight-legged horrors hadn’t already gotten to him.
Her spine turned to ice as chitinous legs scraped closer through the underbrush, each rapid click shrinking the distance between predator and prey. It wasn’t giving up.
I can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous, she thought, pushing herself up onto her knees.
Despite the pain in her ankle and the heavy lure of respite—whispering that if she just lay down, the pain would end—Isa forced to her feet and limped forward, driving her body toward the light that marked the edge of Duque.
She hobbled as fast as she could until certain the threat of pursuit had ended, then collapsed against a tree, chest heaving. Tears streaked her face, salt stinging every cut.
Adrián was still out there. Lost. Injured. Maybe already--
Her head jerked side to side, neck muscles cording. “No.” The word tore from her throat like a prayer, a command, a desperate plea to the universe. Her arms crushed against her ribs as her world threatened to splinter. Then a fleeting image of Sandra’s face flashed behind her eyelids—the urgency, the trust, the quiet certainty that Isa would bring her son home.
For nearly a year, she had done just that. Day after day, she’d followed him into the forest as he searched for his lost pets after Hurricane Eliana tore through Duque, staying close, guiding him back when the light began to fade, promising his mother she wouldn’t let him wander too far. And every time, she had kept that promise.
Not today.
Her stomach twisted violently. She had let him slip ahead of her—let the storm, the fear, the chaos slow her just long enough for him to disappear. How could Sandra ever trust her again, how could ever trust herself.
Her gaze flicked back toward the jungle, toward the place where the creatures had dragged their silken cargo. A cold shiver worked its way down her spine. What were those things? How had something like that ended up in El Yunque without anyone knowing?
Tears spilled down her cheeks as the last embers of sunset spilled across Duque’s edge, painting the trees behind her in dying light. She knew she couldn’t keep searching—not with night pressing in, not with those creatures still moving in the dark. From the town drifted a baby’s cry and the faint hum of a radio—ordinary sounds that spoke of safety just steps away.
She pushed herself up and cast one last glance into the forest before turning toward home, her heart heavy with the weight of surrender.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. I will find you.”
The forest remained silent in the face of her vow, shadows and branches stirring as they always had, as if her words meant nothing at all.
The forest seemed to come alive, its tangled roots reaching out to ensnare Isa’s foot, sending her stumbling into a tree trunk, slick from rain. On top of that, she couldn’t catch her breath in the thick jungle air. Each gulp felt like breathing through a wet cloth, the smell of rotting leaves filling her nose with every desperate inhale.
The storm’s trailing edge had finally released its grip on their town to terrorize some other corner of the island, but for Isa, the fear flooding her now was every bit as paralyzing as the tempest’s destructive howl.
After a moment forcing herself to breathe, Isa pushed away from the tree. Her hands slid across the slick moss, and before she could catch herself, she slammed face-first into the trunk, the impact sending a bolt of pain through the bridge of her nose.
“Ow! Shit--¡maldita sea!”
She shoved herself back and smacked the trunk with the heel of her hand, the wet bark scraping her skin raw. “Damn!” The word came out as a half-sob as tears sprang to her eyes. Blood trickled warm over her lip, mingling with the rainwater already soaking her face. She dragged her muddy sleeve across her nose, gasping at the sting, then slumped against the tree for just a second, exhaustion pulling at her bones. Her shoulders trembled once, twice—before she clenched her jaw and pushed herself upright. She didn’t have time for this.
El Yunque stood, stubborn and unyielding, its tangled roots and branches conspiring to keep her from Adrián, as if the forest itself had taken the boy and now refused to give him back. With every step forward, the rainforest seemed to thicken deliberately around her, a silent but determined jailer.
Tilting her face toward the heavens, she shut her eyes and began to whisper a desperate plea—half-prayer, half-curse. The words died on her lips as the jungle canopy surrendered its collected moisture, unleashing a second deluge. Raindrops pelted her skin with stinging precision, each balmy strike hammered the same message into her flesh: Adrián was still out there, lost in this living labyrinth that seemed determined to keep them apart.
A year earlier, Hurricane Eliana had gutted Duque like a fish, leaving only bones and memories where homes once stood. The storms that followed picked at what remained like vultures. The island bled with fallen trees and crumbled walls—and somewhere in that devastation, Adrián had vanished. And without her there to guide him, Adrián would remain lost forever in El Yunque’s depths. No one else knew how to reach him in the ways that she could.
“Adrián!” Her cry tore through the jungle, each entreaty more ragged than the last, until her voice cracked and splintered like drought-parched wood. The plea vanished into the dense foliage, swallowed whole by the rainforest’s hungry silence. Not a whisper returned to comfort her—not even the hollow consolation of an echo. Only the insects answered, their chittering swelling to a deafening wall of sound that vibrated through her bones, burrowed under her skin, and drilled into her skull. Their relentless drone continued, incessant and unfeeling, as if mocking her.
She tore at the jungle’s grip, each vine reluctantly giving way to her desperation. Her nails left crescents in bark as she stumbled her way onward, while nettles wrote their burning script across her skin. The forest took its payment in blood and salt, but she gave it willingly. Adrián was worth more to her than her own pain and suffering.
She pressed forward, but vines coiled around her ankles like serpents, roots erupted from the soil to trip her, branches bent low to slash at her face—the forest testing what pound of flesh she would surrender to continue.
Beneath the familiar buzz of insects, something else whispered—a faint, chitinous clicking that sounded out of place. Isa paused mid-step, head tilting. The noise came again, barely discernable. As she moved closer, the clicking was accompanied by a subtle vibration that traveled through her mud-caked boots, so slight she might have imagined it. Her exhausted mind struggled to place it—just another forest creature, surely. Yet her body froze before her mind understood why, as sweat gathered cold between her shoulder blades.
Her instincts screamed retreat, but her curiosity pulled her forward like a fish on a hook. Sweat-slick palms pushed aside razor-edged fronds as she stumbled into a clearing where moonlight pooled silver on crushed ferns. The jungle canopy opened above her, revealing a perfect circle of night sky. The trees at the clearing’s edge bent outward, as though even they cowered from what waited at its center.
Then she understood why. There, before her, stood monstrosities that made her throat close—abominations that shouldn’t exist outside of fever dreams, each the size of a King Shepherd dog but with proportions that seemed fundamentally wrong, as if they somehow occupied more space than their physical proportions allowed.
Between them they dragged a massive pearl-white coffin of silk, its surface undulating with the slow, rhythmic spasms of whatever lay entombed inside—not struggling, but twitching with what seemed the last desperate signals from a nervous system shutting down.
Isa’s chest convulsed. The cocoon glowed in the moonlight, large enough to hold a deer…or--
Her mind recoiled, but her eyes kept returning to the silk prison’s dimensions. The cocoon bulged in places that suggested shoulders, a head. Something Adrián-sized. The thought slithered in uninvited, and her lungs seized mid-breath. Both palms clamped over her mouth, the pads of her fingers digging into her cheeks. Her feet refused to move closer, knowing capture meant death, but her eyes couldn’t tear away from the cocoon’s human silhouette.
The thought that it could be Adrián sent her anxiety soaring. A sound escaped through the gaps between her fingers—a tiny gasp, nothing more, yet it hung in the clearing like a stone dropped into still water, ripples of consequence expanding outward.
The creatures froze, then answered with a collective hiss that scraped through the clearing like fingernails on a chalkboard. They pivoted toward her with a sickening synchronicity, joints clicking as legs repositioned. Eight beadlike eyes in each head, unblinking and luminous, cast an eerie blue-green glow across the forest floor. This wasn’t moonlight reflected in their gazes—this radiance came from within, as though some cold fire burned at their core. Isa couldn’t look away. But then she realized—they weren’t just looking at her, they were assessing her.
Her heart stopped.
She stumbled back.
A twig snapped beneath her heel, the crack detonating through the silence.
Isa froze mid-step. The creatures tensed as one—legs splaying, bodies lowering. Then the largest one reared up, its front legs pawing the air while the others formed a protective ring around the cocoon. The massive leader’s carapace gleamed like volcanic glass, fissured with veins that pulsed toxic blue. Its legs—thick as Isa’s wrist—dug into the mud as it positioned itself between her and the silk-wrapped bundle. Eight eyes fixed on her, their glow intensifying with each second that she remained in view, tracking every microscopic movement of her trembling body.
Isa’s heel struck a stone as she retreated another step, and she nearly lost her balance. In that fractional second, the lead creature’s body convulsed—legs coiling tight against its abdomen—before exploding forward with such violence that soil erupted around it. Its mandibles clacked open, releasing not a hiss but a high-pitched screech—a frequency so piercing it rattled Isa’s back teeth and turned her legs to jelly.
The muscles in her legs quivered violently but she turned and launched herself back into the tree line, her heart pounding in her chest. As branches whipped past her face and the ground shook with its pursuit, her dread intensified: if she didn’t outrun it, she would be cocooned—wrapped, drained, stored…dead meat waiting for them all to feast upon.
The forest worked against her, as if in cahoots with the eight-legged horror. Vines snatched at her arms, branches clawed her face, mud clutched at her boots. Behind her, the ground quaked with pursuit, every thunderous stomp a drumbeat of doom. Isa’s heart hammered as she pushed through the underbrush.
The skittering fury slowly faded behind her, but Isa’s legs continued to pump mechanically onward, her muscles burning acid-hot with each stride. A quick glance behind her showed no sign of her pursuer. Hope surged—until her left boot sank, ankle-deep into a hidden hole. Her ankle twisted with an audible pop. Her momentum hurled her forward—one second of suspended terror—then her right shoulder crashed into the sodden earth with such force that her vision flickered black at the edges. Vertebrae compressed, ribs screaming. She lay half-submerged in the muck, blood pulsing from a three-inch gash above her elbow.
Through the lattice of leaves above, the sky bled from crimson to indigo. Night was coming. She had to get home. Her heart split in two directions: toward the safety of Duque’s lights, or back into the jungle’s shadows to find Adrián—assuming those eight-legged horrors hadn’t already gotten to him.
Her spine turned to ice as chitinous legs scraped closer through the underbrush, each rapid click shrinking the distance between predator and prey. It wasn’t giving up.
I can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous, she thought, pushing herself up onto her knees.
Despite the pain in her ankle and the heavy lure of respite—whispering that if she just lay down, the pain would end—Isa forced to her feet and limped forward, driving her body toward the light that marked the edge of Duque.
She hobbled as fast as she could until certain the threat of pursuit had ended, then collapsed against a tree, chest heaving. Tears streaked her face, salt stinging every cut.
Adrián was still out there. Lost. Injured. Maybe already--
Her head jerked side to side, neck muscles cording. “No.” The word tore from her throat like a prayer, a command, a desperate plea to the universe. Her arms crushed against her ribs as her world threatened to splinter. Then a fleeting image of Sandra’s face flashed behind her eyelids—the urgency, the trust, the quiet certainty that Isa would bring her son home.
For nearly a year, she had done just that. Day after day, she’d followed him into the forest as he searched for his lost pets after Hurricane Eliana tore through Duque, staying close, guiding him back when the light began to fade, promising his mother she wouldn’t let him wander too far. And every time, she had kept that promise.
Not today.
Her stomach twisted violently. She had let him slip ahead of her—let the storm, the fear, the chaos slow her just long enough for him to disappear. How could Sandra ever trust her again, how could ever trust herself.
Her gaze flicked back toward the jungle, toward the place where the creatures had dragged their silken cargo. A cold shiver worked its way down her spine. What were those things? How had something like that ended up in El Yunque without anyone knowing?
Tears spilled down her cheeks as the last embers of sunset spilled across Duque’s edge, painting the trees behind her in dying light. She knew she couldn’t keep searching—not with night pressing in, not with those creatures still moving in the dark. From the town drifted a baby’s cry and the faint hum of a radio—ordinary sounds that spoke of safety just steps away.
She pushed herself up and cast one last glance into the forest before turning toward home, her heart heavy with the weight of surrender.
“I’ll be back tomorrow. I will find you.”
The forest remained silent in the face of her vow, shadows and branches stirring as they always had, as if her words meant nothing at all.