Codex Sauria: A speculative biology playground where trees graze the clouds and animals are mountains
Important: This story is in Spanish. I wanted English speakers to also know that Sauria exists. For now, the language barrier is a problem. In the future, in the near future, it won't be anymore. Even so, if you want to read the story of a native of these lands, a hunter who doesn't know how to be a father, come. Sauria awaits you.
There's a place where the ground doesn't push back so hard.
You walk and your steps don't punish. The air isn't light like the one you know — it's thick, warm, like the planet is breathing deep and never letting go. It smells like wet earth, moss, something sweet rotting slowly.
You don't see the sky. Not really. There are trees. But not trees like ours. Their trunks are walls. Their bark, ramparts. The first branch is two hundred meters up. And above, lost in a golden haze that never lifts, the crown. Half a kilometer above your feet.
The forest isn't green. It's almost black. The leaves take everything — every last photon from that orange star that barely moves across the sky. No seasons. No hurry.
Then the ground begins to hum.
Not a tremor. Deeper. Slower. You feel the buzz in your teeth before you hear it. An infrasound — something you don't hear with your ears, but with your chest. And you know it's coming.
First you see a neck. Rising between the trunks like a living crane, slow, majestic, covered in grey hide that looks like thousand-year-old bark. It keeps going. And going. Until you can't see the end of it. The whole animal doesn't fit in your gaze. You have to turn your head.
Thirty seconds between each step. When the foot lands, leaves tremble a hundred meters away. It doesn't look at you. It doesn't need to. You're dust with eyes.
High above, something whistles.
Not a bird. There are no birds here.
A shadow slips through the gap between canopies. It doesn't flap. It glides. Its body is longer than a bus, and its wings — folded, sharp as blades — suddenly spread in a silence that shouldn't be possible for something so huge. The dense air holds it like water. It drifts.
Passes overhead. You don't see its face. Just a bony crest throwing a shadow across the clearing. The whistle fades between the trunks.
Then silence.
The colossus keeps walking. The shadow is gone. The forest returns to its background noise: the constant drip, the distant creak of growing wood, the murmur of something breathing in the thicket.
You don't know how long you've stood there. It doesn't matter.
This world wasn't made for you to understand it. It was made for you to feel it.
