About twenty feet out, there was a sandbank. The water there was less than a foot deep. On the other side of the sandbank was a drop-off. I stood looking into it. Things were swimming in the deeper water. Really big things.

Dozens of plant-dinos were massing where I’d stepped off the bank. They opened their mouths, as though roaring, but the only sound was the rasp and slap of fern vines. I was paralyzed, too terrified to jump into the deep water, with its huge, unknown creatures, but clearly unable to go back to dry land.

One of the dinos stepped into the water. Jolted into action, I turned and splashed my way down the sandbank, but I ran out of bank long before I’d passed the crowd of creatures waiting on the shore.

The splashing seemed to key them into my location, and more began stepping into the river. Desperately, I turned back to the deep water. Something huge was swimming in there — something twenty feet long, at least. I just couldn’t jump in. I stood there trying to make myself, and I just couldn’t.

I felt the ’pus tighten around my waist. A wall of water rose out of the river and, faster than my eye could follow, smashed into the nearest dinos. An avalanche of bone and shredded vines blasted back through the assembled creatures. The river churned, almost knocking me down.

I couldn’t sense whatever was happening, but it had to be the ’pus.

More dinos surged forward, and the ’pus flung another water wall at them. Then it did it again. And again.

Behind the carnage on shore, I could see the vines putting the destroyed dinos back together. The ’pus wasn’t going to save me. It was just delaying the inevitable.

And the delay was brief. Its sixth strike was noticeably weakened, and its seventh did little more than knock a couple dinos down. It tried once more, and only succeeded in misting the creatures with water droplets.

Its grip on me tightened for a moment, and then it just fell off. It landed in the water, slid off the sandbar, and sank.

With a cry, I lunged for it, but it had disappeared into the deeps.

I knelt there in the water, stripped of every hope. I held my hands up at the oncoming creatures.

“Stop! Please!”

They didn’t stop.

Things seemed to slow down. I saw the way individual plants unwrapped and rewrapped themselves over the bones as the creatures picked their legs up and stepped toward me through the shallows. I saw the gleam of their ancient teeth as they opened their mouths in soundless calls. I saw my own bones being passed through the ferns, being picked clean and buried in the peaty soil, locked in this place forever. I saw them resurrected into some horrifying parody of my body to destroy other intruders and add them to the sentinel horde.