I walked like I had in the desert, walking miles through plains and bush with little rest. In the desert, if I slept, I'd always wake up with sand in my shoes. I hated the feeling of wet socks squelching in my shoes even more, so unless I felt I really needed it, I didn't let myself sleep more than I had to to keep my body going. I missed the warmth of the hotel bed, the sure safety, security in Fengour. And then I missed my room in the Chief's Villa and waking up every morning to the sound of breaking waves before the day I turned sixteen. If I thought hard enough, the never-ending time in between breaks could almost be drifting out on empty sea before the sea stole my boat, or trekking in the desert with miles of sand on either side of me. They could have been drifting down the River Tyrbery in a makeshift raft or racing Ricco up the sand on the beach. But they weren't.
Unlike in fairy stories, moss didn't make a very good pillow. With every step I took towards the mountains, I felt darkness pulsing towards me, like a corridor that I was walking into, swallowing me up further with every movement. Since it was likely from the demons running rampant in the mountains, I felt like I was hiking straight into a trap. Like a demon would be smart enough to plant the ruse of a magical mountain keep in people's mind, luring the Gifted there like moths to a lantern.
No, that was NOT possible. Not. Possible. I chanted in my head.
"Not possible," I scowled at the ground. I would NOT let myself have come all this way to find out it was a trap. If it was, then I'd kill all the demons with my bare hands and build a shelter myself. That was what I told myself, at least. I sighed, my breath forming a cloud of mist in the chilly morning air.
I picked my way over the rocks and through the moss, around the mushrooms and over logs, barely taking in my dewy, wet surroundings as I walked. I wished I could say there was nothing but green in all directions, but I couldn't, because there were so many greens that some of them were laughing with pale yellow and some were taking strolls downhill to merge with sylvan brown. Whereas in Kaleveh, orange would be walking hand in hand with blue and marigold sand would be inching up to rusted bronze.
The marshy ground was abuzz with flies rising from murky pools dotting the landscape, all glossed over with tangles of water plants.
Then the squelchy mud turned to packed earth beneath my feet, and trees draped with vines adorned the hills. I may have walked into trees once or twice, but that's not the point. Slowly, my limbs became leaner and looser, and every day I could walk a bit more without stopping for rest.
Forests were always portrayed as whispering or whatnot, but the woods around me really did murmur as I stepped over their gnarly roots, rustling leaves betraying the deepest of secrets. Ferns swayed in the wind sweeping over the world, and shrubs gossiped. I wished, in that moment, that being Gifted with Earth allowed me to hear the whisperings of the forest trees, hear what they saw from their soaring canopies. But I couldn't. I could only imagine what they saw, what the wise owls of the forest relayed to them, the secrets betrayed by the travellers hunting for safety.
Just as I could only imagine the day when I no longer needed to run.
I was nearly at the base of the mountain.
Here the trees were not tall and majestic and covered in lichen and creeping vines, but gangly and lifeless, with charred trunks. Charred black. Black—as if a demon had sucked the life out of it. Black, as if the trees had barely survived a summer bushfire when summer was almost giving way to autumn. I neared one, poking at an overhanging branch tentatively. It swung from side to side. Not burnt out, otherwise it would've snapped at the slightest touch, but limp—shrivelled and drooping. Like an upright bit of rope.
And I could tell—I didn't know how.
No fire had wreaked this sin.
My magic could sense it, sense the darkness that had made these trees this way. It recoiled at the taste, the feel of it that was so inherently evil. Something born not of this world but another, one of darkness and dampness, one where the sky was not a cheerful blue but a dirty grey, where the sun was not a beam of golden warmth but only a trickle of white through the clouds. A depressing world, where a human would never live but where a demon would thrive.
But the trees did not harm me, and I could not do anything to improve their sorry situation, so I kept walking, up,
and up
and up.
Every step was agonising, every step through the thick undergrowth that more often than not snagged on my clothes (trusty Kaleveran fabric was normally my best friend in these situations. But the weave was designed to become tighter around holes, and because the twigs were so limp, they were agonising to tug free) and scratched at the skin left bare between the hem of my pants and the top of my socks. With every meter I pushed on through the carpet of forest covering the Calbron Mountains, the path grew steeper and rockier. Not to mention the air soon became thinner, the side of the mountain swathed in a blanket of fog. The gradually wetter ground sucked at my boots as I hiked. It was all I could do to keep warm and keep from fainting with the cold, exhaustion and thinning oxygen supply, let alone warm up my food, so I ate it cold. I thought I was beyond lucky to not catch any illness.
The birds had long since stopped cawing; I had not heard their songs for a long time. The blackened husks of the trees were devoid of leaves. Without their steady rustling, the woods were eerily quiet. I could only see a few metres forward at a time. The rest of the leaf-strewn path was be steeped in fog.
Suddenly, a howl cut through the air. It was deafening, louder than a normal canine should've been able to yowl. Which meant…it was close. Too close for comfort. I could almost see it in my mind's eye; the predatory, yellow eyes, the thick, grey pelt, and the razor-sharp teeth. Another howl echoed in my ears from lower down on the mountain, even more ear-splitting than before.
It had to be getting closer…
I imagined deadly claw-tipped paws leaping swiftly through the shrubbery, maw gaping as it closed in for the kill.
What was I doing, standing here and listening?
I ran. I fled through the bushes, not caring when the thorns ripped at my heels, trampling layers of grass and mud and fallen leaves from times old. I crashed through the forest, only undiluted fear keeping me upright as I tripped my way over roots and fallen boughs. I should've abandoned my pack and its bulk, but all I could think of was getting away.
I swear the roots tangled around my ankles as I stumbled over them, the bramble bushes grew thicker, and the mud turned into quicksand. But I told myself it was just the heightened sense of danger pulsing through my body, and I kept running. Not long after, I started to tire, my thighs and calves baying in pain, but I had no choice but to keep going, the small wounds and nicks on my skin bleating feebly with the speed of my escape. The path I took through the trees grew thinner, and my lungs were gasping for breath, for the wispy oxygen that was cold as ice and stung the inside of my nostrils with biting, glacial air.
But still I could hear the growling noises the wolf made, and as I started to slow down, my throat burning, chest heaving, I could soon hear the panting of the carnivorous mammal closing in on me. Although I had been arduously making my way up the mountain for hours since dawn, sweat pooling in my bones, the cold was numbing. The thought of it pouncing and pinning me down, tearing into my flesh, terrified me, giving me a temporary burst of speed. Too temporary. Too quick.
The temporary spasm of speed and strength disappeared too quickly, and the wolf was too fast for me to possibly outrun.
A predator, it had been born with the will to kill in its blood. Not me.
I looked back just once, seeing the topaz eyes of the beast glinting between the trees. That look cost me, as I turned back—
—and crashed face-first into a wall. It was not Jack this time, though. Instead, this was a wall of glittering, malicious stone, hewn of darkness. As I stepped back, panting, I was alive to the fact that between the bloodthirsty wolf circling, lips pulled back in a snarl behind me, and the wall that stretched across the mountain, I was utterly trapped. I looked up, seeing if I could scale the stone. I couldn't.
I looked back again, and the grey wolf was gone. I whipped my head back to the rock, but it was gone too. I tried to keep running, but I was frozen in place.
I tried to summon fire, to make the earth shelter me, but I felt as if the ropes I had to pull to do so were no longer there. I was only grasping at empty nothingness like a climber suddenly suspended in mid-air, the deathly blackness of the trees choking.
How much depends on a feral cat?
I faintly remembered comparing the fire to a cat in those barest moments when my magic first manifested. Right now, everything depended on it. Yet the elusive feline had run from the canine hounding me.
Everything depended on a feral cat that was no longer there. My friends. My family. My buried memories and blossoming hopes. My life.
My past and present and future.