Outside In

Chapter 19 Whomp!

Yarah could feel herself scraping against the edge of the cliff and she could see the ground a great distance below her. Her arms grasped at the air, there was nothing she could do.

Whomp!

She felt a jerk as Ten grabbed hold of her in an awkward way that was part harness and part backpack. Ten began to distance them from the cliff and lift higher into the air. Yarah was then bounced around while he incrementally shifted his grip to get a proper hold on the harness. Yarah tried not to think about her precarious situation in the air and focused on hanging on to breakfast with her eyes firmly shut tight.

When the bouncing and shifting stopped and they seemed to have leveled off and were flying smoothly, Yarah begin to relax again and opened her eyes. They were flying very high at this point and Yarah was glad for the hat and gloves that helped fend off some of the chilling wind.

As they flew, she continued to relax until Yarah eventually starting dozing off - at least in between the times that Ten would swoop down to the ground to check out potential senshwa. After what felt like days of flying to Yarah, she was woken from a doze by Ten asking, "do you see it?"

Yarah slowly lifted her head, thinking Ten was trying to show her another senshwa possibility, but as she looked, she saw that up ahead was something different. Up ahead was a solid, gray rock spire larger than any they had seen so far. It was surrounded on all sides by water and it looked like she and Ten had been flying over water for some time.

As they got closer Yarah could make outbuildings stacked upon the rocky gray mountain island. Fog surrounded the island's lower half causing the portion by the water to look darker and shadowed.  As they approached Ten stayed higher than the fog bank, but Yarah could see that the buildings were so close to each other that she wondered if there were streets in the town. As they continued to approach, she could see that many of the buildings did not have roofs and others were merely piles of rubble. Near the top of the pinnacled city landscape was a plateau and on it, a castle-like structure looked out over the rest.

"Center City," Ten commented. "The castle looks like the best place to try. I'll bring us up there."

He beat his wings upwards, and they went higher than they had been flying, and he just managed to lift Yarah enough to clear the surrounding wall. Yarah had to lift her legs to help get both of them over the towering wall. Ten then neatly dropped them into a dusty courtyard.

Upon landing they had kicked up some of the dust and it swirled in the air around them as they each tried not to breathe it in. Ten coughed and the sound echoed through the area. Yarah felt like the hollow windows all turned to stare at them.

"I found it!" Ten fluffed his feathers and shook happily causing another cloud of dust to rise up.

Yarah sneezed. "I was worried we wouldn't find it" Ten continued," but we did!" Ten's eyes flashed with excitement and pride. "I did it!"

"Yay! Ten!" Yarrah called out and clapped with her glove-muffled hands - carefully so as not to cause more dust to rise up. "But, what now?"

The pair looked around the area they had landed in. It was all gray and covered in a layer of the dust. There were a handful of door frames and archways that ringed the courtyard they were in but it was hard to make out what was beyond the empty frames as the light did not seem to penetrate very far into the darken rooms. The courtyard did not have much in it, only one dead tree trunk in the center that looked like it once may have been a fruit tree of some kind. They decided to try one of the empty doorways that seemed to go in the direction of the taller part of the castle and Yarah dug out her flashlight. Ten was taken aback by the stick that could light up without fire and spent a few minutes gushing about the amazing lightstick before they cautiously entered the dark inner castle.