The Fear You Know

25. To Ashes

  Eli was alone with the silence, a silence that had pressed in around him like heavy, wet snow.

Six days of silence.

He didn't speak that entire time, didn't cry, didn't scream. He simply walked, and kept walking as he made his way out of Twisted and into the territory abutted by the uncanny Valley and the lost. Clouds rolled overhead, moving in double time across the sky. Time seemed to pass around him, separate and incongruous with the slow plodding of his feet.

Their original journey had taken them on a wide circle: beginning in the South East from affliction, then south down to the tower, then north to Genua and west to kurshing, only to circle north and then east through the stalk. Twisted lay in the north east of the territory just over the Uncanny valley, leaving him only a few days travel south and slightly west through the uncanny and the lost before he was to reach desolation.

He hugged the curve of the uncanny, seeing only the occasional reminder of the area's true nature as a strange scaly butterfly with a black aura filtered out from the forest, and faces appeared in the clouds above looking down on him as he walked. A cold wind blew down from the northeast, likely from the stalk, though he didn't put a jacket on.

He was too numb to feel the cold.

In the first mile or so out from the University he had heard his name being called in the distance, but he had ignored it as he kept walking actively doing his best to avoid pursuit, as much as his numb mind would allow.

For the first time in his life, he was well and truly alone.

He thought he had been before, but this was different.

He didn't have Wink to keep him solitary company.

Didn't even have his fear to keep him warm.

He did his best to shut out the memories, dancing with his mother while rain roared outside, sitting with his father as he learned how to read, learning to survive under wink's instruction.

All memories, blocked as soon as they appeared.

Long grass brushed against his legs as he walked, and walked, and walked. The sky overhead became a field of stars in bitter blackness as his feet continued to move through the grass. He turned his head to look up, and for the first time in a long time he felt the disarming expansion of the Sheer overhead it seemed to be pulling him in stronger than ever. Eli felt a sudden lurch and staggered onto his knees, feeling as if something had tried to tug him off the ground.

He stared down at his hands and the dirt, afraid to look up at the sky.

Eli closed his eyes curling up there on the ground, hands covering his head wishing that the sky would just leave him be. He stayed there until morning, at which time he rose to his feet and continued to walk, following his own exhausted footsteps and the quiet of his own mind. There was nothing to think about, no theories to come up with, no clues to unravel.

They had all been meaningless.

Besides, It was Peter that had found those anyway.

Eli was a pretender.

A fake.

Eli was nothing,

Nothing.

Nothing.

He crossed into the lost the day after that following his own footsteps in a wide churning circle for most of the day. Everything looked the same, everything seemed the same, and it was difficult for him to tell where he was.

He was lost, it frightened him more than he would have liked to admit. He had never actually been lost in the lost, but he found himself wandering too and fro through the tall grass staring at the same line of hills in all directions trying to position the sun behind the thick layer of clouds which rolled overhead. It was no use and so he sat in the grass staring at his hands as the day grew brighter and then darker around him.