Yellowhair: An Elf Hollow Prequel

SIX | Panic

CHAPTER SIX

Panic

The crushing water tumbled straight at her. Qello sucked in her breath.

The blast swept around and over them, spinning Qello right off her rock. She hit hard, hands finding a log going by at a crazy pace. The uprooted tree flipped its end up in the water, as it hit something submerged, and flew out onto the bank-roots, again, poking up onto land-topsy-turvy. It was now sideways, but springing and bouncy. The hold she thought she had on one of its branches ripped from her grasp, and she felt herself flicked aside, onto the shore, as insignificantly as Eldrid would have flicked a fly off a horse. She hit another trunk that was deeply implanted.

Dizzy, she moaned. Bruised and numb from the icy cold, she picked herself up and crawled toward the same huge rock she had stood on moments before, surveying the fury. Her rock was now half submerged in the racing water-her narrow ridge path still intact. She crawled along it. More debris swirled and bumped all the way along, washing and tearing new banks. The torrent widened below and became somewhat less angry than it had through the narrower shoot.

The water had ruthlessly carved out new edges and took down some of the trees, from behind the spot where they had been standing. Roots had been wound around each of the boulders and each smaller rock attached to its tree had followed other trees into the mud bath of turmoil. Only the sheer size of the rock she was on had kept her platform from also leaving.

And then it was over! The water subsided, returning to a lower roar and bubble, swallowing all that had floated on the churning surface.

Qello stood, shocked, on an almost-island of sorts and surveyed what had just happened. The landscape was now unlike it had been. Mud and rubble lay everywhere around. Nothing looked as it had.

Her heart seized with fright, suddenly sickened. Nowhere in sight was Luu to be seen.

A gasp and squawk came from Qello's throat as she scrambled, lurched forward, downstream through the new mud-laden banks that had been made from what was left of the old forest edge. Terror seemed to fill her more with each direction she searched. She jumped and slid, on and between each downed tree. Muddy water grabbed and sucked at her ankles. Scrapes and bruises, she hardly noticed, were covered in mud. She struggled, desperate with purpose.

A long time later, when the sun dipped behind trees, Qello was still crying for any sign of her mum. She climbed down the way they had come for half of the day, and then, finally, she came over a rock pile from the top, where the water had formed a new mudflat on the river's opposite bank. 

Qello climbed higher to look over and could just determine the lump of her mother's still form, half-submerged in receding brown muck on the far side of the now wider river.

There, in a crumpled brown and slimy mass, too far away to hear any sound, even if Qello had been able to shout, was the shape of her mother's prone outline: dress and hat, shoulder strap from her pack and the harness her brother had made Luu to hold firmware she used as she gathered special berries for ceremony, all sticking out. The fast-flowing, gurgling torrent was slowly receding, leaving Luu's body, the remaining high point, cast in mud-far across the muddy swell, rushing between them.

Qello's mouth opened, silent and screaming-a plea for River to return her mother to her, help her, but again, this time, her friends let her down. Why? Why? When she needed them most, would the sky and the earth voices not try to answer? She remembered that there was no way to cross the river downstream the way they'd come up.

Branches snapped, and cries of her pain were heard and felt by the mountain that day, as she ran upstream trying to find a way across to her mother. Each time her foot slipped or broken limbs stabbed her, she howled. She climbed and climbed, frantic and lost in the changed landscape.