Nightly Mirage

7. Under a New Dawn

With a slight twitch, Atorak shrugged the snow off his feathers. Despite all, cold did not bother him particularly. In fact, the days he spent telling to himself the stories he knew, one after the other, had been strangely fun. Seeing the puffs of vapor produced by his breath, the storyteller even mused that the scene could be included in one of his tales.

What worried him more, on the other hand, was the suspicion that he was lost. Not on the mountains, but since the day he left to find the blue maiden.

At first, not even he could believe it. After all, a person is lost only when she no longer knows which path to take – or so he remembered. But, with regards to the direction, where was the blue maiden?

According to what the cat told him in the ath'ar city, the maiden should have been somewhere in the north. But did this not mean that, since the beginning, he lacked a precise destination? And that, thus, there had never been a moment in his journey when he was not actually lost?

Atorak started pondering frantically. What did characters in stories do, when they got lost? There were some who were no longer found, but as far as he knew, nobody was looking for him. How could he no longer be found, without somebody who at least tried looking for him? There ought to be a different solution.

The idea finally came to him when he saw a dark rocky ridge sticking out amid the snowy field, apparent even at some distance despite the blizzard.

A signpost.

The stories he knew were full of heroes who could find the lost way thanks to these special places. He only had to keep looking for more and he, too, would have undoubtedly found his way. Even if, right now, he did not have a precise idea of what his way was.

Following this train of thought, Atorak walked down towards the frozen river, in search of other features of the landscape which stuck out of the white background. Contrary to his hopes, though, the storyteller saw very little other than snow and frost.

At least, until a dark shadow appeared on the horizon.

Wavering like a reed in the wind, the mysterious figure was steadily advancing in the snowstorm. Long black hair waved loosely behind her, shrouding her like a ghost. Atorak told and heard many scary stories in the past, but the chill he felt now was more vivid and frightening than anything he had ever experienced before. However, when the figure was close enough for him to see her face, Atorak had to think again.

That was not a ghost. It was a nightmare which manifested in the world. Or perhaps, he was simply sleeping.

Judging from his memories of two years before, the one before him ought to be the blue maiden. Not the kind girl who had listened to his stories, but the emerald-eyed warrior who had led them on the Mountains of the Shattered Sun. Even if he had not seen her face, he would have easily recognized her leather armor, black like the rest of her attire.

It actually was her face, though, which first made him doubt. The blue maiden he remembered did not have her azure skin covered by weird dark veins, her lips livid, her green eyes flaring in a morbid scarlet light.

While Atorak was still trying to make sense of all this, though, the maiden slowly picked up her pace until she assaulted him furiously.

***

If he still had harbored doubts until a moment before, now Atorak was sure of it: that ought to be the worst nightmare he had ever experienced.

How could he explain it, otherwise? Even before he had the time to figure out what was going on, creeping shadows darted from the hands of the warrior maiden against him, leaving wounds through his body as if a thousand thin blades had brushed against his skin. Thankfully, the nymph stopped right after that attack, leaving enough time for the storyteller to back off and put a safe distance between them.