The Book of Trials || ONC 2019

Chapter Seventeen

I saw the little girl again, her face a shadow as she watched the flames envelope the orphanage she'd known for so little a time. Her eyes were as dry as the fiery smoke, her cheeks smudged with the ashes and her face lit with the spark of something I couldn't quite remember.

The image flashed and the memories changed.

This time I watched as the girl stood at the foot of her parents' bed, the sound of her sister's racking coughs echoing through the hallway. On the faces of her parents were features she had never seen on them in the past—deep purple circles beneath their eyes, a yellow tint to their normally creamy skin, their bodies wan and sickly, the only shadow of their lives with the girl found in the creases in their cheeks where they had smiled in times previous. Their age showed through their normally youthful skin, the eyes of both the man and the woman closed but peaceful. Then the coughing from the hallway stopped, replaced by a horrible, deafening silence.

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The soil was cold when I awoke. Everything was cold, it seemed, as I weakly pushed myself to my elbows. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with chilled, shaking fingers, then gasped.

The water from the river splashed furiously at the edge of my dress, which was soaked clean through with frigid river spray. When I rolled away from the water, my skirt crackled as the frozen layer upon it broke apart, and I fumbled over myself as painful pins and needles shivered through my limbs. My breath rose in cool, icy puffs in the February air and my body stiffened. Had no one bothered to come for me when I left the warmth of the fire? My thoughts returned to me at the slight thump of my mother's necklace against my collarbone.

Oh. Right. Of course they wouldn't come for me.

I bit my lip against the ache in my chest and trekked up the steep incline, my numb feet crunching the leaves on the forest floor and rustling the birds in the trees above me. My throat stung with dryness and I patted a hand against my hip where a flask was normally dangling from my belt, but quickly realized it had been destroyed in the fall down the ravine. I swallowed my thirst, carrying myself up the mountain with a pall of dark thoughts swimming around my vision. The morning had already become most unpleasant, indeed.

I must have been climbing for nearly a hour before the crunch of leaves was matched by an old, nasally voice squawking something awful from somewhere close by.

"Jaren, is this one of those salad-something-or-others you were telling me about earlier—Jaren, come here and look at this!"

"Yes, Miss Mylda." A darker tenor voice sighed. "That's a salamander. Please leave it alone."

I peered past a patch of trees to where an ancient-looking woman in a hundred layers of scarves and shawls crouched, pointing under a bush with a withered, spindly finger and holding a one-sided conversation with another person I couldn't see. I moved around a tree and her gaze snapped toward me, her eyes wide.

"Good heavens!" she cried, jumping to her feet with shocking agility. "It's one of those forest people you were telling me about"—her eyes flicked to her left several times—"Jaren, do come look!"

I blinked once, freezing in place. Out from behind a thicket came a tall, graceful wood spirit. Or at least the young man looked like one with his brown leather vest and green blouse and his long silver hair falling in a braid down his back, his eyes glimmering an earthy hue in the forest light. It was a trick of my eyes, though, as I blinked again and he appeared fully human—but still just as striking in appearance.

I lifted a hand in greeting, my mouth going dry and my words muffled and stuttering. I clamped my mouth shut and pulled my hand back in, feeling a hot rush of blood flood my cheeks.