J. Chansellor - Son of Erebus

The place she'd taken for granted for years grew new form. The trampled leaves, twigs, and roots seemed foreign to her, rolling from under the overgrowth and snaking along the forest floor to trip her already unsure footing. She knew better than to imbue inanimate objects with hostility, but her gut recoiled at the mere whisper of a thought related to what had befallen her morning. She went back to cursing the wild, unkempt underbrush.

Gregor is never going to hear the end of this when I get a hold of him. This should have been clear-cut months ago.

The absurdity of her thoughts hit her and made her throat dry. A voice murmured in her mind that she would never have the chance to throttle Gregor properly for his negligence.

There is no sound, nothing, save your own fettered breathing. There is nothing left.

She almost tripped on it. Absently, she picked up her satchel from where she had thrown it to the ground in dismount and slung it over one shoulder.

Listen… what do you hear?

She shook her head against the question. She couldn't let herself think this way, she had no reason to. Then, her internal ramblings halted with her breathing and any threadbare hope she'd held that Palingard had in any way been spared. She crossed over the densest part of the forest to see clearly what she had been hearing, and ignoring, for a few paces…

The flames danced and licked angrily at the night air, spiraling upwards toward the waxing moon. Any trace of the festival decor was long gone, and scant pillars remained where modest cottages had once speckled the clearing. Those on the outskirts smoldered, while those in the center remained viciously ablaze. There were no survivors; no one picking up the remnants to begin again, no weeping and mourning, no scurrying of animals to find new shelter. Her vision blurred, her eyes glossed over with unshed tears. Her thoughts were as barren as the devastation before her.

What she could see beyond the destruction was the scene she had once tried so hard to forget, the one she had been clinging to anew with hope. As if on top of what was real and in front of her, she saw Palingard as it was fifteen years past. The village was reeling from the aftermath of the last siege — shouts of pain and grief heard in equal measure.

Shock turned to anger as she pictured her savior's face again. He'd known. The Ereubinian had not spared her life out of goodness or mercy. This had been a game for him.

What good are his spoils with no one to suffer for them?

"Was this what you were waiting for?" She wailed. "To see me fall apart?" Her resolve weakened and the ground rushed to meet her knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks and sobs choked her words of clarity. "Why didn't you come back sooner? Finish us off before we had a chance to recover?" She rested her cheek against the soil as she wept.

At first she thought she felt his breath, the Ereubinian's — that he had returned to revel in his win — but she realized the very idea that he would have knelt down to lie on the ground beside her was lunacy.

"Koen," she moaned. Grabbing the dog by his nape, she pulled him to her and buried her face in his matted fur. "You left me, you useless coward."

Her brief joy was sobered as she fought another round of tears, this one stronger than the first. Keeping one hand on Koen, she lowered her head into the other hand and tried to slow her breathing as her father had once taught her.

I can't do this now. I can't let this paralyze me. She didn't trust the Ereubinian to keep his unspoken promise of respite. She waited another minute before trying her legs. Once she was secure on her feet, she limped back to the edge of the woods, where she stood for a moment, peering into the darkness of the Netherwoods. A wind whipped through the boughs of the trees above her, bringing a chill to her skin. She moved to pull her cloak tighter to her when she realized whose cloak she wore.

Ripping it off, she held back a string of curses that would have made a seaman blanch, but couldn't bring herself to drop it to the ground.

It doesn't matter whose it is, it will still keep me warm.

She swallowed a healthy measure of disgust before grudgingly wrapping it around her shoulders again. Koen seemed to look at her with approval.

"I don't want to hear it from you," she sounded ill, but was more than pleased he'd run from the fight. She'd seen nothing but what appeared to be charred carcasses of both man and beast. No doubt Koen wouldn't have made it.

He looked up at her and sneezed, as was his tradition when she spoke to him as if he had the ability to answer.

"Not that you would have been able to do much anyhow," she murmured. Though she played a one-sided conversation, her mind was already elsewhere. Father, where are you?

She'd heard for three years counting that Palingard was the last stronghold and it had been at least nine years or more since they'd stopped trading with the city of Ruiari. Could we really be the last? Her intuition told her that somewhere there had to be smaller camps of those, like herself, who'd managed to evade capture.

Surely Father is somewhere among them, maybe without sense or memory of where he is from. As much as she avoided others and feigned little interest in what Palingard called society, she now found herself wishing for the world of Sara's parents to be real, for Ruiari to be intact, for anyone to be out there in the darkness other than those who'd taken her life from her.

She imagined as she trod along that she would find the University still stood, and that maybe the village leaders in Palingard had been misinformed. They were hard-headed, ill-read and it wouldn't have been entirely out of the question for them to take the words of one mistaken messenger to heart. Had they even bothered to see for themselves? Given the extent of their preparations, they couldn't have. Then she recalled hearing something herself from Sara. It had fallen. She was being ridiculous. Even Jonathan, whose family was as lofty as Sara's in what had once been Ruiari's royal court, had spoken of its fall.

She traveled for several hours, until the depth of foliage hid the light from the moon. Only when she could no longer see did she stop and take refuge beneath the overhang of what appeared to be a large rock formation. Finally, she was left with no choice but to contend with thoughts of Sara and Bella that she'd previously held back; she surrendered to another bout of tears.

When she woke the next morning, she found she'd slept so deeply that it took her a minute to gain her bearings.

"Koen?" What she'd thought to be stone was in the light of day a huge root. Standing, she found that she could observe nothing but the walls of dirt that blocked her view. "Koen!"

As she climbed to the top of the embankment, she was overcome with awe. Ravines wove their way deep into the ground, dipping from trees whose bases were larger than the home she'd been born in. Moss clung to the winding roots and made their way in strings to the forest floor. The varying hues of green and specks of pale violet flowers left her speechless. The effect was stunning. She had grown so accustomed to the simplicity of her village, the rugged cliffs and barren stretches of land, that a new definition of the word "forest" was beginning to form.

"Koen!" Still hearing nothing, she shook herself from her stupor and began to tread through the maze around her with staggered progress. Her ankle, still swollen, throbbed.

She spied her companion a few paces ahead, hopping from one root to the next. "Koen!" He howled in recognition of his name.

After walking a bit, her stomach overturned her will and forced her to admit she was hungry. She'd argued with herself for some time, insisting she was too shaken to eat and digest anything properly, but in the end, the growling in her gut won.