Page 69 of Cursed Shadows 4

A raspy sound grunts out of me.

I push from the tree and stagger to look around the mist.

Dread pools in me.

It’s an ill sensation. An unease that sways in my gut like a boat sways with the waves. I know I can’t go back the way I came. I can’t head back down the mountain, through the forest.

Now, I have only one route to take. I must head through the narrowing pinch of the forest, until it spills out into the white, dead and barren part of the mountain.

The very direction I have been avoiding, because it’s the pass, the way up. It will be riddled with fae travelling to the summit, hunting others, seeking out slaughters.

But the three litalves are hunting me in the other direction. Not to forget the dokkalf I lied to, the one who will most certainly be prowling back that way with reinforcements.

One could say I am surrounded.

Call me crass, but I prefer my way of saying it.

I’m thoroughly fucked.

18

††††††

No wind batters these trees, yet they groan and whisper all around me, as though communicating. Maybe they do.

Maybe they talk about me.

The intruder.

A being who doesn’t belong on this mountain, a new creature that has taken shelter on one of them, scaled the trunk, slow and lethargic, climbed its branches, bleeding and sagged, all the way to heights that offer a spanning view. From this high up, I can make out parts of the river, at least the parts that aren’t hidden by the steep inclines and sloped forest floor.

Beyond the pass that brought me here, there’s a rusty red smear on the mountain, like a faded maroon field of sorts, maybe just a barren glade of the death.

Further up, I can make out some caves dotted around, black inky smudges on whitish stone, and—too far out, past the dead whitish frost of the woods that envelope me now—I watch the lovely blue of a kind-looking waterfall pour from cliff heights, then disappear into the woods. A much nicer waterfall than the one that killed the litalf.

The view of the summit would be in my line of sight from this high up the tree if it weren’t for the constant fog that clouds theair in a stagnant mist. That fog hasn’t gone anywhere, not in the hours I’ve been in the white woods.

The pass took me from the thick mist to a wood of frosted earth and icy bark.

I took cover up the tallest one within my line of sight.

No time to gut and cook a fish from my backpack, no moments to waste on warming myself by a fire or washing the caked blood off my face.

I had to be quick.

I scaled the tree, tied my middle around the trunk, and dipped black powder into my shoulder wound.

It knocked me out like a club to the head.

Hours have passed since I drifted off into a sickly, sweaty slumber. A fever sleep, the nightmares of black powder.

Now, I wake to the sluggish frost of the skies. While I slept, the sun came up, lightened the clouds to bleached stone, but now, it starts its descent again.

I missed the hours of sunlight. Slept through them.

Now, the dark ones will be out again.

I have lived my life well-fed, and so the hunger is a great discomfort I am not accustomed to. All I have are some berries, a few nuts, and crumbling honeycomb.

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