Page 84 of Cursed Shadows 4

I don’t delay much longer.

I scale the tree.

If I’m wonderfully lucky, maybe I will find another python I can strike a bargain with.

Chances are dimmer than hope.

The truth is, I will face another night alone. I will sleep by myself—again—and ignore the hollow sensation of loneliness that’s carving itself into my chest as deeply as the hunger empties my stomach.

This night, as I drift off, there is an essence inside of me not unlike the mist in the air. It’s a flicker of him. At least, I think that’s what it is. Daxeel, his life, his soul, echoing through the mountain and into my heart.

But it’s a distant, faraway feeling, it’s detached.

And so it does nothing to soothe the ache.

As I tuck myself onto the sturdy bough above the thicket of snowy branches, concealed from the lower ground, and my face twists with the release of tears, and my breath turns shuddering, I wrap my arms around myself—

And I realise how pathetic I must look to the spectators, sitting alone in a tree, holding myself to ease the loneliness, weeping in the face of these horrors.

Weak, they must think.

Weak, silly, little halfling.

But they cannot read my mind.

They cannot feel what I do.

The flicker.

The faint essence.

Daxeel is a whisper. He passes through me in fleeting moments, and I can never quite grab onto him. Whenever I try, the sensation is gone—and it’s like snatching a fistful of water.

Like everything else in life, it simply drains away.

21

††††††

If it wasn’t for Dare, I would have given up on this fire an hour ago. The branches are too cold, the frost too deep, the kindle too damp—and the spark from the flint won’t take.

The fish that I caught in the stream about a mile back is now gutted on a boulder beside me. But what’s the point if there’s no fire to cook them?

I caught two, but only one is ready to be cooked.

The other is wrapped in parchment and stuffed into my backpack. The one I prepped has gone ignored as I crouch over this smoky mess I’ve created in a patch of dirt.

Any more smoke and I might as well just jump up and down on the spot and shout my whereabouts into the skies.

A grunt catches in my throat as I drop to my knees—the crouch was killing my already strained legs—and I toss the flint rocks to the ground. I rub my red, raw hands down the thighs of my leathers, as though it will soothe them.

It doesn’t.

I glance to the side.

Besides my discarded gloves, the gutted fish is sprawled and peeled open on the parchment. Its insides have been scraped out, the body peeled apart, red flesh exposed.

I wonder how sick I might get if I eat it raw.

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