The rest of Catherine’s night was spent traveling from the base of Mount Ophelia to that of Mount Priscilla. It felt odd to be so far downhill for so long. Her entire life had been spent high up in the village. Not many even knew that it was possible to travel along the coast to avoid the deadly myst between mountains. It wasn’t always safe, as there was myst on the ocean as well that sometimes made its way to the mainland, but Catherine saw no clouds in the distance.
After much walking and climbing up the side of Priscilla, the moonlight was becoming scarce and Catherine was too tired to continue. She found a place to rest and fell into a sudden, exhausted sleep.
A red-haired girl in a dark room was stuffing clothes into a pack. The candle was on the floor near her, not on the nightstand as it usually was. From there it cast an unfamiliar light, making this room they shared seem like an entirely different place. Indeed, after this night it would never feel like the same room again. The girl paused for a moment to look at Catherine from beyond the veils of dream and memory.
“You could come with me,” said the girl. Her emerald eyes said more. They spoke of a past of secret pleasures, and a future of unmapped possibilities.
Catherine didn’t say anything. Her skin still burned from the shame of being tied up in front of a crowd; her back ached from the lashing she had endured from the whip. That night’s punishment was not the first, nor was it the worst.
She was afraid.
They had beaten that fear into her.
It would always be there, reminding her of what happened if she dared to dream of love.
Now her closest companion, the only one that had never betrayed her, was about to leave forever. Yet she couldn’t speak. No one here felt like family. This room alone did not feel like a home. Rachael was her family. Any place with Rachael would be home. That is what she should have said. Instead she said nothing.
Rachael went back to packing her things, taking Catherine’s silence as an answer. She would never ask Catherine directly to go with her, and Catherine would not ask her to stay. She only watched as everything she cared about prepared to walk away into the frightening, dangerous world outside the walls of Misyrea, and never return.
Catherine woke.
A mere two hours had passed, and the sun was just beginning to rise. She cursed how tired she was, but sleeping more would be a waste of daylight and she was freezing. Being in one place for too long didn’t feel safe, but for now she would make camp at least until the sun was fully risen. A fire would be beneficial, if she could set one up before she froze to death.
Catherine tried to draw her stolen sword and found that her arm wasn’t long enough to pull it completely free while the sheath was tied to her belt. She would have to modify the sheath later, or carve herself the kind of back scabbard she had seen experienced travelers use, with an opening running halfway down one side. Not that she knew how to do so. For now, the sheath had to be untied to slide it from the blade. Weapons of this size were usually ceremonial and never meant to actually be used, but it was sharp and her only other tool was the small knife in her boot, which she had forgotten about.
“I regret having to use you for such a mundane task,” she said, “But I need to gather firewood somehow.”
The sound of a whisper caused her to whirl around in search for signs of anyone nearby, but she saw nothing. “Is someone there?” she called out, and was answered with only the wind passing through the leaves. “Too early yet to be getting paranoid,” she said, but kept listening for more voices.
It didn’t take long to build a decent campfire. Once everything was set up, she carved a sigil into a dry log and covered it with kindling. Then her hands came together in the sign of elemental fire and she began to sing the Seventh Song of Searing Flames. As fire was not something made of matter, the teleportation was much simpler than most. She had never managed to transport a solid object, but was able to hold onto the fire long enough to light the kindling before the connection to its previous source of fuel was cut.
For a while she merely sat and warmed herself, listening to the crackling flames. Her wandering thoughts eventually turned to what would be needed for her journey.
The first thing was food. Catherine made another sigil on the ground with her finger, then sang the Aria of Animalia as she put her hands together in the sign of nature. Her mind reached out, searching. There, not far from where she planned to camp, was a grazing bush-antlered deer. They linked. Catherine could taste the grass in the deer’s mouth. One of its back legs ached from an earlier misstep, and Catherine unconsciously reached for her own leg to massage it. A cold breeze on the deer’s fur made Catherine shiver.
Come here, she commanded, but the deer did nothing. Her thoughts were in words, but a deer has no concept of such things. Catherine took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind of more civilized ways of thinking, instead focusing on things like images, smells, feelings, and instinct. She commanded the deer’s legs to move, and felt as they did so. She relied on the deer’s sense of direction and eyesight, using it to guide the animal toward her camp. It complied reluctantly, growing more fearful of her human smell as it approached. She calmed it as best she could, attempting to lie with emotions instead of statements.
The deer eventually emerged from the brush and into the campsite, and Catherine continued to draw it toward her. It was still afraid, but Catherine was successful in soothing its fear into suspicion. Through the deer’s eyes she saw herself get up from the ground and approach, sword in hand.
The deer had never seen a sword, it didn’t understand the danger.
How to kill it, though? Catherine had never killed an animal with a sword before. A slice across its throat? A stab to the heart, perhaps? She could feel exactly where its heart was, as if it were beating in her own chest. Of course, these thoughts were kept shielded from the deer’s mind. The deer sensed that it was in danger, but Catherine’s reassurances had kept it from fleeing.
“There, there, I’m a friend,” she said, and felt a knot start to grow in her stomach. The deer sensed it as well. It stepped forward, and tried to nuzzle her sympathetically. Catherine tried to push it back with the hand not holding her sword, but the deer closed its eyes and rubbed its forehead against her palm, as if it were being pet. It enjoyed her touch, Catherine could feel it.
The sword dropped from her other hand. She pet the deer until its fears were gone and it knew that its new companion was going to be okay. Then she let its mind go, and the deer left to graze some more.
Catherine cried out in hunger and frustration. She knew now that she could never kill something her mind had touched so intimately. The deer’s memory of where some wild apples and blackberries could be found still lingered, though. That would be better than nothing. For now she returned to her campfire.
Catherine pat her stomach and assured herself that food wouldn’t be an issue. Even if she couldn’t use conjured animals as food directly, they would at least know where to find fruits, berries and nuts. Perhaps she could try to command a wolf to hunt for her instead of killing prey herself, but that was an idea for another day.
Water, however, was the most immediate problem. She hadn’t brought any with her and even if she found a source, she had nothing to carry it in or boil it clean. That was foolish, and could cost her her life.
A new idea came to her. Could she summon water? Teleporting something solid was beyond her skills, but water was liquid. There were no spells she knew of to do so, but was confident in her knowledge of the basics and wondered if she could figure something out. Excitedly, she went to the sigil she used to summon the deer and wiped it away, then scribbled a generic summoning sigil in its place. She brought her hands together in the elemental sign of water and, in place of an incantation, began to mumble a children’s song about splashing that she only partly remembered.
Nothing happened, and she felt like an idiot.
She would be very thirsty until she found a village or a traveler. Then she could steal a canteen or something similar. At least she could use birds to scout out a stream and hope that she didn’t end up suffering from various diseases and parasites. Pouting, she turned back toward the campfire and began poking at it with a stick, her thoughts beginning to wander again.
Whatever path she chose was going to be exceedingly dangerous, no matter how she planned to do it. There were several methods to move from one mountain to another, and all of them came with their own risks. The most common risk was falling to your death, but the direct method, crossing straight through the myst and praying you came out on the other side, was far more dangerous. Few that entered had ever been seen again.
The myst would make things very difficult. They were thick patches of roving fog feared for many good reasons. The valleys and any part of the range that went below a certain elevation would be covered in them. Even the skeptical Catherine couldn’t deny how dangerous the myst was. She had seen for herself the nightmarish shapes that traveled through them, just deep enough to be indistinct shadows. She had heard the screams of those that dared to venture in too far. Those who saw for themselves whatever those shadows actually were either never lived to speak of it, or emerged gibbering incoherent nonsense, their minds shattered by the experience.
She had used the clear beach to cross over from Mount Ophelia to Mount Priscilla, but the ocean was to the north and she intended to travel south. Every valley and anything under a certain elevation from here would be covered in fog.
Magically supported bridges existed between some mountains, but these were one of the first things to be destroyed whenever a conflict broke out among the mountain tribes, and the locations of surviving ones were highly guarded secrets. Sometimes they were built just under the surface of the myst so that they were harder to discover. Crossing the myst through one of those was less of a death sentence than an attempt to do so at ground level, but was still far from safe. She only knew of a few rumored locations anyway.
Hot air balloons and full-on airships were spoken of in stories, but Catherine had never seen such things for real. She had met some teenagers that claimed to use ziplines to cross between mountains, but that would take an unrealistic amount of rope that she didn’t have. Trogs used underground tunnels, but she wasn’t about to fight a horde of trogs just to get lost in their labyrinthine caves. She cursed herself once again, this time for not having the foresight to steal a glider, though she would have likely killed herself trying to figure out how to use it.
It seemed that either she would have to find a way to fly, or would soon have to face the shadows in the myst.
