It was several days since her stop in the fishing village, and her destination was almost in sight. Whistlecork had been walking for almost a month, following the coast road north, where there was road to follow, anyway.
At low tide, she would often walk along the shoreline, but currently she was forcing her way through dense woodland, steep sea cliffs to her right, and miles of unexplored forest to her left. She would have had an easier time if she had gone further inland and taken the trade road, but it was a huge detour, and besides, that would defeat the point.
It wasn't about the destination, it was about the journey.
At least, that was what she told herself, as a branch smacked her in the face.
Still, adventure or not, having a destination always helped. For that reason she had at the bottom of her pack a small pile of letters, picked up from various villages and settlements along the way. She would pass them on to the post office in the next city she came to, a place named Hollow Ridge.
Hollow Ridge had been a mining town once, in the distant, distant past, but that industry had long moved on, leaving a quiet and sparsely populated city, with a broken, cratered mountain looming above it. Still, current economic situation aside, it had been a boomtown once, and it was well situated for travellers, which was why it was also the first place she had been in a long time that had an actual Dragon park.
None of the letters were destined for anything as fancy as that, of course. Most of them were addressed to estranged children and relatives, those who had moved to find a better life, but it was a mark in the place's favour that it was even a possibility.
As for herself, she was looking forward to a soft bed and good food.
The night in the fishing village had been her only one indoors in at least two weeks, and the Spring weather was taking its toll on her gear. It wasn't advisable to travel outside of the summer months for exactly that reason, but she had never been fantastic at taking advice.
Idly, she mused about what she might see in Hollow Ridge, and the shopping opportunities ahead of her.
She would have to buy some wax and see a leatherworker about a small hole in her backpack, where the weatherproofing had failed. The buckles were solid copper, and resistant to the weather, but she needed to find some cleaner for those too. Hopefully, she would also be able to buy a map of the city, if not one of the whole area.
Over the past few years of travel, she had become somewhat obsessed with maps. She loved the sheer variety of them.
Often she would find that two villages a mile apart would give her completely different maps, and it fascinated her to see what different people considered important.
A chart from a fishing village would be more sea than land, detailing the crags and caves of the sea cliffs, marking out each individual rock, with the land little more than an afterthought. A mile into the forest, it would be the complete opposite, the sea cliffs a straight ruled line, but each road and each interesting tree marked out with exacting care.
She was looking forward to seeing what a Dragon city offered in the way of maps. Would it be one of air, of scale? Would it mark out rest stops and cover miles, or would it be only of the locality, the scale of a dragon's flight too massive to ever fit on a single sheet of paper.
With a spring in her step, she upped her pace. She should be able to see the mountain soon, and after that, it should only be another day's walk.
As for the maps, she looked forward to finding out.
-
By dusk, her path still hadn't cleared. The forest here came right up to the cliff edge, and if she had been at the bottom, she thought she might have been able to see the mats of their roots layered throughout the face, one of the few things stopping the land from crumbling further into the ocean. She had hoped there was walkable shore down there, but lying on her front and peering over the edge, all she had seen was a sheer drop into rolling sea.
As she pushed another branch out of the way, searching for a place to settle down for the night, she considered how amazingly varied landscape could be. It wasn't something she had thought about before she started her journey, but it was something she had come to enjoy.
In the past year, she had seen everything, from high cliffs to sandy beaches, to so, so many trees. She had tried keeping a map of her own when she first started walking, but she had no training in the matter, and it came out a rough thing, all out of scale. She had given up, burning her attempts for kindling, and instead, she held onto the vague idea that she might one day take her whole collection and merge them together as best she could, making one huge map out of many, many small ones.
For now, she purchased all she could, and then, every now and again, she would send them home, when they became too much to carry. She wasn't sure what her parents did with the maps, once they were there, but she imagined, with a smile, they were dumping them on her childhood bed, heaped in an evergrowing pile.
-
Camping under the trees wasn't ideal, but as the light faded, she got lucky. One of the maps she had picked up two days earlier had marked a large pit around where she thought she might be, and investigation had revealed it to be a dried lakebed.
She settled down at the edge of the treeline, set up her bedroll, and was now attempting to make some dinner.
From what she had seen, before the light faded too much for her to make it out, there might have once been a settlement or farm here. But the encroaching cliffs had caused the lake to drain, and whoever lived there was long gone, their house likely long gone to earth.
Most people, who had never been away from home, imagined that you had to fight your way through the forest with a machete. They imagined that it was like an overgrown garden, but, while she didn't want to say that never happened, most of the time it was easy enough to navigate. Places like this, small farms and forgotten villages, were more common than you might expect.
It was the things which lived in the forest that you had to watch out for, that was what made it dangerous.
She resisted the urge to move further out, to sit under the moonlight and sleep under the stars. Here was much safer, on the edge of the treeline, where she could merge away into the shadows should something terrible emerge.
Most of the time it was wolves or other, mundane predators, but twice in the past, she had been taken over by the urge to move, for reasons she could never put into words, and she trusted those instincts.
It had taken her a while to clear the leaves enough that she could make a small cookfire, and even then she had to be careful, making sure there was no way the sparks could catch and set the whole forest alight. That happened once a decade or so, and small villages and farmsteads were often lost to it.
She poked the small fire and added an extra piece of kindling, angling her head so that she could see the reflection of the moon in the water, pretending she was boiling it alongside her beans.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She had a short bow she carried behind her pack, and she often used it to take down small game, but she had settled down late tonight, and further inside the forest than she was comfortable with, so she was keeping the fire small and hadn't had time to hunt.
She should write a letter to her sister, she hadn't written in a while. It would be good to let her know how things were going. She wouldn't get a reply, obviously, but it was nice to keep in touch.
She nudged the fire again, the beans were slow to cook tonight.
Perhaps she could work her way inland, she considered, once she'd seen Hollow Ridge. She had been aiming to follow the cost until the Turning Point, far, far to the north, where it never got warm and few people lived, but a detour wouldn't cost much.
At the pace she walked, Turning Point was years away, and her sister's home was sort of on the way. Halfway along the flat coast of the continent was the place where the sea became the land, a huge tidal river and estuary, the Mere. If you followed it inland, eventually you would come to Lushgrave, the biggest city in the world, and the seat of royalty. Her sister lived in a small town, miles out from there, but she would love to visit on her way past.
With a sigh, she rummaged in her pack until she found her writing paper, dip pen and the small bottle of ink she kept wrapped in her winter scarf. She had used a fountain pen at first, but the first time it had leaked she realised her error and switched over, she would have had to carry the ink either way.
She was carefully slotting the nib into the wooden body, keeping an eye on her boiling moon and thinking about what she would write when, for a moment, the image disappeared.
She blinked at it, and then leant out of the tree line a little, squinting up. Yep, it was still there, the brightness of it blotting out everything else and ruining her night vision, until it looked like a mirror, hanging in a sea of darkness.
She frowned upwards for a moment, and then, placing her pen and papers down, nudged her fire, banking it so it was as small as she could make it, without it going out.
The crashing of the sea was still audible off to the east, but muffled by the vegetation, and Whistlecork wondered if she should pack up her camp and move.
No, it was too dark. Worst case scenario, she would go straight over the cliff, and nobody would ever find her body, best case, she ended up cold and miserable somewhere on the cliff edge. It would be fine.
-
She was halfway through her letter, and most of the way through her beans, when the moon blotted out again, casting the world into darkness for a moment.
Whistlecork didn't panic, there was no point in that. Instead, she folded the letter- hoping it didn't blot into unreadability- wiped the nib of her pen on the hem of her shirt, and then poured the remains of her soup over her small fire, listening to the hiss and crack of the rapidly dying embers.
The full moon still shone down on her as she packed her belongings back up in silence, listening with care to the noises of the forest.
There was no sound at all. There were no cracks of branches or whistles of sleeping birds, no noise of footsteps or swooping wings, absolutely nothing. The only sounds she could hear were her own heartbeat, the hiss of the fire, and the distant crashing of the ocean.
She was pulling her pack over her shoulders and rubbing out the remains of the fire with her foot when it landed. Well, landed is a strong term, crashed might be better.
She instinctively shrank back into the tree line, crouching down to make herself smaller, as branches above her cracked and broke, showering her in debris. Around them, birds scattered and cried, woken from silent sleep.
On the edge of the lake bed, the bird floundered around on the forest floor, breathing laboured breaths and trying unsuccessfully to stand, making quiet keening noises as its lungs worked overtime.
A few minutes of watching, and it calmed a little, failing to stand and instead choosing to lay in the clearing. It was clearly recovering from some exertion, although she couldn't begin to guess why.
She should have left, snuck away while it was distracted, but something held her in place, those same instincts which had told her to run in the past.
Instead, she stayed and observed. The moon above her was almost full, and its light gave her a good view of the animal. Its feathers were unkempt in the moonlight, clean, but ragged, and it seemed thin and underfed. Was it an escaped pet, maybe? A hunting bird or mount from some noble's estate.
Whistlecork bit her lip, considering what to do.
She could leave, and report its location in the morning when she made it to Hollow Ridge, but chances were it would already be gone by then. If it was an escapee from one of the local estates, then there would be a reward for its return, but you never knew the temperament of these things. It might follow her through the forest like a child, or it might take her arm off at the first opportunity.
In the clearing, the bird seemed to finally regain itself, and staggered to unstable feet, testing each leg for injury.
From her observations, it wasn't a creature which was meant to land often, with feet the wrong shape for walking, and unstable with exhaustion, but it made do. First, it checked the dry lake bed, and then, shaking itself out, limped over and checked the remains of the fire.
Whistlecork didn't move, frozen in place, trusting in the shadows of the trees to hide her presence. Now it was closer, she could see it had something wrapped around one leg, a chain, which jingled as it walked. That reassured her that it was an escapee of some kind, rather than your bog-standard monster.
It nuzzled at the remains of her fire with its beak, carefully nudging at the beans from her soup, and she wondered if it was hungry, it certainly didn't look well.
Domesticated animals rarely did well in the wild. Somebody had abandoned a pregnant cat near their home when she was a child, and the thing had attempted to raise its kittens in the forest. They had only found out when one of them wandered in after a storm, covered in fleas and sick with magic poisoning.
They had nursed the kitten to health, and as far as she knew, he had rarely gone outside again, having decided that once was enough for that lifetime.
She thought of that cat as she crouched in the woods, watching the bird. It held one of its wings tight against its side, and she wondered if it had been injured in the crash, or if it was an old injury. It didn't look broken, from where she sat, but she didn't know much about birds.
Her main worry had gone from that the animal might attack her, to that the noise might attract other, worse things from the forest. It had caused quite a ruckus when it came down, and she could still hear the birds resettling themselves.
Making up her mind, Whistlecork rose to her feet, shook the debris out of her hair, and took a step forward, hand outstretched.
The bird jumped back, to her surprise. She didn't actually think that it hadn't seen her, only paces away, she had assumed it was simply pretending not to see her.
Still holding her hand out, she took another step towards the bird, which was now frozen in place, staring at her with wild eyes.
This close, she could see that the chain around its leg was copper, green with corrosion. Copper was resistant to magic and difficult to break, but it looked like it had been there a while. Whoever owned the bird had either been afraid of it being stolen, or the animal itself had some sort of inherent talent for Change. It wasn't unheard of, especially in the sort of animals the nobility bred, but it wasn't usual either.
Her father had once had a lizard which could change the pattern of its scales, to blend with a background. It had been debated whether this was magical or if it was some inherent property of the creature's biology, but nobody had ever come to a definite conclusion.
As she held out her hand to the animal, taking slow, careful steps forward, she considered what she had in her pack, that she might lure it with. It was too late in the day for her to hunt, and the shape of the beak indicated that it was a meat eater, but she had half a block of cake left, maybe that would be ok. It had been interested in the beans, after all.
It was with gentle, coaxing words, that she finally placed her hand on the animal's side. It skipped back a step at her touch, but then accepted the next one, holding itself still with sheer force of will. She could feel it trembling violently at her touch, and its gaze was still wild, but it seemed willing to accept her presence.
The whole time she made small sounds, nonsense babble, the sort of thing you would coo at the sight of a new baby.
As she ran her hands down its sides, she tried to remember her small experiences with hawks and owls. She hadn't been into the mews much, it being deemed too dangerous for a child, but she had stroked the birds sometimes, and her sister had raised an eyas once, all the way from hatch to hunt.
Slowly, it relaxed under her moving hands, allowing her to check for injuries. The chain around its leg was held on with a lock she had no way of breaking. It would have to be chiselled off, looking at the high level of corrosion on it. Cheap junk, they should have plated it in gold, but it was too late for that.
Other than that, it didn't seem injured, or whatever injuries it did have, none of them were breaks. The leg was going to be a pain, the chain too tight, and there might be problems with the wing she was incapable of diagnosing, but the main issue seemed to be one of starvation, more than anything.
With slow movements, she turned away and rummaged through her pack for the cake, the bird's eyes on her the whole time. She would have to hunt in the morning, pick up a rabbit or two, and then try and find the owner at Hollow Ridge.
That seemed like a good plan, and once it was over, her sister would enjoy the tale.