Adjaash saw the sun at morning. It was the last time.
She caught a glimpse of the parent star’s amber glow in the east as she scaled a highland slope, and she used this information to reorient herself to the north. She kept the sun to her right until it disappeared behind the trees and creeping plants. She dared not stray from the path.
Around late morning, she saw a light which led her to a small clearing. In that clearing, she came to a boulder half-buried in the ancient moss, standing beside a weeping cherry tree with cool white leaves, distinctive with its swirling roots. She dismounted Ashanji and climbed atop the rock, and she craned her head to search for the star again. But she could see nothing through the canopy – only the icy glow that permeated into the depths. The light was playing tricks.
She fixated on the art of moving straight. When Ashanji whined about being pricked by bushes, Adjaash pushed her to keep pressing with a guiding whisper. When snarling vines and bamboo roots encroached upon them, she brushed past, with as little lateral movement as she could manage. With one hand, she held the reins. With the other, she suppressed her coughs.
She dared not stray from the path. Not here.
Not an inch to the left. Not an inch to the right.
Around midday – she assumed – she stopped to rest. She tended to Ashanji, then to herself. At the very least, she could take comfort in their healthy supply. She’d throughly stocked Ashanji’s leather packs with food and water before heading south. She couldn’t be sure that the medicine was working, but she hadn’t gotten worse.
She forced herself not to stop for too long, and so their rest was a short one. At a careful trot, they wandered in the wilds. Roots and vines snaked onward in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Adjaash kept her eyes ahead. She dared not linger on the serpentine stalks and climbing roots – the ancient forest’s favorite adornment. If she looked for too long, she might’ve thought them to be moving. Watching her.
Around mid-afternoon – she assumed – it started to get darker. The sun no longer bore down on the tall trees from directly above, and so the forest’s many spines swallowed its light. Its last remnants fluttered slowly to the cavernous low as a cool blue, its heat long stripped away. In the chilled abyss, Adjaash shivered and sweat. Her throat ached and tightened.
By evening, the light was almost lost. Adjaash lit a torch. Crickets chirped and woodland creatures called out in the dark. In the smothered space, Ashanji began to grow restless. Her head whisked about, flinching at hanging branches and leaves, and she whimpered at the foreign sounds. Silently, Adjaash asked Shenu for respite.
She almost thought the light to be gone, until a distant scarlet afterglow came into view, through the halls of trees. Gently, she brought Ashanji to a canter – though at the thought of freedom, the horse was eager to follow the command.
They rode through the forest brush, and slowly, the woods around them became awash in the low crimson light of the sunset almost past, flowing from the glade up ahead. When they emerged, Ashanji whinnied with excitement, kicking in the open air and freeing her legs. Adjaash, however, looked on in horror, at the same twisted weeping cherry tree she’d seen earlier that day – pale blossoms painted red by the bleeding cinder-glow.
“You have to be fucking kidding me…”
Adjaash tugged at the reins and turned Ashanji to the left, then to the right. Her eyes lashed from one end of the clearing to the other, but it quickly became clear she had not misjudged where they were. The weeping cherry tree stood next to a speckled stone boulder, which fought off an invasion of blue-green moss from below.
Furious thoughts flared and then faded. She had no time or energy to dwell on how they’d ended up back here. They needed to rest.
And so they retired against the broad side of the boulder, underneath the arched branches of the weeping cherry, in the soft moss and grass. Adjaash couldn’t sleep.
As soon as the morning’s light crept back into the world, they set off again.
To the best of her ability, Adjaash used the angle of the early sunlight to try and judge due north. With tired, bag-ridden eyes and raspy breath, she stared ahead as she rode, willing her horse to stay on course.
The icy light pooled above once again. The woods filled with cold, humid air. Time passed. Up and down a ridge they went. And as the cool blue mist began to skew into gold and orange, they descended into the wetlands. Dirt and brush transitioned into muck and peat. The fog sank and thickened, and the remnants of the sun’s gleam spread in the saturated air, painting across the verdant spires of emerald and aqua green.
In her head, Adjaash envisioned a map of Mide. This development could be good or bad. The Mides spilled into wetlands on the northern and eastern sides, where the river basin lay. But there were also dozens of hidden marshlands within the range itself, preserved by concentric ridges and steady mountain rises. If she had truly found her way to the edge, the trees would soon spread and reveal the basin to her.
But night began to fall, and the trees only rose in greater numbers. The wilds constricted upon them again, like a snake coiling and enveloping its feed. Where pine trees had once stood, bald willows and wide, rough-barked dracena trees. Flowering vines drooped down as if angel’s hair, and spindly leaves clustered above, dotted with round orange fruits. The ground was moist and warned of standing water nearby. As the last light faded and died, the living labyrinth began to speak again; a chorus of unseen creatures echoed in the dark.
Ashanji scuffed her hooves along in the dampness, huffing at the discomfort. A nearby mammal screeched from a branch above, and Ashanji snorted loudly, shutting it up. Weakly holding a torch, Adjaash fought to stay awake; she could feel her grip slipping on the rein. Her forehead burned, and her bones simmered with pain. Before she could notice, she started to sway, and Ashanji stopped, glancing back with a murmur. Adjaash straightened up and sighed.
“Sorry, Ashanji…” she grumbled. “Looking for a place to stop…”
It was then that a quiet flash caught Adjaash’s attention, and her eyes focused out of instinct. She gazed ahead and waited, and after a few seconds, she saw it again: A pale yellow blink of light not far away, ephemeral in the suffocating dark. She waited for it once more to make sure her weary mind was not deceiving her.
When she saw it again, she ushered Ashanji ahead. And in just a few paces, they came to the edge of a shallow pond. Here, the crickets and the frogs overpowered in song – a gentle yet captivating tune, echoing beneath the confines of the canopy, past the cattails and vinestrands.
Adjaash took in the scent of the water. She looked down at the duckweed and sedge, and the dimly-glowing foxfire fungi that climbed along the edge of discarded trunks and logs. And then as she looked up again, she saw the source of the light: A bellbug, with a bell-shaped bulb on its underbelly that emitted a bioluminescent light. Its yellow shine faded in and out, and then in and out again. Fast wings flitted softly.
Over a dozen of them thronged above the pond, their glows reflecting against the calm ripples below. One drifted close to the cattails, and Ashanji leaned in to sniff at it. When it flashed, her ears perked up. Adjaash forced a weak smile, and then she brought the reins to the left.
“Maireh koro. We’ve got to find a way around.”
She started to turn when something caught her eye. It was there and then it was gone. But in the fleeting light of the bellbugs, against the canvas of night, she saw it: The shadow form of a humanoid, standing and spreading its arms over the waters not far in the distance. She froze. Her eyes bore right. But when the citrus glow faded in again, there was nothing. They floated like lanterns. The crickets’ song went uninterrupted.
Adjaash let out a short breath. It was just her eyes.
Just her eyes.
She squeezed her shins.
“C’mon.”
They trudged through the peat bog; Ashanji’s hooves sank with each heavy step. Adjaash could tell the horse was growing agitated, but she didn’t know what choice she had. She couldn’t leave her horse behind. To turn back was to eliminate a day of progress. As long as they kept going, maybe they’d eventually break through.
They worked around the perimeter of the pond, and the soil hardened enough for Ashanji to quicken her pace a bit. They went left and turned right again. The pond stretched into a slow-moving stream and they rode alongside it. Lily pads grew from weeds beneath the surface, intermingling with the green water clovers. In her cocoon of torchlight, Adjaash kept glancing out over the marsh – but the small fire could only pierce so far through the cloak of night.
As they walked, the wetland’s vines and tendrils entered and escaped the shell of flamelight below, at times giving off the impression that they too were moving – slithering and scattering under the cover of shadow. Adjaash knew this was only an illusion. But her tired mind could tell the difference less and less.
Perhaps only one thing gave her solace: She still heard the sounds of nature.
There was a high-pitched rattle and a muskrat skittered across the soil, into the creek. Somewhere deep in the swamp, a bristleback hog grunted. The katydids chirred and the cicadas sneered. The air was heavy, both cold and warm.
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Ashanji flinched and huffed as a large dragonfly whirred past. Adjaash patted her mane and whispered to her, as well as her scratchy voice could allow.
“I know you don’t like these kinds of places. I need you to be strong, Ashanji. I promise, if we keep going, we’ll make it through.”
Adjaash pursed her lips.
“We have to.”
As soon as she said this, Adjaash heard another noise far in the distance – one that echoed and was lost before she could make sense of it. But it was a sound she knew: The laugh of a young girl. Ashbashenu.
She would’ve dismissed it as a trick of her slipping mind if Ashanji hadn’t also halted in her tracks. The horse froze, and the hairs of her mane stood on end. Adjaash squinted and peered into the blackness. She saw nothing but the glow of the bellbugs and the fauna. She heard nothing but the nature she’d heard before.
She waited a bit longer this time, and then with a fragile sigh, she urged Ashanji to carry on again. They trotted through the heavy overgrowth and the swamp’s humid tunnels, guided only by the beacon of fire, crackling quietly. Midnight grew near, and it was only then that Adjaash saw the next source of light. The yellow call of the bellbugs beckoned her forward through the brush, and when Adjaash and Ashanji emerged again, they came to a larger pond – the night sky unobstructed above it.
Finally out of the forest’s cover – even if only for a moment – Adjaash took a long, relaxing breath. She looked up. The night sky was completely clear, alit in a deep navy blue by the many stars and the reflection of the half-moon. The stars twinkled and whispered in hues of silver, blue, yellow, and gold, and the galactic ring enveloped them – dark nebulaic clouds untouched by the cornice of the realm.
As Adjaash’s eyes sank, she saw the mirror of the starscape painted across the pond, beneath a field of flashing bellbugs. As if a constellation themselves, they silently hovered above the lilies and the pink lotus plants, fluttering to the tune of the crickets as they interspersed with the night sky’s shivering image.
The sight was somewhat familiar, but Adjaash only let the wonder captivate her for a moment before she remembered her objective. Her eyes lifted again and traced the sky until she found the Peak of the Obelisk – the north star. She made a mental note of it, and then she glanced left and right at her surroundings. The soil seemed stable enough on the bank of the lily pond. They could rest here and start again in the morning.
Now Adjaash’s eyes went to the ground, as she searched for a place to dismount. The soil was firm enough, but all across the shore, flowering vines with petals of white and red and indigo roped along from beneath the ripples, scaling the banks and overlapping one another. She ushered Ashanji over a cluster of serpentine limbs, then stopped. She looked out over the pond again.
It was dark. The bellbugs were gone. Only the stars remained.
Something felt wrong. Adjaash’s brow lowered. She dropped the reins and let a hand flourish toward her bow. With the other hand, she held the torch as close as she could to the waters, begging the firelight to stretch farther. In the dark, she heard a fish jump and slosh quietly. Past the pond, a bristleback screeched. The crickets’ call remained. All sounds of night.
Maybe she was only being paranoid.
A lone bellbug flashed closeby and Adjaash forced out a calm breath, still staring daggers. She grabbed hold of the reins again and inched ahead once more, when another sight in her periphery forced her eyes up once more.
At the edge of the pond, from left to right, she saw a stream of bellbugs flashing in perfect sequence, like a ribbon of gilded light that illuminated in a flow. It might’ve been mesmerizing, but Adjaash took no delight in the unnatural sight. She heard Ashanji’s anxious grunts beneath her, and her eyes fixed on the lightflow. Just as she focused, there was more light from the right, and she glanced that way to see a symmetrical flow coming from the other edge of the pond.
The blinking lights drifted over the pond and wavered within the ripples, and they each carried toward the center. And when they converged at the very center of the water, Adjaash saw their master in the confluent glow.
It was a slender womanly form, limbs and torso made of snarling vines. She stood atop a trunk of roots, as tendrils slithered beneath her, crossing her right leg in front of her left. Her arms stretched across the pond from end to end – bellbugs flocking to her branches like Aelyum-bound stars. Adjaash saw the thing’s face – a rough, oaken, featureless mannequin visage with two antlers formed from hardened stalks and sprawling branches. It had a nose, clear eyes, a mouth, and nothing else – and as the light rained over it, Adjaash saw its devilish, downturned smile.
Ashanji jolted back and whined. Adjaash tightened her grip on the reins. The horse backed into a bush and lurched forward again. Adjaash’s heart pounded, and as she looked ahead, the being opened its mouth.
“Aaaaaaaaa…”
Now Ashanji started to shriek, and Adjaash gritted her teeth. Her eyes began to water. The voice wasn’t loud at first, but it nonetheless stung her ears. Her eardrums rang, her temples seared, and her head began to throb. She felt the trickle of blood from her nose. And as she fought to control her horse, the voice grew louder.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAA…”
And now the servants of the forest joined in. The crickets’ rhythmic chant became an imprisoned buzz. The cicadas, trapped in an endless shout. The fish jumped and gesticulated feverishly in the shallow waters, manifesting waves. Bristlebacks and muskrats and otters bellowed in an off-tune chorus, frantic and fierce. Foxes trilled. Coyotes screamed. The noise rose and rose into a deafening blur. The bellbugs brightened and brightened… as the nymph droned on…
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMHH!”
And then it stopped. The bellbugs blackened. The warnings of the woods halted in perfect harmony. Adjaash’s torch blew out, leaving her and Ashanji in total darkness. The silence stung, louder than any noise.
Ashanji snorted and grunted in a panic; Adjaash dropped her torch and extended a hand to try and calm her. But just as Adjaash’s hand reached Ashanji’s mane, there was a loud “snap” and Ashanji screeched again, lurching to the right as she bucked back. Fearing that her horse might fall on her, Adjaash ripped her feet from the stirrups and escaped to the left, rolling in the dirt as Ashanji kicked and teetered back. When she landed and steadied on one knee, Ashanji was sprinting the other way.
“Ashanji!!”
The horse dashed into the dark and was lost.
Adjaash rushed after her, moccasins slopping through mud and swamp grass. Over her shoulder, she heard the sound of something speeding through the water. Before she could go any further, a snare of vines erupted from the pond, snarling and spiraling in front of her path. A limb of the forest snapped at her arm and wrapped around her wrist. She grimaced at the sudden pressure, then tore a dagger from beneath her poncho and cut the snare loose. She ran into the woods. She heard the laughter again.
She brushed through the thick verdure and slammed her shoulder against a tree hidden in the shadows. She pressed ahead in pain, holding her side with one hand, while her dagger sat ready in the other. When she heard the vines slithering behind her, she quickened her pace. She saw one climbing a nearby tree as if a snake, and she swerved away, keeping her stride.
“Ashanji!”
She dared not stop her feet. She leapt over a tangled root and ducked beneath a low branch. Her lungs begged for air, her throat burned, and hair matted her face. She heard a screech of some kind to the right, and she turned and sped that way, breathing rasped.
“Ashb– A-Ashanji!”
She stepped to avoid another tree in the dark, and then she stopped. She had to catch her breath. Against the willow bark, she slid slowly to the ground, holding her hand close to her face as she suppressed a coughing fit. Then she brought the back of her hand to her face and wiped the red from under her nose. She scowled. Her breath could not be caught.
“Aaaaaa…”
The nymph’s seraphic note came again. Distant, but still close. Adjaash’s eyes clenched shut and she shook her head, holding the dagger close to her chest.
She dared not feel fear.
As the note crescendoed and carried through the woods, the flora and fauna went aglow, and petals and growths erupted in a sea of color – luminescent blues and purples and pinks and ambers exploding into sight, pulsing with each vibration. The glow illuminated Adjaash, and in the low light, she saw a serpentine vine creeping toward her. She flashed to her feet just as it snapped, narrowly avoiding its serrated thorns. And then she raced off once more.
Tendrils flared. Tentacles of tree bark and twining stems flashed toward her. Only narrowly did she evade, bolting past – speeding into the forest, though she saw no escape. She ran and ran until she saw another yellow light not far away between the trunks, and she started toward it. She only hoped Ashanji would follow it, too. She stopped herself from calling her horse’s name again, in fear it would give her away.
It was quiet now – all too quiet, save for the sound of her frantic footsteps. Adjaash glanced back behind her. She saw nothing. Back ahead. She was getting closer. Back over her shoulder. Down to the ground. Back ahead again.
She emerged into another small clearing, at the edge of the marsh. Standing in the brush, her eyes widened as, in the pooled yellow light of the bellbugs, she saw the same weeping cherry tree she’d seen twice before – its limbs hopelessly mangled and contorted beyond recovery. Its bloom spread in a twisted cloud. Its leaves started to change before her very eyes – from deep red to pale pink, and from pale pink to white. She heard a voice hiss in the air, and inside her head. Mimicking Ashbashenu.
Adjaash loathed this trickery.
“Elesvii, elesvii… so predictable. Like moths to a flame.”
From white to green. From green to orange.
“Tell me… why is it when you are afraid, you prefer the light to the dark?”
From orange to brown.
“They mislead you all the same.”
And then the tree’s leaves decayed and fell, leaving only a shriveled skeleton. And just as the leaves fell, the tree itself melted away, revealing a conglomeration of vines – sinking and sprawling. Washing toward her. A stalking stampede.
Adjaash’s breath left her in a gasp, and in a rush, she went to run again. But just as she began to turn left, one of the reaching roots grappled her ankle and sent her tumbling to the ground. She grunted on impact, and she just as soon swung her dagger back to try and sever the snare. Another vine wrapped around her wrist at the top of her swing, however, and she felt the vines tug and stretch.
Adjaash gritted her teeth and fought to break free, but she couldn’t slow them now. The dagger fell from her grasp. Another vine wrapped around her midsection. Thorns and flower petals scraped against her. She opened her mouth to cry out, before the voice spoke again.
“Shhh…”
Now Adjaash stopped. Her eyes darted around. Her chest heaved.
“Shhhhhh…”
And then it was silent. The yellow glow of the bellbugs began to fade. Another vine snaked slowly across Adjaash’s lap, and she watched as flowers sprouted from it in seconds. They shined fluorescent in the night – beautiful blossoms of life and color – and between them, a fruit grew off the stalk, weighing heavy over Adjaash’s stomach. From a seed, to a stem, and then to a full harvest. A thick green skin, dripping with fresh dew.
“Eat,” the voice said.
Adjaash tried to cry out again, and this time, a thornless vine wrapped around her jaw. Another snaked around her ears.
“Eat.”
She couldn’t fight anymore. She heard Ashbashenu’s stolen tongue.
“We’re still playing.”
The vine slid down and tightened around her neck. She squirmed, and another wrapped around her free wrist, pulling her back. She felt her spine flatten against the ground. Her racing heartbeat drummed inside her ears. Her last free foot kicked and scraped, until it too was snared.
The air was stuck outside her pleading mouth.
Her eyes started to drift shut. Her muscles slacked.
The light brightened and blurred and goldered. She saw Ashweban on the beach, hair dancing in the wind. Feet marking the soft sand, beneath the pure blue sky. She heard the waves. She smelled the sea foam.
Adjaash tried to chase after her mother. One step at a time.
She fixated on the art of moving straight. But she wavered.
Her eyes closed.