They took a faster pace across the dunes than Olive expected. He soon realized his newfound companion was clearly in no mood to waste time.
While they traveled over the long slopes, the glowing fireflies swirled and bobbed right along with them. The creatures kept following wherever they walked, no matter the weather, swirling like loyal schools of fish. The luminous little things brought a certain levity to the stormy air, somehow, the way they each danced and twirled in the gusting wind like floating liquid lanterns.
But the strange woman abruptly paused. She turned to look at Olive. Even the firefly light was not enough to reveal much of her features through the airborne sand.
Olive stopped as well, and waited. The woman stared at him for a brief while, before she turned away and began to take a few paces ahead. Olive stepped forward too.
Her voice snapped as sharp as broken twigs when she turned around again. “Did you get sunstroke out here, or something? Or are you dehydrated?”
Olive tilted his head at her inflection. “What?”
“You hit yourself pretty hard on that barn door, didn’t you? Either that, or you breathed in too much of the air out here.” She braced her umbrella against one of her shoulders in order to gesture with her other hand, pointing into the heavy winds. “Or maybe your ears are just clogged up with sand.” Her tone shifted then, drier than the rising dunes. “Did you not hear what I told you before?”
“Um. I’m pretty sure I heard you.” Olive blinked at the bizarre sight of her. He leaned over to try and get even one small glimpse of that strange second shadow, but the shade from the umbrella was still hiding it away. “You said you’re a witch, right? Was that really a demon?”
She did not respond for many long moments. “A kid like you should be sprinting away in terror by now.”
Olive shrugged. “You already put your knife away..?”
If a mostly featureless suited figure could look utterly baffled, she certainly managed it. “The air is bad out here, when the sand is still in it.” She muttered her words just loud enough that her voice modulator could pick them up. “Give it an hour or two, maybe, and you’ll realize what you’re doing and run.”
It began to sound more like she was talking to herself than anyone else. Olive just waited there for a while, slowly glancing all around, until the strange woman eventually turned back and started off again. When she did, he followed.
The barren wastes stretched into long, winding paths of gray sand. The woman led the way forward over the crest of each dune, where she kept glancing back every so often towards the young boy who trailed her.
Olive tried to brush away the mud from his clothes while it dried. The occasional gusts of humidity did not help much, but at least the whirling air felt dryer than before. He managed to clean most of it over the time that passed in travel, peeling away the half-dried chunks, brushing it away from his skin and hair and leaving himself somewhat presentable. Even if he could find no eyes there in the swirling breeze to judge him.
How strange it was, Olive supposed, when for only the briefest moment, the storm winds seemed to die with a most breathless, unceremonious murmur. It left the air flowing around them as clear and open as it possibly could be, at least against the next visible churn of gray lurking off in the distance.
Olive blinked to try and clear his eyes. He looked down at his boots. The damp clods of mud made his footprints hard to distinguish, even in the higher terrain. It was so much that the pattern in which the clumpy sand had settled over the top of that particular dune made it look like the steps he and the woman had taken led in both directions all at once.
He turned to stare back at the northern horizon, the empty stretch of space he just walked from. Some odd sensation tickled at Olive’s spine and chose to grip it, as if somehow, that path of theirs spiraled on across the horizon into perpetuity, treading the very same path they’d each taken a thousandfold times over and over again, without bounds.
But he knew that could only be fantasy.
A flash of sleekly darting something caught his gaze, as if the unseen outline of it scampered just beyond where the woman’s boots kept steadily walking. Olive turned back in a whirl, gazing all around, eyes primed and widened and wary for whatever it possibly could have been.
Walking on Dunes [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Walking-on-Dunes-1.png]
But no matter what it truly was, it was gone beneath the first breath of air groaning in from the front of the storm, below the long, hazy whirls of sand rolling far across the cloud-coated west.
Olive’s legs began to ache deeper with each sprawling hill he scaled. With every hour that slipped by into the boundless sands, the respirator mask only felt like it was growing heavier over his face, weighed down by the snags of filtered grit.
Only after the first few hours drifted between them, once the woman finally stopped looking over her shoulder quite so often, only then did her words break through the sand caked over her voice modulator.
“Well. I am actually going to end up going west, eventually.” She kept mumbling in that same odd way of hers, a tone that made it sound like she was mostly talking for her own benefit, speaking in some small echo of sound. Though she did intone her voice just loud enough to crackle out past the dried patches of mud. “Which is really not as safe as east or north, but that’s just how it is.”
Olive stared up at the blurry outline of the late afternoon sun. The thin rays of brightness were sinking steadily towards the western horizon, a weak blur of orange and soft evening purple beyond the haze of gray.
The woman reached over her shoulder to adjust the satchels on her back. Her supplies made a nearly inaudible jingling sound with each step she took.
“But I’m going south, first. A lot further across this area.” She sighed and stopped walking for a moment. “Kid, you can help me look around for any groundcover or trees that haven’t been wiped out. We’ll take shelter there until you come to your senses.”
“Oh. Okay.” A fragile wave of relief washed over Olive’s weary thoughts. “I can do that.”
He peered back at the fireflies, watching how the glowing creatures just kept swirling around the both of them. Olive realized his ‘own’ floating companions were not trying to go northeast at all.
They were all still drifting in the direction of their fellows, those other fireflies that were each steadily following the strange woman and her southward path. But sometimes, while she kept leading the way through the sprawling dunes, the woman seemed to look around at them and adjust her course ever so slightly, just as long as it still kept her moving steadily south.
It did make Olive begin to wonder, for just a moment, who was really leading who out there in such a sprawling, empty waste.
Olive reached up to tighten a loose strap of his respirator. “Is it true fireflies can find safe places?”
“Not always. But sometimes, maybe? I don’t really know.” She gestured towards a high ridge in the distance, just scarcely visible through the haze lingering in the atmosphere. “All I know is they know how to find water, if you follow them. And there’s solid ground up there. It looks like it hasn’t fallen all the way off yet.”
Olive swore he felt his heart sink just a bit deeper. There was still a long, wayward climb to reach where the woman was pointing.
At the very least, he considered, the ground there had eroded in a pattern that swerved back and forth, winding upwards like some massive, disjointed staircase to reach the steeper rocky expanse. It meant the two of them would not necessarily need to scale the worst parts of the rocky cliff, especially without the aid of climbing equipment.
But Olive found he would not have been very surprised if some of the supplies clinking quietly in the woman’s traveling packs were just that sort of something. Whatever was in there was mostly muffled beneath something soft, likely cloth. Olive did feel a tiny pang of curiosity, but he thought it would be far wiser not to ask what other goods she might be carrying.
The broad wingspan of a lone carrion bird drifted high over the sandstorm winds. Olive took a moment to tilt his head and study the massive vulture’s leathery face, how bare and pale and weathered it was.
That alone had to be enough to protect the bird from the sheer ferocity of the current environment. Olive’s own exposed skin was starting to feel like rather tough hide as well, he supposed, from the repeated abuse of the weather.
“Don’t get distracted.” The woman called back to him from along the higher slopes. “We can rest once we get there, not sooner.”
Olive hurried to catch up with her. But it was not the easiest task to even reach the low base of the cliffside, not with all the tall jagged rocks jutting up along the path towards it, looming high across the windswept sands.
Those same boulders eventually led towards the first proper cliff. Olive blinked when he saw it, the sleek glint of rock caught and snagged beneath steel once the woman really did reveal a climbing pick from her equipment. But when she tossed one end from a cord of rope over to him, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it at first.
Olive watched how the woman fastened her own end around her waist. She then wove the rope through a few fabric loops sewn into her suit, cinching it tight.
When she began to truly first use the metal pick, reaching up further and striking it over the first few faultlines to scale the rocky ledge and clamber her way skyward, Olive wondered if he might just be able to impress her as well. He moved to copy what she’d done, weaving his own end of the rope down through his belt, pulling it snug over his chest, before he reached for the nearest handhold.
The sounds of his boots scraping over dry stone brought his mind back to what had once been, what was so far, far away from his grasp by that point, back to the salt-crusted bluffs he used to scamper across like a fearless little squirrel.
The towering cliffs had risen far above the warm sands below, where shellfish hid away from clever hands like his. He would fill a pitcher with seawater and pour the liquid down into their burrows, where the salty taste would tell them high tide had come. Only it was his bucket the mollusks would find themselves dropping into, not the embrace of the ocean, but the simple creatures were none the wiser.
Thorn trees would rustle and sway beneath the open winds, creaking over the steady crash of the ocean. Birds would chatter and flutter their way through the leafy undergrowth, searching for fallen fruit and wiggly insects. And the young little boy Olive once was would sit there beneath the gnarled boughs along with them, deep within the forested shade, a quiet little refuge away from town.
The meaty mollusks tasted good even when they were raw, easily pried open by the hooked edge of his fishing knife. But he would leave most of them untouched for later, all the way back from the lofty seaside cliffs, where his mother was already counting on them for that evening’s meal.
Olive reached for what he thought was a familiarly shaped rock, and slipped. His fingertips scrabbled against the humid earth, digging and scraping over the stone for purchase. His body slid in a sudden lurch. But he only found himself halted by the rope tied tight around his waist, caught hard with an exhaling gasp of ‘oof.’
The woman glanced down at him. Even then, she did not look at all disturbed by the abrupt jolt on the rope between them. Olive’s featherweight frame had not even shaken her. He wondered if she might stop and scold him again for getting so lost in his own thoughts, but she only tugged at the rope by her end to see if it still held secure.
The rest of the climb eased by without much incident. The next few stretches of open rock rose less steeply, inclining in a somewhat flat enough angle so the two of them could walk mostly upright again, and they did so for a while.
A narrow trail of rough gravel swung over the face of the stony wall, where they clambered their way past the majority of the sheer cliffs. Neither of them tried to brave the outright worst of the vertical scarps, but the woman looked determined enough to climb over whatever else they could both manage.
When Olive finally caught the barest glimpse of the final ledge, he breathed a heavy exhale, muffled only slightly by his respirator mask. He hadn’t climbed like that for many weeks at least, and it made his limbs shudder and his muscles burn.
The earth at the top of the cliffs did indeed look sturdier, standing solid wherever it loomed far above the uncertain sands. Up there, Olive reasoned, the surface might have even once been normal ground level, before the land itself was sundered.
Dry bushes curled in a dense tangle between the jagged cracks of upturned rock. A long-dead tree rose high above the craggy ridge, branches spanning like vast arms above the undergrowth, yet bearing no leaves or fruit.
“Well. This is enough for now.” The woman nudged one of her boots at a stray pebble beside the brambles. She stared up at the tree, into its haggard silhouette, towards the sky that swirled past it with clouds. “We can wait out the rest of the storm in here.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank goodness.” Olive nearly collapsed over the top of the cliff in a pile of limbs and panting breaths. He swore his lungs ached like they were ablaze. “I, um, I really like climbing, but not with a mask on my face, like this...”
The woman grabbed a loose branch near the bushes. She poked the narrowest end down into the thick tangle of dry, dead plants. She kept pushing the stick around for a while, prodding it back and forth, before she finally stepped forward to enter the deep cover of ash-coated foliage.
With cautious little footsteps, Olive followed after her. It gradually became darker beneath the prickly shrubs. At least being under the solid brambles kept most of the gritty sand from flying into his face, even with the help of his respirator.
With her chosen stick, the woman tapped the clearest patch of earth between the tallest bushes. “You have to check for spiders and snakes in terrain like this.” She peered her way all around the cramped little clearing. “There might even still be scorpions out here, but I haven’t seen any. I’m not sure which of the local species survived.”
“They were around, once.” Olive waited for the woman to finish inspecting the undergrowth. Once it seemed like the dangerous-critter-test was finally well and truly over, he sat himself down on the dirt. “But I haven’t seen any either. I don’t think they made it through the war.”
The woman only stood there for a while, gazing off into the distance. But before too much time could pass, she eventually moved to sit as well, crouching in a way that looked like she was ready to spring back up over the earth at first, if she really needed to.
Beneath her helmet, even in the shadows of the underbrush, her strange eyes, sharp and keen, became more visible in the glow of the sunset. But what emotions Olive saw there, he did not recognize.
The fireflies still twirled between the two of them, but their dancing motions grew much slower, more unhurried.
Olive reached up to touch one of the translucent creatures. He smiled a little when that particular firefly, like some luminous blob of weightless liquid, gently curled and glided against his fingertips. “Should we make a wish on them?”
“You could.” The woman shrugged, looking away from both Olive and the strange floating animals. She kept slowly rubbing one of her gloved hands over the branch she held. “They say it only works for children.”
Olive felt his lips tug into a tiny frown from her dry inflection. “Oh. The old folks, um, at home, they used to talk about how it only works if you believe in wishes.”
She said nothing. The woman merely reached out to test a firm, lingering press against one of the nearest ash-coated boulders, smoothing over it with the palm of her glove. Only a small part of the outer surface crumbled away at her touch. She pushed the end of the stick against it instead, probing the base where the stone met the earth to see if anything might coil out and lash at it.
“It wasn’t always like this.” Olive stared down at his boots for a while, anything to try and escape the stretch of silent tension. “I’m not from around here. But I did live here for a while.”
The stranger finally broke her lapse of speaking. “Were you here during the start of the war?”
“Well-” Olive’s words faltered in his throat. His thoughts did the very same thing in his mind, but they felt even more fragile somehow. “Well, it... It’s weird. I remember it happening. But these days, it sort of almost feels like... Like time isn’t even as real as it was anymore, you know?” He blinked and tried to look closer at her, in that silently helpless sort of way, enough to see if she might have, in some small sense, felt the meaning of what he was trying to tell her. “All of the days just blend together now. I don’t even know how long it’s actually been.”
She nodded for him. The gesture looked odd when mostly only her head moved inside her helmet, not as much the glass surface itself. “When you’re surviving, you aren’t really living the same as you were.”
“I guess so. Yeah.” Olive picked up a smooth pebble from the ground. It looked a bit shiny, like unrefined metal. “I haven’t really seen many other people out here. It’s been a long time since I saw anyone at all. People haven’t stayed around for very long, or they’ve died. Or told me to go away and leave them alone.”
Something about the look of the woman’s eyes minutely sharpened.
Olive tried not to sulk too much at his more recent memories. He tried harder to ignore the phantom whisper of sharpened bolts in the air, metal striking the tracks in the sand he’d since left far behind. “The air isn’t safe in the storms. But people used to say it’s not like this everywhere, that there’s still good places out there in the rest of the world.” He looked up into those most unusual eyes again. “Is that true?”
“Yes.” The woman finally leaned herself back to rest against the nearest boulder, but not before shrugging off her backpack and satchels to let them slip away to the ground at her side. “But I’m only telling you that because I know it for a fact. And you shouldn’t believe me just because I say so. People, no matter the situation, can lie about anything.”
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Olive thought about it for a moment. “Why would you be lying to me if you’re telling me to be careful about believing lies?”
She gave him a more reproachful look. “Because people who survive in places like this are usually just as crazy and dangerous as their surroundings. They’ll lie to you for absolutely no reason.”
“Oh.” Olive moved to slowly rock his boots against the dusty earth. “I guess I hope it’s true, then.”
She looked at him then, waiting, like she almost might have chosen not to say it. “Are you being obtuse on purpose?”
Olive stared at his feet for a while. “Only a little.” He kept silent for a longer time, to the point where it nearly seemed like he wasn’t going to speak any more on the subject. “You kind of have to be, sometimes. I know people out there can be bad. But the really bad people, they... I can just tell, most times, when someone’s going to try and hurt me, or trick me into something. Like my skin crawls up, you know? The way it feels like you get a gross shiver all the way down your back from your neck.”
The woman’s eyes truly met his, for just a moment. Neither of them felt even a pale ghost of anything prickle down the length of their spine.
Olive did nibble quietly at his bottom lip, hidden just beneath the respirator mask. “I’m not saying I’m, um, perfect at it, or anything. But most adults always think kids are kind of stupid, you know? Easy to catch with that sort of trick. So they don’t even think they need to try very hard about it.”
She hesitated. “Kid-”
“But you haven’t really talked down to me, even if you did sort of tell me I shouldn’t get distracted, or shouldn’t be following you ‘cause you’re really dangerous or something.” Olive rested his arms in a loose position against his knees, watching the faint flecks of color in the sand stir and drift over his hands from the weakening wind. “I think a bad person would... When I told them I had water and money, they would’ve just taken it from me.” He stared blankly at the span of dust between them. Olive let his chin rest against one of his arms. “Like a soldier. Or a raider.”
She sighed at him. The woman gripped her hands just a bit tighter down at her sides, slowly leaning her head back to stare at the storm whirling above the thicket. “You keep saying that. ‘Raider.’ Who are they?”
“Um. Just people who aren’t good news, I guess.” Olive fidgeted where he sat. “They’ll try to steal things. Or, uh, throw things at you if they see you from far away. Or-” He tried not to wince. Olive briefly dropped his voice to a tentative mutter. “Rocks are way better than crossbows...” He shook his head. “Sometimes, people would call them ‘kheshig.’ Or vikings. But my mom would always say that’s racist.” Olive looked back at his boots and frowned. “It’s not like raiders are really always people from Kjerin, I think? Like most of the soldiers. But I guess it’s still racist to say.”
The wind swirled along through the coils of thorns and withered bark. The woman did not speak for a very long time. Olive began to expect her not to. He leaned back and looked up as well, wondering what the eyes of a witch might have ever seen in the odd flashing glints that whirled without end in the haze of humid, ashen air.
Finally, she tipped her head back down from gazing at the shrouded sky. “Far away from here, this area is widely considered ‘no man’s land...’ But try telling the soldiers that.” Her gaze flicked fully away from him. “Or whoever tells them what to do.” She closed her eyes and folded her arms in a stiff posture over her chest. “It’s time to get some sleep.”
Olive let himself settle further into the quietness of the evening. He tried his best to ignore the slow burn of hunger working its way deeper into his belly.
It always felt like once his stomach realized he wasn’t focused on traveling any longer, the pesky organ decided that right then and there was surely the best time to try and gnaw its way out between his ribs. Olive clenched his teeth. He flopped his weary body down over the ground.
The last weak rays of sunset sank lower beneath the horizon. Red light leaked further across the evening sky, patterned by deep purple and blue, but most of the vivid colors were still hidden beyond the lingering storm. Sheltered by the darkness of the thicket, tiny insects began to cautiously chirp.
Olive sighed. He squirmed around in a fitful heap. His eyelids felt all too heavy already. Sleep was pouring down over his brain like an ooze of liquid concrete. But beneath the softer sounds of crickets calling, even past the dry, hazy breaths of the muffled sandstorm, he almost thought his ears could catch the woman’s voice begin to speak once more.
Her voice sounded faint, and she seemed so far away in the stir of the wind, but her words felt undeniably real somehow, so much more solid than a dream.
“We’ve gone too far to turn back now. You seriously still want me to give up? Walk all the way north for nothing?”
The sounds of the dry bushes rattled, whispering across her words.
“He’s not some pampered city kid, look at him. Smart enough to try and act like he’s more naive with me than he really is. The environmental exposure alone kills most people out here.” She paused for what felt like a long time. “I wouldn’t have to teach him everything, at least-” She went quiet again. “Is it enough?” Her voice faded into the windswept silence. “Why are you even asking? I don’t know.”
With that, Olive’s mind finally slipped away into a much deeper slumber. His breaths slowed to a quiet crawl. His body twitched lightly under the stinging sands.
Moonlight drifted across the cliffside hills, over the last whirls of the wild sandstorm.
A bird called out sharply into the night, but it was a thrumming sound, constant and unhurried, more contented than any warning signal. The little creature was likely already full from a long day of hunting vermin in the sinking ruins. The pale face of the moon gradually receded into the dark.
The woman woke. She stared up into the last faint traces of starlight. The storm had long since slowed to a dry, quiet echo. The light of the fireflies floating all around her was becoming duller and more laggard by the minute. She knew there was hardly any moisture left inside the air for them.
She watched as they each fluttered there, slowly gliding back and forth into the dark. Their lights reflected over the curve of her helmet, within her gaze, deep beneath that thin, glassy mask. She closed her eyes and let the tiny creatures murmur away into the dawn.
Short Line Breaker [https://nautiluca.com/wp-content/uploads/Short_Line_Breaker.png]
When the last swirling gale finally died before the morning light, Olive woke again.
He could already see the first traces of daylight off in the distance. The sun peeked low over the far-off mountain range, casting a blur of rich reds and hazy yellows.
Olive blinked around blearily. He shook his head and glanced over towards his strange new companion.
But he felt a bit startled to see that she was already sitting upright nearby, resting beneath the shade of her bizarre patchwork umbrella. She had the entire thing unfurled and propped over herself again, only with the handle wedged tight between two solid rocks.
Her satchels and boots were each offloaded into a mostly orderly pile in front of her. It looked as if she’d busied herself with scrubbing off most of the sandy grit and caked mud from her gear, not to mention the sleek surface of her unusual suit.
It felt strange in a very different way to see the woman resting on the ground with a rather fuzzy pair of pastel-patterned socks donned over her feet. Olive blinked a few times at the sight. He peered instead at the rugged hiking boots sitting out to dry in the weak morning sun, as well as the much more utilitarian set of plain gray socks hanging from a low branch not far away.
With a slightly uneasy yawn, Olive remembered to pull off his own boots as well and let them air out for a while.
The affliction of gangrene was something his mother always direly warned him about. But having stumbled across the occasional corpse out in the wastes all by himself, those twisted, hollow figures rotting up from the feet first, seeing that sight with his own eyes was far more than enough to keep Olive cautious about such a fate.
With his socks hung up to dry over a different branch, Olive unstrapped the mask from his face, breathing in the somewhat clear air with a soft shudder. After wiping the condensation from his face, he peered around once more, but there was nothing else there for him to find within the thorny undergrowth. “Wait, did the fireflies leave?”
“Yes.” The woman looked like she was more busy counting inventory on a pack filled with canned goods. “They can’t stay around for long without moisture. When I broke them out of that jar, that was their water source. Without it, fireflies always go up to the clouds eventually.”
“Oh.” Olive sat himself down again. “That’s too bad. They’re pretty neat.” He stretched his arms high above his head and yawned. “But it’s better than being stuck inside a jar, I guess.” He frowned a bit at the next thought that came to mind. “Why do you think soldiers even catch them like that in the first place?”
When he received no answer, Olive shifted his gaze back towards the supply pile again. He eyed a can of food resting just inside the nearest satchel, but he thought better of saying anything. He could spot how that particular tin had a stylized fish symbol stamped neatly over the label, but the language printed beneath it was not something he knew how to read with any real fluency.
Olive forced himself to look away once more. “So. Are we, um... Heading out soon?”
“No. Why would we?” The woman glanced up to examine the gusts of receding wind, the way the sand itself barely stirred in the air above the thicket. “It’s not safe to walk around this kind of place during daylight. Not when it’s as clear as it is now. I’m not sure why you even bothered to wake up yet.”
“I don’t know.” Olive shrugged. “You’re awake too, aren’t you?” He clambered over to sit against the trunk of the dusty old tree. “Morning is when you’re supposed to wake up.”
“Ha. No. Not when there’s soldiers around.” She kept a watchful eye over the rays of sunlight gathering across the distant dunes. “You sleep or rest whenever things are this visible. You move in the darkness of night, or under a storm. That way you won’t get sniped by an arrow you’ll never even see.”
How many times before, Olive wondered, what number of aimless days had he gone wandering around the empty wastelands in the brightness of total daylight? He suddenly felt as if a cold, ghostly arrowhead had already pierced its way deep into his chest. “Oh.”
“Exactly. So if you insist on sticking around for now, you’re going to need to follow rules like that.” The woman pointed at him with a more stern look on her face, half-hidden as it was. “What I’m doing is way too important to get derailed by having to run around looking after some random kid. I’m not a babysitter, but I don’t want to see you end up dead either. Got it?”
“Right.” Olive peered back at the ground beneath his feet. “I won’t make trouble.”
“Good.” She looked up towards the sky again. The storm was well and truly finished, so she reached for the clasps of her helmet. “If you’ve made it this far on your own out here, you’re definitely not a pushover. You just need to make the right moves from now on and not make easily avoidable mistakes.”
The very first thing Olive noticed about her, once the deeply shaded tint of her helmet was so abruptly lifted away, was how the woman’s face was quite narrow and pale. He glanced back at himself. His own tone of skin was quite a lot darker than hers. He began to feel infinitely grateful that she did not seem judgmental of it.
“Second rule: you need to be a lot more quiet when you travel. Crashing down that barn door was a stupid move, one that never should have happened.” She shook her hair out from her helmet. Granules of sand trapped within her headgear fell away in loose waves across her suit. “If I had been someone else, anyone a lot more trigger-happy, you would’ve been dead before you even knew I was there.”
Despite the nature of her more scolding tone, Olive took that very moment to observe the strange woman with as much of a casual gaze as he could manage.
The second thing he noticed was definitely those eyes: sharp and clear, and yet so bright, as if staring at them for too long would surely hurt. But Olive found he could not tell what color they really were, not with how uncertain that keen gaze first appeared in the faint morning light, even beneath the shadow of the umbrella.
Likewise, the woman’s hair was too speckled in dried mud and grit for Olive to tell what it truly looked like, beyond the fact that it seemed very long and wavy, likely some type of brown or tan shade. He wondered if she must have fallen at some point without her helmet, or been caught in a sudden storm before she could lift the solid part and protect herself from the oncoming rush of sand and rain.
Olive reached up to clean away a bit of the sand and dust from his hair. His own locks had once been a bit longer, and even more curly. But whenever his hair grew out too much those days, Olive always felt forced to try and cut it as short as possible. There was not much else for him to do, not when it kept getting into his eyes and face during the wild gusts of every sandstorm.
His own hair color (whenever it was not caked deep beneath a layer of silt and grit) was somewhere between sleek black and dark brown. Olive remembered the way it looked whenever it was longer, how the ends of it used to always shine a bit like burnished gold under the open glow of sunlight.
The third thing he noticed about the woman, was how, as he struggled to describe: unusual, her features were, though not in an entirely bizarre way. She was just, in some odd sense that he could not quite articulate, undeniably distinct.
Her general demeanor had always seemed somewhat crowlike, pointed and harsh, yet not aggressive in any harmful sense. It was still present without the glass to hide her, but Olive could just begin to see some other quality, a sort of far less jagged air of poise holding fast against her sharper angles.
Even her voice, despite the sternness, did begin to sound much softer without the distorting pitch of her voice modulator, far more pleasant than any squawking corvid would ever be.
Olive fought the urge to tilt his head at her more curiously. Maybe the woman was more owlish instead? He could not quite decide.
That face of hers still looked somewhat gaunt, like he first noticed about her in the glow of the fireflies, but there was a more old-fashioned elegance to her features as well, especially her nose and eyes. Olive would not have called the woman’s nose long, but it certainly wasn’t short.
The odd angle of her gaze still struck him as both hungrily keen yet incredibly wary of everything all at once, the same form of proverbial beast he’d gotten a sense from her earlier: concealing teeth far more than sharp enough to bite him, yet completely uneager to do so without being provoked. He wondered if it was a witch thing.
Olive spoke that very thought aloud before his sense of self-preservation could ever hope to catch it. “What is a witch, really?”
She eyed at him from the furthest corner of her vision. “You don’t know?”
Olive shook his head. “Well... You’re not a warty old green lady.”
That actually made her laugh.
And there, beneath the pale morning light, the clear tone of her voice betrayed how young she truly was. Her words were usually so gripped by such a tersely dismal cadence, but the real, pure sound of it, her true youth broke through for just a brief moment in time.
The woman’s shoulders shook while she laughed. She shook her head, briefly closing her eyes, features brightening despite the way she tried to stop them. She covered her mouth with one of her wrists to try and stifle each of those soft sounds of mirth. And then, with a muffled exhale, even without really looking, she moved to pull away both of her thick leather gloves, fingertip by fingertip.
“Okay... ‘What is a witch?’” The faintest of smiles still graced her lips then. “You could ask a hundred people that question and get a hundred different answers. Maybe even more.” It was in that very moment, when even a small glint of amusement finally twinged those strange eyes of hers, it somehow made her look distinctly much more like Olive’s second guess: owlish. Smooth yet narrow, just like the feathery arched eye ridges of a regal, watchful barn owl.
Olive cleared his throat to try and help steady his wayward thoughts. It certainly was not the time to get distracted by small details again. “I mean, the only answer that matters is the one that’s true, right?”
“Truth can be subjective.” She lifted her hands as if she was shrugging, but she held them each in place before herself instead. “If I were to cast a spell to curse you into a frog just now, what would you think?”
“Um... I think I’d rather be something else than a frog?” Olive tried not to grin at that most unusual concept, but his amusement crept out anyway. “But I don’t think witches can really do that.”
“Oh?” The woman closed her hands, letting them ease into loosely curled fists. “Well. You’re right. It would probably just turn you inside out instead.” She let her eyes drift shut. “To change the shape of a living being, to even attempt that sort of process, would be attempting to channel magic all the way down to the molecular level... And that is extremely dangerous, and difficult on the wielder, not even considering the intended target.”
Olive almost tensed up when he felt some imperceptible stirring in the morning air, as if the innermost energy of the bramble thicket itself was shifting, coiling, waking the longer the woman spoke.
When she exhaled quietly over her next words, the vaguest gust of lucent heat and air furled all around her fingertips. “For most people, instead: energy turned outward, an external force-”
Olive’s eyes fluttered wide when that first swirl of luminosity began to swell and lift and breathe around the woman’s steady, uncurling fingertips.
“It’s much easier to project away from yourself than otherwise.” She opened her eyes, and the glow was gone. “Have you ever seen magic before? Not like the fireflies.”
“No.” Olive sat entranced, even once there was nothing left there for him to witness. “How did you do that?!”
She let her empty hands drift back down to settle against her lap. “Years of practice.”
Olive leaned closer. “How did you learn it?”
“It... It isn’t something learned. Not exactly. It’s innate.” She stretched her fingers for a moment, as if the odd light had been somewhat taxing to cast. “You learn the finer details, as much as you can even try to do. Not the beginning. The source. I don’t know of any human studies on the subject. But we think it’s genetic.”
Olive felt a small twinge of discomfort from the sound of her words. “Is there really a difference between humans and witches?”
“It’s just the polite term used for non-witches.” Her gaze shifted away from him then, like it might have been too sore to consider. “If I called you ‘hedera,’ for example...” She trailed off and stared into the distance. “Well. I wouldn’t call you that.”
Olive could already tell the woman was not speaking the word with any amount of malice, even if she intoned it in a way as if she rather would not have uttered such things in the first place. Olive blinked a few times and considered it. “Is the difference between witches and humans just magic?”
“We aren’t exactly considered human whenever the torches and pitchforks come out.” She eyed him for a moment more. Her shoulders bristled a faint degree beneath the cover of her suit, but she relaxed them just as quickly. “And this isn’t something I’d ever be casually talking about with a regular person if this were any other situation. If you do happen to make it out of this place alive, and tell anyone what I told you, they won’t even believe it. You’re just a kid.”
Olive wondered why it sounded so much less like she was even talking to him again that time. “Well. I wouldn’t tell anybody, anyway.” When he tried his best to sound resolutely proud about that statement, his stomach suddenly twinged with an audible whine. Olive winced to try and hide it. “Um, there really aren’t too many stories about witches where I’m from...”
The woman pretended not to hear anything. “We’re usually not around long enough for stories to be made.”
After only a moment or two of silent deliberation, she grabbed for a few of the cans from her nearest pack. She opened one of them with the switchblade slipped from the sheath at her belt, before she plucked out a chunk of preserved golden fruit from it. The food did look a bit off-color, but not quite rancid. With that, delicately chewing the first mushy slice of fruit, the woman lifted another can and rolled it across the ground towards Olive.
“Thank-!” Olive’s breath caught. He tried not to yelp his words at her so loud. “Thank you.”
She did not look up from her own food. “You won’t need a knife to open that one.”
With trembling fingertips, Olive grabbed for the pull tab on the top. The rusty old can creaked open with some reluctance, but with just a bit of additional urging, he finally peeled the lid all the way back.
So then, Olive wondered, had he died somewhere out in the wastes and woken up in the next life already? The first taste of salty, fatty fish chunks, that indescribably magnificent flavor hit his senses like a heavenly brick to the chest.
The flaky meat was mild, a tender whitefish of some sort, heavy and sweet. The can was surely more than a touch past the expiration date, but it was still ambrosia inside his mouth.
The woman slowly poked another chunk of canned peaches with one of her fingernails, watching them bob around the congealed fruit syrup. “Better than dog food.”
“Y-yeah.” Olive laughed and fought back a sudden hacking cough. What a farce that would have been, he realized, if he were to choke to death on the first actual meal he’d gotten in however many tireless mornings.
They ate together in silence, sitting across from each other in the bramble clearing for what felt like a long, quiet while. But in reality, it was less than a single minute before they’d each scarfed down their respective breakfasts and left the tins entirely bare.
The woman quietly licked the last drib of peach juice from one of her index fingers. The slight glint of her canine teeth really was no more sharp than that of any average human being. And yet, Olive considered, they were undeniably pointed.
“So.” She gazed deep into the bottom of the empty fruit can. “The next rule is, uh, usually... One can per meal, for the sake of rationing. But-” The woman quietly tapped the outside of the tin with her nails. “Yesterday was a pretty good haul, though.”
Olive waited with bated breath. “Yeah.”
She picked up another can, one with an intact label. She examined it, then grimaced. “I don’t like corned beef.”
“I like it.” Olive had never once heard of it in his life. How did one ‘corn a beef,’ exactly? “Um, if you don’t want-” The can was rolling across the earth for him before he could even finish.
“And this one is chicken, I think?” She opened the next tin and breathed a soft sound. “Much better.”
Olive soon dug into his own round of food with just a little more self-restraint than the first, but only by so much.
It was a strange sort of meal he sank his teeth into, complex and bizarre. Canned ‘corned beef’ seemed to Olive like a somewhat solid, yet wobbly blob of spiced meat product suspended in something gooey and gelatinous. He definitely did not enjoy it nearly as much as the preserved whitefish, given the fact that the second offering did resemble a texture far more like canned pet food. But it was food.
Once he was nearly done eating, Olive licked the scant remnants of gritty beef fat away from his fingers. He looked over at his newfound companion, where a warm surge of gratefulness spurred his next words. “What’s your name?”
She huffed a quiet tone at him. “You first.”
He felt a light flush fill his cheeks. It wasn’t very often those days that Olive had to introduce himself by his own name to anyone, especially not in such a desolate place. “Don’t laugh.”
She only glanced at him from over her food. “Mine is weird too.”
“Okay, um... It’s Olive. Like the tree.” He tried his best not to fidget. “Like how some people are named Rowan, or Juniper.” Olive braced for a reaction, but it did not come. “It’s not short for Oliver, or anything. Mom just liked it, I guess.”
She only shrugged and kept eating. “Amiela.”
Olive blinked at the unusual sound of it. “‘Amelia?’”
“No.” She paused to set her can of food down on the ground for a moment. She lifted her hands. With a gesture to time each of the syllables, she tried to slowly enunciate the difference. “Mine sounds like: ‘Amee-lah,’ not: ‘Ah-meel-yuh.’”
“Oh.” Olive thought it over for a moment. “So, um, a little bit like: ‘Amelia,’ but with no ‘yuh’ sound near the end?”
“Sort of.” She nodded. “No ‘yuh.’ And the first part sounds more like ‘Amee’ than ‘Ah-meel.’”
“Well. Yours is a nice name.” Olive picked at the last scarce bits of crumbly food inside his tin. “It’s not just some weird scraggly fruit tree.”
“Olives are useful plants.” She shook her head at him. “Not only for food, they’re a reagent in a lot of medicinal things too.”
“It’s still such a weird thing for a name.” He set his empty can down in the dust. “Kind of like naming a kid ‘Corned Beef.’”
Amiela rolled her eyes at him then, but there was a good-humored twinge to the gesture. “Not remotely.”