Chapter Nine

Nia once again found herself locked in a battle of will. It was difficult, painful even, but after many days and weeks of constant tempering of her mind and her mother’s chiding words, she had finally managed to finish the book her mother had given her.

Grainy, yellowed pages were bound between nondescript wooden boards, giving the deceptively thin tome a weight that could be dangerous to one’s toes should it be dropped. Not that she had learned that from experience. The contents of the pages were rather dull –which was the issue– the words long and meandering in their explanation of the village's history and the elves as a whole.

She closed the old book with a soft pop and a heavy grimace. They weren’t her people. She had been naïve when she was a small child, thinking that she only looked different from everyone else, that the only reason they hated her was because of her looks. No. They hated her because she was a human.

It was hard for her not to hate them back. She only held back her disdain for her mother and father’s sake. They loved her, but they also loved their village. Who was she to drive a wedge between her family and the village, especially when she wouldn’t be around much longer.

Her room was small. Only a humble straw bed with rough linen sheets took up one corner, and a wardrobe hardly big enough to hold her few dresses sat in the other. A single, narrow window let the fiery evening light stream through the shutters, illuminating the warped floorboards and roughly hewed walls around her.

Nia ran her fingers over the hard spine of the book, the wood worn smooth by generations of handling. She almost lost her nerve as she remembered the look on her mother’s face when she gave her the book. It had been passed down to her mother by her grandmother, to her grandmother by her great-grandmother, and so on, as far back as anyone could remember. It was a family heirloom, but not her family.

No. It was wrong to think that way. Her parents had raised her and loved her, and she loved them. But she still longed for her real parents, to know what had happened, how she had come to live in the village, and there was only one way to find out.

She had to leave the village.

She got down on her hands and knees, reaching underneath her bed for the pack she had tucked underneath. It might have been a poor hiding place for anyone else, but her parents placed a lot of trust in her and would never think to search her room. That thought sent a stinging pain through her chest, but the flower resting atop the pack firmed her resolve.

It seemed so much larger when she was smaller; its white and orange petals flecked with gold were only the size of her fingers, and its pink center was as big around as one of the maple candies she loved so much. Altogether, it was no bigger than any ordinary flower, and other than its unusual beauty and the fact that it was still as lovely as the day she got it, there was nothing special about it. It was an oddity that could only be explained by magic, which no one in the village knew anything about.

“I’ll find you, Mister Greeny…” Nia whispered as she gently placed the flower atop the ancient history book, her memory of that day still as fresh as the flower itself. Her parents would find it along with the book when they returned from the village meeting. It was a gathering held once a month for all of the village's adults, where they would discuss… things. She had never been to one, so she didn’t know what they talked about and had no desire to change that.

She blew out a nerve-filled raspberry as she shouldered her pack, looking back at the home she had known for the last sixteen years. Inside these walls, there was nothing but love and warmth. She always had a shoulder to cry on and arms to support her, but there was nothing but cruelty outside of them . “Okay, here we go.”

Her boots were laced tight, and her flowing dress had been replaced by thick trousers and a simple frock that matched the color of the forest around her. She wasn’t used to traveling clothes; her mother was a seamstress and made the most beautiful dresses and enthusiastically modeled them on her, so the rough, restrictive fabric was something she would have to grow used to. She already missed the bright and cheerful colors.

She had to stay focused. The forest around the village was safe; there hadn’t been a monster attack in… forever. Although even she had been told the awful stories of how it used to be, she would rather not become dinner for a roaming ogre or a pack of vicious goblins. She had never seen one in person, but her mother had shown her drawings, and just thinking about them made her skin crawl.

With her nerves sufficiently frayed, Nia’s eyes jumped from tree to tree, shadows of monsters behind every one. It was already almost entirely dark. She had waited until late evening to set out from the village due to the meeting; it was the only time she could safely sneak away, but now she was thinking that leaving in the early morning might have been worth the risk .

It was too late now. She had to hurry, find someplace to spend the night, and not worry about what she should have done. She stopped and looked around, scanning the trees for any wide branches that might make it less likely to roll out. She had heard some village hunters talking about sleeping in trees during their hunts, keeping them off the ground and out of the clutches of anything that might want to eat them. If they could do it, she was confident that she could do it as well.

Her fingers found little purchase on the smooth bark as she slid down the trunk for the fourth time. Nia had been struggling to make it more than a few feet up the tree before slipping down the trunk like it had been greased. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong. Perhaps the hunters had special equipment she didn’t know about, or maybe they helped each other climb the slippery tree. Either way, she had to find a way up before it was too dark to see.

“Fine.” Nia huffed as she brushed her sore hands on her trousers. “Stupid tree.”

Giving up on this particular tree, she walked a little further before coming across a slightly smaller one with branches just low enough for her to reach. They weren’t nearly as thick as the previous ones and offered little comfort, but she knew she couldn’t be picky regarding trees. As long as she could climb it, it would have to do.

She reached over her head and wrapped her hands around the lowest branch. Her arms trembled with effort as she pulled herself up. The strained grunts squeaking between her lips echoed between the trees around her.

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“C—come on. I g—got this.” She panted between heavy breaths until she finally managed to get her upper body onto the branch she was climbing.

It took her a few more minutes of struggling, but she eventually swung her legs up to meet the rest of her body. She was hot and sweaty but had made it… up the first one. She was still too close to the ground, so she had a bit more to go.

By the time she had gone up far enough to be comfortable, Nia was exhausted, and it was pitch black all around her. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. A thick blanket of invisible clouds had moved in to smother the stars, starving the forest of any light. By feel alone, Nia dug out a length of rope and wrapped it around her waist, securing herself tightly to the branch.

She lay there, a thin, crooked branch digging into her back between her shoulder blades while her mind whirled in numerous meandering directions. Her path was unknown, which made her incredibly nervous and scared; she worried about her parents and how they would react to her running away. She didn’t want to cause them any pain but knew that her actions would, but it was something that she had to do. She couldn’t stand staying in the village any longer.

And they knew that.

Nia let out a trembling sigh, her muddy eyes looking off into the barely perceptible canopy around her. “Where to now?”

Her question was left unanswered. It was a question she would have to discover the answer to herself.

A beam of early morning light caressed Nia’s face, gently waking her from her restless sleep. Increasingly vicious monsters plagued her dreams, waking her several times during the night just before they could sink their fangs into her soft flesh. Thankfully, the horrid images were already beginning to fade into nothing but fuzzy memories as the sounds of the rousing forest filled her ears.

She first heard the leaves rustling in the wind, like waves breaking on an endless shore, followed by birdsong whose cheerful melody drove away the remnants of her sleep-addled mind. A squirrel bounded along a branch on a neighboring tree, its bushy tail flickering in staccato waves, the sight of which brought a smile to Nia’s face.

She took a long moment to appreciate everything around her. She had always loved the forest and everything living within it. Something drew her to it; it was a feeling she had had in her heart for as long as she could remember. As if she had a connection with it on a level that she didn’t quite understand.

A snuffling that didn’t belong pierced her wayward thoughts, drawing her eyes to the forest floor below her. Her breath hitched in her chest as her eyes searched for whatever had made that noise. Her mind was filled with twisted monsters and toothy beasts, their maws slavering as they sniffed around her tree, searching for her.

Nia’s knuckles popped as her fingers gripped the branch. Leaning over, she waited for any signs of movement, and when the large boar trundled into view, she sighed in relief. It was a rather large pig, its hunched shoulders coming up to her chest, and from head to tail, it was as long as her mother and father stacked together. Its coat was a tawny brown of coarse, bristly fur and two tusks as big around as her forearms curled up out of its slobbering mouth.

The forest boar wandered through the forest nearly blind. It could hardly see more than two feet in front of it with its two small, beady eyes so disused that warty skin had started to grow over them. But just because it could not see did not mean it wasn’t dangerous. Its nose was as sensitive as any other beast in the forest, and its thick hide was known to shrug off arrows and spears. A boar was a hard fight for the village’s hunters, something she had no chance against if it decided to charge.

Luckily, the pig couldn’t climb trees. All she had to do was wait it out.

So, she waited… and waited, then waited some more. The sun had hung in the sky for some time, and the forest boar was still meandering beneath her, its broad snout pushing around the soft loam in search of hidden treasure. They were known to seek out young roots and buried mushrooms, sniffing them out with their sensitive snouts, and it looked like this boar had found a trove of them.

“Stupid pig,” Nia huffed as she fought with indecision. She had to keep moving; she wasn’t very far from the village, and there was a real chance one of the villagers could find her, especially since her parents were sure to be out searching for her. She only hoped they would go to the river first, giving her more time to get further away.

She had left the flower the forest spirit had given her for two reasons. One was to let her parents know that she left of her own free will ; the other was to hopefully lead them to the area where she had gotten it. That was the opposite direction she had left, but she had been sitting up in the tree for so long that they had most likely already figured out she hadn’t gone that way.

She could only hope the other villagers didn’t care enough to help them search for her. She didn’t think that was too far out from the truth.

Carefully, Nia lowered herself down to the lowest branch. Although it was only six or so feet off the ground, it was still high enough so that the boar wouldn’t be able to reach her. A broken twig was gripped firmly in her hand, bouncing up and down as she tested its weight. Satisfied, she threw it as hard as possible into a bush directly behind the snuffling pig.

Cracking noises exploded from the bush, causing the birds to go quiet and the squirrels to chitter anxiously. The boar, with the noise much too loud for it to ignore, pulled its tusk-filled mouth from the mud and swung its heavy head in the direction of the offending bush. For a breath, Nia thought that the pig would dismiss the noise and go back to filling its belly, but suddenly, the boar squealed in indignation and charged toward the leafy bramble.

Its comparatively small hooves left deep furrows in the forest floor as muscly haunches propelled the massive beast forward, its wide head swinging back and forth indiscriminately. Anything caught in its path would be gored by its twisted tusks before being thrown several feet to the side. Luckily, the only thing it caught in its rage was the bush. The boar stomped its front hooves, flattening the vegetation with a cacophony of cracking and snapping, and its tusks caught on the bush's twisted limbs, pulling it up by the roots as it swung its head.

Nia took this moment, between the piercing squeals and thundering hooves, to drop down from the branch, landing as silently as she could. She had no interest in catching the boar’s attention, so she quickly left in the opposite direction from its rampage. She moved until the only sound she could hear was her heart thundering in her ears and her ragged breathing.

“That was close,” Nia chuckled nervously. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, dragging a smudge of dirt and grit across it. She tried to ignore the unpleasant feeling of sweat and dirt getting everywhere; she hated being dirty and made it a point to bathe in the river at least once a day, but would have to rough it out, at least until she got further away.