The mood among the group had changed greatly since they’d left the bridge.

Though Dela had always known this journey was going to be dangerous, it hadn’t quite seemed real until she’d watched a woman bleed to death and then be sucked though the apparently solid stone of a bridge.

Now she saw danger in everything. In every sway of a tree branch, in every squawk of a bird, in every cough or sneeze of the people she was traveling with. She jumped at the slightest sound, and still hadn’t managed to subside the shaking that had taken over her limbs the moment the woman had started bleeding from her eyes. Had something like that happened to her brother? The Chosen who had returned from the same trip he’d been on claimed they’d been attacked by an unseen force in the mountains, but maybe they’d been lying. Perhaps they’d been trying to spare Dela and her parents all the nightmares the truth would have caused.

The thought of Ridley dying in such a way twisted at Dela’s guts. She couldn’t help but picture him alone and terrified, and every part of her wished there was some way she could turn back the clock and change the outcome of him being part of the Chosen three years earlier. But such a thing was impossible.

Dela made a mental promise to herself. No matter what happened to her on this journey, if she made it home again, she wouldn’t tell her parents the truth of the things she’d seen. It would be a small comfort, but at least she’d be able to give them the chance to sleep at night without being plagued by nightmares.

Within a couple of hours, night began creeping in.

They chose a clearing beside a small copse of trees, just off the side of the road. The trees offered them some shelter, while they were able to still see the road from east to west. They’d not come across any other travelers yet, but that didn’t mean they weren’t on the road. There were plenty of people who chose to live outside of the city walls, and those same people were known to be dangerous. Dela couldn’t help feeling, however, that the most danger lay within the things they weren’t able to see. They could fight off other people with swords and stones, but they couldn’t fight things like dark magic.

They stopped and began to string canvas from the branches of trees to at least give them some shelter from the dangers that lurked out there. Fires were lit, water was gathered from a nearby stream, and rations were handed out to each person.

Dela found herself settled around a fire with Layla, Brer, Norton, and another man in his thirties called Gilford. Layla had barely eaten, but instead stared into the fire, chewing on the corner of her thumbnail. Norton sat with a knife and a piece of wood, whittling it down into something Dela didn’t recognize yet. No one had mentioned directly what had happened. It seemed pointless, as they couldn’t change anything, but Dela found she couldn’t remain quiet. Thoughts and questions churned over and over in her head, and in the end she couldn’t prevent them bursting from her tongue.

“What do we do if we come across another Devil’s Bridge? Do we try to cross it?”

Norton’s lips pressed together. “Let’s pray to the Gods that we don’t come across another one.”

“But we will, on the way back,” she insisted. “We’ll have to cross the same one again.”

“We have to make it back alive first. But then …” He gave a hiss of exasperation and threw the piece of wood he’d been carving to the ground. “I don’t know! It’s not as though I asked to be leading up this whole thing. I was Chosen just like the rest of you. I didn’t volunteer. I don’t know anything more than anyone else.”

The older man got to his feet and paced away from them, his head shaking. It was strange, but Dela found some comfort in his words. She didn’t like to be afraid, but it was good to know she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. It didn’t make her weak or a bad person, it just made her normal.

“We just have to keep going.” She lifted her voice so Norton would hear. “Keep going and take care of each other the best we can. We don’t have any other choice. People do come back from the Passover. Every six months, the Chosen return. We’re not the first, and we won’t be the last, but we have to remember this isn’t a certain death sentence. People do come back.” She did her best to ignore the twisting in her gut as she remembered one of the people who hadn’t come back.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Norton’s back was to them, but his shoulders slumped, and he turned around to face them. He ran his hand over his graying hair. “You’re right. My apologies. I didn’t mean to behave like a child.”

She shrugged. “Apology accepted.”

Norton came and took his place around the fire and picked up his whittling once more. Dela exchanged a glance with Layla, and her friend gave her a smile and a nod and started to eat the rations she’d been staring at for the past hour.

***

Mid-morning the following day, they approached the entrance to the Southern Pass. They walked alongside the carts still laden with the bags of grain. The oxen were starting to slow after several days of walking, but they still appeared strong and unhindered by the huge weights they pulled. The same couldn’t be said of the people, and though they knew it would add more weight to the carts, they took turns hopping up on the bags of grain to give their feet a rest.

Dela was sporting a number of huge blisters, but she did her best to ignore them. She worried about Layla. The other girl appeared to have already lost weight, her face becoming gaunt. If Layla grew too weak to continue the journey, what would Dela do? Could she continue without her, and leave the others even more people short, or would she stop with her friend and do her best to take care of her? They were already down from twenty members of the Chosen to only fifteen, having lost people along the way. What if they were attacked and didn’t have enough people to fight off the assailants? The possibility of being robbed of this grain was very real, and Dela was thankful for the knife at her hip. They’d all been offered different weapons with which to defend themselves and their produce before they’d left on this journey, but these weren’t a group of warriors she traveled with. She thought herself capable of being able to defend herself, but that was about all.

The flat tundra leading to the Great Dividing Range gave way to sudden mountain slopes. Grassy fields were overtaken by outcroppings of rock. The temperature noticeably dropped. The atmosphere of the group became even more tense, if such a thing were possible. Approaching the mountains was like facing a giant.

The gap of the Southern Pass opened up like a yawning maw through the mountain range, threatening to swallow them. Despite the bright day, the sides of the mountains threw deep shadows across the pass, making it appear as though it was almost in darkness.

The fables told that when the Gods were creating the lands, they caused the mountain range to erupt right through the middle of the land, dividing west and east. But when they looked down, they realized the mountain range was too inhospitable and would mean the two sides of the lands would never meet, so one of the mountain Gods, Oreus, reached down with both hands and scooped two massive pathways through the mountains—one in the south and one in the north—giving them a way to meet. But at the same time, he put a curse on each of the passes, that only the best and bravest would be able to make the journey from one side of the country to the other.

Dela didn’t believe for a second that they were either the best or the bravest, but they were here.

The hardest part of their journey was about to begin.

Layla was riding one of the grain carts, and Dela looked up at her and lifted her hand in a wave. They could do this. The distance they had to travel into the Southern Pass wasn’t as far as for the folk entering from the western side, so they were due to meet about one third of the full distance across.

A thrill of excitement prickled through Dela. She’d never met any other races, not properly, anyway. She’d come across them on occasion in the market square when they’d entered the city walls to sell something of importance to humans, such as an ancient artifact they may have unburied, or when a higher class human had purchased a lower class race as a slave, but she’d never actually had a conversation with one of them. In many ways, they were like humans. They had two arms and legs, and a head, but there the similarities ended. Some were huge like giants, and others more diminutive in size. Their skin came in different shades, and she didn’t understand their cultures. Some were versed in magic, while others ate only meat and lived like wild men. Would she even understand when they spoke? She knew they were supposed to have a universal language, but different dialects were bound to have developed with them all living in such different lands. Years ago, before the Treaty, they shared the same lands, and the city of Anthoinia didn’t have its high walls. She couldn’t imagine everyone living side by side, working together and living together.

Of course, things hadn’t stayed that way. They wouldn’t have needed the Treaty, otherwise, and their lands wouldn’t have been divided up the way they had. And they wouldn’t need to have The Choosing, or the Passover either.

But that was the price of peace.