The next day after watching the Hunter prepare his tea and complete his morning meditation, we continued traveling along the river. I eyed the mountains to the north whenever they were in sight. We were silent most of the morning – or rather, he was silent and I was morose over the previous day’s events. As it got to the afternoon, my stomach growled, and I sat down on a rock to rest for a bit. Without my pack, I didn’t have my food supplies, and I didn’t know how to fish or hunt without any sort of gear. I also was not going to ask Asterollan for help. Instead, I summoned water, gulping down handfuls at a time, hoping it would be enough to tide me over.
When I chose to take my break, Asterollan stopped several paces back and perched on a rock. He watched me while idly playing with a short, slightly curved knife. “Did you tell anyone that you could cast after you found out?” I asked, finally unable to take the silent stares any longer.
“No. Of course not.”
“Scared they’d enslave you?” He stared at me, his expression carefully neutral. “Then one of your own would probably be hunting you down.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“But it was easy for you to just… leave? Don’t you have a family or anyone that’s going to be worried?” I wondered fleetingly how my mom was treating my dog. She had never been a dog person.
“No. I have no one.”
There was a pause as he continued to stare at me. The silence and the answer, the constant staring, was all very unnerving to me. “How did you survive the desert?”
“The cactus forests provided shelter and water. I had an idea of what direction your group was traveling in, so I followed at a distance. I would catch up at night to check in, and then I would move far enough away to not be spotted.”
“But you were. Spotted. Silden saw you.”
He hesitated a moment. “I was careless. I was trying to decide if I should walk into your camp, and lingered in the open too long. I was careful to stay out of sight after that.”
I tilted my head curiously at him. “You were going to walk into our camp?”
“You were injured.” He looked away. “I thought that perhaps offering my meager healing would be a good way to ingratiate myself to you.”
I nodded, and stood up to continue the walk. He was silent, and I glanced back to see that he was following several paces back like he had all morning. We continued along the river again, though I was in a considerably better mood. For one, the scenery was nicer than the endless sand dunes, and the weather was milder down in the gorge. The trickling of the river was also quite soothing. I detoured once when I saw a copse of evergreens, checking for pine cones that were half open, and picked at them for any remaining seeds as we walked. The leafy trees were displaying their full autumn foliage of golds and reds. There were birds – nice, normal sized, chirpy birds – singing loudly. It was a beautiful day.
I found myself thinking several times that the company could have been better, and wondering about how my friends were doing.
I stopped to rest again late in the afternoon, thinking that it may be time to make a camp, but Asterollan walked up to me as I started to sit. “We need to continue on a little further,” he said.
“It’s nearly dark,” I protested.
He looked at me, a strange expression on his face. “No. There’s something ahead.” He continued walking, a bit away from the river, entering a thicket of what looked to be aspen trees ahead. I stared at his back in confusion, but then stood to follow him. The water was getting louder as we walked, and I realized there was a waterfall ahead – not a large one, but still very idyllically pretty in the fading light. We had walked away from the main river, so this was a small stream that had deviated from it, and it looked like it wound back around toward the main river near where we had left it. We exited the white barked trees.
Near the waterfall was a stone structure. Ruins – it was open to the sky since the roof had fallen in long ago, but a grand arch still stood, and half a wall. As we approached, I could see that the ground was paved with colorful stones, that had once formed a circular mosaic floor. Asterollan walked out to the center of the circle, and turned to look at his surroundings. “I know this place.”
“Have you ever been here?” I asked, but I knew the answer even before he said it.
“No.” He stood, his head tilted, a distant look in his eyes as though he were hearing something I couldn’t. Then he looked at me. “We’re going to camp here,” he said. I didn’t argue.
Similar to the previous night in the cave, Asterollan made a fire and then disappeared for awhile – he said nothing, but I assumed he went to hunt again. I poked around in the pool at the base of the waterfall, wondering if I’d be able to catch or forage something by hand. After several minutes with no success, I decided to strip down and wash for the first time in many days. I started with the clothes, scrubbing as much of the dust out of them as I could, then wrung them out and lay them out to dry. Then I washed myself. The water was cold, but also refreshing. I didn’t have any soap, but it was still nice to just rub the majority of grime off my body. I played around with sitting under the waterfall in lotus pose as well, inwardly laughing at the stereotype of the scene.
When I was done, I stepped out of the water and wrung my hair out as best as I could. My clothes were still wet, so I pulled the cloak around me and sat on a nearby rock. I closed my eyes and reached for my magic, focusing on the water. Since it wasn’t magically summoned, it felt somehow more substantial. I realized I couldn’t dispel it the same way. Instead, I focused on controlling it – moving it off the clothes. When I was done, there was still some residual dampness, but the clothes were dry enough to put back on.
As I dressed, I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye and realized Asterollan had returned. He was sitting near the campfire, with some small game skewered over the flames. I could feel myself turning bright red as I wondered how much he had seen, and I was careful to dress under the cover of the cloak.
When I finally approached the fire, I sat very near it to warm myself up and avoided looking at him. Instead, I studied the cooking meat on the skewers. It looked suspiciously like squirrel, but I didn’t ask what it was. When he decided it was sufficiently cooked, he handed me my share, and then proceeded to sit across from me, staring at me as he ate.
Still feeling embarrassed, I pulled the hood of the cloak up and ate quietly, staring absently at the flickering light of the flames. When I was done, I tossed the bones in. “Were you meditating under the waterfall?” he asked.
Okay. So he had seen a lot. I licked the grease from my fingers slowly and nodded. “It’s a… joke. From my world.”
“A joke?”
“Yes. A thing a person does or says to be funny.”
He grimaced. “I know what a joke is, Cassandra.”
“Really? You’ll have to forgive me for thinking otherwise, Asterollan.” He sighed.
The warmth of the fire and the food I’d eaten were starting to make me drowsy. I pulled the cloak more tightly around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to see flashes of luminescence from the woods. I watched them for awhile, thinking it might be lightning bugs, but these were bigger. I watched the wings fluttering and realized they were glowing moths. I saw one land on a plant – when it lifted, it left an imprint behind. The imprint glowed faintly and then lifted away, leaving a moth shaped hole in the leaf. The new moth fluttered in the air.
Asterollan followed my gaze and watched them as well. “Well, there’s something I’ve never seen,” he said.
“So you don’t know what they are?” I asked. He shrugged.
We watched quietly as the moths multiplied amongst the trees, softly glowing. One fluttered very near to me, and I reached out to touch it. It flickered and disappeared.
Asterollan stood and approached me. I stared at him warily as he knelt next to me. He started to reach out, but I pulled back cautiously. “I think I’m stronger here,” he said quietly. I paused, curious at what he meant. He placed a hand on my head. The glow of magic surrounded him again. I stared at his mismatched eyes and felt the healing begin.
It was more thorough this time. I felt my leg wound tighten momentarily, and then the tightness disappeared. The shine of my burns faded to clear skin, and I realized that a constant headache I hadn’t been fully cognizant of disappeared, leaving me feeling delightfully clear headed. I stared at him in wonder.
The glow faded. His hand slipped through my hair and he smiled at me, a smile that softened his features and lit up his face in a way that almost left me breathless. “Ah, good. Your head is no longer dented where you hit it.”
In a mild panic, I reached up to touch the spot where my head had hit the rock, but his hand was still in the way. “My head was dented in?!” I asked, hearing my voice jump up an octave.
“Yes. It was quite ghastly.” He rubbed a thumb over the spot, and then pulled his hand back. I rubbed my hands down my arms, no longer shiny with half-healed burns.
I looked back up at him. “Thank you,” I said sincerely.
He frowned, staring at me silently for a moment, then mumbled a brief acknowledgement to my thanks before moving back to his own side of the fire. Then he lay down to sleep, turning his back to me.
I turned to watch the glowing moths until I also drifted off, wondering what it was about this place that made his magic stronger.
I woke the next morning to the smell of mint tea. I sat up and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Glancing around, I could see that Asterollan was dressing near the pool, his curls weighed down and darkened with water. As he returned to the campsite, he sat and began sipping the tea. “Joke or not, the waterfall meditation was surprisingly refreshing,” he said. I scrunched my face at his statement and began summoning water to wash my face and rinse out my mouth.
Asterollan stared thoughtfully at our surroundings. “I think we need to stay here one more day,” he said.
I frowned. “I want to get back to my friends, Asterollan.”
“I know. But… I believe they’re coming to us.”
“How do you know that?” He gave me a strange look. I sighed. “Your voice talks to you more than mine does, I think.”
After drinking his tea, he disappeared for a few hours. I considered leaving without him. I had no idea how Lyre would find me this far south, and I was anxious to get back to him. Still, the voices hadn’t steered us wrong so far. And Asterollan had helped me a lot these past few days – he had saved me on the cliff, and from the river. He had healed me. I pulled the cloak close around me. This was a man I shouldn’t trust, and strangely, I did trust him. I had already trusted him enough to tell him everything about me – about where I was from, about the voices.
So I sat and waited. He came back with more small game and proceeded to cook it. It occurred to me that I was perhaps just easily won over with food.
Asterollan spent most of the day studying the stone ruins. At one point he was examining something in the rocks that formed the ledge of the waterfall when he called me over. When I went to see what he had found, he pointed out a cavern, hidden by time and stones – it looked like it had once been an offshoot of the building that went underground. We worked together to shift some of the rocks aside and took the ancient stone steps down.
I reached for my magic as we descended into the darkness, to give us light. Asterollan did the same. The place was eerily quiet, and I had a strange sense while entering – like for the first time, I was truly unaccompanied, despite the Hunter’s presence. When we arrived at the bottom, we found a damp cavern, gently lit from an opening above. The light that filtered through was colorful, and I realized that it came through a circular pane of stained glass with an image of a sword set in front of a sun. “How did that manage to last all these years?” I asked quietly.
“It’s been protected by magic,” Asterollan said. We stood, listening to the echoing drip of water from somewhere within the cavern.
A thought occurred to me as we stood staring up at the symbol. I remembered how I could feel wounds, injuries, and sickness when I healed. And there was something I hadn’t been able to confirm for myself since I had arrived here. “Asterollan,” I said. He turned to look at me curiously. “When you were healing me… could you feel anything… malignant inside?” He tilted his head, a confused look spreading across his face. “Like an advanced illness.”
He shook his head. “No. You were perfectly healthy.”
I thought I had been certain when I found my vision improved and my scars gone, but I guess I hadn’t been fully convinced that everything wrong with me had been fixed despite that. I closed my eyes and took three deep breaths, and felt tears of relief well up. “Good.”
Asterollan stared at me thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”
“In my world, I had a disease. One that was a death sentence.” Like everything else that I had shared with him, the words just tumbled out of their own accord. “The doctors that treated me thought I wasn’t going to last longer than another year at most. I was prepared to die.” I stared up at the miraculous pane of glass that had lasted longer than the stone temple that had once stood outside. “I was going to die.”
“Then I’m glad you’re here,” Asterollan said. I glanced over, but he turned away quickly and began to make his way back up the steps. I watched him go.
mehryment 