Chapter 11
A Silver Path
They were lost.
Charla could see it, even if everyone else refused to. For all she could tell, they were walking in circles. Meredy kept stopping and starting, turning her head this way and that, always with that same anxious look on her face, and Charla just knew she had no idea where she was taking them. The forest seemed very dark.
How long had it been since they'd left the clearing of dryads? Charla didn't know, but she was sure that the river hadn't been this far away.
But everyone just kept going, unspeaking, trusting that Meredy would be able to lead them back. Charla's scales burned with impatience. In fact, her whole body felt like it was burning. The forest was so hot she thought she might melt—and now they were completely lost and Charla just wanted to scream.
Finally, she couldn't take it anymore.
"We're going the wrong way, aren't we?" she snapped, halting in the muddy leaf litter between trees. "We're lost."
Everyone else stopped, and Lance gave her a reproachful look. "You don't know that. We can't be far from the river now."
"Yeah, just let Merry guide us," said Nuala, as if it were as simple as that.
"We have no idea where the river is! She has no idea where it is!" Charla stamped a paw, spraying mud up the front of her forelegs, and hissed in disgust. "Meredy doesn't even know where she's going! She's leading us nowhere!"
Meredy looked stung.
"I'm trying my best," she said, shrinking back as everyone turned to her. "But it's so hard to sense anything here. There's not much wind in the forest, you know... Everything's so still."
"You found me," Charla pointed out mulishly, scowling.
"Because I sensed your breathing! Rivers don't breathe, Charla! I'm trying!"
"Look—" Lance started, but Charla didn't let him finish.
Her blood was boiling. She was so frustrated with this. She was frustrated with everything. Of course Meredy would make excuses!
"Well, maybe you wouldn't have such a problem if you could just use magic properly," she spat, and Meredy's eyes went wide.
"Hey!" Nuala snapped, drowning out whatever stammered excuse Meredy had started to say. "Don't talk to her like that! You're the one who got us lost in the first place, Char. I don't see you making yourself useful."
Charla puffed up like a bullfrog. Her hackles rose, fire flashed in her eyes, and heat blazed through her face and all the way down to the tip of her tail. She was burning up—flames were licking at the edges of her scales.
"Oh sure!" she heard herself cry, her voice cracking with barely restrained anger. "Blame me for everything! Blame me for getting tricked like the big stupid kid I am! It's all my fault! Everything's my fault! Let's all blame Charla because she's so dumb!"
Meredy just gaped at her, and even Nuala looked startled. Charla lashed her tail, gritting her teeth against the rising burn in her throat. She wanted to spit fire in their stupid faces. This was all their fault—thinking they could trust Meredy with something like this when she couldn't even use magic properly.
Now they were lost in the middle of this stupid forest, and it was so damn hot!
"Charla."
"What?!" she snarled, whipping around to glare at Lance, flames jumping from her nostrils.
He just looked at her, a frown shadowing his forehead. His voice remained calm. "What's going on with you? You're not like this. Come here."
He beckoned, but Charla stayed where she was, wishing she could set him on fire with her eyes. Lance sighed and stepped forward himself, ignoring the way she jerked back from his touch. But just as his paw brushed the edge of her shoulder, something strange happened. A little tongue of flame—real flame—leapt from her scales and curled around his talons. He snatched his paw back with a hiss.
Charla stared. She wasn't just imagining it. There really were tiny fires licking and curling away from her burning body and into the muggy air, all of their own accord.
Lance's frown deepened. "You're burning up. You're completely overloaded. What happened? You didn't run into any spirit gems while you were gone, did you?"
Another spark of irritation burned through her chest. "I don't even know what you're talking about. I haven't seen a spirit gem in ages. Stop changing the subject!"
"No." Lance fixed her with a stern, steady look, like a wall of stone in the face of her fire. "You're not thinking clearly, kid. I don't know how it happened, but you've completely overloaded your mana pool. You're so full of magic that it's leaking out of you. Look, come with me for a moment."
Charla just glared at him. Part of her wanted to be interested in what he was saying—maybe, deep down, she was—but the rest of her just didn't care. She was just too hot and she wanted to burn something.
"Maybe you should do what he says, Char," Nuala said behind her. "You're not acting like yourself."
Charla gritted her teeth, but Lance interrupted before she could spit out a retort. "Just come over here, Charla. Trust me. I know how to fix it."
"Fix what?" Charla spat, but she trudged after him anyway, leaving Nuala and Meredy behind without so much as a backwards glare.
"We won't go far," Lance called back to them. "Just stay put for a moment."
Then he led her into the trees, back the way they'd come, and paid no attention to her angry stomping footsteps. She glared at his back as they went, hissing fire between her teeth and wishing she could just burn this whole damn forest to the ground. At least they wouldn't be lost then.
"Here," said Lance abruptly, stopping at the edge of a small clearing in the trees. "I thought I remembered seeing this earlier."
Curious in spite of herself, Charla crept out of the trees to see what he was talking about—and then stared flatly. There was nothing in the clearing except a big mossy outcrop of stone with a tall flat face. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly boring.
"Why did you take me to see a rock? What's a rock going to do?"
"Nothing," he said calmly. "I just want you to breathe fire at it."
Charla stared at him like he was stupid. "Why?"
"Because if I let you breathe fire at the trees, the whole forest might go up."
She just glared at him. He was making fun of her, wasn't he?
Lance sighed. "Look, just do it, kid. Trust me. You'll feel better."
"Fine," Charla snapped, turning to face the outcrop. "But not because you told me to."
He ignored that. Baring her fangs, Charla stared hard at that boring face of stone and tried to imagine it as the biggest, ugliest ape she could. It was surprisingly easy. Then she pulled back her head, let the flames rush into her mouth, and fired.
She aimed for a single fireball. What came out was much more.
Charla staggered and almost fell backwards as a spray of flames and tiny white-hot fireballs exploded from her jaws, blazed through the air, and impacted the rock with a deafening, bone-rattling roar. Smoke and embers flew in all directions. Charla's tongue was on fire. But it didn't stop there.
It was as if she'd opened the lid on something that had been straining to escape—and now she couldn't have stopped it if she'd wanted to. Fire burned through her body and into her mouth, and she didn't try to hold it back. More fireballs, more flames, more explosions—Charla screwed her eyes shut and fired until there was nothing left, until her throat was raw and smoke was rising in great black plumes through the canopy.
Only then, gasping for breath, did she stagger back and stop.
Lance was silent. Chest heaving, Charla stared at what she had done. The face of stone was cracked and blackened, the moss completely burned away from its ledges, and tiny embers were still flickering in the leaf litter at its base. Unspeaking, Lance stepped forward and stomped them out.
"Feeling better?" he asked, turning back to her.
Charla just gazed at him, and slowly she came back to her senses.
She did feel better. She felt drained, and yet there was still fire in her belly—as if she had somehow not used all of it up. All of the anger had bled out of her body; she wasn't even sure she remembered why she'd been angry. The burning feeling was gone. Standing there in the leaf litter, watching smoke rise from the blackened outcrop, she suddenly felt very stupid.
Then something came crashing through the undergrowth towards them, and before Charla could say anything, Meredy and Nuala came bursting into the clearing. Their eyes were wide and startled, as if something had been chasing them—but when they saw Charla and Lance, they seemed to relax.
"What's going on?" Nuala exclaimed, hovering over to them. "We heard explosions! What'd you do to that rock?"
"Just a bit of element therapy," Lance said calmly, as if what had happened was nothing out of the ordinary. "Alright, kid?"
Charla nodded slowly. "Y...yeah. I feel better. Um...why did that happen?"
She glanced sidelong at Meredy, who quickly averted her eyes, and felt her stomach gurgle with guilt. Why had she yelled at her again? She'd said something pretty nasty, hadn't she?
But before she could think of how to apologise, Lance responded.
"In basic terms, you absorbed so much magic that your body couldn't hold it all in and it started leaking out of you. As a nice side-effect, it seems like it made you somewhat angry. Typical fire magic." He gave her a wry smile. "All you had to do to fix it was get the excess magic out of your system. Which is what you just did.
"But as for where you got all this magic from..." The frown returned to his face. "That's what I don't understand. You're sure you haven't absorbed any spirit gems lately? That's the most common way to do it—to overdose on gems."
But Charla could only shake her head. What she'd said before was true. She hadn't seen any spirit gems for ages—not since she'd used those few shards back in Pyreflight. She didn't think the dream at Lake Crystellus counted, either—and even that seemed so long ago.
The only thing she could think of was...
"That creature..." She looked up at Lance. "That animal I saw, back where the dryads were. When it was near me, I felt like I was going to explode with all of that magic! That must have been it!"
Far from looking pleased that she'd solved the mystery so quickly, Lance considered her in silence. Maybe he thought she was mad. But then he shook his head and shrugged.
"I guess it's the only explanation we've got. Even if it leaves more questions than answers..." He huffed and looked her in the eyes again. "Whatever the case, it's fixed now. So let's just figure out what to do next." His gaze turned on Meredy, whose whole face flushed with colour. "Do you think you can find the river again? Be honest. We won't be angry."
"Of course she can!" Nuala snapped, but Charla was watching Meredy.
Very slowly, as if the act of doing so physically pained her, Meredy shook her head. She seemed to shrink before them, like she wanted to disappear into the leaf litter and escape their staring eyes. Her voice was very small.
"No," she whispered. "I don't know where the river is. Charla is right."
Lance sighed. Charla swallowed. Any other time, she might have felt a bit smug to hear those words, but now she just felt guilty. She hadn't meant what she'd said to Meredy—at least, not the mean things.
"Merry..." Nuala started, sinking down to her level, but Meredy shook her head again.
"I can't, Nuala. I tried. I really did. But we're lost, and my windsense can't help us this time. I'm sorry."
Nuala pursed her lips. She stared into Meredy's face for what seemed like ages, her wings beating just fast enough to keep her afloat, and finally she just shrugged. Meredy looked relieved.
"Oh well," said Nuala, spinning around to face Lance instead. "Can't be helped. So what's the plan, big guy?"
He glowered. "Why are you asking me?"
"Because you like to be in charge. And also because it's easy to blame you when things go wrong." She smiled sweetly and then settled on Meredy's head between her horns. Meredy didn't even blink. Nuala waved a paw at Lance. "So go on, then. Make with the clever ideas."
"Why don't you come up with a good idea for once?" he snapped, bristling at her nonchalance. "Since you were so adamant about coming with us. Make yourself useful, damn fox."
"Well, excuse me, lord jerk-face. I've had plenty of good ideas; you're just too stupid to remember. Whose idea was it to sneak into Earthsoul and get supplies? Oh yeah—me. And it looks like we're gonna need them soon, too, if we don't figure out where we are."
Lance started to retort, but Charla cut in before he could get a word out. She'd been looking around at their surroundings for the last few moments, and she was pretty sure she'd figured out their biggest problem. With all of these huge trees so close-knit around them, they couldn't see very far in any direction. But if they were above the trees...
"What if we flew up to see where we are?" she suggested, pointing a wing towards the canopy. "Maybe we'd even be able to see the river."
"Not possible," Lance grunted, without even stopping to think about it. "The canopy's too dense. We'd never get up there without injuring our wings—and then we'd be in trouble."
"But...!" Charla wracked her brains, desperate to convince him. "But I could climb up there! I won't fly!"
"Don't be daft," Lance snapped. "You'd probably slip and fall—and then you'd hurt more than your wings. Forget about it. None of us could..."
He trailed off. Charla stared at him. So did Nuala and Meredy.
"Actually," he said, turning to look at Nuala, "you could. You're a better flier than any of us. And you're small, too. Just fly up there and crawl through the canopy, and you can tell us what you see. You don't even need to find the river—although that would be good. Just tell us which way is south and we'll head in that direction."
Nuala huffed. "Make me do everything, why don't you. Fine. But only because it was Charla's idea."
She stood up on Meredy's head and spread her feathered wings again. Meredy seemed to brace herself.
"Back in a jiffy!" Nuala cried, and she leapt towards the canopy with a small kick and a powerful flap.
Meredy flinched as the rush of air ruffled her fur, then craned her head back. "Be careful, Nu!"
There was no response. Like a ghost rising into the night, Nuala's pale form glided up into the dark canopy and quickly disappeared from view. Charla tilted her head back until it hurt, trying to see where she'd gone, but it was hopeless. The forest ceiling had swallowed her whole. All they could do now was wait.
And so they waited in silence—until Charla got bored and her wandering eyes settled on Meredy. Meredy just smiled weakly and averted her gaze to the forest floor. But Charla was determined.
"Sorry," she said quietly, kind of hoping that Lance wouldn't hear. "I mean...about the things I said earlier. I didn't mean it."
Meredy nodded, shuffling her paws in the leaf litter. "It's okay. I know you weren't yourself."
She didn't sound very convinced, and she still looked somehow downtrodden, but Charla didn't know what else to say. Maybe she'd feel better when they weren't lost anymore.
Speaking of which... Charla looked up again, and sure enough Nuala was coming back down towards them, gliding effortlessly between the tangled boughs. It was hard to tell if she looked pleased or not. But as she came to a hover above their heads, the first thing she said was, "Well, I didn't find the river."
Meredy seemed to sag. Charla's hopes sank.
"The canopy's just too thick here," Nuala said, scratching her ear. "We're pretty deep in the forest now, from the looks of it. I didn't want to fly too far searching for it in case I lost you guys."
"But?" Lance cocked an eyebrow expectantly.
Nuala rolled her eyes. "But... Judging from the sun, south is that way."
She turned and pointed away into the darkness of the trees, in a direction that looked no different from any other. Lance grunted approvingly.
"Better than no direction at all, I guess. Let's see if we can't find our way to Lake Qilin on our own. Thanks for making yourself useful, fox."
"Must be your turn next, jerk."
Lance said nothing, but it almost looked like he was holding back a smirk as he brushed past her and began in the direction she'd indicated. Charla, Meredy and Nuala exchanged a look.
"Well," Nuala said, hovering down between them. "Looks like this trip just got a little more exciting, yeah?"
Meredy looked nervous, but Charla grinned. With the dryad encounter behind her, and her belly full of magic, she felt a lot less spooked than she had before. She felt like she understood the forest a little more now. Whatever Lance believed, she was sure that the dryads were real—that the magical antlered beast had been real—and that thought was somehow comforting.
Besides, she thought as she followed her friends deeper into the forest gloom, it wasn't like they were going to be lost in here forever...
A few hours later, Charla had come to one conclusion: Being lost was not very fun.
Without the river to guide them, they had to be careful not to let themselves get all turned-around and confused. Lance took to marking the trees they passed with his claws, but every direction looked the same and it was all too easy to get distracted and forget which way they were supposed to be going. Plus, all of this walking made Charla thirsty, and now there was no river to drink from.
"We've got to conserve our water," Lance told her when she bugged him about the waterskins. "We've hardly been lost for a few hours. You'll survive."
So Charla grumbled and let it go. Her good mood had quickly evaporated, and as the forest became darker with evening, all of her fears and insecurities came crawling back. So what if she knew there were dryads amongst the trees? That didn't mean there weren't other more sinister creatures out there, just waiting to make her a meal...
Lance told her not to make a fire that night. He, too, seemed anxious—and no longer quite so sure that fire would ward off the creatures of the night.
"It's best we lay low and don't draw attention to ourselves," he told her quietly, which did nothing to calm Charla's nerves.
She stayed awake for long into the night, wishing she could see through the dark and jumping at small noises in the trees. The forest was no longer that magical, whimsical place she'd imagined it as. It was huge and unwelcoming and full of the unknown. It frightened her.
Lance sat up with her for hours, even after Meredy and Nuala had managed to find sleep, and Charla spoke to him just to drown out the eerie sounds of the forest.
"Have you ever been overloaded with magic before?" she asked, because she kept thinking about that burning, raging feeling of fire leaking from within her. It was a new and unpleasant feeling, like nothing she'd felt before, like the tingling warmth of a thousand spirit gems all at once—enough to make her feel like she was exploding. She'd never heard of such a thing happening to anyone before.
"Once," said Lance, gazing away into the gloom. "I was probably about your age. Maybe younger. Stalagor, my old dojo master—he thought we all needed to know what it felt like, so he let us overdose on spirit gems."
Charla thought about that for a moment. "That sounds kinda dangerous."
He shrugged. "Probably is. But not enough to deter Stalagor. He wanted to show us how to deal with that sort of excess power, I guess. I didn't get angry like you did, though. I just felt...heavy. And slow. Like I wanted to lay down and go to sleep. And the earth cracked under my paws even when I was standing still. I felt like I could topple a mountain with a single push."
"Do you think you could have?"
Even in the dark, she saw his amused smirk. "I doubt it. But I might have made a sizeable dent."
Charla nodded thoughtfully and looked away into the yawning blackness between the trees. Now that he mentioned it, she really had felt powerful—like she could burn down the entire forest with a single breath; like she was fire itself.
If that happened again, what might she be able to do? If she had that incredible power at her clawtips again, could anything stand in her way? The forest, the apes... Gaul himself?
She gazed down at her paws, her scales dark as dried blood in the gloom. This was one secret that Silverback and Jayce had never told her. What if it was something she could use to save them?
By the time morning rolled around again, Charla hadn't gotten much sleep at all—but still she led the way with eager steps, full of new ideas and the growing urge to break free of Whisperglade. The forest was becoming claustrophobic. The further they went, the deeper it seemed to become; the trees became denser, and taller and taller still, until Charla felt as dwarfed and insignificant as she had amongst the towering skyscrapers of Warfang. Far above their heads, the canopy was an unbroken dark ceiling, enclosing them in gloom and silence.
Charla longed for a glimpse of the sky, and she watched with envy every time Lance sent Nuala up to check that they were still heading south. She came down and corrected them a little each time, but of the river there was no sign. From now on, they were on their own.
But the forest itself was brimming with life. Charla kept her eyes and ears peeled for danger, and she saw far more than that. There were frogs and lizards in the undergrowth; small mammals—some with leathery wings, some without—flitting between branches; strange insects buzzing around their heads... At times she heard muted giggling in the distance and caught glimpses of dryads between the trees, but every time she tried to point them out to Lance, he never seemed to see them.
Worse still were the occasional sounds of huge creatures moving through the forest—never seen, always hidden by gloom and trees, but loud enough that Charla knew, whatever they were, they were much larger than anything she'd yet seen in Whisperglade.
She made sure to keep close to Lance this time, and she wasn't the only one. She and Meredy kept almost tripping over each other in their eagerness to stay in his shadow, but Charla didn't mind. She didn't want to be separated from everyone again—not now, when they were so lost. Even Nuala's bravado seemed to have disappeared.
Another night came and went, and still Charla hardly slept. She watched Meredy toss and turn in the dirt, jerking awake with frightened eyes only to curl up closer to Nuala and try to sleep again. The noises of the forest never abated.
Sometimes, Charla felt like Whisperglade was laughing at them.
She kept herself brave by thinking about Jayce and all of the stories she'd have to tell him when they were finally together again. She imagined the way he'd laugh, the way he'd gasp in awe, the way he'd say that he wished he'd been there too—and she imagined the moment they'd reunite at last, when she would fling herself into his arms and he would hug her tight. And then her fears would melt away. She knew everything would be fine.
Another day passed in this manner, and still they remained no less lost than before. Lance, whose patience was running thin, finally let them sip from the waterskins. Then he asked Meredy to keep her senses peeled for the feeling of fresh air between the trees, and sent Nuala up to check their direction once more.
"If we can find a big enough gap in the canopy, we can all get into the air and figure out where we are," he said. "Even if we have to fly for a whole day straight just to get to the lake…"
But they found no gaps in the canopy—at least none large enough for a dragon to safely break through—and night once again crept darkly upon them.
Growing blind with the deepening gloom, they chose to make camp between the roots of an enormous tree that would have dwarfed some of Warfang's highest towers. But just as they began to settle amongst the moss and the leaf litter, a sound came to them.
It was soft at first, just a rustle in the undergrowth. But then it grew closer, louder, and Charla knew—just knew—that it was something very, very large. The creaking of roots and low-hanging boughs moaned through the forest, and the very earth seemed to tremble with the slow rumbling roar of something sliding through the underbrush, splintering branches in its path. She scrambled to her feet. So did everyone else.
"Something's coming," Meredy breathed, staring away into the trees. A spasm of fear flitted across her face. "It's big. It's very, very big. Lance—"
"This way," he hissed, before she could even ask. "Stay quiet."
Holding her breath, Charla stumbled after him as quickly as she could, slipping in the leaf litter. Nuala had dropped out of the sky for once and settled unsteadily on Meredy's back, her wings clamped to her sides. Lance led them up the slope between two trees, and around behind a mossy outcrop of stone as tall as a full-grown dragon. But before he could lead them any further from the rumble of the approaching monster, Meredy uttered a strangled gasp.
They all stopped. Lance hissed at them to stay quiet. Nuala clamped her paws over Meredy's muzzle.
Charla craned her head around the rock, and her stomach dropped violently.
A huge, flat, triangular head had just snaked its way around the tree where they'd been sitting only moments before. Its long forked tongue flickered and probed around the mossy roots where they had just been, the gigantic head swaying to and fro as though in contemplation. Then it shifted and slithered further into the view, and Charla's legs turned weak.
It was a snake. But it was not a snake like any she had ever seen. The head alone was as wide as the wingspan of an adult dragon, the huge yellow eye as big as her own skull, and the body—the body... Charla felt her heart beating in her throat. It was as thick as a tree trunk and it never seemed to end. The longer she stared, the more snake there was.
It coiled itself fluidly into the hollow between the roots, swinging its head backwards and forwards, tasting the air with a tongue that was longer than her. Charla felt sick, but she couldn't tear her eyes away. Any second now, she was sure it would turn towards them and see where its prey had gone. And then... And then...
Charla's whole body shuddered. She gathered fire in the back of her throat. Her friends were rigid beside her.
She didn't think they could fight off something that big. All they could do was run and hope for the best—hope that it wouldn't lash out at them like lightning, like she had seen snakes do before, faster than her eyes could blink. They would be nothing more than a snack.
She tensed her paws.
But the snake did not turn towards them. Instead it raised its colossal head and began to wind itself up the trunk of the tree. Charla watched in horrified fascination as, coil by enormous coil, the snake wound its great glossy body up towards the canopy. It hardly seemed possible. The tree was not that much bigger than the snake itself, and it looked almost as if it were being strangled—squeezed to death by this giant serpent's muscled body. But it did not break or splinter, and the snake soon draped its unending coils amongst the highest, sturdiest boughs close to the canopy, where it was camouflaged by its dappled green-and-brown scales.
Had she not known it was there, Charla knew she would never have seen it.
"Well," Lance whispered, when all had become still and silent again, "looks like we won't be making camp here tonight."
Charla managed a nervous grin, her eyes still fixed on the nigh-invisible snake far above their heads. Nuala gave a strange, whispery chortle. Meredy just whimpered.
"Come on. Quietly." Ever so carefully, Lance stepped back from the stone outcropping that had been their shield, gesturing for them to follow.
Charla staggered after him, her legs numb with fright, holding her breath as damp leaves squelched under her paws. Even that sounded too loud in the silence. The back of her neck crawled, and she kept one eye on the snake as Lance led them away into the trees with slow, deliberate steps. She could feel Meredy's shaky breaths on her tail. Any minute now, she expected to hear the snapping of branches as the snake came darting down to make them its prey.
But the forest remained silent.
Very soon, the snake's enormous coils were lost from view beyond the trees and the gloom of night, and still they carried on, hoping to put as much distance between themselves and that monster as they possibly could.
The night deepened around them, until they found themselves in a blackness so thick they could not see the paws in front of their faces. Still, Charla dared not make a fire. At least, here in the darkness, they were invisible—even if everything else was, too. She kept almost walking into trees and tripping over enormous roots, and the whispering, chattering forest did nothing to calm her nerves. They had escaped one monster, but for how long? What of the next? Would they be so lucky?
Charla couldn't stop thinking about what would have happened if they hadn't moved in time, if they'd been too slow, if the snake had found them...
She didn't ever want to stop and sleep. But they couldn't carry on all night, unable to see and jumping at small noises. They needed shelter; they needed a hiding place.
Finally, Lance called a stop at the base of a mossy rise sheltered by undergrowth and gnarled roots.
"We need to sleep," he said firmly, as if he'd noticed Charla's twitchy, nervous paws and her urge to keep going. "We're not going to find any shelter better than this. That snake is well behind us now. Let's just keep going in the morning."
Charla wanted to protest, but she didn't have the energy. Despite her fears, there was a heaviness behind her eyes that just wouldn't go away, a leadenness that made it hard to move her legs. She was tired and she needed sleep. With a deep sigh, she trudged over to join him.
"Wait..." Meredy whispered.
They looked back at her. It was hard to see her face through the darkness, but her head was craned back, her muzzle pointed somewhere above the rise. She didn't sound afraid.
"What's wrong?" said Nuala, who was perched on Meredy's back with her tail curled around herself. "Don't tell me it's another one of those snakes."
"No..." she murmured. "It's... I can feel the wind. There's fresh air somewhere that way."
Lance perked up. "Fresh air? You're sure?"
Charla looked up at him eagerly. Fresh air meant a gap in the canopy. A gap meant light and freedom—a way out of the forest.
Meredy inclined her head slowly. "I'm certain."
There was a moment of pause. Nuala's ears swivelled back and forth. "So... Do we go look for it? Now? I mean, we still need to sleep. I don't know about you, but my eyelids feel like rocks."
Lance grunted. "You're right. We should sleep. If it is a clearing in the trees, it'll still be there in the morning. We'll check it out tom—"
"I want to look for it now."
Everyone looked at Charla.
She jutted her lower jaw out stubbornly. "I don't want to sleep here. It's creepy. I want to see moonlight. I want fresh air."
"W-well, I don't think it's too far away," Meredy said quickly, like she'd been waiting for someone to say that. "It won't take long. We could sleep there. If...that's okay with everyone, of course."
Nuala shrugged. "Yeah, sure, why not."
Lance heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Alright, fine... Lead the way, then."
And so they moved on, this time with Meredy in the lead, and she guided them up over the rise and further into the trees. Calmed a little by the thought of fresh air and a glimpse of the sky, Charla found enough courage to weave a tiny ball of fire to light the way. It bobbed ahead of her like an eager sprite, shimmering brightly through the dark. No one protested. Maybe they, too, were glad to no longer be blind.
"Put it out if you hear anything moving nearby," Lance told her grimly, and Charla just nodded.
Step-by-step they carried on into the night, straining for a glimpse of moonlight, and just as Charla was wondering if they'd have to go much further, something strange materialized out of the gloom.
A rope. There was a rope encircling the trunk of this tree. Charla stopped and stared.
It was a pretty rope, all things considered. Its fibres glinted silver in the light of her fire, and it had been weaved in a delicate braided pattern that reminded Charla of rolling waves. Little braided silver strands hung from it like woven icicles, drifting in the slightest breeze. She cocked her head.
"Look at this," she started to say, but Meredy interrupted her.
"Guys..."
Charla raised her head; something about Meredy's voice made the back of her neck prickle. And when she cast her gaze beyond the tree with the rope around its trunk, she understood immediately.
"There's a path..." Meredy whispered.
And there was.
Cutting through the trees like another great snake, distinct and unmistakable, a winding path led further into the forest and quickly out of sight. Moonlight shimmered on the leaf-strewn floor, so that it looked almost like a glistening silver river flowing between the trees.
Charla let her fire wink out. The moons' light was enough to see by now. This must have been the gap in the canopy they'd been looking for, where the leaves of the trees far above their heads did not quite meet over the path. It was not nearly wide enough to grant them freedom from the forest, but it did afford them a tantalising glimpse of a sky strewn with stars—and a taste of fresh, cool air.
But this path... Something about it made Charla's scales tingle, just like when she'd met the dryads and seen the creature with the crowning antlers. In the moonlight, she could see mist curling up from the forest floor. And when she looked further along the path, she saw something else—another tree marked with a silver rope around its trunk.
A whisper of cold wind whistled down the path. Charla shivered. Someone had put those ropes there—but who, and why, and when? What sapient creature could possibly live here, in this forest of tricksters and monsters?
Lance seemed to be thinking the same thing. "This doesn't look natural... What are those things around the trees? They sure didn't grow there."
"Maybe they're markers," said Nuala, fluttering off Meredy's back and flying towards one of the silver ropes. "You know, to mark the path?"
"Yes, but why?" Lance said impatiently. "Who put them there? Something about this makes me uneasy..."
"Maybe we should—" Meredy started to say, but she never got the rest of her words out.
Just as Nuala reached the tree—just as she stretched out her paw to touch the rope—a flurry of motion exploded above her. She shrieked and jerked back; Meredy screamed. But Charla just gaped. A flock of what looked almost like enormous flying leaves had just burst out of the trees, disturbed from their place on the trunk above the silver rope. There were too many to count, but as they flew out over the path and caught the moonlight, Charla saw that they were moths—moths as big as her whole head, their gossamer wings exactly like huge flat leaves with iridescent silver veins.
They seemed to shimmer beneath the moons, blocking the path with their fluttering bodies, and Charla watched in wide-eyed amazement as they glided over her head. Tiny glistening particles fell from their wings, like flakes of silver snow drifting in the moonlight. She reached out a paw to catch them and they gathered like fine sand in the crevices between her scales.
Charla felt her heart swell; awe settled like a warm flame in the pit of her stomach. Then Meredy uttered a strangled, frightened gasp, and Charla jerked her head up, her heart leaping into her throat.
Someone was standing on the path.
Time seemed to stand still. The flock of moths passed on unnoticed into the darkness of the forest, and beyond their glittering wings they revealed a figure hunched unmoving between the trees. There'd been no warning of its approach; it seemed to have come out of nowhere. For a heart-stopping moment, Charla thought it was some kind of wild animal, maybe a boggart come to make her its prey—but then she saw that it was only small, no taller even than her, and it was wearing clothes. A long sweeping robe covered its hunched body and hooded its face, shadowing it from the moonlight, and Charla was strongly reminded of the moles she'd seen in Warfang.
But whatever it was, it didn't move. It just stood and faced them, the mouth of its hood full of darkness.
Charla gulped.
"Who's there?!" Lance barked, and Charla flinched so hard she almost leapt out of her scales.
As if that had been a signal, the figure suddenly shifted and swayed in place. Then, with a slow shuffling gate, it began to glide over the leaf litter towards them. Charla felt her mouth go dry. She tensed her legs to run, just in case, but her paws seemed to have turned themselves to stone.
"Who are you?" cried Nuala, her voice hoarse and fierce, but the figure still did not reply.
It moved closer, the moonlight that played across its hooded robes failing to reveal its shadowed face. Meredy had slithered around to hide behind Lance, but Charla couldn't move; she opened her mouth to say something, anything, but her pounding heart had rendered her mute. Claws—huge, deadly, sickle claws. Charla could see them curling out from within the figure's gaping sleeves, the weapons of a monster. Her blood ran cold.
Lance shifted himself in front of her, a low growl thundering through his chest. "Show yourself!"
The figure stopped. It gazed upon them for a short, silent moment. Then, without a fuss, it raised its enormous claws and pulled back its hood.
Moonlight fell upon a long slender face with a soft nose, a pair of huge dark eyes, and tawny fur as fine as feathery down upon its cheeks. A pale crown of enormous plate-like scales covered the top of its head and trailed down the back of its neck, disappearing into its robes. It was hardly the face of a monster.
Charla could only stare. She had the strangest feeling that she had seen a creature like this before, but where—and when? Lance seemed to falter, the growl dying in his ribcage, and his head lifted in surprise.
The creature's soft eyes glittered with starlight. "Be calmed, Children of Qilin. I am a friend. I had a feeling I'd be meeting you here."
Her voice was like cool water. There was a hushed silence. Charla held her breath, and her mind travelled back in time to many weeks ago, in the golden halls of the Temple of Warfang, where she had gazed upon a carving etched into the wall. Chelcie's voice echoed through her memories. But it was Lance who spoke aloud.
"You..." he whispered, staring at her like he'd never seen anything quite like her before. "...You're a pangolin."
Just like that, the pangolin smiled.
"Yes," she said. "And I've been waiting for you."
A/N: I like snakes. Has there been a lot of snakes in this story so far? I think so. Never too many snakes.
This is one of those rare chapters where I hardly had to rewrite anything (except for the very end). The next chapter was not so easy. Speaking of which, I've been thinking a lot and trying to change how I think about my fanfics. Ever since I started this story, I've been so caught up on trying to make each separate chapter technically 'perfect' in its own right that I've spent more time rewriting than actually making progress. But I know that's not the way I write best; I write best when I don't think too hard and just write, and don't get caught up on trying to make things perfect. It's impossible to make each single chapter perfect. Attempting to do so has just made my story disjointed and robbed it of some of the dynamic it should have.
Long story short, I'm trying to get myself back to the way I used to write. Maybe chapters will end up slightly less polished, maybe they won't. But my hope is it'll improve the flow and dynamic of the story as a whole. Dunno. At any rate, it should make me write faster if nothing else. That's always a bonus.
Anyway, thanks for reading! I'm glad y'all are still enjoying this. Next chapter shouldn't be too far away.
