Faithful Pebble
Part Eighty-Two
"No such thing?"
The words reverberated between the two travelers. They journeyed across the meadow repeating like a whisper in a church, or a gasp at a wedding. But still they faded. Quickly, the echo, the whisper, the words ebbed away lost, but not forgotten. In light of the hut, before its brilliant sunlight, the conversation dropped.
A moment passed.
And then another.
And then, before he could catch himself, the wanderer moved. His feet slipped stepping into the sun. In the meadow, his sac shone brilliantly as white as the morning and as light as the clouds floating silently above. Through the trees, he could see them, their fluff, their height, their warmth. His eyes drowned in the image of the sky and the image of its secret treasure. His gaze drank in the portrait of the famed fabled hut, Snow White's refuge, sanctuary and eventual tomb.
In silence, he took in its battered door, its shattered windows. As he neared the ring of flowers, ivory and violet, only then did he notice the wooden logs lying haphazardly across them. They were a bridge, he easily guessed. This thought stopped his feet. At this, he eyed the tall grass around them. He spied their roughly chopped edges and the rot eating through the bark. Why were they there? The wanderer wondered. More importantly, who put them there? Once more, he pondered the logs' decay, their gathering moss and figured it'd been sometime since their laying. The wanderer scratched his head. He licked his lips. He looked back at the girl huddled deathly still in the shadows of the woods. He paused.
Instantly, the mysterious bridge faded from his mind, the wanderer. Seeing the way she stood frozen in space, immediately his thoughts departed as he stared at the tremor of her hands, the quickening of her breath. Even in the surrounding darkness, her darkness, even without the watch's glittering power, the wanderer could see her fright. Pebble was apprehensive, scared even though he did not know why. He had an inkling though, a hunch. A guess tickled his mind, one that only bordered on the truth.
But Pebble, she knew the reason. She thought much on it when she was in the well before the wanderer came, played with it the day he lifted her out, orchestrated it until he followed her through the woods, and now here it was. Here she was. "I thought I wanted to see it," she whispered.
If she meant to do so out loud, he didn't know. The wanderer was uncertain and yet he had heard her. In silence, he listened and waited. In silence, he hoped she'd speak again. But words never came. Just steps.
I want to tell you, but I can't tell you, so I won't. You'll just have to wait. Believe this is hurting me more than you. (^_^) - Calla