Faithful Pebble

Part Eighty-Three

One
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Three

In silence, the wanderer hoped Pebble would speak. But words never came. Just steps.

One
Two
Three

Her steps wavered. Her feet faltered. They stumbled as they inched forward one foot at a time down the hill's slightly rambling slope. They crept passed her speechless partner and whispered over the rotting logs. Hidden amongst the ring of flowers, they were like snakes floating in a stream at dusk. They blossomed thoughts, sprouted questions. Yet, he left them alone, the wanderer. In favor of the girl, he tucked them away. He carefully watched as she wandered. As she crossed, her hood didn't tilt. It didn't bristle or bow. The brown and coarse and tattered fabric drooped stale and lifeless like the logs, like her silence, like the wanderer's curiosity, like the sun's basking light. Even the woods seemed stunned in its stillness. To the wanderer, it seemed the trees knew something the sojourner did not. The sun did too as did the surrounding breeze. Each held its breath watching the scene play out before them. But speechless as they were, the sun, the trees, the forest, the flowers, they each kept their secrets while the wanderer could only stare. He wished he knew what they knew. He hoped he'd learn.

He waited, the wanderer. In silence, he steadied the logs as the girl descended into the grass, into the small meadow on the other side. He trailed her steps over the serpent like beams and down into the hill's quiet basin. There the small cottage slept forgotten in grass as tall as the sky. Tender green shoots bowed under their own weight. The breeze played with them as he climbed shredded stairs to a dilapidated porch. He passed drooping irises' while he gazed through cracked windows, passed a shattered door that swung open like the wing of a dying butterfly. Its rot made the wooden panel light and ineffective. It no longer kept the outside out nor the inside in. He could smell the decay long before he pried it open.

The wanderer stepped inside. He took a breath and stared. The house was ransacked, the floors dirty, the furniture broken from time and neglect. But that did not draw his attention. For a second it did Pebble, but the wanderer did not see that. Through her hood, through her veil, through her coarse and dark and brown stale covering, this the wanderer did see. Her cloak, which hid everything from him, couldn't hide where her gaze ultimately landed, where it ultimately stayed. His gaze too found it. He just stared at it. For a moment… maybe two…

One Step
Two Steps
Three.

Pebble moved closer. Her hood tilted up to where two feet dangled, up to where once delicate hands swayed gently beneath fabric just as brown and coarse and long and hooded as the girl's below. She stared at the hood which draped like a shroud over a face. The face was seven years rotted and many decades older. Pebble lifted a hand, a scarred and black and bloody thing, but then it stopped. But then it drooped. She couldn't touch it, nor reach out. Still, she raced. In seconds, before the wanderer had time to blink, the girl moved. To the rope tied from the corpse to the ceiling to the chair tipped over beneath it, they fiddled, her hands, her claws. Her words came out in panicked gasps. "Get her down… Please.

"Please!
"Please!
"Please!"

That word got him moving.

"Please!" The wanderer snapped his eyes from the display down to the girl kneeling at his feet. Quickly, his steps followed, his hands followed, his strong and stout and green and brown, his softly deft fingers wrapped around her own. With ease, he pulled them steadily away.

"I can't undo the knot," she mourned.

With compassion, he loosened the rope.

"Please, just…"

And with a silence that was stark and stifling, heavy with experience and understanding, the wanderer lowed the rope until the body was on the ground, in a grave, covered in flowers painted purple and white and blue, the colors of a stream at dusk.

This is the new chapter even though the numbering says it isn't. I fixed the double chapters 68 and 69. Then, I fixed the chapter numberings. That's why it seems off. Sorry about that. - Calla