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12

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Essie opened her eyes calmly from her slumber. She had been sleeping all through the night and not waking to a cold sweat or a pounding heart for the past few days. She pushed herself out of her bed, lit her fire, and then proceeded with her work on her sigils and herbal research.

Her work, sadly, was not as productive as she wanted it to be. Try as she might, Essie could not clearly concentrate on the task at hand. Everything in the world attempted to distract her, even her own thoughts.

Four days.

An entire four days.

It was too long. It was so many days.

If he were coming back, would he not have done so during that first day? Maybe even the second?

By the way he spoke, the hand sized house guest would not be returning to the home of the Wizard of the Wood.

A few months ago, Essie would have been completely content with this decision. She was completely satisfied with her solitary existence. She preferred it. It was why she lived here.

Still…

There was a part of her that listened for the swaying of the bridge clacking against the side of the stone wall as Rylir walked past it. She almost wished she could stop and listen to the peaceful sounds of his sleeping breath in the early morning. It was meditative, and she honestly could say she wanted it.

She liked his questions, from time to time, and that way his eyes squinted as he was trying to concentrate hard on whatever he was doing, whether it be his contraptions or something he was supposed to be studying like the herbs in her garden and their uses.

Could it be?

She… missed him…

Ug!

Essie shoved herself away from her desk and glared at the stack of parchments which were completely blank. The plaguing question of whether Rylir made it safely down the mountain weighed on her mind. Was it possible to be driven insane by something as simple as whether someone was alright or not?

What really plagued her was the fact that the weather had taken a nasty turn for the worst these past two days. Snow fell constantly from the sky and the wind was a bitter cold, beyond what she was accustomed to living high in the mountains here. Had Rylir made it down to the town below before the blizzard set in?

Something needed to be done.

As she sat there by her desk, she made her decision.

Pulling a few of the herbs out from the garden including poppy, salvia, and jimsonweed, she ground them into a paste and applied them to the flat surfaces of four black slate stones she collected from the banks of a nearby lake. She aligned the stones side by side and laid her hands on either side of the palm sized stones.

Muttering the incantation “ostende mihi” over and over and keeping Rylir in the forefront of her mind, she laid her left palm over a blade and cut. She contained the blood in her hand and dripped it methodically over the stones and the smeared herbal substance.

The wizard let her vision unfocus and blur as she stared in the direction of the black slate stones. Her snow-white hair raised, and the smeared substances began to shift and move, dripping across the stone and spreading like a drop of water on cloth until the surfaces of the stones were completely engulfed in an abstract vision of trees and stone.

The vision shifted, closing the distance by a stream Essie was familiar with, which made her heart sink.

It wasn’t a vision of the town.

She couldn’t even see Rylir.

The wizard focused harder on the vision. There was no sign of Rylir anywhere. All she could see was quickly deepening snow.

But then, she noticed one area of the snow that seemed disturbed.

Her body ran frigid cold as she suddenly recognized part of the hood that was on Rylir’s cloak sticking out of the snow.

He was out in this? Rylir was trapped out in the snow? Was he injured? What was he doing by the stream? It was far out of his way if he were trying to make it to the town. Was he ever headed to the town? Or did he just get that horribly lost right outside her front door?

Whatever the case, Essie knew Rylir would not survive this snowstorm. Pulling herself from her vision, she splashed a bit of potion over her palm and wrapped it, knowing she would heal and tend to it soon, and whisked herself to the door.

As she reached for her cloak, however, she hesitated.

He left because she was interfering after all. He left because he wanted to be independent and because she did not have the answers to his questions. She certainly had not pried into the answers he was seeking, and this would be interfering with his choice to leave.

Was this what he wanted?

Essie clenched her fist before snatching her cloak off of the hook and securing it to her body.

Regardless of what Rylir wanted, these past few days showed her that him leaving was far from what she wanted. She didn’t understand why she was feeling this way, but she did know that she cared enough about Rylir as a person to not have him freeze to death alone on the mountainside.

The blast of wind that ripped through her as she opened the door was excruciatingly painful, but this mattered more to her than momentary warmth. Slamming the door behind her, she muttered the same incantation and sprinted through the forest down the mountain to where she believed Rylir was.

The snow pierced her eyes like tiny daggers while every breath made her gasp and shudder. Bringing such cold air into her lungs made her body seize, but she pressed on. Leap after bound, she skidded through the snow until she reached the side of the cliff where the stream began. Her ice shard-colored eyes scanned the terrain desperately for any sign of her small companion.

“Rylir!” she called through the snow dense air. She stumbled forward, feeling her own footing slip and threaten to plunge her face-first into the snow. “Rylir!”

Essie stepped carefully by the banks, shuffling her feet purposefully through the snow to disturb it. The bandage on her left hand was freezing over, sealing the wound she gave herself. Already, her fingertips were growing numb and there were parts of her face that were exposed that were becoming hard to feel.

How long had Rylir been out in this?

“Rylir!” she cried out. The wizard’s heart pounded wildly in her chest as she looked around frantically until she recognized a nearby cluster of trees.

Then…

There!

There was a patch of disturbed snow near the base of one of the trees just like she’d seen before. Stepping carefully, she crouched and began sifting her fingers through the snow, brushing it away with careful precision until her fingertips brushed against something that gave way. Pushing further, she felt a small lump curled in on itself.

Tenderly, she scooped up the handful of snow and turned it over, revealing the tightly bundled, frostbitten figure of Rylir. He was holding eerily still. It was obvious he was unconscious or barely present, but it wasn’t until she muttered her incantations to amplify sound that she heard his skipping heartbeat.

“Rylir. Rylir! Can you hear me?”

His features swinged and his body shuddered involuntarily.

A warm rush of relief filled her heart, and Essie could not even begin to describe her emotional state, though she did note the frozen streaks of liquid coming from her eyes as she pried her cloak open and pressed Rylir’s frozen form against her chest.

“Hang on Rylir. I’ve got you,” said Essie as she ran faster than she ever thought possible back to her home. Heart pounding with panic, the only reassuring sign of life she received from Rylir was the faintest squirm against her chest.

He was alive, but what would be his demeanor toward her when – yes, when – he recovered.