Taru’s feet pounded the ground. Branches whipped her hands and face. Thorns caught the fabric over her arms and legs. She dodged and wove through the invisible forest with its unavoidable barriers and wondered when she would come upon Bhaltair. The chattering shadows had receded into the distance, for now, but she hadn’t found Bhaltair yet. Ruskin, too, had fallen silent behind her some time ago. She decided then that, the next clearing she came to, she would stop and catch her breath. The threat was far in the past, by now.  She needed to get her bearings if she was going to catch her friends.

Still, she couldn’t pretend it didn’t worry her how she hadn’t come across the alfar: she had purposely avoided gaps she thought she could squeeze into in case Bhaltair had judged them too small, and there’d been no forks in the path. And how had Ruskin fallen so far behind that she couldn’t hear him any more? 

The trees broke open. So too did the ground. Taru skidded to a stop atop a steep cliff, but her body kept going. She shoved her arms back as her back bowed, belly jutting over the sheer drop, desperate to save herself from falling. Bits of rock and dirt crumbled, tumbling down into the ravine. Her feet slipped with them. Twice, she stumbled back, but it wasn’t enough. The ground gave out and she dropped. 

Her sleeves tore on stone and root as she slid, sure she’d left her stomach at the top. She fell for an age, always reaching out for something that might stop her—something she could grab and hold. She caught a root. Though it burnt as it slipped through her hands, the moment she held it tight enough it came away with her, breaking from its source with a sickening snap that yanked agony deep into her shoulders. She didn’t reach out again.

At the bottom, she flew forward, tumbling farther than any rock, stone, or clod of dirt. The root, on the other hand, skidded out of her grip. It clinked where it stopped.

Taru’s muscles shook as she lay on her back, her shoulders aching and furiously itching. She sobbed a curse as she shifted them, chest heaving with her stuttering breaths. It was unbearable. The pain was unbearable. She tried to pull in a deep breath, but her shuddering throat wouldn’t let her. She swallowed the emotion down, trying to shove it away, but it escaped through her eyes, hot on her skin as it ran, cold when it was gone.

All she wanted…

Did she really have it? Was this it?

Gods, her shoulders hurt. Her head hurt. Her heart hurt, the space beside it pounding with futility. She clutched at it and, with another sob cut off by gritted teeth and screwed up eyes, curled onto her side, tucking her knees close to her chest.

-~*~-

She didn’t know how long she lay there. She had come to the conclusion that time was an illusion, maybe not just here. Maybe that was its nature, and it was just clearer here. In any case, she had no idea if any attempt to measure it would have shown it to have been minutes or hours or days.

She sat up gradually, allowing her aching body the rest it needed between movements. When finally she sat upright, her eyes fell on a glinting shape resting a few paces away beside a gnarled, torn root. She rolled over her knees to crawl towards it. It was a cube of brass and glass, with a burnt out clod of wax that must have been a taper candle at its centre. A lantern. A useless lantern, but a lantern, nonetheless. She crooked a finger in the loop handle on its pyramid roof. It scraped the ground and clinked against itself as she lifted it and sat back, bringing it onto her knees. At her bidding, the door opened with a creak and she glanced up nervously to find that if she had alerted anything, she couldn’t see it. No surprise there.

Dim red light surfaced from the depths of the mirky pool of her memory. She went to shove it back down, but a sudden fluttering in her chest gave her pause: made her wonder. She had lit the lantern that time, hadn’t she? Without a candle, without a match, without the weave—as far as she knew, anyway.

She gnawed on her lips as she stared at the stub of a candle and toyed with the idea of trying to do it again. It was a stupid idea. She wouldn’t know where to begin, besides which she couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t draw every malignant thing in this place right to her. She couldn’t remember how she’d done it the first time. If there was even the slightest chance that, in remembering how to do it, she would remember everything else that had happened at the same time, then she wouldn’t. Instead, she closed the lantern’s door. She used a scrap of torn fabric from her sleeve to tie it to her hip. When she met up with Bhaltair, they could light it. They’d know if it was safe.

Every part of her ached as she climbed to her feet, though nothing gave out and nothing hurt so much that it stopped her in her tracks. She turned to assess the slope she’d fallen down, hoping that there was some way she could climb back up. Her hopes were dashed when her hand sank into dry, shifting dirt. While that explained why the ground had dropped out from under her, it didn’t offer the purchase she needed to get back up. Fearing another landslide, she stepped away and looked around herself, squinting into the darkness for something—gods, anything that might show her which way to go.

Without a path or a signpost, the best option she could think of was to assume Bhaltair hadn’t fallen down the slope and head along the bottom of it until either she could climb back up or the slope lowered to meet her. She turned parallel to it and hobbled towards the trees.

-~*~-

All of her aches had eased into the back of her mind, with some of them having disappeared completely, when Taru finally heard the sound of people talking. Hesitant, she crept towards the sound as quietly as she could, gently toeing and pushing branches from her path before they had a chance to snap under her feet or slap her in the face. There was no light to follow, only sound so—inexperienced as she was—she had to change direction more than once because the voices seemed to change direction at will. No doubt they were bouncing off trees.

When the people sounded as though they were not very far at all, Taru ducked and crept on, her eyes darting around the distant trunks and the canopy, looking for the interruption of a face or a hand: anything that wasn’t a tree.

She found what she was looking for; two people stood very close to one another, one facing her and the other facing the first. The one facing her was mostly hidden behind the shadowy back of the other, though one arm jutted out at an odd angle, as if flailing for emphasis, except there was no flailing. It didn’t move. 

Murmurs persisted beyond them, and Taru rose a little to see two other pairs oddly positioned beyond.

The first pair was on the ground, one paused as if mid-backwards crawl towards the trees with the other looming over them. The second pair was lunging away from the trees, or dancing. Either way, they were entangled in one another, their legs far apart and arms straining.

Taru couldn’t tell which of the six figures the murmuring was coming from, but she was beginning to get an odd feeling, like the skin on the back of her neck was tightening and tugging all her nerves closer. She shivered, and the bracken rustled with her.

She might as well have screamed.

Eyes glinted in the gloom as they turned to her. For a moment she could see the people as they were: not six figures, but three. Not three pairs, but three individuals, fighting the darkness, their feet turned to roots in the ground. All three partners returned to a trio of muffled groans, lazy with exhaustion. 

Their partners were not really partners, but their shadows peeling away from their bodies.

Taru panicked and fled, scrambling loudly through the ferns and over broken branches, leaping over rocks and dodging trees wherever they sprouted. She heard the frantic rumble of the trees rearranging beneath the pounding of her heart and feet. No longer hiding its machinations, the forest launched brambles across her path, branches into her face, and rose rocks under her feet, all of them unfathomably black.

She stumbled on, arms up to protect her face, but it wasn’t long until the shadows of the forest caught her. A whipping vine from a tree looped about her arm and pulled her back. She wrenched free just as another coiled around her throat. She clawed that away as another grabbed her ankle. She fell forward with a yelp. Her face hit the dirt, more than she’d care to admit entering her mouth. She spat it away as the vine crawled higher, then tore at the black tendril until nothing was left. It slithered through the undergrowth, snapping twigs and rustling leaves around her. Moving away from wherever she heard it, she turned a full circle on her hands and knees, eyes darting through the shadows to see where the next one would come from. The next one, however, was a quick and sharp foot to the face.

Taru fell back, turning her head to try and match the turning of the world around her, but she couldn’t keep up. As soon as she thought she was stable, it slipped away again. She swallowed down the growing nausea and rolled onto her stomach, trying to ignore the rocking of the ground as she pulled herself through the undergrowth and into a more open space.

With each new scratching shadow noise, her head jerked to the side, turning to find the source and sending the world spinning before she remembered that she couldn’t. The sounds carried voices, some she knew and others she didn’t. She tried to ignore what they were saying as she pulled herself up with the help of a tree.

Darkness closed in around her: darkness shaped as people.

Suddenly, and with a sound Taru could only compare to the cry of an extremely angry baby, something large and dun flew right by her eyes, whipping her face with cold, animal-scented air. Close behind was a huge, lumbering black creature with glowing pink-red eyes, jet-black horns and white lightning crackling through its static-fluffed fur. Both shapes filled the space between her and the now-frozen shadows until, step by missing step, the shadows slunk back into the forest.

One more time the world turned, and so did Taru. She released what little she had in her stomach onto the ground behind her, then stumbled forward towards the horned creature.

“Kludde,” she gasped, and the kludde stepped closer, the static of her fur releasing with a series of snaps. Taru sunk her hands into the black mass and heaved a sigh of relief at the warmth she felt. “Timing on that, eh? I guess we’re even now,” she croaked, and the kludde tossed her head lightly towards the dun shape a few feet away. Taru blinked at the other creature, hare in body, vampire in tooth, and grouse in tail and wings. “Skvader?” She shook her head, stepping towards it and lowering to a crouch when it turned its head sharply to survey her. “I guess I owe you one.” 

The skvader fixed her with a huge, unimpressed eye.

“Two,” she amended.

Its nose twitched in the air.

“Gods,” she breathed as she straightened. “It really is grim out here on your own,” she asserted, rubbing her tummy in an attempt to soothe it. “I’ve gotta find the elders to fix this place. Do… uh…” She felt a little silly talking to two animals. However, she reasoned, what was she if not also an animal? “Do yous fancy coming with me?”

The kludde turned and nudged Taru’s arm with her nose. The skvader gave her a look that seemed to say she was stupid for even asking.

“Right,” she said, taking a step towards the trees. Her ankle wobbled. She dropped to the ground. “Maybe a quick break first though, yeah?” She offered a light laugh but it broke, tapering off into a desperate whimper.

Kludde stretched her front legs before lying down beside her.

Skvader hopped closer and hunkered down just out of reach of either of them.

Taru turned, hoping to rest her head on the Kludde’s soft side. She hesitated. “Do you mind if I—?”

Kludde rolled onto her other side with a heavy sigh, baring half her belly to Taru, who took the invitation without question, resting her head just under her armpit to hear the reassuring pounding of two slightly out of sync heartbeats.

Today had been far too long.