by Daryl Banner
To that, Arrow croaks two weak words: “Teleport … charm.”
0256 Wick
The wind is very strong today. That’s okay, so am I.
The woods grow thick the farther Dran and Wick journey out. When they cross the West River, Wick’s reddish tunic catches on an unseen twig beneath the water, and it takes him seven fierce, grunting tugs before it’s wrenched free, leaving a big tear.
It leaves him stunned for a second, remembering another article of clothing he once tore.
“Should’ve gone shirtless like me.” Dran lends Wick a hand to help him out of the river (and out of his thoughts), the bed of which sucks at Wick’s feet, making each movement a tiresome labor. “We still have the woods to cut through before we reach the rift. C’mon.”
“How big is this rift, again?”
“Aye,” grunts Dran with a smirk. “I was pretty sure you’d not seen the rift in person, otherwise I wouldn’t have taunted you so much and taken you out here in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just come, Wicker. I’ll show you.”
“My name’s Wick, Dranner.”
“When we finally break through this sexual tension between us and I claim you as my boyfriend, we’ll already have cute names for each other.” Dran’s jape is dry and biting. He eyes Wick over his shoulder as they pursue their way through the thicker woods. “Are your lips soft like a lady’s? It could work if I close my eyes.”
His teasing is endless. “You know, your face is quite handsome,” remarks Wick, “if I close my own eyes and think of another, that is. Like, any other face in the world.”
Dran snorts at that. “It isn’t my face that’s the skill I boast of. It’s my tongue, and I can’t think of a thing to do to you with it if you haven’t a hole between your legs.”
“Oh, I can,” Wick taunts back, and the boys laugh as they push through the trees.
The farther they go, Wick realizes the wind is picking up out here for the wrong reason. He glances upward and finds too many clouds in the sky. “Dran,” he calls out, then points upward. Dran only gives a shrug and shouts back, “It’ll pass. So many little showers out here. Even after all this time, you’re still not used to them.” But Wick isn’t convinced it’s so little a shower, watching as the darkness in the sky swells and spreads like a great, glorious blanket. Even in the face of danger, I’m constantly awed by the breadth of the sky out here in the Oblivion. It is infinite, and nothing hovers in the way.
This must be what a Lifted sky looks like, every single day.
What Athan enjoyed, every morning, every evening, every storm.
The trees soon break into a clearing that inclines to the west, through which Dran takes the lead. Wick follows him, his own legs cramping from the effort of them hiking uphill. He is nearly out of breath in just ten short minutes of scaling it. Soon, the way is made more difficult when the rain starts tickling their backsides with icicle fingers, making the ground slick and muddy in seconds. Then the clearing ends, and they’re ascending through trees and thick brush once again.
“Please,” Wick grunts as he braces himself against a tree. “Tell me the rift is soon. Tell me it isn’t another day’s journey up this fucking hill.”
“Hey, you wanted to get beyond the rift, so here we go,” Dran argues back. “I never said it’d be easy.”
“You never said it’d be this fucking exhausting.”
“Aye. You actually may have a point. I do at times forget about your second Legacy of needing sleep.”
“No, it isn’t my need for sleep, and my sleeping isn’t a second Legacy. Needing to sleep isn’t the same as being exhausted.”
“Are you sure? You’ve been sleeping earlier than usual lately—”
“Well, yes, in some part, they’re related, but …” Wick rolls his eyes. “Can we talk about the intricacies of sleeping another time? I’ve barely the breath to simply breathe, let alone make words on a tiresome subject.”
“I only see it as education. You’re educating me.” Dran comes to him and slaps a hand on his back, then encourages him farther up the wooded hill. “We don’t have much longer to go, in truth.”
Wick’s original excitement has long since died. Even if they do reach the rift soon, they’ll have no energy left to make their way across it and do any decent exploring on the other side. Maybe this was all a terrible idea to begin with, and I was too arrogant to listen to Dran’s and the others’ warnings.
“Nearly there.” Dran still has an arm around Wick as they push up the hill. The rain grows heavier on their backs, joined by rumbles of threatening thunder like war drums in their ears. Two times Wick loses his footing on the slick, muddy incline, and two times Dran is there to hold him up.
Then there seems to be no more trees ahead of them. In ten paces, the two stop. When Wick realizes that in two more steps there is no more ground, he backs away, his heart jumping through his body in terror. Once again, he’s dropped of jaw as he stares out at a thing Dran has taken so much effort in bringing him to.
The rift is not exactly what he was expecting.
“Aye, do you see the problem now?” asks Dran with a sneer.
The rift is an enormous canyon that must be several miles wide, and impossibly deep. If Wick takes two more steps, he will plunge so far downward, he doubts he’d land in half a day’s time. The canyon’s floor is a multitude of grass in ten shades of green and yellow, tiny streams that worm their way through it, and trees of every size and breed, boasting of reds and greens and even purple here and there. It is a feast for the eyes.
And it terrifies Wick. “What the fuck is out there?”
“I think that’s the point, isn’t it?” Dran still has an arm around Wick’s back. His grip has tightened since Wick’s jerk backwards. “It is impossible to know. The world is enormous. Vast. Too vast for us to ever know what’s truly beyond our tiny piece of Oblivion here.”
“It’s not Oblivion. None of it is. It’s … It’s the very same planet our Ancients nurtured. The very same planet our Ancients lived in.”
“And ruined,” adds Dran through the noise of rain that still falls all around them. “I suspect … aye, actually, the whole lot of Gaea suspects … that the world we destroyed and then hid our cowardly selves away from has been reborn over the thousand or so years we’ve been hiding behind the Wall of Atlas. Look with your own eyes, Wick. The forests, there looks to be twenty different kinds. The air … take a deep, deep breath, Wick, and taste that air. The vastness of what’s out there …”
“All I taste is rain at the moment,” Wick confesses. He takes yet another step away from the cliff. The ground is still too slippery to trust himself standing close to that edge. Even deep in the valley, he sees whirls of fog and mist playing in the rain, which must stretch on for miles and miles beyond his view.
“When we break down that Wall,” Dran goes on, “and we will, we most certainly will, then Wick, I propose we direct Atlas’s eyes outward. Imagine a world with more than just one city. Imagine a world with ten cities.”
“Ten Atlases,” murmurs Wick, struggling to picture it. Atlas has been his entire world, the one and only place on the whole planet where humans live. What if we were wrong? What if there are others out there already?
“Aye, try fifty. A hundred. A thousand cities like Atlas. Do you even know how large the world is? The Ancients did. The greedy lot of them measured and portioned the damn world out for themselves. Countries, they called them. Tens of thousands of times bigger than Atlas, my friend. At least. That world is tens of thousands of Atlases.”
“Greedy. They … They were greedy.” Wick steps away.
Dran watches as Wick braces himself against the nearest tree, which is too far out of view to see the valley anymore. Wick is sure, at once, that he’s seen enough. We can’t get beyond the rift, he then realizes, understanding the humorous, almost mocking tone of Dran whenever he spoke of it. The rest of the world is the rift �
� and it’s more land than any of us can hope to explore in a thousand lifetimes.
“We won’t die in Atlas,” Dran calls out to him over the noise of the pouring rain. “Neither will our friends and loved ones in that big city, which looks so awfully small out here. It’s beyond Oblivion …” He points. “It’s beyond Oblivion where the future of humanity lies. Of that fact, I am absolutely certain.”
Lightning flashes as bright as an explosion followed by a crack of thunder that shakes the earth beneath their slippery, muddied feet. “Of another thing I’m certain,” adds Wick tensely. “If we don’t head back now, the river will flood too much for us to cross.”
Dran glances off into the distance once more. Perhaps it’s been a long time since he’s been to the rift himself. He drinks in the sight of it like a favorite beverage. “We could camp under a cluster of trees until the storm passes. After all, you wanted to forage out here for a bit, didn’t you? Look for more resources?”
“Yes, but that was before I knew the sky was going to split open over our heads today. I know the way here, now. We’ll come back and take as much of a look over the rift as we please next time. For now, we have to head back.”
Another bark of thunder crashes over their heads. All the trees are swaying about them, their rustling branches and leaves hissing at the tops of their wet heads.
Dran sighs. “Alright, then. Let’s fuck off.”
Downhill, the way is far, far easier, but also twice as slippery. Each step is carefully planted to ensure they don’t slide the rest of the way down the precarious, muddy landscape. Wick’s calves burn and his ankles ache by the time they reach the thick woods again at the bottom of the hill. Through blinding rain, thick brush, and all the whispers of bending trees that sound like furious spirits spitting curses at them, Dran and Wick push on as fast as they can.
At once, Dran stops. Wick nearly crashes into his back. “Why the fuck did you stop?” Wick is about to protest, until his eyes zero in on the thing before them.
A feral dog.
Sometimes called a wolf. Sometimes called a snarl. Sometimes called the Fanged Horror—and for a good reason. The animal, which Wick has heard others refer to as female regardless of their actual sex, which isn’t always so easy to tell, has straggly, wet hair the color of obsidian, tall hairy grey ears, and two beady eyes. She looks as if she hasn’t eaten in days. She stands ten paces away.
“Don’t move,” warns Dran. “Wolves never travel alone. Eyes, Wick. Use your eyes.”
The rain punches the ground all around them, muting his usual senses. Still, Wick scouts the woods in every direction.
It’s not good news. “Another,” hisses Wick in his friend’s ear.
“How many?”
“One.” Wick blinks and looks again. Oh, fuck. “Three.”
“One just became three …?”
“Four. They blend in with the trees. Five wolves in total.” Wick turns about. “On all sides. The feral dogs have us surrounded. Dran, what the fuck do we do?”
“Weapons, fool. Draw your weapon.”
Both of them pull free their stone daggers from their sheaths. Wick holds his tightly, thinking about how he was just using this sharp, stone dagger to cut his hair and shave his face not a week ago.
This same dagger might now pierce a feral dog’s heart.
The animals stand perfectly in place, eerily watching them with no sign of attack, motionless as dark, furry statues. They don’t growl. They don’t circle. They just sit there and stare, blending in with the trees and brush so well, Wick has to look twice at each.
And stare and stare and stare. “Why aren’t they moving?” asks Wick, turning his face from wolf to wolf, unsure which one to give his attention to. Two of them appear to have come closer. Or is that just his eyes playing with him? “Dran, I think they’re getting closer.”
“Don’t attack yet. Don’t attack.”
Wick feels Dran’s body shaking against his own, standing back-to-back as they are, daggers brandished. “Will these even harm the wolves if we throw them?”
“Yes,” Dran answers, “but you won’t throw yours. If you throw and miss, you’ll be a snack that can’t bite back. Careful, Wick. We’re going to start moving.”
“Moving? What?”
“See that hole where there isn’t a wolf?”
Wick turns his head. He sees it. “Yes.”
“When I say go, we’re going to make a run for it, right between them. We are very close to the river.”
“Dran. I don’t like this.”
“The second they start snapping their jaws and licking teeth, we are finished.” He nudges Wick’s back. “Be ready. Once we run, we don’t stop, neither of us. I won’t leave you behind.”
“Not yet.”
“We have to. Wick, get ready.”
“Dran.” He holds his dagger so tightly, his fingers cramp. The feral dogs look so hungry, each of them. Their heads are bowing, one by one, staring at the two humans through the tops of their heads. They’re getting closer, too, but I can’t see it. They stop advancing when I look. “Dran, not yet, not yet.”
“GO!”
In an instant, Dran and Wick plunge through the trees between two of the feral dogs. In that same instant, all five dogs break into a sprint. Wick hears and knows nothing but the slapping of wet grass and mud beneath his feet, of branches and twigs as they sweep past his face, of tree trunks he slaps as he thrusts his way forward. Rain swirls in his ears. Wind blasts past his eyes.
The dogs are a silent, impending death upon their heels.
And then they reach the river, and Dran and Wick come to an abrupt and very unfortunate stop. The river has swelled to twice its width, and its waters are charging hungrily. One missed step or slip of the foot, and the river will take Dran and Wick away, drowned or separated or dragged far, far away from home.
Both of them turn their backs to the water and face the five feral dogs, who have all come to a stop ten paces before them once again, except now they are all on their feet, and this time, their jaws snap and their teeth show.
“The river …”
“I know,” snaps Dran. In his nervousness, black has bled from his eyes in waves, running down his cheeks and over his lips.
He doesn’t know, nor care, if he’s accidentally doing the same. “We need to cross. We may be better swimmers than the dogs.”
“Or we may drown.” Dran slaps a hand to his waist, then grunts with frustration. “I lost my spare dagger. Fuck. FUCK!”
Wick’s heart beats so fast, he worries he might throw it right up. The noise of the storm and the river crashing behind them is so loud, it’s torture to his ears. He can barely hear his own thoughts.
But the one that keeps repeating is Dran’s words from before: We won’t die in Atlas. No, indeed, they won’t; they’ll die right here in the jaws of five hungry Fanged Horrors.
Wick reaches down and grabs a rock from the riverbank. With a grunt, he throws it at the first wolf he sees and shouts, “AWAY!”
The wolf dodges the stone easily, then bares her fierce white teeth and growls back.
Fuck.
Dran takes up the same idea. He reaches for a stone by his feet, kneeling for one instant.
The next instant, two of the wolves charge forth.
“DRAN!”
He rises and lifts his dagger just in time to ward off one of them, but then gets tackled by the other.
Blindly, Wick thrusts his dagger at the wolf now standing atop Dran. The wolf parries, but it’s just enough of a distraction for Dran to regain his footing and push the beast off of him. She falls into the water where she begins to kick, scrambling for something with her paws to hold on to as the current pulls at her.
Wick is slammed to the ground on his back in the next instant by a wolf he did not see coming. He screams out and grabs the wolf by her chest, holding her an inch from his face where her jaws snap and spit and snap again, eating the air before his nose.
He’s already weak. He’s losing strength by the second. The will to survive is stronger, however, and when Wick next thrusts his hand up to meet the wolf’s throat, his dagger meets it first, and the wolf ceases her fighting at once, life stolen from her.
When the wolf tumbles off of his body, he finds his dagger too deep in her to easily be pulled out, stuck. He tries and tries, but the handle slips from his grip, wet from rain and blood.
He looks up just in time to see a big purple ball hurtling toward his face.
What the—?
The ball explodes against his chest, covering him in a sticky, sweet, tangy, aromatic juice. Is Dran fighting with fruit now?? When Wick turns, he finds Dran wrestling with another wolf, now atop her and fumbling for his dagger, which he has dropped.
The next instant, the back of Dran’s head is slammed with a purple fruit, too, which comes out of nowhere. It explodes over him, the juice splattered across his hair and the back of his neck. The force makes him fall off of the wolf, who breaks free and races to join her brethren, scattered about the quickly flooding riverbank.
“Dran!” Wick shouts through the rain, then looks about for the source of the flying purple fruit.
And that’s when he sees it.
Wick freezes in place, terrified.
From the brush charges forth a feline twice the size of any of these feral dogs. Her paws—each the size of Wick’s face—slash claws of steel at the wolves when she pounces. The wolves have scattered, howling and snapping their jaws as they retreat, but one unlucky wolf—the one nearest Dran—is now beneath the great feline beast.
Wildercat.
She opens her jaws mightily—each of her teeth is the length of a finger—and sinks them into the wolf’s tender, furry neck, silencing the helpless animal forever. Blood bursts forth, mixing with rain and mud and river as the Wildercat makes a feast of the feral dog.
Dran has escaped to Wick’s side, the pair of them watching as the Wildercat dines. Neither of them move. Neither of them make for the river or the woods or anywhere.
