by Holly Hook
It did. A bug jumped across the surface, leaving its own ripples that masked mine. I held my breath, which was easy as the stench was overwhelming. The water was cold. I realized that as I waited. The air was even getting colder. More intense. It filled with prickles. Alric was close.
And then the man in black and Mother both stepped into the clearing.
"She has left," Mother told him. "She has run away. How to you expect me to find her?"
Alric wore his hood lowered over his face. At least it might block his view of me. My limbs froze. This water was sucking the life out of me. I couldn't stay in here much longer. I'd never felt colder in my life.
"She couldn't have gone far," Alric told her. "I need to dispose of her. There have been too many incidents where I should have won, but a story has always come back and triumphed. I had a very bad experience with this happening only days ago. I want to make sure that there is no chance of this story coming back after what you did."
The two of them stopped where I had been standing less than a minute before. The water remained calm, but something slimy brushed against my leg.
I bit in a scream. The creature passed, likely mistaking my legs for tree roots. I had to stay still. Things that lurked in here could bite, like that rat.
Mother turned to face Alric. Her face was paler than ever. Her eyes, darker and beadier. She looked even worse than she had before I had climbed down. "You will not dispose of Rae. There is no need. I chased away that boy trying to take her from the tower."
Alric advanced on her. "I will," he said. "Do you not realize, Gothel, that you did as the story wanted? In the story, you make the boy fall from the tower and then thorns take out his eyes. It looks like that has happened here. He is still alive, and if one of them doesn't die, the story still has a chance of having that same ending it always has. The two of them get together and they live happily ever after with no choice. Do you want Fable to stay trapped in this cycle forever, with no free will? With no choice? I am doing what is best for Fable by ending this madness."
"With your rule," Mother told him.
"Gothel, dear, I know you would want to rule if you could," Alric told her. "Don't deny that. It is your nature and the nature of all of us filled with dark magic. I believe you are upset because you can't hold back your darkness without the power of the girl."
I sucked in a breath and held down a cough. It was true, then. That part was real.
Mother glanced around the forest and her shoulders sagged with relief. "It looks as if the story has already ended the wrong way," Mother said. "This part of Fable is now dark. Isn't that what you wanted? Why worry, Alric? This entire area is yours. And when I find Rae, I will send her far away to where that boy can never find her. What about that lone tower in the desert that one in the hidden valley? You of all people know which one I speak of."
"That is also in the story," Alric said. "The boy finds her in the desert in that place. He will wander there. And I will wait for him."
The cold seeped right into my chest. Henry was still alive, but he might not be for long.
"Just because a place has gone dark does not mean it is permanent," Alric continued. He waved Mother towards the trees. "I think she must have gone this way. There is a small deer path here and I'm sure she is trying to get as far from the castle as she can. If I were a scared girl, I would have run that way."
"You can't kill her," Mother said. But Alric was already walking into the trees. And then the two of them continued on, Mother pleading with Alric in a low voice.
I waited in the water for a long time.
The desert.
Henry would head there if we were part of a story. But I didn't know where the desert was.
I waited a long time for them to return, but nothing happened. My limbs were going numb, and it was an effort to move my legs again. I waded back towards the clearing and climbed into the dead grass, dripping stinking water. I had gone almost numb to the smell, too. It was like the time I had smelled the lilacs that Mother brought up to the tower so many times I couldn't detect their scent any more. Only this time, the lack of smell was welcome.
My muscles cramped as if I had sat in one place for too long. I stretched and walked in the direction Mother and Alric had come from. I had to head away from him at all costs. Mother wouldn't kill me, at least, but she would hide me somewhere far away. But Alric—
Mother didn't want me harmed. That had to come first.
I walked faster, holding my sopping wet braid. My wet skirt slowed me down and caught on outstretched branches. Life crept back into my legs as impossible as it was in this place. I felt like I was walking through dusk, the forest here was so dark.
But then I burst back out in a clearing and my tower stood there, tall as ever.
I had rounded back to where I had come from.
The clearing stood desolate and without life. Mother's garden had turned to mushy, rotten vegetation and thorns. The brambles had climbed higher up the tower and the tallest of them was ready to reach in through the window. Darkness was invading it now.
Was it because I had left? Perhaps my light magic had held it back. But now the evil could enter.
My heart ached at the sight of my home. It struggled to rise above the growing brambles, but the green thorns poked in through the window, searching for victims. A brick fell from the tower and landed somewhere in the stabbing death. And then another, and another.
The tower was crumbling.
I backed away. Bricks rained down, hammering the ground below. Dust flew.
And the entire tower fell.
I screamed again and backed away, but the roar of stone on stone masked the sound and I dodged into the cover of the trees. The roof toppled down towards me as if it were a giant, accusing finger angry that I left it to the darkness.
I hugged a dead tree trunk as the tower landed.
The roar made my ears ring. Dust rose everywhere, obscuring the tower from view. I held my breath as the sound reverberated through my mind and dust clung to my arms, to my wet clothes. Coughing and gagging, I glanced down. I was gray, as gray as the dead soil, as something that had crawled out of the ground.
And the tower lay there in ruins.
The brown shingles of the ceiling lay crushed under gray bricks, some of them still covered in moss on one side. The dank, earthy smell of the tower's inside mixed in with dust and despair. Tears filled my vision as I choked on the dust. This couldn't be my home. This was just a pile of rubble. I had spent my life here. This couldn't be real.
My tower.
Gone.
Chapter Seven
I blinked tears and dust out of my vision as the air cleared. Tendrils of dust fled into the trees and drifted into shadows. Bricks. Piles and piles of bricks. Our iron stove stood there in the middle of it all, its chimney bent in defeat. Our red rug lay tangled among the rubble and a single, dying yellow flower poked out from a pair of bricks.
Everything I had ever known lay here, broken.
I reached for the flower, but before I could touch it, it shriveled as if it didn't want to live anymore. Its yellow faded to a sickening green and then to a deadly black.
Nothing remained.
My home and life had fallen.
Only darkness took its place.
I must be dreaming. I turned in a circle. No color all around. Just dark greens and grays and browns and blacks. The dust had even stolen all the color from my dress and my hair. My braid hung in a wet mess on top of the bricks. I picked it up, coiled it, and wrung out the swampy water that remained. Even I blended in well here now.
The noise.
Mother would come back and investigate and Alric would follow.
I had to get out of here.
The trail.
It still snaked into the forest, away from the ruined garden which now lay half buried under rubble. I could still follow it. If Mother was right, it led to a village.
And people.
They coul
dn't be as bad as Alric, right? What if some of them were like Henry?
I had to try for it. And if I were Henry, I would have gone this way.
Holding my braid close to my chest, I ran down the trail, gasping for air. It seemed much more stale now, thicker and harder to breathe. But the further I got away from the rubble, the better it got. The choking dust got replaced with the stench of swamp, but it was duller now and less noticeable.
I ran until I got so tired that I had to slow to a struggling walk. My sides felt ready to split open. I glanced behind to see I had left the rubble well behind me. Mother might even break into our clearing now to find the destruction. I wondered if Alric was punishing her for not allowing him to kill me. Maybe he'd made the tower fall.
Or perhaps I had. By leaving it.
The darkness hadn't invaded until I left.
I had to keep going.
Ahead was the rat tree. It hadn't changed at all. The hole seemed smaller now or was it because I was taller? Something scurried inside and I hurried past it, expecting a bite on my leg any second.
The remnants of the magical plant lay there, crushed, next to the trail.
I stopped, making sure that nothing was coming out of the rat tree. After the tower falling and the deadly brambles, the rat didn't seem that terrifying anymore. Just yesterday, I would have been too scared to stop here.
Just yesterday, I'd been too scared to climb down the side of the tower again.
Now I had done it without a thought, but only because I'd feared something bigger and scarier.
I leaned down to the flowers. Before its death, this plant been healing the surrounding ground, turning it back to light. The grass circling it was still green. But now the rampion lay as crushed and ruined as everything else. I picked one of the crumbled flowers, which barely held onto its purple color. It was still more vibrant than the rest of the forest, even in death.
Had this flower remained alive, it might have healed the dark spot.
And stopped all of this from happening.
I tucked the dried blossom into my pocket and moved on. Mother and Alric would be back at the tower now for sure, wondering if I had anything to do with its collapse. I didn't want to be around for that.
I left the pond of swampy water behind along with the dead rampion.
Beyond this point was a world I had never seen but only heard stories about. It was like stepping into another world.
The trees remained as dark as ever, even where the dark spot had ended before. This hadn't all been bad before. Once, this area had been alive.
And then I spotted a rat ahead.
Even though I had grown, it was just as big as the one I'd seen as a child, and it was chewing on a piece of bloody meat. I caught a flash of white. A rabbit. The rat was busy chowing down on an innocent rabbit. It might have even been one I'd seen hopping around the tower so many times this summer. Over time, I'd thought of the rabbits as friends who came to visit, as much as Mother hated them getting around the garden.
I hurried past. The rabbit was dead. Beyond help. The rat glanced at me with black eyes that held a trace of angry red, then went back to its meal. It ignored me, distracted. I checked and saw I was still gray and damp even though some dust was drying. I wanted nothing more than a bath, but our bath was still in the rubble of the tower.
And the water here was not fit to bathe in.
So I kept going. I kept my ruined hair cradled in my arms and the dead flower in my pocket. I had nothing else.
Numbness filled me as I wandered.
The trail remained narrow, but passable and made of packed dirt. Sometimes the trees drew close, and I had to step over roots, but other times they backed away from the trail and I could get through with no branches slapping at me for a few blissful minutes. Sometimes I had to dodge the edges of ponds, other times I only had to go through clearings of yellow, dead grass. At one point I passed a rotting tree stump with white mushrooms growing all over it, but something about them made me give them a wide berth. They were too bright and something about them screamed danger.
The dread feeling inside me faded the more I walked. I was getting used to it or my entire body had filled with the feeling and I couldn't tell the difference anymore. The trail sloped downhill, and I passed large gray bricks that stuck out of the ground. Remnants of ancient buildings. An old town, maybe. They reminded me of the bricks that made up the tower, only larger—much larger. Mother told me there were ruins out in these woods. People had lived here in the past.
And then I spotted the bright red flowers and the bright green of the brambles growing alongside them. My pulse quickened, and I hurried past as the brambles moved, slithering closer and opening those bloody blossoms. They had already snared a fox which lay tattered and broken at the bottom of the thorns.
A cry escaped my throat.
I broke into another full run and sucked in air as the brambles slithered in anger behind me. I couldn't linger near those. That was Rule Number One of being out in the scary world. No brambles. No thorns. Or maybe this was Rule Number Two. The first rule had to do with staying away from rats.
I felt there would be a lot more, and I'd need to learn them to survive.
The slithering faded, and I glanced back. The brambles had settled back around the bricks and gone back to constricting the dead fox. I had spotted no living animals out here other than the ravens and the rats. Everything that couldn't turn to evil was dying out here, dying from thorns and teeth.
I wouldn't think about that right now. I had to get out of this forest first before I decided what to do next. My stomach still rumbled, and I was sure I would starve out here. We had left all the food back in the tower. It had all decayed by now, just like the garden and my hope.
* * * * *
I walked forever.
The dread feeling had gone so numb now I couldn't even feel it unless I paid attention. The forest stayed as thick as ever and I only passed one of those ancient blocks occasionally. Most of them had the brambles growing around them, but they were so far back from the path so they never noticed me. I even stepped over some stone slabs that looked like they might have once been stone roads or paths but were now long taken over by the forest. I was walking over remnants of some ancient history here. Mother had told me that Fable changed over long periods of time, but here was the evidence.
But there was no Henry anywhere.
He must not have come this way.
I didn't dare call his name in case Alric was following. There was no way I could alert him or anything else out here about my presence. I still held onto the hope he had reached the village, but that was fading fast. But I also couldn't turn back. I would be no good to Henry dead.
The forest didn't clear until I had grown so hungry that my head was hurting and my legs were tired and shaking. I had used up more energy than I ever had walking out here. How did Mother do this every day? She was so much stronger than me.
And the village was nowhere in sight. I hadn't seen another person out here since I had left the tower.
The dust fell off my dress the longer I walked and some yellow popped out again. It seemed brighter than ever out here and the dust and grime was coming off my hair, too. The gold strands sparkled with a faint life and I kept it cradled and away from the ground. I felt cleaner the more I walked as impossible as it seemed in this place. And I was drying. Everything but the inside of my dress had dried now even though I passed swamp after swamp full of black water. The trail never sank below any inky surface, so I could keep my bare feet dry.
But then the air grew darker.
And darker.
When I stepped into yet another clearing full of tall, dead, and yellow grass, I eyed the sky. The gray was turning to black. Night was approaching and I couldn't spot a single star, nor the fiery glow of the sun as it made its way to the horizon. The entire sky remained a slate like the one Mother had brought me from the village to draw on once. Only sadder. Much sadder. The m
oon wasn't even out.
Night out here would be very scary.
Where would I sleep?
I searched around the clearing. The trail continued, sloping downward into more forest. I didn't want to go in there where brambles could sneak up on me at night. I'd never see them or anything else coming. Or rats. Maybe I could get up into a tree until morning but then the ravens might get angry. However, I couldn't see any of them around. Perhaps they were all hanging around Alric, waiting to follow his orders.
That made little sense. Unless people with dark magic could control dark creatures?
Tree, then.
I rushed over to the nearest one, a thick oak that could hide me for the night. There was no way I wanted to stay on the ground if Alric came looking this way. I was sure the man would have no trouble walking through the night. He embodied darkness. He had nothing to fear out here.
And he wanted to make all of Fable like this.
I stopped at the base of the tree. My arms trembled from carrying my hair around all day. I let it drop to the dead grass, relieved to be free of it. The first branch was well above my head, but also inside the canopy and not visible from the trail. And I had no way to get up to it.
Or did I?
I took my hair and held the end up.
And tossed it up into the branch.
I missed, retrieved my hair, and threw again. And again.
