A Traveler's Fate (The Journals of Krymzyn Book 3)

by BC Powell

  Maintaining a slow pace to search for Tela, we travel to the cavern. Once we’re in the gully, the others wait outside while I creep through the tunnel. I call out Tela’s name several times but don’t receive a reply. Inside the cave, the all too familiar purple glow illuminates an empty room.

  As I look around the cavern, an inexplicable desire for Darkness to fall chews at my brain. I suddenly want to sink my teeth into the black bark of a tree and fill my veins with raw, unrestrained power. Trying to keep the craving for wild sap in check, I choke down the sap of the Delta from my canister.

  “Chase!” Larn’s voice rings out from the far end of the tunnel. “Did you find anything?”

  I lower the steel from my lips. “Nothing,” I yell. “I’ll be right there.”

  After inhaling a few deep breaths, I screw the top back on the canister and call out, “Dark.” As the light fades away behind me, I hurriedly make my way to the others.

  “She isn’t here,” I say. “Let’s go to where I hid the transport.”

  “Are you alright?” Larn asks. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine. Just a few bad memories.”

  As we speed to the southwest, I try to remember how much I told Tela about where I stashed the transport. I know I said that it was hidden about two hundred miles southwest of the cavern. Although she was out of it at the time, I also told her that it was in a small gully near the base of the tallest hill in the area. If she pieced that information together, the transport wouldn’t be hard to find.

  When we reach the bottom of the hill, I head straight to the wash where I hid the transport. I’m not at all surprised to find the gully empty. I survey the flat area at the bottom of the hill and spot a fresh wheel track in the dirt. With the others close behind me, I follow the trail for about fifty yards. The line left by the wheel gradually becomes shallower until it disappears altogether. Since it never resumes, the transport must have risen in the air.

  “Someone took the transport,” I say to the others. “It could have been the Murkovin or it could have been Tela. Whoever it was knows how to travel.”

  “Does anyone have an idea about where she might have gone?” Larn asks the group. “Her mind obviously isn’t clear enough to return to the Delta. What would you do in her situation?”

  While we all try to come up with a reasonable theory, Jeni scuffs her boot across the dirt a few times. Even by Krymzyn standards, she’s quiet and reserved, but she’s the first to answer.

  “Maybe she went closer to the Expanse,” she says. “Fewer Murkovin dwell out there. That’s where I’d go.”

  Larn turns his face to the west. “That makes sense. Why don’t we spread out and travel towards the Eternal Canyon.”

  Spacing ourselves about ten miles apart, the five of us zigzag to the west. Every hundred miles or so, we each stop on the crest of a different hill and holler Tela’s name. After roughly five hundred miles are behind us, I glide to the top of a low hill. Less than half a mile in front of me, a shirtless Murkovin with his spear slung over one shoulder and a backpack over the other is walking towards a valley. While staring at him, I realize he’s the same beast that I lured away from the Murkovin camp before stealing the transport.

  Before he enters the valley, he looks over each of his shoulders. When he sees me on the hill behind him, he immediately runs away. As I sprint down the hill, my muscles tense with fresh bloodlust for revenge. If I was right about him before, he can’t blend his light. I set my sights on him and explode into the beams in his direction.

  He twists his neck to look behind him. When he realizes I’m closing in on him, he rumbles to a stop and spins in my direction. I time my exit from the light so that I’m almost by his side. He has zero time to raise his spear in defense before my forearm slams into his face.

  The force of my blow lifts his feet off the ground. Losing his balance, he flails backwards until his back pounds to the dirt. Sliding to a stop, I swing my spear over the top of my head. The end of the shaft smacks against his forehead. He tries to lift his head from the ground, but he’s too dazed to get up.

  After dropping my spear, I leap to his side and roll him onto his stomach. Pinning him to the ground with a knee in the center of his back, I rip the belt off my waist. He tries to get out from underneath me, but I slap an open palm against the back of his head and smash his face to the gravelly dirt. Before he can make another move, I knot my belt around his wrists.

  I snatch my spear with one hand and a clump of his hair with the other. Angling his head to the side, I dig the tip of my weapon into his neck. A trickle of blood runs down his skin.

  “Where is she?” I shout.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “You’re full of shit!”

  I let go of his hair, pull my spear out of his neck, and drop my weapon to the dirt. After gripping one of his pinkies in my hand, I wrench it to the side. When his finger snaps at the middle knuckle, he shrieks in agony.

  “I’m gonna’ cut you,” I snarl, “and then I’ll break another finger. Over and over until you bleed to death or tell me where she is.”

  “I never saw her again after you took her from the canyon!”

  “You’re lying!”

  I seize my spear in one hand and jump to my feet. As I rear back my weapon, a body crashes into mine. I stagger away from whoever attacked me and wildly jab my spear in that direction. When my assailant blocks it away, I coil with the urge to unleash my wrath on another Murkovin. Puzzled by the face in front of me, I freeze in place.

  Chapter 25

  “What are you doing?” Larn yells at me.

  “Why did you hit me?” I shoot back. “He’s one of the assholes who attacked us. He knows where Tela is.”

  “I didn’t see her again after you took her,” the Murkovin grumbles.

  Never taking his eyes off mine, Larn shakes his head. “Nothing warrants the torture of another living being. You need to get control of yourself right now.”

  As I glower at Larn, his words slowly sink in. I won’t try to justify it as an excuse for what I did to the Murkovin, but I realize that I must have gone ballistic because of the wild sap still in my blood. Suddenly repulsed by my act of cruelty, my lack of restraint, I close my eyes.

  When I open them again, I notice Sash standing on the side of a hill behind Larn. Velt and Jeni are beside her, all three staring at me with shocked expressions on their faces.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I ashamedly admit to Larn.

  “I told you that you might still have problems with the wild sap,” he says.

  “That’s not an excuse. I’m sorry for what I did and how I behaved. I just want to find Tela.”

  “Not like this,” he replies.

  Sash, Velt, and Jeni walk down the hill and stop beside Larn.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Sash asks me.

  I chip away at the dirt with the tip of my spear. “I was trying to find out where Tela is,” I answer. “I went too far.”

  Larn unclips a flask from his belt and kneels by the Murkovin’s side. After helping him sit upright, he rubs a handful of sap on the wound in the creature’s neck. Holding his flask to the beast’s mouth, he tilts it up for the Murkovin to take a drink.

  “Have you seen the female Traveler?” Larn asks him.

  The Murkovin finishes a gulp and then pulls his mouth away from the flask. “Not since she was face down at the bottom of a canyon.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Larn asks.

  “I left the area,” he answers. “I can’t travel. It took me several morrows to get out here.”

  Larn stands up and motions for Sash to come closer to him. “Have your spear ready.”

  Sash takes a few steps forward and raises her weapon in front of her. Larn helps the Murkovin to his feet while Sash keeps a close watch on him. After Larn unties the brute’s hands, he tosses my belt to me.

  The Murkovin narrows his eyes in my direct
ion, holds his hands up in front of him, and grabs his broken finger. The bone crackles under his skin as he bends it straight, but his face never flinches.

  “That’s your neck if I ever see you again,” he taunts.

  Larn holds a flask out to him. “This is yours to keep. Be on your way.”

  The Murkovin takes the flask from Larn and shoves it in the waist of his pants. As he grabs his spear and backpack from the ground, he fires a threatening glance in my direction. Without saying anything else, he jogs away from us and heads deeper into the valley.

  “I believe he was telling the truth,” Larn says.

  “The others must have caught her,” I reply. “Or maybe they killed her.”

  “Not necessarily. She’s a strong, clever person capable of surviving on her own.”

  “Then we’ll search until we find her,” I say.

  “She may not want to be found,” he tells me. “If that’s the case, it may be impossible to locate her.”

  I shake my head. “I can’t believe she’d want to stay in the Barrens.”

  “Based on how you were acting when you returned to the Delta, she may have passed the point of having the clarity to make that decision. If her mind is trapped by the wild sap, her only thought might be to stay in a place where she can get it.”

  “Then what do we do?” I ask.

  Larn shrugs. “I don’t know. She could be fifty thousand miles in any direction by now and hiding in one of many thousands of caverns. A random search by eye is pointless.”

  “We can’t just give up,” I argue.

  “We’re all exhausted,” Larn says. “I think Jeni’s idea about searching closer to the Expanse is valid, but we need a better plan in place.”

  I run a hand through my hair. “I just wish we knew which direction she went in.”

  Larn bends down to retrieve his spear from the ground. Sash steps to his side.

  “You can try asking the Reflecting Pool,” Sash says to me. “Ask the Pool if Tela is alive and where she is. Since you were with her, you should be the one to ask.”

  “Of course,” I reply. “I should have thought of that.”

  “Be forewarned,” Larn interjects. “The Pool may not give you the answer you seek.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?” I ask him.

  “The Barrens is an immense place. The Pool may not be able to show you exactly where Tela is. She might also stay on the move. At the very least, the Pool could let us know that she’s alive.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I say.

  “Think your questions through carefully,” he counsels. “Only the correct one will lead to a useful answer. And even if we do find her, she may not want to return.”

  “We’ll make her. We can use sap from the Delta to change her back.”

  “That may not be possible,” Sash says.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Healthy sap from the Delta won’t change a Murkovin into one of us,” she explains. “A Disciple tried it once many Eras ago. No one has ever tried with someone born in the Delta who changed into a Murkovin.”

  “It worked on me.”

  “You weren’t fully a Murkovin yet,” she says. “Your hair still had a little blue in it. Your eyes were still purple, not red.”

  I look out over the endless miles of Barrens around us. “We still have to try. It’s my fault she’s out there.”

  “Why is your fault?” Larn asks.

  I’m not about to tell anyone other than Sash what happened in the cavern with Tela, nor do I think Sash and Tela would want me to. I also don’t think the others would understand, so I resort to a simple explanation.

  “I should have made us come back sooner,” I say to Larn. “I could have carried her. We were worried that my speed was slower from the wild sap, but I should have tried anyway. I made the wrong decision.”

  Nodding his head, Larn seems to accept my explanation. “Right or wrong, it’s in the past. Let’s find her first. Then we can worry about how to change her. We’ll take it one step at a time.”

  By the time we make it back to the Delta, Aven is already fast asleep. Since we promised to pick her up before we went to sleep, Sash carries her to our habitat. When we step inside the main cavern, Aven stirs a little.

  “Sleep wif you,” she groggily mumbles, reaching a hand towards our bed.

  Sash lays Aven down in the center of our mattress and rests her head on a pillow. Our daughter falls asleep in an instant. After Sash and I take turns cleaning off in the fall, we dress in sleep clothes and sit on opposite sides of the table. Sash pours each of us a cup of sap.

  “I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable,” I say. “Do you want me to stay in an empty habitat?”

  “No,” she answers. “I want you to stay here. Aven needs you right now.”

  “I know you need time. I just want you to know that I’ll wait as long as I have to. I feel horrible about what happened and want to make things right.”

  Sash looks across the room at Aven and takes a sip from her cup. As she returns her eyes to me, she sets her cup down and folds her hands on top of the table.

  “When I was younger,” she says, “I crossed the bridge to the edge of the Barrens with Eval and a few Watchers. We were looking for signs of Murkovin near the river. I stopped by a badly damaged tree that was near death.

  “A Murkovin walked over a hill in the distance. Even though Eval yelled at me, I couldn’t stop myself from going after him. I wanted to kill him so badly because of the damage to the tree that it twisted my stomach. When I caught up to him, he was hiding behind a hill. As I started over the top, I had a glimpse of the future. A trap was waiting for me that would have resulted in my death, so I returned to the Delta. But more than anything else, I wanted to inflict pain on those Murkovin.

  “I know what it’s like to feel vengeance that can’t be contained. The emotion was new to me at the time, so I didn’t know how to stop it. When I saw what you did to that Murkovin earlier, I knew that wasn’t you. Something else was in control of your mind. You would never torture someone else, not even a Murkovin. You’re not that kind of a person.”

  “I don’t think I am,” I say. “I’ll kill to protect my life or the people I care about. I’ve proven that. But I never thought I was capable of doing something like I did. I don’t know what happened to me.”

  Sash looks down at her hands. “After seeing how you were, I think I better understand what happened to you and Tela in the Barrens. I just want you to know that.”

  Rubbing my temples, I try to figure out how to explain better what happened in the Barrens. Sash picks up the pitcher and refills my cup. I take a few sips and then set the cup down.

  “When I saw that Murkovin,” I say, “something went off inside me that I couldn’t stop. My body acted without the permission of my mind. I blamed him for hurting Tela, for trapping us in the Barrens, and for the bad decisions I made. I wanted him to suffer.

  “The wild sap gives a person a sense of power,” I continue. “Part of that is the desire to have power over others. That’s how some people in my world are. All they care about is power.

  “As we grow up on Earth, we learn to control things like anger, jealousy, greed, and revenge—everything you call irrational or extreme. But not everybody in my world learns how. A lot of bad things end up happening to people who don’t deserve it.

  “I told you that the wild sap magnifies everything to extremes. The longer I was out there, the more a lot of my old fears were revived. But they were ten times stronger than I’d ever felt before.”

  “What fears?” Sash asks.

  “Like, do I belong here? Did I make the right decision giving up my life on Earth? The more I thought about those questions, the more blurred the answers became. I lost my ability to think rationally and ended up getting so mad that I was filled with nothing but rage.

  “The only relief I felt was taking care of Tela. It gave me a sense of purpose. I think that’s why I gave in
at first when . . . when we kissed. All the negative emotions I was feeling were so overwhelming that I believed you tricked me into coming to Krymzyn.”

  Sash frowns and shakes her head. “How could you ever think that, Chase?”

  “Unless you experience it, you can’t understand what it does to your mind. I could control it sometimes, but not others. I kept trying to answer a question that I thought I had the answer to a long time ago. Out there, I believed there was no answer.”

  “What question?” she asks.

  I take a deep breath. “How could someone like you ever love someone like me?”

  Sash holds my gaze. For the first time since our fight after I got back from the Barrens, her face softens with sympathy. “You saved my life in the river. You’ve defended Krymzyn against intruders. You’ve risked your own life to protect me and others. Those are all reasons to respect and honor you, but none of them is a reason to fall in love.

  “The first time we went to the Tall Hill, you drew a picture of a sustaining tree in the air. You made sure that I saw a healthy tree because you said the trees seemed important to me. When we sat on the Hill, you asked me if it’s hard on me to be the way I am. I told you that no one had ever asked me that before.

  “Over and over, you’ve shown how much you care about my feelings. You’re the only person to ever fully understand me. You accepted Krymzyn to be with me despite all that you had to sacrifice. Those are the reasons I fell in love with you, Chase. I’ve always felt safe with you. Safe on the inside.”

  “And now I’ve betrayed you,” I say.

  “I don’t think you betrayed me. I’m angry. I’m hurt. But I still love you. It’s going to take time, but we’ll find a way to put this behind us.”

  “Like I said,” I reply, “I’ll do whatever I need to and wait as long as it takes. Even as messed up as my mind was out there, I never stopped loving you and Aven. That’s the only thing that got me back.”

  After rinsing out our cups in the fall and putting them on the shelves, we climb on the bed on either side of Aven. Sash doesn’t kiss me, caress my hair, or rest a hand on me the way she usually does when we go to bed. Understanding that it will take time for her to trust me again, to repair the emotional damage I’ve caused, I drape an arm over Aven and go to sleep.