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His head turns toward the window as he continues forward. I become hopeful that he will pass me by since his eyes are no longer scanning the floor, but then he suddenly looks down the second he is above me.
His eyes lock on mine, but he doesn’t say anything or react to my presence. Instead he just stares at me as I stare right back into his eyes, the eyes my childhood friend, Eason. Had it been anyone else, I might have gasped in terror and tried to somehow crawl and get away, but not Eason. I’m not afraid of him.
We used to play together all the time, but as I got older, we began to see each other less and less. Then my sisters died, and we stopped seeing each other entirely. I kept to myself for a long while after that, but one day, he came to the temple to tell me that he wanted to keep me safe. That he was planning on joining the Temple Guard for that purpose.
The Temple Guard is much like the Warrior Cult, only smaller and housed in the temple itself. Its purpose isn’t so much to protect the royal family as it is to protect the temple, which is used to perform a variety of religious rites and ceremonies, including those that take place during the Festival of Three Suns. Still, it was a touching gesture of friendship.
Eason’s lips quiver and his mouth stands half-open, but no words come out. I desperately search his eyes, trying to understand what is going through his mind, but to no avail. He looks nervous, even fearful. When it seems as though he is finally about to say something, more footsteps echo in the hallway, and a voice calls out to him.
“Have you found her?” a man calls out.
“No,” he firmly declares, his eyes still fixed on mine.
I smile at him and he smiles briefly back.
“Then we need to go. Her tracks lead into the building but not out of it. That means that she must have left by the shore where the rocks would have covered her trail. The queen is going to be furious if we don’t find her.”
Eason turns around and marches back across the room. Moments later, the sounds of movement and voices disappear altogether, though I am still trembling. Once I feel calm enough to get up and move on, I remove the floorboards once more and plan my exit.
As I do so, I look over at the pouch again, which is lying on the dirt nearby. Opening it is now the last thing on my mind. I need to get to the cave. Maybe then I will have the time and space to reconsider emptying its contents.
By the window, I watch the temple guards in the distance following the shore to the other side of the lake. I try to figure out which one Eason is. His blonde hair and tall, strong features normally would make him stand out, but the patrol is too far away to tell any of them apart.
Seeing them wander the wrong direction calms me down a little, but it doesn’t completely remove my anxieties. After my experience yesterday with the dark figure in the brush, I fear that the temple guards aren’t the only ones following me. I will have to be careful even after I reach the cave entrance.
Rather than going in the direction of the guards around the eastern shore of the lake, which is what the instructions on the paper say, I retreat to the tree line behind the building and follow it west and north, eventually rejoining the path that the paper tells me to take over the rocky hills to the northwest. There, I am able to find a crevice between two rock walls with a small recess just large e
nough to fit me and my things and rest for the night.
My desire to sleep is not present at first despite my tiredness. Instead, I feel the return of watchful eyes surrounding me and the pitter-patter of footsteps, though I want it to just be the wind. The trees rustle in the cold breeze, one that seeps through the cracks in the rocks and chills my bones. Summer is giving way to autumn.
When the blue sun rises, I begin again despite a sleepless night. The day passes nervously as I realize that my pursuers could be anywhere at any given moment. There are so many directions they could have gone after passing the lake, but maybe they’ve found my tracks again. Or maybe they’ve figured out where I’m going.
Luckily, it becomes the only eventless day I’ve had, and in the evening, I reach the pass. I find that it is not so much a pass as it is simply the point at which two mountains meet. But the directions are not clearly worded in some places, so maybe the pass refers to the cave itself.
When I arrive at the entrance to the cave, I am faced with a new dilemma. Do I wait until morning to enter so that I can get some desperately needed rest, or do I go now and risk becoming so exhausted and disoriented that I get lost?
After thinking it over, I decide on a compromise. I will try to sleep for a while, but if I wake up at all during the night, then that is when I will leave. I lie down just inside the entrance out of the light from the stars, and surprisingly, I am able to quickly fall asleep for what feels like a while.
When I wake back up, I go outside to examine the sky. It is still dark and will be for quite a while because the dawn preceding the rising of the first black star isn’t even reaching into the sky yet. Feeling rejuvenated, I realize that now is a good time to go, so I open my pack, construct a torch, and begin my journey into the dark abyss of the mountains.
