World Warden, page 25
“We’re okay,” Tristan repeated in a soothing, deep voice. “All of us. You saved us.”
“They d—they died,” he managed to say between barely suppressed sobs he could not fully control. “So ma-many of them. It’s not right. We killed them.” The hot tears in his eyes stung as he remembered each of the wurl’s pain, fear, and suffering.
“We had to,” Tristan reminded him gently, running his hand through Elias’s hair. “They attacked us. They would have killed us.”
Elias knew Tristan was right. There had been no other choice.
But a small part of him, the part that was connected to the distant Flower on a mountaintop hundreds of kilometers away, warned him that with every senseless death, they got closer and closer to the edge of a horrible cliff at the edge of a bottomless pit.
Chapter 16. Bouquet
OSCAR HELPED Samantha many times over the following weeks, and he went out with her on foraging missions where they explored regions of the surrounding area that were both scary and fascinating.
Doran took them to places that Oscar was certain he would never have been able to reach without the help of the strong, surprisingly peaceful wurl. Once Oscar had gotten over his initial fear of Doran, he began to feel more at ease in his company. A few weeks in, Oscar found himself looking forward to the days when he would be flying. The sensation of freedom when both he and Samantha were up in the air was something he had never experienced before, and he started relishing the thrill of landing, the suddenness of jumping off a cliff knowing he would not truly fall, and the calm majesty of flight while soaring on a thermal as he looked down at the world from a vantage point that few creatures ever had.
Samantha and Oscar explored many kinds of environments in their search for food. Some of them were wide plains where edible wildflowers grew in abundant clusters, and where Oscar’s chief worry was avoiding beelike insects with three barbed stingers at the end of their abdomens. At other times, Oscar acted as a lookout and support while Samantha daringly rappelled down sheer surfaces in ravines overlooking a foaming river, intent on finding special mushrooms that grew in the moist crevices between oddly striped black rocks.
Once, Doran flew with them for nearly half a day to take them to a small island in the middle of a freshwater lake, far away from the coast, where Oscar and Samantha spent two days and one night digging in the soil in search of the tubers Oscar had already eaten a few times before and that Samantha said were not only very nutritious but excellent winter food because of how long they kept. That night Doran stayed with them when they made camp, and Oscar was surprised at how safe he felt in the company of the male Flyer. Most creatures gave the wurl a wide berth, and the ever-present heat that Doran seemed to radiate from his entire body kept the faint chill of the night at bay when he curled up to sleep next to Samantha like a giant winged dog. When they returned to the seaside house the next day, Oscar realized he had a kind of fondness for Doran that he would have never expected to feel. He was not a terrifying beast anymore, but a mysterious creature both beautiful and surprisingly intelligent. Oscar began to understand what Elias had meant when he spoke of male wurl the way he had, telling Oscar how he even had made friends with some of them. Oscar doubted that he would be friends with Doran, since the wurl ignored him for the most part and appeared to care only for Samantha, but he was happy that Doran tolerated his presence more and more as the days went by.
His interactions with the rest of Samantha’s family improved as well. He helped out as much as he could when he stayed home on the days Dresde summoned Samantha, and Nadja expressed her appreciation for the help more than once. Ute did not speak, but she smiled frequently and seemed glad to have him in the house. She reminded Oscar of his mother, always looking out for others and making sure everybody had what they needed. Ute was a great cook, and she was very athletic. For instance, she could climb a tree with ease if it meant she could reach the top branches to collect spicy lichen, which she used for some of the sauces she made in the kitchen. She made house repairs quietly but efficiently, and Oscar was once tasked with helping her replace some of the boards covering the window to his own attic, but from the outside. Ute did not even need a ladder to get to the top level of the house, and she hung by one hand from a windowsill, like a rock climber, while hammering nails into wooden planks with the other—spare nails between her lips.
Laurie was the only one who remained distant and slightly cold. Oscar wondered why that was, but he gave her space and offered to help her only when it was obvious she needed it. As her pregnancy progressed and her belly grew, Laurie’s mobility decreased, and she had to rely on others more often. Oscar had no idea how to help when a woman was pregnant, but he did his best to be available in case Laurie needed something brought to her, and he often made little snacks so Laurie would have something to eat if she was hungry in between bouts of morning sickness.
He began to tell them stories at night about three weeks in, mostly because he got bored in his room at night without talking to anyone and he liked the company of other people. He also supposed they would appreciate listening to something new after who knew how many years of talking only to each other, and he was right. Although Nadja, Laurie, and Samantha all rejected his first offer to read them part of Wild Beginnings, the serialized novel from his favorite Portree author, Penelope Jones, Ute did not exactly say no, since she never said anything, and Oscar took that as an invitation. He began reading Ute the story, which he had downloaded to his link months earlier, and little by little the others joined.
Soon it became a kind of nightly ritual for all of them to sit in the living room after dinner, drinking some water or tea, while Oscar read for about an hour. He enjoyed seeing their reactions. Nadja and Ute would show rapt attention, while Samantha and Laurie would hang back, almost like they weren’t really interested in the story, but every time there was a lot of action, they would sit perfectly still, as if they didn’t want to miss a single word. At the cliffhanger at the end of the first book, both of them groaned with frustration, quickly replaced by excitement when Oscar told them he also had the sequel on his link.
Oscar received weekly messages from his family, and he was glad to hear that the colony was doing well. The seeds Elias had brought had all sprouted, and Oscar’s aunt Laura was overjoyed, or so Oscar’s mom told him in one of her messages. They expected to have the first full harvest in a few months, and they intended to save many of those seeds to build a cache that would be kept in safe storage for future years. According to his mother, the colony would use about ten percent of the first harvest for actual food as a test to see how well it was tolerated, and everyone was excited to find out what the new crops would taste like.
Oscar received no messages from Elias since there was no way for them to communicate, but he was certain that his older brother was still coming to save him, and the thought gave him strength through the days and particularly the nights. He sometimes dreamed that Elias was hurt, and he would wake up in the night and feel like crying. Oscar stayed up and prayed for a bit at those times, and the ritual helped him go back to sleep while still thinking about his brother and hoping he was safe, wherever he was.
Although he was slowly being accepted by Samantha’s family, that did not mean the days were easy and carefree. Every person, Oscar included, lived under the constant threat of a winged shadow appearing in the sky. Dresde did not leave her volcano very often, thankfully, but when she did all activity ground to a halt. At those times the five of them would huddle in the house, every window boarded and the door shut tight, and wait for her to fly away and leave. Ute in particular would get a pained look in her face, and Samantha would try to comfort her, but it seemed as though Ute was off in her own world, remembering something that tortured her whenever she so much as caught a glimpse of the wurl queen.
The threat of Dresde’s presence was like a worry that never left, an unattended fire that needed to be minded every few minutes, or a faint whisper in the back of the mind that made it impossible to truly relax. Oscar developed the habit of looking up at the sky every now and then when he was outside, much as the others did. During the day the threat was minimized because it was easy to spot Dresde if she decided to fly close to the house. It was much worse during cloudy days or at night because the water vapor and the darkness hid her from view. There were even times, late at night, when Oscar woke up as if from a nightmare. He would sit up in bed, listening. Most of the time there would be nothing but a faint mental nagging, a pale echo of the horrible mental pressure Dresde’s attention could inflict.
Other times, however, he would hear furtive noises in the night. Oscar would listen, petrified in his bed, as something scratched the heavy wooden beams of the attic roof overhead. The scratching was slow, almost calculated, and occasionally there would be a faint smell, as if something was burning. The ceiling would creak, small showers of dust raining down from in between the boards, perhaps because of a great weight that shuffled or shifted on the house.
One night in particular, a little over five weeks after Oscar had arrived, he bolted upright in the middle of the night as if somebody had slapped him as he slept. His heart in his throat, Oscar listened intently but heard nothing at first. The air in the room was hot, almost unbearably so, and his wide eyes darted every which way as a sweat rivulet made its way down his forehead and onto the bridge of his nose. The murky blackness of late night made it impossible to see anything.
I’m alone in the room. There’s nothing there. It’s just shadows.
A loud snap startled him badly, followed by an almost gentle wooden creak near the place where the boarded-up window was located.
Oscar could not even scream as the evil red glow of a single unblinking eye bathed his room in crimson radiance the color of blood. The eye moved, ever so slightly, and Oscar had the crushing certainty that it was watching him. She was watching him. Her awareness flooded his mind like a raging river, submerging him in a sea of emotions he could never hope to fully understand.
Then the eye was gone. The roof of the house shuddered, and the night was still again. Quiet.
It took Oscar a long time to go back to sleep after that. The next morning, he walked up to the attic window and saw that one of the boards had indeed been ripped out.
He shuddered and went through his morning routine mechanically, hoping that Doran would take them far away from the volcano for their scheduled foraging mission that day.
“Where are we going?” he asked Samantha after he came back from the river, where he had taken a quick bath.
She shook her head. “I’ve been summoned.”
Oscar’s heart grew cold. His mind flashed back to the previous night. “No,” he said before he could stop himself.
“What did you say?”
Oscar flinched a bit. Samantha still scared him, particularly when she sounded angry. “I meant… um, can you say no? What does she want?”
“I do not know, but I have to go.”
“But….” Oscar remembered how Dresde had watched him in his bed, perfectly aware that he was terrified and enjoying every second of it. “Take care, okay?”
“I will. I always have.”
Oscar was worried all morning. Nadja appeared to have noticed, and she gave him the afternoon off. She probably meant well, but it was the last thing Oscar needed because now he had nothing to occupy his mind as he waited for Samantha to come back. He dithered around the house, attempting first to compose a message to his family but stopping halfway. Then he tried to concentrate on some schematics he had found to maybe increase the energy efficiency of the water-purifier system, but after an hour he realized he hadn’t been able to retain a single word of what he had been studying.
Listless, he left the house near dusk. The temperature was balmy and pleasant, and the smell of the sea reached him clearly. He walked all the way to the edge of the cliffs and looked down, gazing at the beach. It was a beautiful and strange environment in its own right. The sand was black and stretched from the rocks to the edges of the foaming waves that crashed against it ceaselessly. There were large prism-like structures sticking out from the sand at random intervals, their transparent and multifaceted beauty an odd echo of the same kind of contrast Oscar had seen once before at the Field of Thorns. Individually, the structures looked like octahedral crystals, each of them larger than Oscar was tall, or so he estimated, although he had not once been down to the beach. It was a long way down the cliffs, and as far as he could tell, the only way to reach the ocean from where he stood was to fly there. In fact, now that he thought about it, the volcano and its surroundings were like a fortress with natural defenses all around it that made it as difficult as possible to reach from either the sea or the land.
The light of the sinking sun, filtered through the crystals on the beach, resulted in multiple multicolored beams that adorned an otherwise dreary landscape devoid of much life. The few trees close to the cliffs were all dead, their trunks bleached white, their branches stripped bare. They looked almost like bones. Farther out among the waves, more crystals rose from the ocean. Oscar had yet to see a single living creature in the water.
This place is so beautiful. But it feels wrong.
He glanced to the right at the towering bulk of the volcano. Samantha was there somewhere. And so was Dresde.
He turned his back on the cliffs and began walking aimlessly, with the general idea of maybe going to the river again and trying to swim for a bit to relieve the tension. He soon reached the bank but decided against getting in the water. Instead he walked upstream, hands in his pockets, while the sky overhead changed from blue to shades of yellow, orange, and red as the sun went down.
He rounded a bend in the river and saw movement ahead. Surprised, his first instinct was to duck, but then he realized that it was a person. Ute.
Why is she so far away from home?
Oscar approached, curious. Ute was standing in a field of red-and-white wildflowers, a gentle plain that was quite beautiful and peaceful. The river nearby filled the atmosphere with the calming sound of flowing water, and the heady fragrance the waist-high flowers gave off as Oscar moved among them was pleasant and soothing.
Ute still hadn’t seen him. She was standing with her back to him, maybe two hundred meters away. Oscar thought of calling out to her, but he did not want to startle her, so he walked closer instead.
Ute knelt down among the wildflowers.
At the same time, the toes on Oscar’s right foot bumped against a hard unseen obstacle, and he very nearly fell on his face. He was able to recover, though, and looked down to see what it was.
A weathered rock, almost perfectly rectangular in shape, jutted out from the ground to a height of about ten centimeters. It was clearly artificial. Someone must have cut it to that shape and put it in the ground.
But why?
Oscar knelt down and brushed bits of grass and debris off the rock.
There was a name etched on it.
Cmdr. Hugo Wright
3089—3142
FREEDOM ABOVE ALL
Oscar yanked his hand away and stood up with a sharp intake of breath. He took a few more careful steps, looking down as he searched, and soon stopped in front of a second, larger stone.
Lt. Alicia Jones
3119—3142
FREEDOM ABOVE ALL
As twilight settled over the land, Oscar made his way among more rocks with great care, trying not to step on any of them.
No, not rocks. Tombstones.
One of them, maybe ten paces away, stood out above all the others. It was much more ornate, and it was larger, but the name had been defaced with rough, angry-looking scratches, and a portion of the top of it was missing. Sections of its metal decorations had evidently been torn away in the past.
There were many more tombstones surrounding it. The first twenty or so were regularly spaced, but as he walked forward and closer to where Ute was kneeling, they were spread out more unevenly. The stones themselves were also cut more roughly, and when Oscar reached Ute at last, he saw she was kneeling in front of a simple rock with rough edges on which a single name was written. There was no date.
Jörgen
Ute must have heard him approach by then, but she kept her gaze on the ground. She arranged a flower bouquet so it rested partially on the rock. It was a collection of wildflowers of many different colors, some of which did not grow in the vicinity of the house at all. In particular, Oscar recognized a couple of intricate pink blooms that he was certain grew close to the Nightmare Caves.
She must have walked all the way there, on her own, to get these flowers.
A sniffle betrayed the fact that Ute was crying. Oscar knelt down next to her among the tall grass of the peaceful graveyard as a gentle breeze stirred the petals of the flower bouquet. Oscar remained respectfully silent, wondering what had happened and why there were so many graves in that place.
Ute glanced at him a few minutes later, and she wiped a tear from her cheek. She gave Oscar a sad smile and reached for his hand.
Oscar clasped it in both of his.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said softly. He felt like crying too. Although he had never known Jörgen, he could tell how much everyone had loved him. “Was he your son?”
Ute nodded, looking back at the tombstone and touching it lovingly with her fingertips.
“When did he…?” Oscar began to ask, but then decided against it. Ute couldn’t answer him, and he didn’t want to ask questions that were none of his business.
Ute gave a little shake of her head and pointed instead to another gravestone very close by, next to where Oscar was kneeling. It also bore a beautiful flower bouquet, almost identical to Jörgen’s.
