A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,52
to spell itself out in my head, letters and all:
I don't know you, Tanen.
Fact.
Disgruntling fact.
But then my distraction was warped the other way into focus, as the foolish young man reached a height that I could not ignore. He had reached that point between ground and sky that didn't look natural on a human, that made onlookers queasy in calculation. If he fell now...
Sweat lined my throat, but I couldn't tell if it was outside or in. I watched, perched and uneasy, cheering him on and willing him down. It was a sour taste, stuck between those two.
I realized too late that being queasy on his behalf did neither of us any good, and indeed was a kind of sabotage on mine. When I realized that my blood felt sick in suspense, I wisely decided to move up onto the ledge where I could sit, whether he could see me or not. It would be more stable than clinging to the bluff.
But I was already compromised.
I creaked upward on wobbly limbs, and the folly of not being able to take my eyes off of him at this point took its toll; I slipped.
My breath was reeled out of me as I plunged into the rush of emptiness where my foot landed, any exclamation swallowed back down my throat, and as rubble buckled beneath me, I flailed off my perch and was caught immediately in the tide of a crumbling avalanche. The broken hillside fell away, dragging me down. A breathless shriek murmured from me, cold as water stuck in my lungs, as the world fell away.
Somewhere, the tide of debris steadied, but I bounced on down the descent. When I reached the bottom of the bluff and the beginning of the milder slope, the dizzy craze slowed, but, disoriented, I could do nothing to stop my progress entirely.
A shadowed drop loomed in all directions as I spun; the ravine, unable to be pinpointed amidst my revolutions. No sooner had I glimpsed its gaping form ahead of me than my attempts to hold it at bay did the opposite and spurred me on, for I had turned. The ravine was left, right, up and down – always looming, dodging my efforts to distinguish it.
It grew alarmingly from a crack to a maw, and in a field of panic, I skidded right up to the edge to shake its hand at last, and flailed over that edge through a ripped web of clutching, raked spider-silk fingers.
It had a killer handshake.
Streams of dirt rained down around me, gouged from the sides by my hands. I shredded that wall. And then I hit level ground. My body glanced across the surface, and I was hustled across the ground like a leaf tumbled by the wind, a tangle of skirts.
I came to rest in the middle of the ravine, stunned. Walls rose up around me. It was blessedly cool. Chillingly cool. The sky was a taunting ribbon above me, farther away than it should be.
Shaken, I propped myself up. My fingers stirred through a residue much different than the powder I was used to. I regarded the layer of sullied, decayed leaves that saturated the regular dirt. It was like foreign land, right there beneath me. I had not seen trees in Dar'on for quite some time; but the rustle against my fingertips told me... this concoction had come in on the current that had carved the ravine. A deposit passing through on the season's Northbound Express. The river was a train for this sort of thing, a pollinating device, exchanging one spell of territory for another.
It was just another way that the Great Butterfly was in motion.
On top, the leaves were dry, crushed and light as ashes, spilling through my fingers like feathers. Airy and silent. Deeper down, they were compressed and moist, a cake of decay. I sifted, then dug through it, my fingers absently tasting the memory of the river as I scanned the rest of the ravine. The walls were not overbearingly high, but high enough that a simple hoist would get me nowhere. They were also craggy, but only in a way that would graze; nothing to provide foot- and handholds.
The ravine narrowed a ways down, like the neck of a bottle. Not something that tempted one to try to slip past. It was well wide enough, I could argue, but it gave off a strangling air. For even at its widest, the ravine was trapping.