A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,99

fingerprints until I found my way back to freedom.

Back to freedom, and the dystopian reality I had never considered mild until then.

Back home, to whatever 'home' was when I had built another place for myself, here.

Back to mischief I could cope with, and beings I could relate to, even if their beliefs were so far from mine sometimes that at times I found myself almost hating them.

Back to everything – 'everything' as my world had always measured it, before that everything expanded into a limitless scape of possibility that left me stranded in the waters of a thousand undiscovered oceans. No one would ever come for me here.

So I blazed my way back through those soul-reminiscent passages and emerged into the foreign air of those treacherous outskirts, heading toward home the only way I could cope with defining it, carrying a madman on my shoulders.

T h I r t y - T h r e e –

Return

The journey back does not stick in my mind with much clarity. I had used up everything in me, and everything around me looked the same anyway. I do remember that my shoulders ached like nothing I had ever felt, but only until Bailin's weight snuffed the circulation from them entirely, and then they were just numb as the rest of me had become. There is a certain point where an ailed body such as mine surpasses its capacity and enters an otherworldly state of misery, and of course what is otherworldly is not something we can feel, here.

I collapsed at some point – more than once, I think – and dreamed of the rubble shifting beneath me, of riding waves of it as if my body were a vessel. Much like Ombri did to call herself Shifter, I imagine, except that she never did it lying down, in her sleep. I was a piece of driftwood, a dead swan on the tide.

When I cracked my crusty lids and blinked the salt from my lashes, I was lying on the shore, and the ocean seemed to have dried up. Where it should have been was only a great chasm.

The ravine.

The shifts of rubble had delivered me back.

I would have felt a wave of relief if I was much into feeling anything those days, but in truth I felt like any other forsaken shell lying on the beach, empty and cracking, the sound of the ocean echoing in its irrelevant recesses.

Bailin was cast across the rubble beside me, unconscious still.

Fortune was with me.

Feeling somewhat revived simply for being on familiar terrain, I forced the sleep from my body, more than ready to get this deed over with. Completion was so close I could taste it. Or was that only the sweet taste of blood in my mouth? It seemed I had bitten my tongue during one of the shifts.

I swallowed distastefully, but still found the strength to pull myself up one more time. I glanced at Bailin's unmoving form, considering whether or not I should risk rolling him into the ravine. He would probably not come out of another fall, this one unbroken, at least not without being the worse for wear. For that matter, had he even survived the shifts? Just to make sure, I went to check for a pulse again.

Alive.

In fact, he muttered something in his sleep.

Trying to decide how to go about casting him back into his chasm without breaking any bones, I decided on rolling him to the edge and grasping him beneath his arms to lower him as far as I could, bracing myself in the rubble for the exchange. His feet still dangled well above the ground, but, straining, I grunted in his ear, “Bailin”, and he awoke as if only waiting for the cue.

Awakening suspended against a ravine wall could not be the most serene way to go about it, and, recognizing his place of doom, a shriek escaped him. He thrashed to get free of my hold, but it was the reaction I was hoping for. He did half the work, freeing himself to land upon the bottom of the chasm. Then he was scrambling to his feet again, a crazed look in his eyes, desperate to redeem himself from landing in the spider's web before the beast came out to bind him. But I crouched above him on the ledge to ensure all escape attempts were futile. I would tread on his fingers if I had to. He wasn't coming back out of that ravine