Previous: part 2
Currents change in the firmament. Bright paints, melted, they roll together.
She walks on beneath. Red hills begin to spring up. Between the hills, strands of an ancient forest. The trees, not tall, but thick and old, with leaves darkest green. Night light makes them ghost shapes, shadows, without distinction. But she has walked in the same forests before; she knows their look.
Once she hid in the branches of a similar tree. For hours she was not found. Cringing at every sound, eyes straining, she saw nothing. Twilight began to settle. The shadows grew. Only when she realized that she might never be found did she climb out of the tree. She ran home. The game was long over.
A faint smile dances at the memory. Fear and anger of childhood hold happiness for her now. She sees it as a simpler time, a time well worth returning to in memory and thought.
The path rises. It curves, and she passes between the arms of two hills, into the forest of her youth.
Perhaps it is the dark. Perhaps there are other memories hidden here she has not wandered through in nostalgic play. Perhaps this forest is a little different, not what she’s used to.
She is seized by fear.
Behind every tree lurks a presence. There, in the dark, waiting in anticipation. She cannot turn around. Right behind her it waits, wishing only that she would turn, face it, and be consumed. She stairs straight ahead. Her gait grows stiff. She focuses on the path, but as she steps deeper under the trees the path seems to narrow. Her view of it shrinks as darkness enfolds her. As if her vision is fading and she will soon fall.
She shudders on, trying to laugh at childish fears. Only a child fears the dark in this way. It is unreasoning, ridiculous, the remnant of deep memories. Nothing more than the body’s reaction against an unfamiliar situation, the deprivation of the senses, the unknown shapes of trees.
Here is the path. Before her it stretches out, its climb steady, its way strangely straight. She has but to follow the path. Her destination is at the end. She gives up choice when she steps onto the path. Where it will lead her is none of her concern, she only knows that it will lead her there. And that is where she should be. She sets her mind on the destination, disregarding all but the path leading onward, onward towards its end. There are no trees, there is no dark, only the beaten path beneath her feet.
There is a sound. Where at first the night and the forest had been silent, there is now a sound. There it is again. Like a scrape, or rustle, off to the left. She forces herself to keep her pace steady. She does not speed up. Her walking stick is held in both hands now. She does not know when she shifted her grip.
There it is again, off to the right. But it can only be a creature of the forest. A squirrel, or an apsis. The sound seems larger than it is. It is a tiny creature, harmless, afraid. Once more she hears it, off to the right, farther away.
And then silence.
There is a little clearing off to the left, lit momentarily by the light of the firmament. Perhaps the bed of a stream is there, for she is slightly above, and she thinks she hears water running sleepily. A cricket sings somewhere in the grasses.
The night is quiet. She walks on.