by Jim Galford
“There’s light ahead,” he said, now guiding the others. “We should be able to see if we can get a little farther down the tunnel.”
Picking each step carefully, knowing that a wrong move could leave him tripping over rocks or even falling into a crevice, Estin did what he could to move them forward. It was taking an incredible amount of time and once he could begin to see the walls and floor again, he was sure that they had traveled no more than a hundred yards over the course of an hour or better.
Grinning happily at the approaching daylight, Estin pushed on, ignoring the pain in his leg as he hurried them towards escape from the dark. One final curve in the tunnel lay ahead, then from the look of the lighting, they would be able to see the other end of the passage.
Rounding the curve, Estin very nearly fell as his legs gave out. The bright light was from the outside, as he had thought, but filtered through a wall of the glowing mists. Their path was entirely blocked by the roiling cloud. Though the mists appeared unwilling or unable to enter the caves, they sealed the end of the tunnel completely.
“What do we do now?” Oria asked, stopping beside Estin, her eyes wide as she stared at the mists.
Estin had to almost tear himself away from the hypnotic patterns of the mists, taking his weight off Feanne and using the wall to support himself as he began back up the tunnel.
“There has to be another passage,” he said out loud, limping back into the darkness. “We must have missed something.”
“We missed nothing,” Feanne told him, sitting down at the curve in the tunnel, pulling the kits onto her lap. “There were no other ways. I searched the whole way down. We are trapped.”
Estin could not accept that, not even believing his own eyes. Each step he took, he let his hands trace the walls on both sides, trying to find anything usable. Even a smaller tunnel that would allow the kits to escape would have been acceptable.
“Children,” Feanne said in the distance, once Estin was already far enough out that he could no longer see. “Please go fetch your father before he hurts himself.”
Swearing, Estin punched at the wall, barely aware of the sharp pain as the rocks bit into his knuckles. He could feel tears running down his face as he put his forehead to the tunnel wall, even as Atall took his hand and tried to pull him back towards Feanne.
It just was not fair, Estin could only tell himself, weakly following the kits back to their mother. They all had survived so much and seen more in their short lives than they should have managed. With odds stacked against wildlings where he had grown up, then the whole world becoming a threat to any living being, they had thrived somehow. Through war and fate, they had managed to become a family, even as the world was being swept clean of life. While nearly everyone Estin had ever known had died, the love of his life and the children he considered to be his own lived, only to die trapped in a cave, consumed by the mists, created at least partially due to his mistake.
“How can you be so calm?” he asked, collapsing near Feanne. The kits sat down nearby, clasping hands nervously. “With all this happening, how do you do it, Feanne?”
Hoisting the kits back onto her lap, Feanne motioned Estin closer. He practically crawled to her, the last of his strength fading.
“I am not calm,” she said, pulling Estin close to her so that she could embrace him with the children. “I am accepting. If this is the end that the land gives me, so be it. I have known love and been loved. I refuse to regret, Estin. Not one moment. I will find my end when it comes and meet it, ready to fight for every breath for all of us, but I will not let it destroy me if I cannot fight.”
Estin nodded gravely, understanding at last what she had meant by a “good death.” It had little to do with the perfection of completeness and the fulfillment of one’s duties in life. It was in knowing what you had done and found, then letting that be enough. It was not what he had hoped to find in his own heart, but he prayed it would be enough.
One arm still around Feanne and the kits in her lap, Estin gingerly placed the other on Feanne’s stomach, wondering what could have been. So many lives lost and so many more he would never know. Biting back the desire to weep, he lifted his head and faced the mists, which were already beginning to creep into the tunnel. He was determined not to shake Feanne’s calm in front of the kits again.
As he watched, the mists began inching into the cave, tendrils of cloud-like luminescence reaching around the cracks and rocks. The flickering light within the mists became his focus as he held his family tightly. The calm fluttering glow was not much different than watching the light cast by a candle and was equally hypnotic.
Atall was the first of them to break, crawling onto Estin’s lap and openly crying. He dug his hands into Estin’s clothing and fur, burying his face against Estin’s chest. Seconds later, as the mists reached within an arm’s length, Oria began weeping, too.
On a whim, Estin looked back up the way they had come, that little voice in his head begging him to take them all and run into the darkness for even a moment’s longer life. In the long passage behind them, he could see the flickers of the mists approaching as well, dashing any hope that might have lingered.
Estin swept his tail around the group, finding some degree of reassurance that whatever would happen to any of them would affect them all. If this was the end, they would die together. No part of his heart would ever allow him to watch the others die even a second before he did.
The mists were close enough that Estin could feel a radiant warmth against his arm and tail, where they were closest to the semi-transparent cloud. He looked up at the mist again, trying to steel himself for what was to come, but found himself mesmerized by what he could see inside.
The flickering he had seen within the mists was not at all like that of a flame. Instead, it was a rapidly-changing view of thousands of places and things. Landscapes he had never imagined flashed past him, interspersed with scenes that he could only imagine being the elemental planes, with their raging flames, endless miles of oceans, and so on. He saw people for the briefest moments, though they all appeared to be in agony. Then there were buildings that darted past, built with designs he had never seen in either of the land’s major cities. There were fields, deserts, mountains, and swamps. Between all of the scenes, he saw death and destruction.
A tendril of mist reached out, brushing across Estin’s arm gingerly. As it did, the fur all across his arm froze painfully, then began to thaw as the tendril moved away, seeking more substance. The whole ghostly entity moved around haphazardly, seemingly seeking things to snatch away, but when it found something, it would not always move in the right direction. To Estin, it seemed both malicious and entirely mindless, seeking to destroy, while having no concept of how to accomplish that goal.
“Don’t let go,” whimpered Oria, one fist clutching Estin and the other Feanne. “Whatever happens…”
As Estin watched in horror, the mist seemed to rear up like a wave, then it crashed down on them, covering all four of them at once.
Pain filled his body and he could feel his fur burning, as screams drowned out all other sounds. He recognized the kits and Feanne’s voices, then realized his own was part of the chorus of agony. Every inch of his body was lit by pain and he felt as though he had been thrown into a vat of molten metal.
As swiftly as the pain came on, it went away with the passing of the mist cloud. Then there was nothing more as the mists moved on through the empty tunnel, seeking more to consume.
Epilogue
We had gambled and lost. The mists had won where even an undead army could not. We were the last of our people in the valley. Likely, there was not another living creature there once we were gone.
My parting thoughts had been on how I had spent my life seeking things that I never believed would be mine. In the end of all that, I had all of the things I had ever wanted in my arms. The only love I had ever known was beside me, along with our—that word burned itself into my mind, even as the mists
swept over us—children, both born and unborn.
Once, I had said that all I needed in life was a roof over my head and some food in my stomach. When my mind grasped at the last vestiges of thought in that cave, knowing my life was at an end, that singular memory came back to me. Neither of those things mattered anymore to me…they were the same things every man and animal seeks to survive, but were not things that I as a sentient person needed. When the mists took me, I was hungry and homeless, but holding all the wealth I could imagine.
The mist certainly could kill. Of that there was no doubt. Whether the odds are one-in-eight of surviving or worse, I could not say. I was never one for gambling…I was bad at it and had always lost my bets.
Now, at her request, I must add that Feanne truly despises this new land and I think all five of the kits share her feelings. My kind may not be built for desert-living, but I can now certainly say that red foxes belong there even less. Perhaps someday we will find a way back to our old homeland, with its woods and mountains, assuming the mists have moved on and the undead have been defeated. If not, I am not too worried about where I live.
What I do care about is that there is no one bringing leashes out here in the desert. Our children will be free.