by Scott Beith
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” she snarled back, unwilling to accept any praise about the subject.
“So what is that bug?” I asked her, looking over the creature, never having seen anything like it before.
“We don’t have a name for them,” she informed me. “Ordinarily they keep to themselves in the higher trees, drinking sap. They’re generally peaceful, but you’ve gotta be careful of the pregnant ones – they’re the ones that seek blood over nectar,” she explained to me.
“So how did you know that one was pregnant?” I asked curiously.
“Because it was the only one attacking me,” she replied, revealing the smallest smile of a joke before turning her face bitter and impassive again, trying to keep herself detached from us and the whole situation we’d brought to her house.
“Are you ever going to tell me who are you, and where exactly we are?” I asked, still desperate for some actual answers to all my many theories. “What is this place, and what happened to your mother’s leg?” I added quite rashly and impolitely, looking into her eyes as she sat there on other side, hearing me but choosing simply not to respond.
“Why don’t you just relax,” she said to me dismissively, trying to silence me from asking questions as if I was the one pretending to be something I’m not or acting ignorantly to some kind of well devised con. “It’ll all be explained in time,” she assured me, leaning back in the chair and closing her eyes.
“Why can’t you just tell me now. I don’t know how much time we have to spare,” I then pleaded to her, although only despising her further as she chose to stand up and walk away from me instead, moving to sit on a smaller side table and chair beside the warming mantle of the fireplace.
With no choice but to work it out on my own, I began observing all the other things I could see while centred in the dark muggy hut. Shocked to discover another body I had completely missed upon my entrance; it was the resting figure of a wounded soldier about Arlo’s height and size – lying on the darker end of the smaller side table the pale princess sat beside.
Her table was covered in blankets and pillows for the young man to rest upon. His hair appearing as white as Milena’s and her daughter’s, only his hair was short and wavy with messed up spikes.
“Pilly, dear, we need that adrenaline sac beside you and Levi. This man’s going to need the rest of it if he is to pull through this,” Milena said towards her daughter over in the corner.
“Whoa! No, wait a second,” the pale princess erupted, jumping up out of her chair abruptly, prepared to block anyone who dared to retrieve the adrenaline sac on the table beside ‘Levi’. “You can’t give him any of it – I doubt there’s any more left in this world,” she blurted out.
Her mother held her arms steady, locking the creature still as they remained in mid-operation, staring back at her, concerned – the blood-hungry bug seeming to stare over at her along with the others, upset over being held just outside its reach of Arlo’s body mid-feed.
“Don’t dispute this,” Milena replied. “He’s going to die without it, Pilly,” she sternly added.
“Then let him die, I don’t care about them!” she yelled. “Levi will die if you take the adrenaline away from him! What if he still needs more?” she added in concern, looking back to the other injured man across the table, a body greatly resembling the figure of her own white-haired brother.
“Pilly,” her mother softly and compassionately tried to reason, “the adrenaline can’t save Levi – it will only prolong the inevitable,” she stated sadly.
“So then give him another day,” Pilly argued, tears building in her eyes as she stood her ground. “He deserves it more!”
Anara and me both looked to each other, wishing to speak, but smart enough to know our silence was best for the situation, the two of us choosing to keep quiet as we waited anxiously for Milena’s verdict.
“Pilly, I know how much you love your brother, but we have a real chance to save this man’s life right now,” she argued.
I was already suspicious of who he was but, nevertheless, her response shocked me all the same. His shape and muscle tone was identical to Arlo’s, and although at first his image was quite hard to distinguish from stray corner objects, upon hearing her words the realisation that it was him was suddenly as clear as day. Levi was Arlo’s double, just as Pilly was Anara’s.
Some parts of their parallel world were starting to make sense… their hair was albino white and their skin a smooth shiny pale due to the lack of sun and the nutrients sunlight gave to the skin.
Arlo had lost his crystal sword in the wall of our castle’s southern spire, but there, by that smaller table, was another replica of it, resting upright beside the other man, balancing on the corner, a perfect duplicate of Arlo’s crystal sword. It also dawned on me that Levi had the wrapping of a battle wound on the low left side of his chest – the same spot Arlo had stabbed the elite swordsman he had beaten in the Ambarvale Village assault, which explained exactly why Pilly held so much resentment towards us.
The war between us and the gnolls had been so evenly balanced because the same people were fighting it on both sides. The significance of that epiphany seemed to have been long discovered by Anara already, but for me it was scary – scary because it meant we were side by side with our one true enemy.
The dark mystery concerning all things unexplained had become so obvious it was near humorous in irony. I mean, after all, Anara was the queen of escape, so who else could have successfully capture other than another version of herself? Who else could rival Arlo in a sword fight other than himself? As lastly what other couple would be capable of building a trans-dimensional portal – had the invention of the Sunspire never separated the man who could build the conduit gateways stones, from the women who could control and power them?
The troubled young girl hadn’t taken the princess for ransom at all; she’d taken her because she needed a nurse for her dying brother. A brother who was dying from a sword wound my prince had given him.
Events that once seemed random and irrelevant were flashing before my eyes with an amazing sense of sequence and pattern.
“I don’t care!” Pilly stubbornly retorted. “He deserves to die,” she stated ruthlessly, looking at him with disgust and gripping her bow, as if deciding whether or not to aim it at him.
“THEN WHY DID YOU BRING HIM HERE?!” Milena shouted back at her daughter in heated frustrated, her harsh words more a tearful cry than they were of her hazardous and typical harpy screeches.
Lost of all response, Pilly dropped back to her seat in a stumped pouty defeat, throwing the fleshy-green organ sac across the room over onto the table beside Arlo, her careless actions near squashing it as Anara was quick and careful to catch it.
Filled with so much repressed anger and disdain, Anara’s attitude towards living was nothing like that of her tempest double, even in the worst situations Anara was able to feign a brave face, but that pretty pale princess was barely keeping herself together. She was a storm of emotion – somebody who was without innocence and had to grow up much faster than age was meant to permit. While, conversely, her mother was but a ghost of her alter self – someone so faint and vulnerable it was just as strange to see her being the new embodiment of fondness and compassion towards helping others, even if the person she helped just happened to look incidentally like her own critically injured son.
Pilly sat stewing in silence for a great amount of time after her short outburst. Of course there were many things I still wanted to ask her, but I was a guest and knew it wasn’t the right time for me to start asking questions.
And so, waiting patiently in the gentle warmth and glimmered darkness while staring at my necklace to a final wipe of sweat and blood around Arlo’s feverish body, the surgery was done. Anara brought over a bowl of water as directed and started washing the table clean around him.
Milena carried the full-bellied bug towards the ladder entry point and allowed it to fly ou
t of the ascending shoot, its ability to fly greatly stifled by its fat expanded belly as it happily buzzed out towards the unseen forest skies.
Anara walked up to me after washing up, sitting beside me as I sat silently and patiently, waiting for her to speak. “I don’t know how long it will take for him to recover, but he will recover,” she said, smiling, before looking over to her duplicate who still sat in the darkness away from everyone. “We all owe you, Pilly,” she stated
“Ok, cool, thanks for that” she sarcastically bit back. “Now what about my brother, have you even looked at him yet?” she asked, unable to look away from his motionless body.
“Well, your mother did a good job of stitching him up, and the wound itself is only minor… But the infection and fever the wound caused is very serious, and I can’t treat them without specific medicine,” she sadly and shamefully then admitted. “I’m sorry but only our doctor can save him.”
“So after all this, there’s nothing you can do for him?” she vented in angst.
“If I can bring our doctor back here, I can save your brother,” Anara contested. “Pilly, I know you don’t believe us, but we didn’t know about any of this. There can be a truce between both our worlds,” she stated optimistically. “Please don’t lose hope for him now. There’s still time.” Anara said, moving over towards her, placing a hand on her shoulder, only to have it shrugged away defensively.
“There is no hope for him then… because there can be no truce,” Pilly stated pessimistically. “You’ve taken too much for us to ever accept amends,” she stipulated.
“But can your world even survive if you don’t receive our help?” I asked, joining their conversation from the distance, making assumptions of their inevitable doom based on what I had seen and assumed to be true.
Her silence said more than any real words ever could, as with it came the thoughts about what we needed most: some well-devised plan – anything that could, at a bare minimum, uplift us all from the gloom we were stuck under.
In order to lead that movement, however, I needed to know exactly what was happening. “So are you two like twins or something?” I joked coyly, playing dumb while trying to showcase my clear desire for an explanation about everything.
Anara and Pilly shared a small smile as they looked at each other and rolled their eyes, making the same silly face simultaneously as they, too, questioned the very absurdity of everything occurring around us.
“When he wakes up, he’ll want some food and drinkable water,” Milena interrupted. “Pilly, perhaps you can take Kya with you to get some,” she authorized. “As far as explanations go, sometimes a picture can paint a thousand words,” she then stated, turning to me.
I wasn’t sure if it was wise for me to leave Arlo behind while he was still unconscious. My own lingering wait as I looked over towards him bringing clear testament to that.
“It’s alright, Kya. I’ll stay with him. He’s going to be safe here,” Anara reassured me.
I took a second to think about it, but having been left out in the dark for so long, I was more than thrilled to be finally getting some honest answers.
“Alright then. Come on, Princess,” I said to Pilly as I walked over to the stairs in wait, feeling rejuvenated from the whole terrifying ordeal, catching the winters cloak Anara threw me as I began putting it on, leaving one hand out towards Pilly in friendship, and inviting her to follow me as I took the first step up onto the stairs.
It was obvious by her wait that she didn’t feel too kindly about being alone with me again – possibly related to something the other version of me must have done to her in the past.
“I’m not a princess,” Pilly said, refusing my hand, which remained suspended in the air beside her as she walked up the planked ladder first. “Come on then, we’re waiting on you now,” she announced, leaving me to chase her up the branchy steps in swift pursuit.
32
Under-hollow
Rugged up and warm for once, my head popped out from the top of the fallen tree log bridge. I felt like a phoenix that had exploded into ashes and been reborn to a second chance at life. I was out among the night life again, among the fierce winter’s chill of a mild forest wind that breathed and battered against the front of my face, the sweet purity of fresh mountainside air rejuvenating my mind, body and soul as I looked out over the dam.
Maybe it was just thin hilly air, but I came out of that hut feeling weightless and cleansed of all former concerns. Most renewed and burden-free, despite being covered up under a thick blanketing hood from the leathery winter’s cloak I’d been given, which concealed both cold cheeks on my face and tunnelled my vision to only ever look forwards.
I was no longer alone, nor did I have to remain in charge of all the hard decisions that had to be made, and so back out within that topside mist overlooking the still river and dam, I took a few moments of relief to breathe and admire the lush midnight forest and its glistening waterhole below for all of its forbidden beauty. Pilly stood still and unamused near me, lingering on the opposite edge of that peaceful tranquillity, merely tapping her leg impatiently in a prolonged wait for me to come over to her side of the bridge.
She faced away from the misleadingly innocent river below her refuge, and over towards the death, darkness and decay that was the whole severe drought-stricken land underneath on the other side of the dam. A deathly path that led endlessly down a long and dry river track, deep into the husky woody meadows ahead. Pilly was caught in the middle of white chimney smoke, catching the whiffs of strong campfire trails as each puff escaped and slowly disappeared through various invisible tree hole gaps hidden inconspicuously under the leafy foliage of the carefully carved-out entrance hole we’d come out from.
She was unimpressed by my slowness, choosing to stay within those small puffy clouds of smoke rather than move slightly to her left and out of its way, a strong, stubborn yet silent indication for wanting me to move more quickly in pursuit of her. And so, I walked up to the wooden platforms edge, watching the smoke sail off and merge with the misty night time atmosphere as Pilly and I together overlooked the same hefty drop point that led down into a never ending empty expanse of dirt, dried brambles and dead thorns scattered between distant trees and their roots as she nodded her head downwards in confirmation that we were going to have to drop down into the deserted leafless woody under-hollows.
The heavy rain had all but ended, replaced by a subtle breeze, with casual raindrops spread throughout, deposited from a few thinning grey clouds that moved towards where Pilly wished for us to go.
It was a lengthy drop down, high enough to break one’s legs if they were to question jumping straight down from the top. I leant over the ledge to look at how hard and solid the river bedrock looked upon this side, along with how many unseen tadpole newts might be lucking underneath. But it was all ash-black, like it had been scorched by an arson who wished to intentionally transform the old swamp and forest into the withering dry-meadow that it had become.
What should have naturally led to a swamp and wetlands moor in the distance was just more of the same small tree husks uprooted from a desolate and decrepit long stretch of dried-out old land.
Unlike Pilly, who was unenthusiastic about the way she fired her arrow beside her feet and began slowly abseiling along a silk rope attached to the tail end of it, I was keen to continue on. Excited to finally unveil the mysteries of her dark world, seeing as I finally had an experienced hunter and travel guide to show me the way.
I decided to jump, recreating my huge fleshy black devil wings that parachuted me effortlessly towards the barren lifeless river of dirt below. To be extra safe, I bounced against a large mushroom cap I sprouted up from the shadow pool I made upon my drop, taking all safety precautions just in case the brilliant new black bat-like wings on my back were to fail me.
In the time it took for Pilly to skip and swing from the stray branches that impeded her slow and silent descent, I had risen that mushroom tall and f
at, rebuilding the ogre that had previously protected me, summoning him back to life.
In terms of getting home, I still had a lot of issues to deal with, but I was more motivated and ambitious as ever to take my time in figuring them out. And so, waiting patiently for Pilly to catch up, I tried to scout the lifeless area as best I could before her arrival, to check the river for dangers behind each thorny stump and rock, promptly walking up the river in patrol around each dead willow and oak tree as I wandered without a clear direction of which way I was supposed to be heading.
Naturally, I and my ogre moved downstream, with Pilly arriving on the soft dirt of the river bed shortly after my brief investigations, standing there by the giant river blockage, simply watching me move down the dry flood-plain with the same stern unimpressed grin as before.
Tamara used to tell me that ‘the grass always looked greener on the other side,’ always trying to teach me valuable life lessons about jealousy and spite sometimes getting the best of proper judgement, and that all citizens, whether rich or poor, had their own personal battles to deal with each day. But on occasions like the ones I kept finding myself in, I had to start wondering how wrong she must have been. The land before me and beyond that river log blockage was completely condemned, its riverbed as dry and infertile as the white desert and red ridges of The Badlands.
Whether natural or man-made, the tree falling over to block the river’s flow was a blessing to all of the forest on one side. Yet by consequence, had cursed the rest of the forest there afterwards, with all the wood upon this half of the land dried up and flaking away to powder in the wind.
Like the graveyard beforehand, we were once again in a dead zone, a dark forsaken hollow that had become so stagnant and suspended of all life, that not one noticeable plant or creature seemed capable to stay alive. It was as if one tree falling over had fortunately saved one half of the forest and yet killed the other. Some might call that a sacrifice, seeing as one area died so that another could thrive, and yet others could dare contest to say that if the giant tree that blocked the river never fell, then both halves of the forest would survive to suffer only half alive.