CHAPTER 295: MISTAKE

Each time the earth shook, Irene had to whisper comforting words to sammy in hopes that he wouldn’t panic and knock things over in the house she was borrowing for warmth. She could see his eyes widen by the light of the fire and his body would tense up each time.

"It’s alright," she would utter to him. "It’ll be over in a sec."

So far, he had been a good horse who didn’t scare easily and that was important in such a journey as wha they were experiencing. However, it was jarring even for her because she had no explanation except that it was a persistent avalanche. Was that a possibility? Could snow persistently fall like that?

As she lay there, her sleep interrupted by the shaking of the ground, she quietly wondered if there was simply that much snow in the arctic north. It would have been useful for her father and grandmother to tell her as such before she went.

Eventually, she stood up and offered more brittle and old wood for the fire to eat up, but she was happy to not use her own supply while she was there. It felt like her family left behind the means to survive.

Instead of trying to force herself back to sleep, Irene found her notebooks and maps and went for the one that was about the very village she slept inside of.

She lazed in the bed until she had the map open. Only then did she sit upright with her eyebrows lowered in confusion.

"What...?" she muttered to herself. "This can’t be right?"

The village on the page was far different than the layout she recalled from the night before. There were probably only five buildings that she recalled picking out, but it wasn’t a detail she thought to pay attention to since supposedly this village was one of the only ones in this area.

However, she went back to the map that brought her this way in the first place, and she realized that if she were to go too far northwest then she would go to another village that was said to be teeming with monsters which was why it had been abandoned even before the village her father came from. She realized that there was a note of this on the back side of the map. It was in handwriting she didn’t recognize but Sunstoian nonetheless.

Irene tried to reason why she would miss such an important detail. Was it because she had been reading in almost only Sunstoian? Was her comfortableness with the language made her finally take note of a small scrawling that said "back" with an arrow next to it?

The girl sighed and settled into the bed.

"It seems we will be going east," she explained to Sammy. "We can’t get comfortable here just yet."

The girl decided she would peek out of the door and see how risen the sun was. However, the door, much like in the past village, was practically sealed shut. She gave a heaving sigh upon this discovery.

There was a small sense of panic within her that she had gone in the wrong direction in the first place. It was her one biggest mistake so far in the journey and so she should likely be grateful that it was only that, but she was still disappointed in herself.

However, with much determination, the girl was able to shove the door open, only for a snowdrift to be presented to her.

Seconds after she had the door open, the world around her seemed to shift, and she was sent to her backside as she fell to the ground. The snow itself seemed to be moving as if it were alive until she was able to reach upward and grab the doorknob to pull the door shut again.

There was scraping behind her and she knew Sammy had stood up.

"It was particularly bad this time, wasn’t it?" she asked. "It’s alright. We will get out of here in no time."

Since the sun had started to breach the horizon, she decided to fix herself a quick breakfast of boiled oats and pour some more hay and oats onto the floor for the horse who ate them up gratefully .

"We’re going to need to find you something else to eat when we make it there. I just hope we get there before the sun sets. This map isnt’ specific on how far the villages are from one another."

It was a matter of getting back into her heaviest layers and dumping water over the fire so that she wouldn’t put all of these items to ruin. Again, she wasn’t sure why the building was so packed full of things.

By the time Sammy’s saddle was back on, they were able to go outside and rectify this leg of their trip. Irene was determined to correct her mistakes and felt a little bit bad that Sammy was having to do the same even though he was merely going wherever she could tell him.

A small part of her wished her father was there to steer her in the correct direction, but she recalled how he went to the north even earlier than her and how he never mentioned getting lost, only that he faced unexpected monsters on his journey there. He told her to be hyper-vigilant while she was there and to not trust that everything was always as it seemed.

The girl pushed the door open once more, finding it easier this time around.

She pulled on Sammy’s reins, only to stop dead in her tracks yet again.

The snow in front of her wasn’t... snow. It was something equally as white and just as solid. Things started to shift again and she saw what looked to be a purple stone. All she could do was stare at it for a few moments with wide, green eyes.

Her heart seemed to stop for a moment, but when wherewithal returned to her, it began pumping the thrill of fight through her body. Her hands were trembling but she knew she could not panic.

As she became more aware, she realized that what was on the hill in front of her seemed to be scales. The purple circle that was admittedlyb beautiful and seemed to have its own source of light looked like a magical orb.

They weren’t even a foot outside of the house before she mounted Sammy and squeezed her knees as tightly as she could. The saddlebags were still on her shoulders so her movements were clumsier and slower than they would normally be. Her balance was off and she nearly fell off of the horse backwards if it weren’t for her entire body squeezing and her hands flexing until they felt like they might fall off of her body.

Only when they had been running for a long enough time did Irene cast a glance backwards.

"That’s the end of a tail," she explained out loud, her voice wavering with each word. "There aren’t supposed to be wyrms left in this world, are there?"

How interesting that she as the one to write that report on wyrms all those years ago and so the learnings of their physical being stuck out in her mind. It was hard to accept.

All of a sudden, a headache seemed to strike her deeply in her brain, she cringed at the feeling that spread through her skull.

"Ah..." she muttered holding her forehead as Sammy still ran forward.

However, since she was alone and she couldn’t see herself, she didn’t realize that her eyes glowed purple for a few moments before returning back to their usual green. At that, the headache subsided as well.

All she could try to tell herself was that it was merely a lot of things happening at once that was enough to throw her off.

All the two of them could do was press on. If that were truly a wyrm, she would be dead. There was no way in hell she could face it all on her own. Considering how large the mere end of it s tail was, she couldn’t imagine just how large that creature was.

Things started lining up. The snowy plateau that kept shifting. The shaking on the ground.

Was there a wyrm that was soon to wake up in the area? Was it merely displeased with having someone nearby in its territory? Whatever the case, she felt she made the correct decision by putting space between herself and that village.

Even if the Sunstoian and knight’s urge was to fight, she had to also have discretion within her to know when it wasn’t her battle or when she couldn’t take care of things all on her own.

By the time the sun had peaked as high as it would get out here, which was pretty low compared to what it normally looked like at that time of day in Chemois, they had stumbled upon remnants of a village slightly further north than the direction they were traveling.

To her relief, when the map was pulled out, it actually matched the village map that gave more details. As she looked around, it was as flat and as wide as her father told her it would be.

At least there was some relief there.

Although, when she wrote in her journal that night, who was going to believe her that she thought she was a mere couple of feet away from a wyrm?

As always, it was time to find a place to stay.