Chapter 18: Into the Unknown

From behind her tears, Violet heard the cat clear its throat, the little beast still frustratingly unruffled by the whole terrible ordeal. She sniffled and stared down at the legs of her pants, wet and streaked with mud. Her feet were soaked, her shoes filled with water and silt, and the abrasive grit of dirt had already begun to chafe under her clothes.

She felt uniquely miserable and, bizarrely, furious at the cat for being so calm. Violet didn’t want solutions, she wanted to wallow and feel sorry for herself, even if, logically, she knew this wouldn’t do anything to improve her own situation.

Again the panic rose, coiling around her anger like a creeping vine, sharp edged and poisonous. The boat was gone. She was stranded now, marooned on the wrong side of the river, far from anything that was even remotely familiar.

“And here I thought you didn’t like the boat,” the cat sighed to itself, lifting one paw from the mud with a muted grimace. “Is this one of those human things I’m not good at understanding?”

“I’m stuck.” Violet repeated.

“No you’re not.”

She stared uncomprehendingly at the cat, which was still trying to find a dry place to put all four of its paws. Taking one hand, Violet swept it out across the river in a wide, jagged arc. Her palm was bleeding, threads of blood seeping through the dark smears of mud that coated her skin.

“I-I’m not like you, I can’t just walk through the air or slip past the shadows, I don’t work that way! I have no boat, I’m stuck!” Her words, sharp with despair, echoed over the river.

Distorted in such a way, they seemed almost mocking, as though the great wide world had seized upon her anguish and twisted it back around.

“Lift your gaze, you’re staring at the mud.” The cat said.

Violet tried to glare at her companion but could only manage an unhappy, sniffly little grimace.

“Past me,” the cat instructed with a sigh. “Look inland. What do you see?”

For a long moment Violet thought about hunching up and ignoring her companion, or flinging mud at it, or staring back at the impossible, intimidating breadth of the river…but the sheer uselessness of all of that threw a pall over her frightened, desperate anger.

Slowly, her gaze sullen and reluctant, she looked over top of her companion’s head.

“…It’s the forest.” She muttered, not knowing how that could possibly help. “Brush and trees and….”

“Trees,” the cat agreed, cutting her off. “Which can be cut down and fashioned into a raft. It won’t be nearly as comfortable as that posh little boat we just lost, but at least a raft is less likely to sink.”

For a long moment she said nothing, her mind suddenly gone blank but for a monotone buzz of shocked relief.

A raft.

Of course.

Violet looked to the river, to her soaked, muddy clothes, then to the pristine, very smug form of the cat, and slowly flopped onto her back on the riverbank, staring up at the sky. She felt like laughing and crying and maybe even screaming, but did none of those things. Instead, Violet took a deep breath and was very, very silent.

“When we, or you, I suppose…when you get around to building this raft, you’ll need to do it well upstream from your island, that way you don’t miss it while paddling across. In any case, probably a good thing the boat is gone. Wouldn’t have been much fun to tug it a few kilometers up the river.”

Violet contemplated, her brows furrowing with sudden concern.

“I hope the Trade Master doesn’t get mad at me for sinking the spare boat.” She said, then remembered where she was and could only laugh. Of all the trouble she’d just landed herself in, village rules suddenly seemed very distant and small.

“Are you feeling better?” The cat asked.

Violet couldn’t decide on an answer. She felt slightly less afraid, but replacing that fear was a general sense of discomforted exhaustion.

Even if there was a potential way for her to get back across the river, it remained more theoretic than fact. Burdening her mind even further was the growing realization that this was it. She was on the other side of the river now, water to her back and nothing but the unknown ahead of her. Even if she did decide to cut and run, constructing a raft would take some time…

Swallowing down her unease, Violet managed as decisive a nod as she could muster.

“Yes.” She lied, and sat back up, wincing at the dull ache throbbing just below her sternum, where the oar had winded her.

The first thing she did was check her rucksack. The thick stitched fabric constructing it was dark with water and streaked with mud and Violet held her breath as she undid the top, silently fearing the worst. She’d gone up to her shoulders in the river and couldn’t quite remember if her rucksack had been completely submerged or not. Gingerly opening the top, she peered inside and then let out a quiet sigh of relief. Her notebook, which she’d laid on top of everything else, looked to be intact, the sigil damp and slightly smeared but still perfectly legible. One corner of the cover had been soaked and she could see the pages clumping together, but that was fixable.

The chalk had survived as well, as had a few other small things packed at the very top of her rucksack, but….

Wait.

Digging in further, Violet found the hard, cylindrical form of her lantern and tugged it free with a grunt. Beads of moisture rolled down the sides and dripped to the mud, Violet’s stomach doing an anxious little flip inside of her. If she lost her lantern then she’d be down to her spark lighter in terms of being able to create illumination.

Taking a deep breath, Violet unfolded the crank and began to wind her lantern with ginger little movements, as though being hasty or overeager would sabotage things. Behind a shimmery veil of moisture, the lantern’s tungsten filaments sparked and then began to glow, producing a steady white light.

“Oh thank goodness…” Violet mumbled out loud and wiped the lantern as dry as she could before tucking it into the top of her pack. The cat watched with some light amusement but said nothing.

Satisfied that none of her things had been ruined, Violet hefted her rucksack with a muted groan and tightened the straps once more. The rucksack seemed quite a lot heavier than she remembered it being, and it was only when cold trickles of grimy water began to run down the backs of her thighs that Violet remembered what happened to cloth when it was soaked.

Biting back a grimace, Violet trudged away from the riverbank, wet shoes squishing with each step she took, and looked into the forest. The cat had moved ahead of her and stood between a pair of pale aspen saplings, glancing back and forth with quiet interest.

“There’s a funny edge to the air,” it remarked. “I don’t expect you can feel it, but it’s right there at the tips of my whiskers…”

Violet looked up to where the sky had become bordered by the edge of the forest’s canopy. The clouds she’d noticed earlier were growing thicker, drawing together into purply gray ridges and vaporous hillocks that pulsed with the promise of a coming storm.

“Rain, maybe?” She suggested, and shifted from foot to foot, not liking the feeling of walking with wet socks. If it was going to rain then she’d need to find a place to camp, and soon. Otherwise she’d only get soaked again.

The cat offered the storm clouds a cursory glance, then slowly shook its head.

“Not like a rainstorm exactly,” it said, turning a slow circle in place, like a piece of flotsam about to be pulled down a drain. “There’s a depth to this, like the moment just after a hunt, when all you can smell is iron and maybe the bitterness of fear if the prey saw you coming. There are communications contained entirely within the blood, perhaps not meant to be understood from an outside perspective but you can still sense a coherence, a very flexible and adaptive intelligence behind those dying impulses. If you shock a system with adrenaline then it, even undirected, leads the muscles to certain conclusions. Even if those muscles, strands and knots of dumb tissue that they are, know not the greater framework their reaction is supporting, they still obey.”

“…Cat?” Violet asked uneasily, and her companion broke from its swirling with a start, looking faintly surprised at itself.

“No,” the cat concluded. “Not like rain at all.”

The forest itself was surprisingly open, its foliage low and soft, covered with silvery droplets of morning dew. Stepping forward, Violet passed through tickly ferns and avoided waist high stands of nettles and purply blossomed thistles.

There were bushes and thorns here and there but for the most part the way was clear, almost inviting compared to the tangled thickets she’d picked her way through back home.

What surprised her more was how colorful everything was. Even in the gray light of a stormy morning the forest had a healthy verdant glow, traced with streaks and splashes of vivid red and blue and yellow. The mosses and vines twining around the trunks of the oaks and birches before her possessed a deep, pleasing saturation, almost as though they were slightly more real than everything that surrounded them.

A part of Violet wanted to relax into this scene of pastoral splendor, but she thought back to the cat’s strange reaction to the unseen, unheard something in the air. Its distracted musings about muscles and blood and prey….

She shook the remembrance from her mind and took some time to think about navigation instead. Her trip across the river had swept her quite a ways downstream. If standing with her back to the river meant that she was looking due north then she’d been carried some distance to the east. As such, Violet angled herself northwest to compensate and began to walk again.

When night fell she’d have a better idea of where the Glow was and could orient herself more thoroughly, but for now she felt purposeful and determined, even through her wet socks and grimy clothes.

The cat stayed a few meters ahead, its tail sticking up above the ferns. The tip twitched from side to side like the needle of a metronome and Violet realized that the cat was humming to itself, the tune unordered and directionless.

“I must admit,” it said. “I haven’t been this far to the east before.”

Violet paused.

“…Is that a problem?” She asked, trying not to sound concerned.

The cat glanced back, not seeming to notice her sudden apprehension.

“I wouldn’t think so,” it said, just a little breezily, “one patch of forest is much like another.”

Violet wanted to ask about the edge the cat had noticed to the air, but bit the question back. Whatever her companion would say, she was almost entirely certain it both wouldn’t be an answer and would only serve to frighten her further.

A moment later she noticed something, a splash of red and blue peeping out from beneath the edge of a fallen log so old and mossy that it had begun to melt into the ground. She was looking at a hesitant patch of growing flowers, the very type the cat had fetched for her on the night she’d faced the drainpipe demon.

Violet wondered for a moment whether or not they had a name, then hoped that her mother would water the transplanted flower while she was away. Even thinking of her flower, sitting there in the dirt beneath her window, filled Violet with a surge of homesickness so intense that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

“Are you coming?” The cat asked from up ahead, where it had leapt onto the top of a stone and looked to be surveying the land ahead…as much as anyone barely four feet off the ground could.

Violet tore her gaze from the flowers and hurried on, grimacing at the persistent squish coming from her shoes.

Songbirds stirred overhead, Violet could hear them moving around in the higher branches, practicing their routines. Little notes and fragments of song drifted down through the leaves, chirps and tweets and trills intertwining. Violet recognized bluebirds and sparrows, though many more birdcalls remained entirely foreign to her ears.

She looked up but could only see vague flickers, the birds were keeping to their own realm for the moment, well away from hers. The cat glanced up as well, ears twitching, then made a strange face and looked away.

A moment later Violet realized why. The birds weren’t singing correctly. As strange as it was to realize that, it made her observation no less true. Violet knew the morning call of a bluebird as well as anyone, a high chatter interspaced with low, smooth whistles, but though she could hear individual elements of that song they never blended together into a cohesive whole. And that was true as to the sounds the other birds were making as well. Violet could hear a whole fragmentary constellation of avian noise passing over her head but none of it seemed to connect. Back on the island she’d listened to the various types of birds sing around one another, their songs interweaving and yet remaining perfectly coherent.

This was…wrong, somehow. The songs had become fractured. The birds were broken.

That last phrase she passed through her mind again and was disturbed enough by it that she decided to ignore the whole thing, putting the occurrence from her mind. Perhaps it was nothing, she made herself think. Perhaps the birds were not used to humans and were being weirded out by her presence.

She could very well be the same thing to them that a demon was to her.

But, in that case, why weren’t they flying away?

Violet shuffled the damp straps of her rucksack more firmly onto her shoulders and trudged on ahead. They were entering a strangely shaped clearing now, a place where only ferns and the occasional spindly sapling grew. Violet could see a stand of aspens beginning to cloud her view to the east, their pale trunks interrupted only by knobby bands of black.

The clearing itself wasn’t very big, only ten or twelve meters from where she stood to its other side, but it was weirdly long and curved out of sight to either side. Stepping forward, Violet felt something hard and flat beneath her feet and looked down, shifting a flat chunk of crumbly gray stone aside with one toe.

“A road.” She realized out loud. The pavement had long since cracked and buckled in countless places, but Violet could still see where the road had swept through the forest in times long since forgotten.

Suddenly the wilderness seemed slightly less monolithic, for there were other traces of fallen civilization poking from amidst nature’s embrace. Violet could see faded signs and the crumbled stumps of fenceposts, low brick walls choked with vines and shaded by saplings. The hunched, sagging form of a tumbled down house peeked from between the trees on the other side of the road, its front garden filled with a golden spray of sunflowers grown so high that Violet would have been lost beneath their blooms.

She was standing at the edge of a neighborhood, now all but erased by the persistent hand of time. Violet stepped into the middle of the road and stared, the birds entirely forgotten. It was odd to see a place where people had once lived, not because of the state of ruin but rather the fact that it was there at all.

Logically, Violet knew that people had to live in other places besides her village (after all, where else could the outsiders come from if not outside) but she’d never actually considered that people might have once lived in the middle of the forest. And the framework of the civilization these vanished people had enjoyed was so familiar that it made her feel intensely strange and deeply curious.

The houses looked almost the same as the ones back in her village, as did the front gardens and the walls and fences and…

“What is this place?” Violet asked.

The cat gave her a half amused glance from atop a crooked garden wall.

“What are you asking me for? I’ve never been here.”

Violet said nothing more and decided to walk along the road instead. It seemed to trace the river more or less and she headed west, upstream. This wasn’t the most efficient path for reaching the Glow but she hardly cared.

There was no canopy above her but for the occasional overhanging branch and Violet found herself enjoying what pale traces of sunshine passed through the gathering clouds. It was full morning now, the sunrise entirely gone, and Violet found herself walking through what amounted to a field of flowers as the road wound onwards. Occasionally it branched, shooting a narrower tributary off into the forest, but Violet kept to the main path. The cracks in the pavement were filled with flowers, daisies and roses and….

“Violets,” the cat remarked, then laughed to itself as it hopped nimbly across a clump of white and purple blooms. “It’s apt that you’re named after these.”

“Apt?”

“Appropriate.” The cat explained.

“How come?” Violet asked. Her mother’s reasoning for giving her the name she had was that violets were very pretty, but something told Violet the cat’s reasoning might be slightly different.

And indeed a slow, carnivorous smile spread across her companion’s face.

“Because you, just like the flower, are edible.” The cat said, then laughed and leapt away from the pebble that Violet tossed in retaliation.

There was silence for a little while after that and Violet watched as the garden walls slowly gave way to tangled rosebushes studded with fat blossoms that seemed to shine like stars amidst a glossy green sky of foliage. Here and there Violet could see places where trees and gardens and even the entirety of ruined houses had been consumed by thorny vines and bright, dew speckled rosebuds. They’d just finished opening in preparation for the day and looked fresh and eager, the inviting spiral of their petals drawing Violet’s eye.

She was used to seeing red and maybe white roses, the same types that had once grown beneath her windowsill before withering slowly away, but the blossoms that lit the sides of the road were vast and diverse in hue. Violet could see roses as red and as blood and as pink as Maud’s cheeks. Others shone the intense golden color of a dying afternoon, or swallowed vision with hues black as ink. These last ones caught her off guard enough that she strayed near to the overhanging bulk of the hedge on which they grew. Coming near to the tangle of vines and leaves and intertwined branches felt almost as though she was stepping up to an ocean wave frozen in mid collapse.

Violet stroked the nearest black rose with the tips of her fingers and felt the velvet of the petals, fine as silk and dark as the deepest night.

“There are blue roses too,” the cat said from where it remained in the middle of the road. “Alas, I don’t see any here.”

“Blue….” Violet murmured to herself. When she continued on, she felt cheered for having seen the flowers.

From somewhere off in the distance a low rumble of thunder shivered the air. Violet gave the clouds a small, pleading look, silently begging them to hold off for at least a little longer.

The next time the road branched off, the tributary was narrower than usual and veered in the direction of the river. Intrigued, Violet decided to investigate. The path she stepped onto had at one point been guarded by a wrought iron gate. The barrier had long since fallen from its hinges, leaving only a heap of rust upon the ground. The two wings of the ruined gate, elaborately crafted and covered with twisting metal bars, were still held together with a steel chain and an intimidatingly large silver padlock. Both had been eaten at by corrosion but still looked strong despite it.

The path itself ended against a small stone walled cottage with a slate roof entirely covered with colorful streamers of moss and fungi. Though it sagged in places, the whole building was in much better shape than anything she’d seen so far. Violet exchanged a look with the cat, then winced as another peal of distant thunder rumbled across the heavens.

“I’ll take the lead.” The cat said, and trotted forward before Violet could say anything. They stepped up to the front door, which had gone crooked in its frame. The cat sniffed the air, then examined the door with a calculating gaze.

“I doubt there’s anything big in there,” it said. “Probably just demons.”

Violet shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, then slipped off her rucksack and leaned it against the front wall.

“If we have to run you might not be able to pick that back up.” The cat warned.

Violet only blew out a breath, tugging her hatchet from where she’d lashed it to the front of her rucksack.

“I won’t be able to run if I have that thing on.” She countered and was met with a light shrug from the cat.

“Touché,” it offered. “…And perhaps there’s a silver lining to this hypothetical tragedy. Without all of your frivolities you might have to learn how to actually survive in the woods, with nothing but your wits and your teeth and….”

Violet pushed the front door open with one shoulder, breaking the cat from its reverie. The door squealed hideously on its rusted hinges and Violet cringed in place. If there were any lurking beasts in the house then they most certainly knew that somebody was coming.

Yet nothing stirred within the musty dimness of the cottage’s interior, and as Violet squinted into the gloom she could see an uninterrupted skin of dust all across the floor. If anything had been using the cottage as a den, it didn’t seem to have disturbed the front room.

The cat padded in, ears fully upright, and Violet cautiously followed. The cottage’s floor was ancient hardwood, much the same as hers back home, but the boards had been warped by time and lay slightly unevenly, sagging inwards wherever they’d been soaked by water leaking through the roof.

Moldering piles of shoes and lost raincoats lay in the corners of the front room, a pair of house keys still hanging from a corroded metal hook. Spiderwebs festooned the corners of the ceiling and Violet had to duck beneath the silvery threads of an intimidatingly enormous web as she advanced.

The cat had left tiny, neat paw prints in the dust and Violet followed exactly in their path, as though she were navigating a minefield. The front room let out into a tiny, almost vestigial hallway, a large living room to her left, what seemed to be a kitchen to her right. Directly ahead lay the remains of a staircase, now nothing more than a splintered tumble of wood and fabric. Above her, Violet could see the entrance to the second floor, entirely out of reach.

The living room was clear at a glance and Violet edged in its direction as the cat padded off to investigate the kitchen. The living room was in much better shape than the staircase but still Violet could see signs of decay, places where water had run down the walls and fed the growth of vividly hued plates of fungus.

A stone hearth dominated the far side of the room, made of flat, quartz stones, the type that could be skipped across a still body of water. It was dark and empty but had clearly been used quite a lot, for Violet could see many years worth of char coating the back of the fireplace. A pair of armchairs stood in front of it, angled to more fully absorb the warmth of a good blaze. They’d both nearly collapsed but still held traces of shape and even the pattern of their upholstery; daisies stitched into the leftmost chair, its companion done in faded, cracked brown leather. Stuffing from pillows that had long since rotted away lay on the floor in sullen, listless heaps.

There were bookshelves as well but they’d been nearly consumed by great crimson streamers of shapeless fungi and Violet didn’t disturb them.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been attacked by demons, have you?” The cat called from the kitchen.

Violet rolled her eyes.

“No wolves in the kitchen?” She asked.

In an instant the cat was next to her, settling atop the daisy patterned armchair.

“Not a one,” it said. “…Find anything interesting?”

Violet turned a small circle in place and shrugged. The cottage had clearly once been a very cozy place, long since reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. Still, it was relatively dry and had a fireplace as well.

“We’ll set camp here.” She decided.

The cat glanced over the living room, eyes settling on the collapsed tumble that had once been the staircase.

“At least you won’t have to go far for firewood.” It said, then stretched out onto its back, balancing easily atop the armchair.

Violet fetched her rucksack, then pulled the front door as tightly shut as she could. The frame wobbled alarmingly, the hinges giving another anguished squeal of rusty metal, and Violet decided not to push her luck any further.

With that done she picked out her stick of red chalk and drew a half dozen sigils across the floor. Even in the dimness her bladed circle all but glowed with arcane potential.

Violet scattered another few markers across the cottage, one within easy view of any window, and stood back to admire her defenses. They seemed admirably thorough, but when she sought the cat’s opinion, her companion’s eyes were shut and it seemed to be napping.

Outside, rain began to patter onto the cottage’s slate roof.

“Perfect timing.” The cat mumbled approvingly, then pulled its tail over its eyes and went back to sleep.