Chapter 20: Entropy

For the rest of the night Violet’s sleep was fitful and frayed. She awoke every so often, a dreadful tension building in her chest, but the room was always gently lit by the glow of the fire and the cat was always in the same place atop the daisy patterned armchair, assuring her that the cottage was clear. Nothing was coming.

At some point the rain began to slow and by the time the horizon went a soft, blurry pink it had stopped entirely. Violet arose, still feeling sore and twitchy, but took comfort in packing her clothes back up. All things considered, she was in a pretty good position to continue her journey.

She left the cottage after having a small breakfast and ended up taking the fire poker with her. It was heavy, but had a longer reach than the hatchet and an intimidatingly sharp point. Violet supposed that it would be easier to stab something than have to correctly time a swing…though the mere thought of having to do either made her feel sick.

Something told her that had she attempted any sort of violence upon the skull faced beast it would have simply wrapped her up in the folds of its fabric body and carried her off, much as it had the can of chicken stew.

Violet looked to the cat and began to ask something, but it didn’t meet her gaze and so she left her question unsaid. The cat seemed faintly troubled, feline ears folded back, as though it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be listening or brooding.

The sun had cleared the horizon by the time they stepped back onto the main road. Violet turned her gaze due north to where she could see the last azure traces of the Glow being swept over the horizon. The road didn’t lead exactly that way, instead continuing west, tracing the path of the river, so Violet reluctantly left it behind and cut between a pair of ruined houses.

There were roses here and there, attempts at hedges that had either been worn down by animals or simply strangled from lack of light, and Violet picked her way through the dying thorns, wincing each time she was pricked.

The back gardens of the houses were even more overgrown, berry bushes grown high and dark, studded with thorns as long as her thumb. Violet ended up having to meander between them, like a person navigating a labyrinth. She ducked beneath thin metal wires festooned with cords of pale morning glory, and moved around banks of wooden planter boxes, now soft and rotten from many years of neglect.

The cat, which had trotted straight ahead with little concern for any of the obstacles in its path, sat atop the farthest garden wall and occupied itself with grazing upon the mint that grew there.

It took Violet a little bit to navigate the remainder of the gardens and she felt rather tired by the time she reached the wall. Her shoulders and chest still ached.

“Take a look.” The cat said, breaking the silence. It was the first thing her companion had said to her all morning and Violet immediately followed the cat’s gaze down to a little cluster of broad leafed strawberry plants that had colonized the shady space along the bottom of the garden wall. Nestled between the rippled leaves of each plant were fat red berries, all glinting with silvery beads of dew.

Violet needed no invitation, setting her rucksack aside as she more or less flopped into the soft, ferny grass. The cat slipped down to join her. The grass was wet and soaked straight through her pants, but Violet hardly cared. There were a few places back home where wild strawberries grew and she sometimes could find them there in the late summer, but those paled in comparison to what she was seeing now.

The wild strawberries, sheltered from the worst of the elements, had grown large and plump and seemed to glow in the morning sun. Violet picked the nearest one, an almost spherical berry that had swelled to the size of a plum, and took a greedy bite. The berries weren’t quite ripe and still had a crisp, starchy snap to them, but that didn’t stop Violet from eating a few more.

The cat watched for a moment, then blinked as Violet offered out a dew dappled strawberry. It chewed thoughtfully, but didn’t seem entirely enchanted with the flavor.

“Terribly sweet.” The cat remarked, and took a mouthful of mint to compensate.

Violet finished the rest of the strawberry and sat back, licking her fingers clean.

“I’m sorry.” She said, glancing briefly, almost guiltily, towards the cat.

Her companion paused in the middle of cleaning its whiskers.

“Hmm?” It vocalized, distracted.

“For feeding the…the thing that came last night.” Violet couldn’t find an appropriate word to describe it.

“I wouldn’t worry,” the cat said at last. “It’s probably harmless…all things considered.”

“Define ‘harmless’.” Violet said.

The cat rolled its eyes and leapt back onto the wall, observing the forest beyond.

“I can see a jaybird,” it remarked, pointing with its muzzle to a neat stand of birches. “It’s not looking at me right now. You know….”

“Please don’t kill it.” Violet blurted.

The cat gave her a surprised look, concentration broken, then laughed.

“I was going to note that this jay I’ve spotted has lovely plumage. It’s about the same color as that Glow of yours.”

Violet got to her knees and shuffled up against the wall next to the cat. The top was at about chin height and she scanned across the near forest like a soldier peeking from a trench.

There was indeed a blue feathered jay sitting in the join of two birch branches. It looked to be fast asleep, beak tucked into its fluffily feathered chest.

The cat gave Violet a sly look.

“I wouldn’t kill that one,” it assured her. “The hunt’s no fun when they’re napping.”

Violet said nothing, only gathered her rucksack and continued over the garden wall Glancing back, she was slightly surprised to find that the basic layout of the place reminded her of home. The house was larger, even in its ruined state, and the garden bordered by a brick wall instead of a rail fence, but where it was situated made her chest feel tight. The corners of her eyes went unexpectedly hot.

It was as though she were leaving everything behind once more, stepping from the comforts of civilization into the primeval unknown of the forest.

The cat glanced back to check her progress and cleared its throat. Violet made herself take a deep breath, then turned her gaze firmly forward and continued on.

It was still cloudy and the rising sun cast only faint rays of light through the treetops, but already it was less gloomy and threatening than it had been the day before. Violet found herself taking notice of new plants, brightly colored and vibrant. This part of the forest wasn’t so carefully managed as the swathes bordering the river. Nettles and ferns grew nearly as tall as her in places.

Fallen trees and dense thickets choked her new path, but even they could not erase further hints of a fallen civilization. At one point Violet cut diagonally across what she thought might be another road, but found no pavement or gravel beneath the foliage.

It was only when she nearly tripped over a rubber coated cable lying amidst the grass and ferns that she realized the purpose of the clearing, which arced on and away from her in both directions.

Following the cable with her eyes, Violet soon found something strangely familiar. It was a crooked, half collapsed V made from rusted metal. For a moment she stood very still, simply staring. It was perhaps twenty meters high, huge enough that she couldn’t quite rationalize how something so big and clearly removed from the surrounding forest could even exist. Had it been standing straight then Violet though it would have easily cleared the treetops. The V, which Violet was beginning to realize was an electrical pylon, much like the ones that dotted her village, had once held a half dozen wires. Time had long since felled all of them and now it sagged sadly to one side, counting down the days until its own inevitable collapse.

Violet glanced behind herself, looking for where the pylon might have connected to something else, but the next structure (if there still was one) was too far away for her to see.

“People used to live here.” She said. This was a hardly necessary realization, but she couldn’t think of an immediate way to express her greater sentiment and the surprise behind it. It wasn’t just that there had been people living close to the river, in a place where the forest wasn’t so thick and wild…they’d clearly lived all over the place. And they’d known about the forest, they’d cut great channels into it simply so they could run their pylons in a more direct route, perhaps to another village, or a town or….

Violet had to shut her eyes. The implications behind even this simple piece of infrastructure made her head hurt.

“I thought you’d seen these before,” the cat said, giving the sagging pylon a cursory glance. “…Is it the design? I admit, the bases on these look a little frail.”

“It’s not that,” Violet shook her head, trying to order her thoughts. She felt troubled. “I don’t understand. If people used to live here then what happened?”

“My guess would be that they got complacent.” The cat said.

Violet sighed and looked away.

“They had lights and stuff. They must have known how to deal with the demons….”

“Do you know about entropy?” The cat asked.

Violet shook her head.

“No.” She mumbled.

The cat found a place to sit atop the splintered end of a fallen log. It looked very wise perched there, like an only slightly devilish professor posted behind a university lectern.

“Entropy is the notion that sooner or later all established orders will fall apart. Villages will fray around the edges, houses will decay, the pylons will topple and the lights will go out. The only constant is that there will be disorder, for disorder is the natural state of affairs in the world.” The cat spoke lightly and with a certain amount of relish. It wasn’t being mean spirited, Violet didn’t think, and it probably didn’t want to scare her, but all the same she felt a new tightness gathering in her chest. But it wasn’t homesickness. Now she felt dread.

“No.” She said sharply. “That can’t be right….”

The cat shrugged amiably.

“There are certainly those people swimming against the flow, but I can’t say they’ve been very successful as of late…” It said, glancing back to the pylon and the fallen electrical cables.

Violet swallowed back an icy shiver of fear and looked instead to the forest, well away from any hint of the pylon. It was strange, she reflected, how quickly the woods were turning into, if not a comfort then at least a constant.

“That can’t be right,” she repeated. “If everything is doomed to keep breaking apart then why does anybody bother?”

“Well….” The cat seemed to reconsider, eyes going to the ground. “…Perhaps we should keep walking.” It concluded without fanfare, then turned, stepped into the arboreal dimness of the woods and was lost from view.

Violet blew out a breath and followed her companion, keeping her notebook clutched tight against her chest.

As the sun rose further the air warmed and the dew spangling the ferns began to dry. Every so often Violet found an especially shadowy place and checked the moss along the trunks of the trees, making sure that she was still properly oriented. Being proactive took her mind away from the lingering fears that populated her subconscious.

By this point the birds had begun to sing again, their fractured half songs spiraling aimlessly through the treetops. Violet tried to ignore them but couldn’t quite manage.

“Hmm.” The cat vocalized from up ahead. It had paused close to a low, flat boulder that tilted slightly upwards, revealing a tiny cave at its base. As Violet watched, her companion stepped smartly away, like a person avoiding a puddle.

“What’s…?” Violet began to ask, then caught the edges of a crackling, groping hum behind her ears. Instinctively, she hunched her shoulders and capered back, heart jolting in her chest as she broke from the demon’s sphere of influence.

“Look at this one,” the cat remarked, voice rich with amused contempt. “It stayed out too late and got stuck literally under a rock.”

Violet stayed where she was and took a few deep breaths, chasing the last of the shock from her system. It had been a nasty surprise to nearly walk into a demon like that, but now that she knew it was trapped she couldn’t help but look to the dark sliver of cave entrance.

It was inky and featureless, well sheltered from the brightening sunlight, but there was an unpleasantly organic texture to the space beyond. Violet decided she didn’t like looking at it and shook her head, making a wide arc around the rock until she was closer to the cat.

“What do we do about it?” She asked, running one thumb across the corner of her notebook in anxious little circles. She was close enough that the dark edges of the demon’s voice had begun to crackle along the insides of her ears, but the noise was barely a hiss and Violet forced herself to stay still

The cat shrugged, apparently unbothered by whatever the demon was trying to convey.

“I don’t think we need to do anything,” it said at last. “This one’s making even less sense than usual. My guess would be that it got scrambled by something.”

“Scrambled?”

“Like the one you hit with your sigil. Remember how it went all funny?”

‘Funny' wasn’t the word Violet would have used, but she still nodded.

“Demons are not very tightly focused creatures,” the cat continued. “It doesn’t take much to throw them off. If you point your sigil I bet it’ll scream.”

Violet’s eyes flashed to the cover of her notebook but there was something in the cat’s words that made her feel…not sick exactly, but close.

“We should keep going.” She mumbled.

“Alright.” The cat acquiesced, and trotted from its place by the cave entrance without so much as a rearwards glance. Violet took a step away, erasing the last of the demon noise, but didn’t fully turn her back on the creature until the boulder and the dark space beneath it were entirely out of sight.