Page 19 of First Light
Carys heard more clicking in the forest and the sound of something small scurrying behind them.
She started to turn, and Duncan squeezed her hand and tugged her closer.
“Don’t turn. Eyes on Dru. Just Dru.”
Cold creeped under her collar and down the back of her sweater, raising goose bumps on her skin. Her feet tripped over another branchthat she hadn’t seen Duncan step over, and something else grabbed her pants.
She felt fingers, and her heart jumped into her throat.
“Duncan!”
“Shh!” He linked their hands and drew her nearly into his body.
Carys’s senses went on high alert, and she tried not to panic. The tapping sound was all around them now, like branches snapping underfoot or pebbles falling onto dry leaves. The ground beneath her was soft, and she saw blue lights in her peripheral vision. In the distance, there was a rush of sound like waves from an ocean she couldn’t see.
Don’t follow the lights.It was her mother’s voice in her head as they walked in the forest behind their house in the late afternoon.Don’t ever follow the lights, my Carys. They want to lead you away from me.
Through the winding narrow path, Dru walked with a careless gait, tossing his hair and whistling a low tune that caught in Carys’s mind. She focused on it, especially when Dru began to sing.
Sing me a place where sea becomes sky
Where stone swallows mountain
Where this world goes to die
Duncan kept her hand in an iron grip as the forest around them turned into a cacophony of sound and winking blue lights tempted her from the corners of her eyes. She heard a baby crying and another laughing. More crying. Wailing.
Something in her heart broke to pieces and fell on the forest floor, trampled under her own stumbling feet. Tears pooled in her eyes, her feet grew heavy and her legs stiff as Dru continued to sing his odd, haunting melody.
Write me a poem of heather and firth
Where forest touches night and night becomes earth
She didn’t know where night ended and forest began. The darkness was everywhere. The shadows moved like figures in a dream, appearing on one side, then another. The sound of wings overhead, and the whoosh of feathers before a tiny screech and silence.
“Don’t listen. Don’t speak,” Duncan whispered.
Carys wanted to close her eyes, but she kept them on Dru, determined not to lose herself in the disorienting rush of sensation. Their strange guide continued to sing as if he was taking a pleasant walk in the woods, though his words grew increasingly dark.
The shadows, they call you when life becomes still
They call you to taste them
They tempt you to thrill
More laughter. More crying. A baby wailed in the night, and Carys’s heart turned toward the pitiful sound, but she couldn’t move. She was nearly plastered to Duncan’s back as she trudged along the dark path, ignoring the catch of fingers on her clothes and the brush of feathers along her neck.
The darkness it holds you
Don’t try to turn back
Its wild weathered places
Are all that you lack…
Dru’s song trailed off as they walked through another narrow stone passage with arching branches overhead. Carys heard water in the distance, not the disorienting rush of waves that sounded like a distant ocean but the grounded, gritty slap of water on stone.
There was one last burst of laughter in the trees behind her before a kiss of light broke through gloom, illuminating something that nearly seemed like dawn.