13Turns (and change) - Naeris Farken

  All Crag, being born in Bestat, had the opportunity to walk the road once and go anywhere in the world. For logistical reasons, all Crag took the road to Somewhere Else, the only other Crag city in the world.

  They did so at twelve turns, when they were old enough to leave the mountain safely and meet the rest of the world. Unless, of course, they had gotten into trouble for magicks and weirdness, and were as a result on probation with the authors.

  Then, they were forbidden from walking the road, for fear of being dangerous. Which is to say, that Naeris was forbidden from walking the road when she was younger. But she was allowed out of the mountain.

  And she hadn’t really caused any trouble since she had 7 turns.

  And her brother did not particularly like spending time with her these days.

  So, in a fit of growing pique, it was easy to sneak away from her family’s market stall.

  Naeris had been grumpy the second she learned all the crag went somewhere else. though of course, that was something of a default state for the persnickety thirteen turn. The young Crag had grumbled and complained like an old woman from the moment she was born.

  “I don’t want to go Somewhere Else.” Was the singular sentence she muttered as she started off from the city.

  Because why would she want that? Somewhere else was boring, she was certain. It was dull, and the same as Bestat, and she could go anywhere. She could go somewhere… somewhere no rules applied to her…

  The child headed off with no elder in sight, down the road to the entire rest of the world.

  Naeris hadn’t been thinking about anywhere else, but she certainly hadn’t considered herself on the road to Somewhere Else, and so, on the road to Somewhere else she had not been.

  The young Crag had just twelve turns, she’d scarcely been allowed outside the mountain, had almost never been alone. Until then, when she found herself somewhere cold, vast, and empty.

  The road she was on was familiar, it looked like streets of Bestat, with large blocks of white marble set into the ground and smoothed by the passage of time. Around her though was like nowhere she had ever seen.

  Bestat was in the wastes (somewhere, probably), and the landscape Naeris was used to seeing was stone gray, dotted by sharp plants and chunks of rock. She was used to a ground that looked flat from a distance, with only the single solitary peak of Bestats one mountain to break the horizon.

  This land was not like that, here there were mountains. Peaks and jags rolled out across the horizon, fading to blue in the distance. The road itself on which she stood curved up across a field of tall grass and flowers before disappearing over what appeared as a curve in the land.

  It was cold too, colder than she had ever known, and mist hung heavy in the air as the winds howled across the land.

  Bestat wasn’t warm by any means, but it certainly was nothing like this. Here the bite of the air seemed to tear at her skin through her clothes, and even the stones that patterned her grew chill in the mountain air.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Distantly she saw large patches of white, like strange curved marble decorating the taller peaks. Snow, she surmised after some staring.

  After a few seconds of stunned silence and gazing she looked around.

  “...hello?”

  It wasn’t a shout, or even really a call for help. Had the young girl been any less afraid she might have been embarrassed by how soft her voice came out, how small. As it stood though, she was alone, and the mountains were very large.

  Another rush of wind ripped through the warmth of her dress clothes, and another terrible thought occurred to her. She had no supplies, no food, no water, and she did not know where she was on the road to.

  The road through Bestat was not necessarily close to wherever one was headed, and Naeris hadn’t been thinking of a place when she’d left, or at least, she didn’t think that she’d been thinking of one. She definitely hadn’t been thinking about somewhere lonely, on familiar cobblestone in unfamiliar land.

  Naeris Farken took a moment to have a good little cry.

  She was young and lost, so she felt it was forgivable, and there wasn’t anyone to see her do it anyways.

  But, she’d always felt more comfortable crying somewhere small, preferably wrapped in a blanket, and the wild winds of the mountain made the edges of her tears feel much too ragged.

  So, now sniffling, she took her first steps forward on the road. There really wasn’t much else for it, and as she struggled to remember what her parents had taught her about traveling out of Bestat, on the off chance that she might one day do so, and she felt certain that getting where you’re going was important.

  It took too long for Naeris small feet, so unused to walking. She was sore in minutes, and exhausted in seconds. At first she took breaks, but they didn’t do anything to get her closer to where she was going and they didn’t help enough to feel like they were worth something.

  So she just kept walking, even though it hurt, and after a while the hurt wasn’t so bad, it was just a fact of life. All she had to do was keep moving.

  Keep moving and not think about how thirsty she was.

  She almost missed it when she got there, almost walking straight off the edge of the road, which had been curving and winding its way through grass covered mountains for what felt like an eternity.

  Naeris reached the pit. Well, crater, crevasse, whatever it might be called. It looked like someone had cut a chunk out of the land with a rusted knife.

  The road stopped there, or at least she assumed it did. There wasn’t any way to see if it continued on the other side of the pit.

  Not past the smoke.

  Hovering just beneath the lip of the crater, it spiraled and turned in unnatural heavy shapes. An ombre of greys, silvers, and whites, it shifted like mist but remained completely opaque.

  It a few moments for Naeris to realize that it’s movements weren’t echoes of the wind. No, the mist in the crater seemed to move entirely on its’ own volition, like some great, undulating, living, breathing, incorporeal monster.

  Shell shocked by the strangeness of the day she just stood there for a second watching. There was something so oddly… horrible about it.

  The young girl took a shuddery breath, and backed a pace away from the edge. But the shoes she was wearing, pretty and new and meant for show more than walking, betrayed her.

  Her feet skidded on the crumbling ends of the road, and there was a heart stopping moment where she stumbled far to close to the edge. But she was not completely devoid of coordination, and she managed to avoid the tumble.

  As deep breaths rattled their way out of her chest in a panic, she almost missed seeing the few pebbles she kicked loose fall into the mist. Almost.

  The strange smoke, undulating and terrible, froze when the pebbles passed through it’s form. Nearis stilled as well, halted in her recovery from her brief stumble.

  The smoke started to move again, slowly, stealthily, she watchedd as its unnatural loops and curves began to run across the craters’ edges. Like it was searching for something it lacked the eyes to see.

  Quietly, she toed off her fancy slippers. Then, as the smoke clawed it’s way out of the pit in front of her, one long tendril curling out like some terrible accusing finger, she ran.

  Over the hills, through the tall grass meadows, past every turn and climb that she had earlier bemoaned. She did not stop when she lost sight of the mist, when she felt the strange horror of the place lessen. She just ran, where she did not know, just somewhere else, somewhere away from wherever that had been.

  It was likely that which saved her.

  Apparently running away from somewhere on the road counted enough as taking a trip.

  Between one out of breath moment and the next she found herself home, clattering back onto the road, amongst the crowd of the day.

  Feet cracked and eyes wide with terror, she practically dove off the central road and tried to get out of sight. What had happened, why had she gone somewhere other than somewhere else, where had she gone?

  She didn’t know, and she couldn’t very well ask anyone else.

  Naeris, born and raised in the city on the road, was now headed to some great untenable mystery. A weird-ass crater of mist.