Aethertide (Chapter 10)

With the sun peeking over the horizon, the daylight returned to the An’Morian forest, managing to hit Olivia right in her sleeping face.

“Gakh,” she muttered. “Mrs Mian, close the curtains!”

Between the landlady’s lack of cheery reply and the sudden onset of a chirruping insectoid chorus, Olivia snapped her eyes open to reveal what she feared. There was no release from an odd dream for her. Her trans-dimensional jaunt and everything that went along with it were all too real. Olivia cast a look around and realised what her head had been leant on. Or rather who. She jerked away from her companion, wiping her mouth where a little drool had slid from her mouth to moisten the leather shoulder of Raisa’s clothing, and groaned as the crick in her neck shot hot pain into her head and shoulder.

Raisa finally stirred as well, casting a look around and finally coming to rest on Olivia before rubbing her eyes and yawning like a jackal. Raisa ran a hand through her hair and began dusting herself off as Olivia realigned her clothing from her night’s tossing and turning.

“Well, we weren’t caught in the night,” Raisa said matter-of-factly. “That’s a good start.”

As Olivia tackled her hair, pulling bracken from her tight curls, she replied:

“One small blessing, at least.”

Raisa unwrapped her fur boots and re-strapped them tightly. Olivia reset her goggles on her head as a makeshift headband.

“We need to go,” Raisa said, standing up to stretch and yawn.

“But where?” Olivia asked.

“To the mountains. They won’t dare to go there.”

“Because of the wizard’s second rule. I remember,” Olivia said. “I suppose we’ve already broken the other two, so we might as well go for a hat trick.”

Raisa cocked an eyebrow at her. “You aren’t wearing one.”

“No, it’s…a saying. It means three things in a row.”

“If you say so. Let’s go,” Raisa said, but first, she paused, looking Olivia up and down in a way that made Olivia hug herself. Raisa reached out, past Olivia’s cheek with hands that smelled of rich earth and warmth. Olivia flinched away slightly, her cheeks bursting hot. But Raisa didn’t seem to notice. She reached back to the spot beneath Olivia’s ear and, like a child’s birthday magician, produced a dry leaf.

“You still had a leaf in your hair,” she said with a smile that Olivia was beginning to recognise as mischievous.

They moved through the jungle with more certainty now that the dawn light aided them and the mountains grew closer and closer, turning richer shades of blue and grey like a dream of mist solidifying before their eyes. Where the tree line gave way to a broad river lined by pale stone shores, they crossed knee-deep in the frothing water from a series of waterfalls that tumbled nearby. The water was crystal clear, and warm, the likes of which Olivia had only ever seen coming from inner-city plumbing. Scooping up handfuls of the water, she washed the last remnants of sleep from her face and let the warmth soothe the knot in her neck. From the opposite bank her companion turned back.

“You might not want to stay still too long. There are some large and hungry fish in there,” she said.

Olivia almost cleared the rest of the way in one leap, finding herself on the opposite bank with no recollection of how she had gotten there. She looked back, searching the water for signs of pike or anything of the sort. She saw nothing. Turning back to Raisa, she saw that her companion had already moved on. Eyeing the river one more time, Olivia followed.

Not long afterwards, it was Raisa who looked back to find Olivia no longer behind her.

She looked around, assuming that the stranger would be easy to spot by either sight or sound. Olivia wasn’t used to traversing the jungle, that much Raisa had gleaned early on. But Olivia was nowhere to be seen or heard. Raisa sniffed the air and still found nothing. She doubled back, swiftly moving from tree to tree, bush to bush, looking for any sign of her companion. There were so many creatures and even plants that could snatch someone silently in An’Mor.

“Foolish, Raisa,” she muttered hurriedly to herself. “You should have watched her more closely rather than running on ahead.”

From branch to bloom, she searched for strips of clothing, whisps of hair, that strange strap with the large eyes that Olivia wore, even a scuff on the ground or blood on a tree. But there was nothing. Raisa picked up speed, spiralling out from where she had been, searching swiftly with her keen eyes darting.

“Dammit, Raisa — ” she muttered and, to her horror, she heard the sound of her mother in it. That made her snap her mouth shut.

Parting a thick fern, she found Olivia.

“Are these poisonous?” Olivia asked, regarding a flower with huge green petals and dropping stamen that burst from one of the fungal trees’ trunk. She was leaning extremely close but she had put her hands behind her back in the childish manner of showing that she definitely wasn’t touching anything. “They look poisonous.”

Raisa sighed heavily, shaking her head.

“You need to stay close,” she said, and it came out like her mother even more. With a grunt of self-annoyance, she turned and walked away.

Olivia took another look at the flower before jogging after her companion, the huge bloom turning to follow her as she walked away.

The ground began to slope upward from then on. As they moved on without incident, Olivia continued as always, thinking out loud, talking mostly to herself as Raisa answered in mostly grunts and short explanations.

“And what else I can’t fathom,” Olivia went on, “is how you speak English. It seems unlikely that the same language developed in two unconnected dimensions.”

“Is that what your people are? Engls?” Raisa asked.

“No. Well, kind of. I’m from a place called England. But we speak the same language, is what I mean.”

“It’s the Magi language,” Raisa replied, rolling her shoulders and stretching her back. “Maybe they taught your people to speak it like they did us.”

Olivia rubbed her temples. “The repercussions of that answer are too much to think about right now.”

Raisa snorted in agreement. “We have enough problems. We’re here.”

Where the jungle parted, they found themselves atop a foothill that looked out over a deep valley into which the jungle continued to flow. But to their other side, a trail of earth and rock led upward in a harrowing slope to sheer cliffs. As they had travelled, the mountains had crept upon them, and now stood like an impenetrable wall before them.

“Where do we go now?” Olivia asked, fearing the answer.

Raisa pointed in the direction Olivia had feared. “Up.”