Kae-ri

 

What struck Ayleah most was not the sight of the familiar color and its cue in her mind, but rather an accompanying surge of feeling that had the party not already decided to stop at the glade, she would have pressed them to do so. The person on the rock had been staring at her as they passed, not the vans in general, but her specifically it seemed. It seemed crazy, because it didn't seem to her she would be very visible from that high vantage point. She felt a meeting of the eyes as she looked through her window though, and there was a slight magnetic draw, like the poles of two universes had momentarily aligned. Now as the group pulled their vehicles into a large clearing by the roadside, the person on the rock leapt gracefully down and approached almost casually.

They were an adolescent youth, it appeared, of indeterminate gender. Dressed simply, as a villager of the mountains and carrying a fine walking staff along with a shoulder-purse. Sutton was the first out of the vans, noticing the stranger and ever wary of a trap. Jaen also descended from the cab and regarded the youth, somewhat less cautiously than his guardsman. He held out a hand indicating Sutton could relax for now. He approached the villager, who still had not addressed them.

“Can we help you? Do you desire passage up-hill?”

The other nodded, but their gaze and stance remained firm. Sutton fidgeted, his eyes combing the woods around for signs of trouble. The mountain-side store stood a little ways away, and Bellinda's van had already begun to head over for some necessities.

Jaen spoke again, indicating Bellinda's group: “Well, we have room in our second van, but we are on a tight schedule so we'll be moving on soon.” When the other simply held his gaze and still said nothing, he furrowed his brow and glanced at Sutton: “Do they not understand me?”

Sutton's gaze though was now fixed on the stranger, his hand moving by the millimeter for his sword hilt. In response to Jaen's last words however, the youth held up with both hands a small pine branch with fresh green sprouted tips. They did it almost solemnly, but their face was soft and light with a contained child-like joy. Ayleah saw from her window and something seemed to click in her mind. She got out of the van and approached the stranger, despite Jaen and Sutton's exhortations to the contrary. The other only stood there with a slight orange aura about them, looking at her with an expression of intrigue. She wondered if that faint glow was only in her mind, and as she tried to focus it seemed to fade all the more. Time seemed to her extraordinarily vivid, as if slowed by her very awareness of each and every moment, and the glow was now all about the periphery of her vision – dissapating into the trees. Taking the pine bough from the other, she asked their name. Whether or not the lips actually moved, all in the vicinity could clearly hear. “Kae-ri”, they said, and the trailing edges of their voice seemed to meld with the forest around.

Then they were on their way again. Jaen and Sutton sat in command of the first van, eyes on the alert for dangers of the forest roads. Ayleah sat behind with Atkins, discussing the hitchhiker. To Ayleah it seemed significant, though she couldn't say how. The orange glow had always seemed to be helping her when it appeared before, and maybe this youth knew something about Telon. At their stops she had asked if anyone had seen the scholar but gotten nothing. He must have come this way, and would have been of note to the sharp-eyed woodsfolk. When they stopped for the night perhaps she would have time to chat with the newcomer. In any case she knew Kaeri belonged with their party because of the pine branch. It had been an odd sort of answer for why they wished passage with this particular party, but a startling one. The symbolism of the 'young Pine' had not been lost on at least a couple of the group.

The road above the halfway glade had increasingly become a series of narrow washed-out dells. Dense walls of evergreens marched along the tops of rock walls carved by rain and runoff from the mountain. The steadily climbing surface glittered with flashes of mica and quartz and the entire land began to change into one of moss and gems. Under the stiff boughs of spruce and fir was an undulating land of decay. Lush green moss meadows interspersed with barren hollows where the death side of the cycle predominated. Sometimes the club-moss on the banks grew so tall that it looked to Ayleah like townspeople watching them pass. The little friendly beings stood there in ranks among the newborn evergreens. Every size of dark green growing thing was represented here, from the giant older trees that formed the canopy to the little club-mosses, only six- or seven-feet tall on their lichen lawns. Ayleah looked them as they passed, quietly alarmed by their personalities. They were the true denizens of the land, outnumbering the mobile fauna and human travelers. They each chose a spot to live their whole life, some reclining under dappling boughs and others bravely standing on the rocky edges of the world. They tended their mossy yards, admired the unintended artwork of an acorn or spiderweb, and observed all the vibrancy of life as it went by around them. The vans climbed higher, and the forest took them in.