At Apala

 

Ayleah woke to a morning lightly obscured by fine mist. The clearing of Theron-Dean lay quiet, with cool dampness slowly fading as the sun gained command again for the day. Something nagged at her, despite the dawn's peacefulness. Throughout breakfast she kept an eye on her travel companions, and especially on the Plainfield man. Something had happened with him the day before that made her wary of his presence, though now she could not remember what it had been. She looked to the color-master sage too, and to their grizzled driver, to see if they shared any of the misgivings, but they only stewed with their morning beverages in silence. The mood at the table was perhaps only pensive.

As she sat there, Ayleah considered her decision to travel north with this random little group. The six of them had been strangers only two days ago. The driver had originally been hired by a nice couple who were headed for the Gap, but Ayleah's presence shifted the cost a bit in their favor. Fen and Heln joining had further alleviated the cost, though they had changed the dynamic of the group. No one fully knew what the color-master studied, and the dark-skinned Plainfielder was a curiosity this high in the mountains.

Try as she might, Ayleah could not recall what had made her so alarmed the day before. It had something to do with Heln, but she felt poor to be so wary around him when she could not remember if he had actually done anything to warrant the precaution. At the same time, she also felt a soft but insistent pull to remain calm. It was as if there were another member of their party attempting to pacify her; a close and comforting friend who just happened to be invisible to all other senses.

“There have been rumors, but nothing really concrete.” Fen was regaling the breakfast table with curiosities from his research. The color-master's notebook went everywhere with the him, increasingly filling with various scribblings, charts, and hue palettes. It sat now beside his plate; a touchstone for his conversation.

“Local accountings should always be taken with a good seasoning, but I do believe” he continued, cutting his own salted eggs, “-that it is well within the realm of possibility. Creatures could exist composed purely of impulses. Why they should have lives any longer than a momentary blink of awareness, that is what I wish to know, and to study.” He looked over at his apprentice, but Heln showed little response, so he turned back to the group at large. “Heln and I have made some good findings, but we were curious about the possible differences between ecological regions.”

The traveling couple were polite enough, but had very little understanding of what Fen was saying. “Interesting” the wife said, “and where are you headed now?” Heln looked up from his food, which he had been heretofore been eating in silence. “North. We will head north to the river.”

---

Through most of that day they descended steep flanks of the mountain. Fir woods clung to knolls that perched high above the great forests far below. The mountain seemed to winnow, dropping them down through birch glades on intermittent flat plateaus too small for market squares. At some places where the rock was simply too steep and no way could be found around the ledge, huge iron bars formed a rudimentary road surface, sticking from the side of the cliff. Ayleah marveled at the constructions, wondering who had placed those bars in the massive stone. How long ago had that been, and what had they gone through to achieve it?

It was well into the afternoon when they reached Apala Gap. There are a few gaps in the mountains: high passes where long-distance carrier traffic can move between valleys. City commerce encompasses a much broader scope than the surface-level trade of Ayleah and her company. Even for those living within a city it can be difficult to see or understand the larger workings that keep them comfortable. Long-Distance trade and travel has always supported the grander constructions of society. This gap was one of the busier, more notable ones along the spine of these mountains, but Ayleah didn't need to know that fact to be impressed. The mountain road opened suddenly on a vast clearing between rising arms of forest. A broad flat place had been cleared, open to the deep valleys on two sides. At the other two directions thick ancient woodland rose dramatically to the sky. They had descended from the south arm of woods and now stood looking at the next mountain unobstructed. Despite it being a relatively smaller peak, the northern wall of forest looked truly impenetrable. Sun shone brightly on the wide open spaces between, tossing some small insistent clouds aside for the occasion and glinting off traffic below.

The driver dropped them off in a sort of upper square, away from the rumble of the occasional LDT on the paved highway. This marketplace was grassy, and a little more sheltered than the open pass below. Ayleah marveled at the different merchants and tradesmen; folks not just from the valleys by the inland sea or the mountain villages, but people from valleys further east: places locked between heights of land where rivers reigned supreme. The sight of such multitudinous activities and people was a wonder to her, and she forgot her journey for just a moment taking it all in. They each had their own journey, and each felt equal in importance to her own. It was not the stakes that mattered, but the conviction of their hearts. Each of them had a world within them, each as strange and beautiful as the last, and each felt that their world was the only one. As she stood looking out at the busy marketplace with various groups of travelers encamped at its outskirts, a familiar glint of silver caught her eye.

She walked over to the group of rangers, curious as ever. The young captain had his head down again, examining some papers that had been handed to him. He scanned a couple paragraphs, and noted the signatures at the bottom before handing them back with a smile. It was the smile that made her sure; Ayleah almost hadn't recognized Jaen for his bearing among the other men. He exchanged some words with the man who had taken the papers back, and shook his hand heartily. The other man then gave Jaen a casual salute and they parted warmly. Jaen was just saying something to one of his companions when his eyes glanced upon Ayleah standing nearby.

“Well what have we here?” he said, breaking off from his group and walking over. “Ayleah, you're a ways from the farm today!”

“Well met Jaen,” she replied, giving him a friendly smile. “It's true, I'm on the road again – there are a lot of other places in the world to see besides a farm up on Little Abe!” she chuckled. “Actually, I have a real lead this time, more than a word in someone's wastepaper bin.”

Jaen was immediately interested. “You think you've found Telon? Where?”

Suddenly Ayleah felt unsure of her reasoning. “Well, I'm pretty sure he contacted me...somehow. I saw him at Lincoln Peak, I know I did. He kind of appeared out of a tree and spoke to me...Oh, you probably think I sound crazy.”

Jaen raised an eyebrow, though his look remained soft. “On the contrary Ayleah, I think anything you say is probably worth believing.”

Ayleah couldn't quite place what feeling that had generated inside her, so she set it aside for the moment. Jaen continued: “So where did he tell you to go?”