16. Chapter 16:
Chapter 16:
I collapsed into a crumple of tears and confusion, my legs giving way to the hard certainty of the ground below my feet. Foxglove rushed over to me, and started trying to speak to me, though I only heard a slurry of noises painted in concern. My vision was the same, seeming to me as if I was looking through a piece of seaglass into a world tainted with red. I felt exhausted, and could not stand up, no matter how much I tried, Foxglove dragged me to a tree near us, and began trying to get my attention, to talk to me. My headache was gone.
"Stuvlok?" She asked, trying to make me drink some water, "What happened to you?" Her voice was kind and reassuring, but I felt a thought of my own tugging at the back of my mind, that could nto quite ignore, no matter how much I tried. Great, I was a burden yet again.
I gathered the energy to pull myself into a sitting position, leaning against the heavy-set tree for some sort of support, though the rough bark dug its way into my spine. Trying to string some words together, I slurped down some water. "Am fine. Headache. Saw Witch." I said, trying to haul my eyelids open, as they had been trying to close ever since I first opened them after the headache.
"You saw a witch?" She froze. "Yes." Nothing more was said about the topic, and I picked through my pack for some powdered Derf Tuber, which Fa Raven had given us, and I had once been told could cure really bad headaches and seizures. I mixed some in with the water I had with me, and tried to drink down as much of it as I could, the bitter taste imprinting itself on my palate and throat, making me cringe as I tried to finish it. The powder left at the bottom was particularly potent, though I felt much better after having finished it. Foxglove tried to help me pick the water up once I had put it down. "No, don't need help." I said. trying in vain to try and seem competent. "Come on Stuvlok, We can't even try to defeat these witches until we can work together as a team." she said, trying to check whether I had a temperature. "Ok." I said, and fell into a slumber.
When I awoke, I noticed that Foxglove had fallen asleep as well, and so I began to make breakfast for both of us, as the strength had returned to my arms and I thought that, as far as I could tell, I was as close ot how I had been before the headache as was possible in one day.
I had a few questions swirling around in my mind, and the foremost was what the witched wanted. Why did they call me into the forest - what do they want? Is my choice to destroy them even my choice?
Then an answer came into my mind. I did not know whether it was the correct one, or even whether it was reasonable, but my experiences with Fa Raven had told me more than I had ever needed to know about the life of the immortals.
Did the Witches want to die?
I pushed the idea out of my mind, and quickly began to prepare the rations, more of the green porridge, but this time with some nuts I had scavenged off of the trees around us to help give it some more textural heterogeneity and help our tastebuds sense some sort of novel enjoyment.
Once Foxglove woke, to the sound of a particularly shrill warbler who had begun to build a nest on the tree we were sat beneath. "You look better now, Stuvlok." she said, walking over to the warming food and splitting it into our two portions. We ate in silence.
Once we finished eating, Foxglove piped up and asked me something. "Can you describe what the witches looked like? I am still not able to." She said, with an air of interested investigation. "No, not really. I can barely even picture it in my mind. It hurts my eyes whenever I even try. They look something like a distortion of reality, a change in the way the world works int hat place and that moment, It is almost as if they are part of the fabric of the world, and their existence is defined by a perversion of its laws wherever they exist." I explained, stopping often and stumbling over my words.
"Are we not part of the fabric of the world then? Are we separate from everything else, just because we think we can think, and we believe we can choose what we want to do? I am not sure even I, as far as I know unaffected by the witches am choosing to go where I am going, this journey. I have vowed to complete it, but is this what the witches want? Can the witches even want, or desire? Can we? It seems as if we can, but you can never be sure. The mind may think itself unique, but it only yet another part of the flesh, just one that can think itself greater. At the end of the day, a king is still a person, just one that has assumed himself to be different." Foxglove said.
I was slightly taken aback by the profound questions she was asking, and I wondered whether this is what she had been thinking about deeply throughout the journey, every time when we walked in the thoughtful silences of the woods, enraptured by the sights and sounds of life around us, and the immediacy of fatigue, or hunger, of waiting, or boredom. I wondered whether she was considering what all of this meant in the same way that I was.
We were getting ever closer to the lake. I could smell the distinct smell of freshwater, the splashing had gotten louder, and I was very quickly getting lost in the rhythm of the waves breaking as I walked. The air got too humid, too, and the cold seemed less intense. The vegetation around us changed, and so did the ground. It got every so slightly more soft, more supple as we walked, and soon large puddles began to appear. At some point, the lake came into view. The smell of freshwater was soon replaced by the smell of rotting flesh. It was visceral and arresting, and I had to smell the fragrant herbs I had brought with me in order to prevent myself from throwing up. I soon got used to it, however, and so did Foxglove, who was able to tell the smells apart with her unique nose, categorisiong them into whichever animal the rotting meat was likely from. Sometimes, she could even discern other smells, like faint lavender, or water-lettuce that had washed up at the fringes of the lake.
Small bones littered the beaches and I dared not think what they could be from. Some looked like the bones of small people like myself, and I was forced to look away - I could not bear the pain of speculation, for when I allowed myself to explore the dark crevices of my mind, mining for any indication as to what the bines could be, I soon got lost in a labyrinth of terrible situations and grief, which I soon realised that I had to escape, or I would not be able to fulfil my promise to myself.
The water in the lake was a deep, almost sickly green, and war largely an opaque mass with small wave crests scattered across the surface. Apart from the waves, the water was glassy and still. The water seemed to be infested with some sort of algae, which could also be found lining the bones and bits of vegetation that washed up on th beaches, and I assumed helped to break it down, releasing the horrific smell that encapsulated the entire area.
"You mustn't drink from it. It will give you something known as 'lake fever', which will slowly cause you to be decomposed from the inside out, until you are just a mass of skin. It is not a good way to die. I once saw a rat who had drunk some of the water. The next day, he began to smell horrid. The day after that, he could not walk, and he bloated to about three times his original size. Then he died. When one of the other creatures cut him open to see what was inside, he saw a giant gaping hole, swarming with that algae. It had eaten him. It is a terrible way to die. He had been screaming the night before to be killed, but nobody had heard him except a little bird who told us that later on. The weasel that ate the dead rat died in the same way, only it took longer because he was larger, and so he suffered more. The lake is a terrible thing, Stuvlok, and I will advise you to be wary of it." She told me. Pointing out all of the desiccated remains of creatures on the beach, one looking something like a young weasel or stoat, all of them covered in the algae. It was almost as if I could hear the algae eroding the bones away to nothingness.
The lake itself was massive, and I could only see all the way around if we climbed onto a mound that let us get a view from a small elevation. The middle of the lake had a large, almost perfectly square-shaped island, made of a dark stone or sand of sorts. The island was shrouded in a fog, and I was unable to discern anything other than its very presence. Just looking at the island made me immediately realise that we were going to have to go to it. That was were the witches lived.
"That island has no name." Foxglove told me, pointing at the island wither her stubby paws, "Some people have tired to get to it to see what it was, but they never returned and were able to tell others. Some drowned on the way back, most of them never left the island, others came back, but had forgotten how to talk. One famed explorer, a kestrel by the name of Haw came back a completely different individual, having lost any semblance of themselves. I hope that doesn't happen to us." Foxglove said this in a slightly melancholic tone. She knew that we would have no choice but to risk the island, and the inevitable consequences were part of that.
"Is there a way to get to it?" I asked, hoping that we already knew how to. I did not particularly fancy building a raft or something similar to traverse the quite obviously dangerous waters.
"I have heard that there is a fox with a boat, who goes to collect any dead bodies lost to the lake, and pilfer their possessions by the west of the lake. I planned to go there today." Foxglove stated, looking out to the west to show me the outline of a small encampment or village of some sort. And so we went.
We managed to get what I soon found out to be a Conglomerate encampment by sundown, and we rested by a tree just outside of where most of the other residences were. I was slightly worried about the implications of the war in our mission, but Foxglove tried to reassure me. "The fox, I have heard, is neutral on the matter. He profits if both sides lose." she told me. "Who told you about this fox, if I may ask?" I looked at her intensely, trying to work out how she knew something I did not. "Once, long ago, when I was here with Nettle, he told me. Nettle had tried to get to the island once, but had fallen in the lake, and was forced to return. he was racked by pains, but luckily, none of the water got inside of him, and the algae only ate away some of his fur." She told me.
We waited in the silence for sunrise, and the last leg of our journey expectantly.
The next morning, we rushed as fast as we could to the small pier that the encampment had set up by the lake's edge. Foxglove told me how she did not like lakes because they did not have moving water. They unnerved her. "Though I am an otter who cannot swim, out ancestral distaste for still water persists. I cannot stand even the sight." She told me, laughing at her own fears. I wished I could do that for mine.
Once we got to the pier, we saw the fox in question standing by a large boat, mostly circular in shape with a long paddle of sorts lain across it.
"Two come together. That is new. Little person, Otter too." The fox said. His voice unnerved me. He was too joyful, too happy in this otherwise morbidly hopeless environment. He got too much joy out of death or danger for it to be purely a passing interest. Both had become mundane to him now.
"Hello, We would like to rent a boat, We would like to explore the island." Foxglove said. the fox was stunned. He stood there for a few seconds, just trying to see what we were thinking, checking whether we were joking or not. "sure, you two? no trip to the south, or fishing for skulls? No surer death than the island for sure." The fox spoke in stilted sentences, strange grammatical structures, and I wondered why. Was he just like this, or had he forgotten how to speak to others as he had been prancing around with the dead? Had he traded interaction with the living for conversations with the dead like Fa Raven had traded sight for the ability to see spirits? Anything seemed possible.
"Yes, We are sure. Just give us a boat please." Foxglove said, evidently getting fed up by the continual questions and winding sing-song of his voice.
"Pay me now, check the boat. Not many of my island travelers come back. I do not get paid, see?" He said. I brought out my small pouch of gold. "Ah! Gold! Like the tears of the dead! Not many give Gold. I usually get copper. Gold!" While he was admiring the gold, I was checking the boat. It did not have any leaks, but was quite shoddily built. I guessed that boats did not need to be very hardy, as the waters here were not very strong, but I would have felt more comfortable if the entire boat did not bend and move as I stepped into it. Foxglove followed me in, and the boat sunk low into the water.
I checked my pack and threw some of the extra things I did not need out of the boat, keeping onyl the essentials., The fox grabbed these, and ran off with them, with a smile on his face, and we prepared to row across to the island. I knew that it might be difficult, but I would have to do it.
Foxglove showed me the basics of how to paddle and steer, told me about the winds, and began pushing off from the beach and into the water, the smell of decay almost painfully overpowering now.
And so we paddled.