5. Chapter 5:
Chapter 5:
I walked for hours. I walked for so long that I no longer remembered when I had started, I had forgotten to take any sort of time-keeping apparatus with me, though I felt a strange sensation that I would very likely not need it where I was going. The woods seemed dead, largely, and I only ever saw a few hares or a deer or two on my journey. I had brought my notebook with me, and so I tried to map the forest where I went, though It was hard keeping the scale correct when I was walking at different speeds, and often found myself falling into daydreams, leaving my body to walk freely among the trees while my mind was someplace else.
Sometimes, I was the past, I remembered Sew walking me to the field just outside of the village where all the children would meet to play. I remembered Sew teaching me how to tan, helping me to spread the hide out flat on his frame, and smear it in the putrid smelling mixture he used to turn the skin into leather. I could never bear to look at the rotting animals he skinned to get the leather, and I he used to tell me to go hide in my room, and close my eyes and take a bit of lavender with me to help mask he scent.
I then fell into dreams that reminded my of times before I could have possible remembered anything. I envisioned being carried out of the forest by Sew, the night as dark and engulfing as it currently was. I remember whining as a baby wrapped in a white cloth and being dragged away from a woman who looked fuzzy to my eyes - It was a dream I used to have often as a child. The smell of rotting meat filled my note, and I looked around me in order to push the dream... memory whatever it was as far away from my mind as possible. I could not afford to let the woods have its way with me.
I looked around with my lantern, and felt myself knock into something on the floor. It was a large snail. I screamed, and ran past it as fast as I could, heaving for breath when I stopped.
I had always had an irrantional fear of snails, I knew that they were perfectly harmless, and that they could not do anything to mee, bing only slow herbivores who sluggishly squirmed in the undergrowth feasting on leaves and vines, but I was afraid of them nonetheless.
Soon, my heartbeat slowed, and I fell back into the trance-like state I had escaped to earlier. I began to remember in the opposite direction, into the future. All I saw a deep black night sky, pinpricked by dots of light I took to be stars, and a large moon that unnerved me. I felt as if the lunar object was staring into me somehow, analysing me for some reason, and it was feeling I could not quite shake. I had an intrinsic notion that this moon was not quite the moon I had grown up with, not the familiar object that I had longed to see on those cold winter nights when the stories of what lived inside the forest seemed as real as anything, and I was all alone in the house while Sew was away collecting firewood. The woods ony amplified this feeling. I felt other. I felt vulnerable.
I thought back into the past again, forcing my mind away from the moon with all the mental energy I had remaining. I remembered those friends of mine - acquaintances really - who had told me tall tales about the glamour and fame that came with being a thief in the town. The fame part should have ticked me off. I soon ran off with them, not even saying goodbye to Sew, at least not truthfully, and was ensnared in the guild's bureaucracy and violence. I remember never seeing those friends again, and hearing stories that they worked for the guild, convincing promising youngsters to come and join the guild. I felt betrayed for the first time in my life that day, but would not be the last. Betrayal is the one consent in life, and I promised myself that I would never trust another person afterwards. I knew that it would only ever lead to defeat and pain and grief and sadness. I was not going to be used ever again.
As I walked, I soon began to see sparse rays of light on the horizon, slowly growing into a brilliant and splendid sunrise. I realised that I had not seen the sun rise in quite some time, and never so vividly. The sky was clear, with no clouds in sight and it rippled with the thousand colours and joys a sunrise brings, the splodges of red slowly blending into the blue that adorns the sky like a sea in the air. As I child, I used to climb onto Sew's shoulders in order to try and clutch at the sky and reprimand it for stealing the rest of my family, because that is where Sew told me they had gone. The sky.
I was beginning to have my doubts that I would never see the end of this walking, that I would eventually starve to death, that i would one day find my self old and whithered and weak, so that I would no longer be able to walk for however many hours a day. Most of all, I began to fear that there were no other sentient, thinking beings in the forest, that I would die of loneliness. I used to doubt that it would even be possible, but now it felt like an all to real possiblilty, and I was terrified that the solitary exisitence I had founf myself in in the town and later the village would continue in the forest. I had entered to find out more about myself. I doubted that now.
I tried to divert my attention by thinking of baby Wea, who I think I had seen once but failed to acknowledge fully. It did not work, and I only managed to conjure up terrible visions of what could be happening to her. Once the dawn had arrived with all of its livelyness, the woods began to burble with the signs of other life. I first heard the clicks of the Flar Bird, all around me and increasingly loudly, each bird perfectly timed with the others to join into one massive, forest-wide wake-up call for any other organisms that cred to listen. Then I heard the shaking of the trees as the wind blew past them. I laughed to myself that I might hear them chatting to one another if I listend in, but when I did, if found only the sounds of the crispy leaves and empty branches. At one point, I thought that i heard a fight or a squabble bewtween two animals, but It soon diffused into the surroundings and was distinct no more, the chirping of the crickets sounded loud and robust over all of the other noises, and I felt that I was alive once more. For the first time in a long time, things seemed to be going well, or at least as I expected.
A few more hours of walking. I soon found myself more tired than I ever remembered being, and I ladi out my sleeping bag under a small bush and went to sleep. The grass that would have otherwisw felt scratchy and itchy now felt like the softest feathers on earth. The ground which was bumpy and uneven now felt as if it was scupled or carved out of the sil beneath me to fit my body perfectly. The woods seemed much less foreboding than they had been, but I rememebered to never let myself become too comfortable with them. I could not afford the accidents that could come out of my negligence.
When I awoke, I found it to be the afternoon. I kept walking. My water had run out, and so I tried to listen for any sounds of water. Nothing.
I used a stick I had found to push into the water to see how moist the soil was. Quite dry. The air was relatively humid however, and so I did not fall into despair, but instead searched around the area the best I could. I walked out to the east as much as I could, and found nothing there. I walked out to the west, and found still nothing there other than some particulary diseased-looking puddles which I decided not to drink from, due to the large dead hare that lay rotting in both. The puddles had been so saturated with blood that they looked less like water, and more like a blood-ale, the kind that would be sold to you in secret of you enjoyed the taste of blood. The scent was horrid too, so repulsive that I had to stagger in the opposite direction as fast as I could, and I decided to take off my shirt and let it air as it had picked up some of the scent.
I soon grew parched, as the night drew closer, I soon began to lose hope for finding water. I managed to find my way back onto the original trail I was following, nothing more than some flattend dead leaves ans the occasional mud patch, the skin of the forest worn down by thousands of feet, the trees cut down or pushed over liek hairs unwanted. It became painful, and I found myself slipping into the dreams I was having the day earlier. These were stranger, however, I saw colours that did not exist, I saw darkness so complete and total that the woods pailed in comparison. I once fell asleep while walking, and dreamt that I was tangled in a net made of congealed blood and sinew, wailing for help but recieving none. I opned my eyes, and decided I should go to sleep. I did not bother getting out my sleeping bag - I was to exhausted for all of that, but laid down on a large patch of particularly feathery, filamentous leaves and fell into a dreamless slumber.
When I woke, the day having returned, I found that my face was covered in tears, and wiped the saline mixture off of my face, and decided to keep going, in my seemingly vain attempt to try and find water. Eventually, I cam upon a stream, gurgling past into a large rock cave. I looked inside, and found it largely empty, other than a few old bones and a scull or two.
I drank as much as I could from the stream, cupping the water in my hands, and holding it up to my needy face, I then filled my water skin. The water was particularly cold, and filt as if it was letting the cold diffuse deep isndie fo you, into your joints and your teeth, deep inside where no amount of warming up would let it out again, where it would stay with you till the day you died. It felt unnatural, and I soon stopped gorging myself on the water in front of me. I kept the water skin close to my body in an attempt to warm it up.
Newly invigorated, I walked at an increased pace, as afast as I could and as directly as I could. On my walk, I came across a few interesting things which have stayed with me through the years since. I saw a large mushroom of sorts which to me looked distinctly to be in the shape of a house of sorts, jut miniscule in size. When I went over to look at it closer, I found it to retreat quicly into the ground when I touched it, but otherwise looking exactly like a mushroom you may see in any other forest. I also saw a tree with a large hollow on the inside. this would have been relatively normal, except the hollow was so large that I could fit inside, and I chose to sleep in it for the night. However, Once I got inside, I felt a searing pain in my back, and turned around onyl to realise that some bat-like creatures were attempting to blindly bore through the tree, with them having begun the process on my back. I tried my best to treat the wound with the supplies I had brought, and so soon was foced to sleep on my front, on the floor, which in this area was particularly knobbly due to the variety of seeds, tree roots and small pebbles which smothered the floor in all directions. At one point, I found myself in what seemed to be an area where only one type of tree grew, this one being smaller than the others, yet just as ancient. I examined them closely, and discovered that they had smaller leaves as well as smaller roots, some sort of pigmy variety of the common Klaar tree which so readily could be found all across the world. I had never seen such a thing before, and (having a passing interest in Horticulture) noted it down in my notebook and went on.
The monotony got to me very quickly, and I soon found myself forgetting large chunks of the jouney because I simple was not paying attention to where I was going. I knew that I had travelled some considerable distance when my mind realised itself, as my feet ached and my shoes had caused great purple blisters on my feet, but my mind only remembered setting off what seemed like a few minutes ago, and arriving where it was. In a way, it was almost a blessing, as I did not have to endure the hours of banal trudging that the journey would inevitably entail, but I had a nagging feeling that something about the entire experience was wrong, and that I left me vulnerable to anyone who might want to prevent me from doing what I was doing. Who that could be, however, I could not tell nor did I want to particularly know.
I soon stumbled across another stream, this one just a tiny little trickle, too small for anybody to be able to take aby water from it. However, this was not the most unusual part of the stream. In fact, the stream was a deep green colour. It was not because of any algae or any other small plants, but instead seeming something dissolved in the water. I was tempted to taste it, but initially controlled myself, only taking a small sample in the bottles I had taken with me.
However, soon, my mind's restlessness could not control itself, and I dripped a tiny droplet of the water onto my tongue. I felt an immediate and scaling pure pain. i t felt as if my tongue was burning away. I immediately tried wiping the mixture off of my tongue, but it only managed to spread it tp the rest of my mouth. I washed it out with water, and this provided some relief as it stopped spreading, but I was soon in so much pain that I curled up into a ball and tired to rock myself to sleep to escape it. While I was doing this, my head seemingly buried in the sheer and overpowering pain that the water - or whatever it was - had caused, I noticed a toad carefully lower itself into the start of the stream and a horde of ants crawling onto its skin, seemingly milking it for some sort of green secretion from its skin, which the ants carried off into their colony, at the water's edge. So that's what it was, a likely poisonous secretion caused by a symbiosis between a toad and an ant species. Interesting. I would note it down later when the pain subsided. I crawled over to my pack, and got out some charcoal. It was good for stopping poisons (as I had learnt in my time as a thief) and I stuffed down a few lumps, trying my best to ignore their sweet yet bitter taste.
After a while, the pain subsided, and I was ready to begin walking again. I packed up my bag, hoisted it onto my shoulders, and walked towards somehing I had noticed while on the floor, something just visible through the myriad of tree between me and it. It almost seemed like it was drawing me in. I considerred whether i should try and avoid it, but I knew deep inside of me that I was never going to be able to go the other direction.
I needed to figure out what it was.