Jace Irons: The Shard of Chaos

Chapter Four: It Hits the Fan

The rest of the journey went by relatively quickly. Briar continued to explain the magical world of gods and goddesses to me. One thing Briar he told me about was that there was this magical barrier that clouded the vision of regular mortals, making any magical things appear normal, for example, why Briar's sword and club hadn't been flagged by TSA. The sword had set off the metal detector, but when the TSA agent pulled it out of the bag, he just looked it over saying it was a neat toy sword. Briat quickly explained it was a present for his nephew, and the TSA agent just chuckled and let us through. Briar and I just passed the rest of the time by cracking jokes, telling stories about our pasts, and turns out Briar has seven siblings. All of them protectors. He told me about his father, another satyr who was an accomplished searcher, and his mother, a dryad, or tree spirit, who could somehow put up with all of his and his siblings' crazy nature shenanigans.

"So your mom is a tree?" I asked, astounded.

"Kinda." He said "She's a nature spirit wherein her existence is tied to a tree. So, yeah."

"Hey, I got a tree joke."

"I don't wanna hear it."

"Yes you do."

"Nope"

"How do you identify a dogwood tree?"

Silence.

"By it's bark"

He chuckled and shook his head.

"Okay, funny man," he said "What do boxers and beer bottles have in common?"

"I don't know, what?" I said, playing along.

"They're both empty from the neck up."

We had a good laugh over that one. It was true, plenty of boxers I knew had taken a few too many hits to the dome. We continued talking and shooting the breeze, and I told him how I started boxing as a way to stand up to the bullies, and later, as a way to escape from home. Although, because I was so successful at it, my boxing career either constantly invited challenge, or made people instantly intimidated.

"Oh damn, I wonder why people would find you intimidating." Briar joked.

"Hey, man I'm sorry about threatening you when we first met. I didn't know who you were." I apologized.

"It's cool man." he said cooly. "I probably would've done the same."

We just walked and talked all day, only stopping to eat and sleep. Every night, we'd take turns taking watch, and Briar would give me a few sword lessons. I was pretty rough around the edges, but I could manage the basics. When taking watch, all was quiet every night, so we started walking parts of our trip through the woods again, Briar said it was faster, and I wasn't going to argue. I was tired of people honking at us when they drove past.

We were five days into our journey, and we had seriously miscalculated the amount of food that we needed. We had gone through all of our provisions: nine MRE's (packaging and cutlery included) and twenty crushed, empty aluminum cans. We needed to find some more food, and quickly. We walked a ways through the woods where we came up behind a small convenience store, with a chain link fence stretching from either side of it. We pooled our cash together and sent one of us through the doors. Briar said he'd stay out in the woods behind the store. He said he didn't want to go in because he hated all the processed foods in convenience stores.

"Why can't people just eat things grown in nature?" he complained.

I convinced him to be okay with some processed foods because we'd need all the calories we could get to make the journey ahead doable. He reluctantly agreed, but stood in the trees behind the store, grumbling about how he hated artificial sweetener.