Of Caverns and Casters ✓ [TLRQ #1]

Chapter 22 - Leavi

Rain follows us the next day, and my mind hangs in its clouds. By afternoon, it drizzles away, leaving behind a golden streaked sunset. For the first time in days, I really look at what's laid out in front of me. The sun is frighteningly large set against an open, even skyline. The High Valley mountains always cut the sun to ribbons.

Presented with this new, sweeping view, my dread battles my awe, each pressing for dominance. This sunset is just wrong. It, like everything else in the Outerlands, is subtly off, real but impossible, similar but skewed. It shakes something inside me that I can't seem to settle. Yet there is something still entrancing about it, beautiful even though it hurts to see.

A view like this wasn't supposed to exist. But I'm here, this imaginary place is real, and the world is so very, very flat. I feel free to move but like I can never leave, exposed and yet safe because I can see anything coming for miles around. Though the flatness is inherently wrong, it exists, so in some way, it must not be.

"Amura," I mutter. Experiencing two conflicting emotions at the same time so that the brain registers them as pain rather than deciding which to believe. My mother, the zealous mentaliti professor that she is, lectured me on it more times than I can count. I never thought I'd feel it this way, though, this strongly, in every single, simple sight I take in.

Amura. The first sign of a breaking mind, she said. A mind too weak to reconcile its own perceptions, to process its own stimuli. Instead of work, it cripples itself.

Amura.

A bird dips across the sunset. Brown and golden feathers flash as it lands, talons outstretched to catch the branch of a solitary tree. It's a hawk. Specifically, a northern-slopes hawk, according to the coloring. It spends summers in the northern stretches of the High Valleys and migrates south during winters.

I take a step forward, hand shielding my eyes, double-checking. But no, that's definitely it. This is so much farther south than we ever predicted it could fly. Farther than we could have imagined it flying. A High Valley bird wintering in the Outerlands. Madness.

I step back, realization clicking in my mind. "If it can get back," I mutter, "so can I."

Sean pulls the tent out of the stuff-sack, everyone around us also in the process of setting up camp. "You planning on helping me, or are you just going to keep glaring at the horizon?"

I grab Sean's wrist and drag him away from the group.

"What's your problem, Riveirre?"

When we reach the hawk's tree, out of earshot of the others, I let him go. "You have to talk to the Ufir."

He scowls, straightening his coat sleeve. "Why the blazes would I do that? And about what?"

"He has to take us back to the High Valleys. Now, before we get any farther out."