By The Moon's Blade

5. Fleeing the City, Two Years Ago

We set up camp against a large boulder at the edge of a precarious cliff. Our wagon rests against the side of the stone to ensure that it doesn't slide away in the middle of the night and we set our tents up behind the trees. As a precaution, my mother set up various traps made up of ropes and pans rigged to clatter at the approach of a trespasser. Though, to be honest, if these predators are as bad as she's saying... I'd rather not be awake when they rip my chest apart.

I start assembling some of the nearby rocks into a fire pit and begin piling up some of the firewood we collected. This land is quite different from the forest we've been traveling through over the past week. It's mostly flat, with a few sprawling hilltops in the distance.

There are still plants, but most are squat bushes and withering grass, all life sucked out from each individual blade. There are also a few trees here and there, but pale in comparison to the towering firs of the nearby forest. Snow has begun collecting in small pockets within the land, a sign of the difficult season to come.

As I finish building the fire pit, I look over to my mother and she has her gaze fixed on the forest from which we just exited. I don't think she's blinked since we arrived an hour ago. Her face is scrunched and lined with concern through her fine wrinkles. I walk up and simply pat her on the back before walking back into my tent to rest for a few moments.

I lay down on my mat, strategically avoiding the abundance of sharp rocks dotting the ground. I place my hands behind my head and cross my legs as I watch the wind ripple the canvas above. My mind darts back to the notebook, ominous words and a sure sign that she's hiding something from me.

That crystal that she's been coveting, it has to be the Vestige she mentioned in the notebook. But, in all of my years and countless stories from Poppy, I never once heard anything about a Vestige. Obviously its dimming is a death knell for the Lunari, at least according to my mother, but why does it matter? I'm upset we left Cloudridge but I'm almost more upset that she hid something so important for my entire life.

If she had known that this were a possibility, why did she keep us in the dark for so long? Why did she let me experience even a moment of happiness when she knew it could be snatched from our clutches at the drop of a hat?

I feel my body tense up with anger and I focus my eyes on a single seam on the tent, moving gently back and forth, centering me and taming the fire that lit up my veins. As I focus on dousing the flames, I feel my eyes flutter close. I fall into darkness and sleep the heaviest I have in a week.

—-

After waking up, I exit my tent and notice a bowl of stew sitting just outside, collecting a few delighted flies, who scramble away as I take a step out. I must have slept straight through dinner and the bowl was left as a gesture of good faith. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought that fire in my veins could be felt throughout our campsite.

"Morning, Rozi. I think today might be a good day to start looking for some sources of food around here," my mother says as she stokes a small fire. "I think this is a great place to hide out for a while, so we'll need to focus on a few necessities — food, water, and weapons. We brought some of those knives from home, but an extra spear or two wouldn't hurt. I already have your father out collecting some supplies and looking for a source of water."

"How much food do we have left?"

"I would say at least a month, I've been rationing pretty well, but we're not leaving anytime soon. So if you can find any sort of wild crop that might be good to stock up on, it's not a bad idea to grab it. Winter is about to hit, which will make it a lot more difficult to find a reliable food source."

"Gotcha, I'll do what I can."

I walk off, crystalline knife in my pocket and my hands wrapped around the handles of a wooden basket. We never learned much about foraging in Starmill, but I do remember some what some of the most popular crops looked like. And considering many of the crops were from around the Tadral region, the odds of me finding something familiar is pretty high.