SLADERS. A PATH UNDER STARS

CHAPTER I. LIVE TOGETHER, DIE ALONE (I)

The sun set on the horizon, leaving the city of the great towers and everything around it in the shadows.

The great walls delimited the perimeter of the city of Ajax, and in the fields, beyond the fortress of the northern capital, the villages that constituted outside the walls extended. At the end of everything, where the fields ended and the paths that were drawn between the villages, marked by torches in the darkness, stood the beginning of the Jungle of Lights.

There were confined to the darkness the creatures that shone inside to the rhythm of the silence, only torn by our steps, making their way between one of the living paths, capable of locating themselves at will to lead you to only they knew where and why.

In the end the whys don't matter. After all, it is not you who looks for the answers, but they who find you.

Our bare feet made our way among the orchids that covered that path, and whose cells, synthesizing oxygen, illuminated the darkness upon contact with our skin, plunging us into a halo of bright neon colors that almost blinded our eyes, already accustomed to the light. darkness, turning the night into an intense paradox.

The path was drawn through the darkness as we advanced, placing our hope in finding a specific place. The one we only looked for on rare occasions, when we needed something from him, or, perhaps, better said, something from Her.

We walked several kilometers in silence, without resting, going deeper and deeper into the thicket with hope beating in us, and trying to quell that fear that always beats in your heart when the day approaches when you risk everything on one card.

Fireflies flew in swarms, luminescent dragonflies waved their whips around us, and our feet connected with the roots of the sacred Earth from which we came and where we were going.

We had walked for a couple of hours by the time we managed to find the Ánnadeg portal.

Two immense trees that rose towards the firmament, beyond where our eyes could see, and whose trunks had been carved like Atlanteans in ancient times, erected the monumental entrance to the Great Sanctuary before our eyes.

We were in some remote wasteland of the old Forest of Lights, whose location, according to the most recent studies, was more than difficult to pinpoint.

We hadn't been there many times, but once a year was fine.

―It's still impressive that we manage to find it every year, without anyone being able to explain to us where the hell it was. ―My friend Agnuk took the lead to quickly enter the stairs that descended several kilometers underground between the roots of the ancient trees of the forest. His bow always held firmly in his hand.

It didn't matter how many times you had stepped foot in that place. I could never fail to impress you.

"Sometimes I think Ella has something to do with it," I scoffed as I followed him. Only us sladers bring offerings to him, his altar would not still be here if it weren't for our stupidity.

"You'd better shut up, Dakks," my friend, Agnuk, complained, trying to silence any attempt at black humor that could allude to our dear friend. Don't make her angry, you know that talking about ghosts is calling them.

"You know it will come when you least expect it, and you..." I concluded.

He turned to give me the most terrifying of his looks and his eyes turned black in that instant, mine would certainly look yellow, I was having fun. I remained silent, suppressing laughter.

-Even if you had finished the sentence it would still not be funny.

I pretended to close my mouth by sliding my little finger over my lips simulating the cross cut of a sword.