Autumn's Fall

XVII. Where Did She Go?

It was dark, so dark that he could not see. It did not matter, he knew his way around the small cave. At the rear, the young girl would still sleeping in her frozen state. He only hoped she would be able to forgive him someday, in time.

She was much, much too young to experience such a level of pain or trauma. She may hate him after this, but in his heart he would know that he had done the right thing in keeping this pain from her, even if she might never see it that way.

He touched the back of the small cave and felt around for the long, silver container, but his hands felt only the roots covering the walls. In a panic he groped around frantically, but he encountered nothing except empty space. Desperate as he was to not be seen, he finally flicked open a small lighter and held it high to see what he had dreaded: the girl was gone!

The lighter fell from his hands, and the roots above him began to writhe from his unrestrained power. His face paled. Earth began falling on him in great heaps which motivated him to hurry from the cave; he rolled out just in time to avoid the cave in. The evidence of the cave was now gone, but he did not need it to find her.

Kneeling to the ground before the blocked opening, he placed a hand to the ground and searched beneath the surface, "Show me what happened here."

Before him he could sense growth. Moss rose from the ground, but only in certain places and in very consistent patterns. He could sense three pairs of moss footprints coming in and out of the cave, but they were so small. "They're children. Where did they take her?"

The moss footprints led away, growing quickly before him, vanishing again underground when he passed by. They led down the ravine, up a path, and back along the top to the mountains. By the pale light of dawn, he finally found the abandoned sleeper pod at the top of the path. Roots rose from the dirt and dragged the container underground where no one would find it.

Another set of moss footprints appeared. "She's alive and out, but how long ago?" That the moss could not tell him, it could have been days, it could have been minutes. The moss only showed where it had been trampled on.

The sun was just barely above the horizon now, and though this place was long abandoned, he did not want to stay exposed like this any more than he had to. Raising up a stout tree, he fashioned and shaped the branches until a seat appeared, which he sat on. From his seat in its low branches, he urged the tree forward as quickly as it could move, slicing and weaving through the earth with its great roots.

It was not long before he found the remains of the campsite by the lakeside. One of the footprints disappeared—the middle-sized ones—and random equipment lay scattered on the table, some of it fallen on the ground or rifled through by some forest animal.

Though he was worried about the middle-sized footprints missing, he was more concerned with what had been the final destination of the largest pair, and so he continued on with his search.

Late in the day, he discovered the reemergence of the middle-footprints on a bridge, before they—and the second largest—disappeared again. A short way off the bridge, the smallest and largest pairs disappeared on the docks. He called out to the plants below the surface of the water, but they had been too low and could not tell him about those who had passed above them.

He searched and searched around the lake in all directions, but he could learn no more for they had not set foot back on the shore. He had lost them, and more importantly, he had lost her.

For the first time, it weighed upon him that he had truly lost the Minister of Winter. She was gone! And he had no way of finding her! The Minister of Spring fell to his knees in the dusk; a guttural cry ripped from his throat as plants writhed around him.