Lost In The Cold

Chapter 5

Soni and Silkver struggle to keep up with Ace as they walk through the blizzard. It was a little more calm than before but it could still bend the trees into different directions . All of them held flashlights with Ace leading the way.

"How far does Xia walk into these woods? I thought she had a fear of walking alone in here." Silkver wonders out loud.

No one answers. She looks ahead at the trail covered in deep snow and then at Ace who was way ahead of her. She then looks at Soni who was trudging through the snow and covering his eyes from the snow.

"What?" Soni asks her, catching her stare.

"How long are we going to be out here? My wings are cold." Silkver pointed to her shaking wings.

Soni sighed. "This is why I didn't want you to co-"

"Okay, okay I was just asking. Geez..." Silkver says, walking farther. Since her wings were starting to feel stiff, she decided to spread them and move them around a bit.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you." Ace warns her.

But it was too late. A gust of wind went by and carried her off the ground. Before she knew it, it slammed her into a pine tree.

With alarmed faces, Ace and Soni run to Silkver as she falls down from a high branch and into the snow headfirst.

"Whoooaaaa what just happened!? Are you okay!?" Soni asks her.

"Do I LOOK okay to you?!" She says, standing up and shaking the snow off like nothing happened.

There were dozens of pine needles and cones stuck in her hair and her wings bled a little from all those needles stabbing through them. Her body ached from the fall but she still managed to stand up without letting out a sound.

"I'll pull those out." Ace approaches her but she steps back.

"I don't need help." Silkver says and turns around to face the tree trunk.

He looks at Soni with a puzzled look. "What's her problem?" He whispers to him.

"I dunno. You ask her." Soni replies back.

After a few minutes of taking out pinecones, needles and treating her wings, Silkver bends down and picks up something.

"Hey, look I found something!" She says. What she found was something shiny and small.

"Can I take a look?" Ace asks her as he took a step forward.

Silkver nodds and gives him the shiny object. Ace looks at it for a while and wipes the snow off to uncover more details. It was a purple screw.

"Hmm...do you see more of these anywhere?" Ace lifts his head up and sees Silkver's glove filled with about 7 screws and bolts with the colors purple, cyan, and silver.

"Yep. Xia's definitely been here. Those wouldn't just show up under a tree." Soni tells Ace.

Silkver looks around the snow some more and sees a few feathers a few feet away from where she found the screws and bolts.

"Soni are these your's? You've got some loose feathers and some of them fell off." She points to a light blue colored feather and does a hand motion for Soni to come and see.

"Those are not mine." He says scooping a feather up without touching it. "They're blue." He shines his flashlight on it and shows them.

Ace looks at the two different objects for a while and realizes something.

"Oh no..." He whispers.

"What's wrong?" Soni regodnized that he had frozen in place.

"If there are two different objects here, ones that belong to Xia and ones that don't...I think someone might have taken her somewhere..." He says pointing to two pairs of shallow footprints that were almost completely covered with snow.