The Hades Throne

Chapter 35 - Courage

I leave a piece of my heart on that hill, with a wild boy and the impossible dream between us.

Nolan walks beside me, saying nothing, and I allow the brief brushes that our hands make to scream out where words can not. It takes a great amount of the most imperceptible kind of courage to walk away from the peace and the escape it provided.

And then Nolan is taking a knife to the tension. "What did one tree say to the other in autumn?"

"I don't know. What?"

"He said, 'It's getting cold, time to leaf." Nolan folds in half as his laughter rings out, and I wish it could banish the anxiety from my soul. "Get it? Because trees have leaves."

Somehow, the joke doesn't make it to the finish line, falling before it could even get close. Silence takes it all the way, and we keep walking.

Reality feels like a hard slap the closer we come to the road. The night is growing old and morning is becoming agitated, forced to wait like a bright yellow wrecking ball in the east. With each passing second, I feel the bubble around us thinning, and the threat that it may pop is more than just a threat; it is a promise.

"Why do I feel like it's wrong to leave?" My voice is a hammer into the silence, and I cringe when I realize the volume of my voice is unnaturally loud. "It's like I'm leaving something behind."

A gasp is wrenched out of my lips when Nolan whirls and grabs my shoulders. He catches my shock, and almost smirks, and I almost play it off, if it weren't for the oven that becomes my cheeks.

"You need to stop that, Ad. You let go of things too willingly. I should know." My eyes turn away from Nolan's, finding the edge of his hairline, which is so close that my eyes are strong-armed into readjusting for focus. The oven in my cheeks blazes out of control and into an inferno. "We're not leaving anything behind, just a memory to hold on to." He shakes his head. "Sometimes letting parts of us go only hurts us in the end."

I sigh, a breath that I could swear warms the oxygen around us. I nod, and then he nods, and we continue to walk.

The journey, though nearly the exact same we traveled to get to the hill where Nolan and I played Battleship, looks like a different world. The high that I lifted me like an elevator, a consequence from the motorcycle, shaded my view like a fogged lens. It seems, too, that the night proved only to cloud even what I could see.

Now, with the faint light, I can see dark clouds between sickly grey branches, promising rain. The trees, though joyous with hints of spring, are gnarled, and mold grows more than the browned grass at our feet.

The silence, though, is what pricks at my skin the most. I noticed it last night, but it's startling now that my brain is sharp. Where some animals pranced about in the safety of darkness, none dare the light. Even the spirits of warriors, three or four posted around us like board-stiff bodyguards, are without sound as they trek the forest.

"It's quiet." I say, my breath drawing the words out in a kind of hybrid between statement and question. "It's weird."

His expression is still sharp from our earlier encounter, and eyes like slits dance around the trees. "We're in a forest, what do you expect?" The words are light, attempting to banish my doubt, but they serve only to rut in my concern deeper.

"I don't know." I whisper, and my own eyes become darts, pinning their targets with a brutal needle. Everything is suspicious; everyone is a suspect.

Then I sigh, again, my own thoughts replying over and over like a permanent repeat button. I sound paranoid, even worse, I sound insane.

But I know, like I know that the sky is blue, that I'm not paranoid or insane. My fingertips tingle, and goose-bumps are a statement fixture on my arms. My conscience, joining in on the stampede, is pulling at me, too.