Clouds

Chapter One Part Five

Part 5

            All time stops as we hear a knock at the door.  Colby’s eyes dart up and he races down across the room to the passageway between the secret room and the main shop.  His security is perfect, the doors both hidden and requiring a password message to enter and exit.  Awesome stands up suddenly and I follow, my eyes wide as he whispers the password.

            “Stay here,” he growls, leaving us to stay behind.  Awesome and I exchange a glance as we hear his footsteps above us.  Suddenly they stop.  Awesome and I look at each other again and exchange the same thought: he’s looking at the cameras posted outside.  He continues towards the door, so the knock must have come from a friend, and opens it.  As if just regaining our senses, Awesome and I rush over to the smaller room and look at the screen matching the view of the camera upstairs.

            An aged woman around forty stands facing Colby, her curly gray-blue hair falling just above her shoulders.  She is panting, her slim body rising and then falling as she stands there, catching her breath, her hands on her legs.  I would recognize her anywhere.

            It’s Misty.

            “Misty,” Awesome whispers.  “But what’s she doing here?”

            “This is bad,” I whisper.  For Misty to be here, at this time of night, it must be terrible: her reason for coming all the way from Misty Mountain.

            Misty Mountain is the headquarters for our group of rebels.  Named after Misty, the mountain is indeed misty.  The clouds always hang low and fog forms around Misty Mountain continuously, the fog lightened slightly in the summer months.  Misty lives there, and is also the leader of our rebel group.  Awesome, Colby, and I are all members of the group, the youngest, in fact, along with my and Colby’s parents, Awesome’s dad as well.  Misty Mountain was, of course, founded by Misty, the original explorer representative for Shrouded Glade.  There are groups of rebels in almost every big city, hidden in areas their explorers had found.

            Misty found the mountain while working for the Queen a long time ago.  She was young, in her early thirty’s, on a job to be rid of hybrid wolves known as snarlers, named for their incredibly sharp teeth and cat-like roar.  She was an excellent tracker, and followed the snarlers to their den, which turned out to be the mountain itself.  But, to her surprise, the wolves were much smarter then she first thought: they had discovered a small crack in the wall that divided the mountain from the rest of the Sanctuary.  Startled, she followed the creatures inside their den and, as if they knew she was following them all along, led her to their nursery where she met the female snarlers and a few of their pups. 

            After meeting the snarlers’ family, they took her to another den, connected by a tunnel, where she laid eyes on three brown bears.  The fact that two species could be so close and fond of one another amazed her after the bears too were kind and let her meet their cubs.  Misty vowed never to hurt the animals and returned to her station, reporting the animals gone after running off. 

            Immediately after her mysterious day Misty joined the rebels group against the Queen.   She had always had her doubts about the dictator, and this was all she needed to open up her eyes to the world around her.

            Misty became Shrouded Glade’s first explorer.

            As she aged Misty became more and more familiar with the mountains range in which the soldiers were often stationed.  She learned her through the mountains all around her and Shrouded Glade, and soon earned her spot as the head of the Shrouded Glade rebels group.