The Rift in the Domain- The Auranos Stories Book 2

Chapter 7 - Hometown

Zina

Finally that old town appeared on the horizon, with its humble homes and quaint little cottages, the sun tucked between the peaks of the mountains above-

Haha! I don't really talk like that. My name is Comet Flicker- although I did go by Zina for a while. Why change back to Comet? It was kind of gradual, I guess. Kind of like how people get nicknames, only this time it was in reverse.

Anyway, I can tell you I was thinking something like that first sentence when I finally saw Cavebrook. Cavebrook was my old hometown, in case you didn't know. It's where I grew up! For all of its flaws and all of its stupid people, I was happy to see it again.

If you recall, I couldn't really enjoy the place the last time we'd gone through, because we skirted around the town on the cliff path. I'd almost forgotten that trail, having never been up there myself. My dad always threatened to ground me, literally, if I went anywhere near them. More than one curious kid had broken a limb or two or three or a neck falling from up there.

But I digress. Finally, I was home. Technically speaking. And everything seemed a little smaller than I remembered.

But everything seemed just the same, as well. The same pastry shop, the same butcher, the same stable, the same park and the same stuffy blue house on the corner.

The rest of the team had no clue where they were going, so they were rather delighted when I was able to lead them straight to the best motel for us. It was Dew Inn, a fairly nice place with an attached stable for the panthers. It had gotten better (and more expensive) than I'd last seen it, too.

I also got to make the "what are you dew-inn" joke somewhere around a hundred times. Haha! That's what you get when you ask a local for advice.

Anyway, here's where another person would give you all sorts of detail about what the hotel looked like, describing the floor to the cieling, all the while using weird little metaphors and stuff that nobody reasonable really understands. I'm not very artistic; all I cared about was that the doors locked, we were paying less than we could have been, and we had complimentary breakfast waiting for us in the morning.

But it's always more complicated than just that, isn't it? I couldn't sleep. For the first time in years I was back in Cavebrook- really back in Cavebrook.

So much was just the same as it had been. Progress and change had a way of ignoring the less wealthy towns in the Domain. Here, the air smelled the same, the sun set the same way it always did between two of the peaks, the flowers grew the same, the roads still had moss between the cobblestones, the carriages still clicked quietly on the streets...

One would think that with these images in my head I'd be drifting off to sleep in no time. But I couldn't. I just couldn't. So I got up and left the hotel in the middle of the night and went out into Cavebrook.

The people were different. That was the biggest, most visible change. In towns like these, you'd never notice if you hadn't lived there. But yes, the people were different. The lumberyard sign no longer said "Sparrow's Lumber and Firewood", but "River's Lumber Yard". The town newspaper was edited by Hearth Ray, not Flier Clouds. In fact, one of the only names that had stayed the same was the name engraved into the old fountain: "Doodle's Fountain". (I remembered it from when I was little, when I had always wanted to meet Doodle. She was one of the town founders, now long dead. But someone with a name like that had to have been fun to hang around with.)