All those stars blew me away. I never imagined you could see so many at one time with the naked eye. Coastal Florida had this ever-present fuzzy orange glow that reached up every horizon from the thousands of street lights and strip malls and obliterated almost everything celestial except for the moon and Venus.
But here, there was even a swath of smudged light that could only be the Milky Way. A name that had been abstract and cartoonish suddenly made sense. It really was milky-looking and it looked like a path through the sky. Strange, how the ancients were probably more in touch with the universe than most of us in this so-called ‘space age.’
I even thought at one point that I saw a meteor, but it seemed too bright to be real and was gone too quickly to etch an impression on my senses.
I plunged headlong up a wide, graveled lane. The moonlight made the pale stone and dirt glow, contrasting nicely with the darker vegetation flanking it, almost as if my way forward was lit by faerie footlights.
Even when the occasional patch of forest snuffed the glow, the path was so straight and the way so obvious, I could have almost walked it with my eyes closed.
I could easily imagine a herd of cattle being led this way. The grade was easy, the footing firm and well-drained. I had hiked a lot worse paths.
I had probably gone a couple miles before it began to narrow. But I maintained a brisk and steady pace, even as the path began to steepen.
I could hear a decent-sized creek gurgling in a gully to my left. The sound soothed me. Since I was a kid, I had always been drawn to water. I still loved messing around in streams. I wish I could have seen it in daylight. From the sheer sound of them, those cascades had to be gorgeous.
Every twenty minutes I chewed up a mile. The path diverged from the stream for a time, but plunged into a little valley after topping a rise and then veered right, following the flank of another stream.
My private light show was slowly curtailed by the hills rearing up before me and a slant of blackness creeping in slowly like a stage curtain from the west.
In the darker areas under tree I blundered off the trail a couple of times, but the shrubs acted like bumpers in guiding back to the main path. If it stayed like this the rest of the way, I had it made. I wondered if the lights of Inverness might be visible from the top of the pass. That possibility excited me and pulled me onward.
Karla. Not the prettiest name.
I couldn’t even remember exactly what she looked like anymore. It had been so long and our contacts had been so few and brief. But as I climbed that trail, flashes of remembrance came to me through the darkness.
Asymmetric bangs shielding intense eyes, one scarred but that one flaw in their beauty rendering them all the more spectacular. The pixie-like and otherworldly proportions of her cheeks and chin.
Could it be her face was a fiction, something that had never existed on this side of life? Maybe the Karla in Inverness sported a completely different visage. People did weave flesh in Root, did they not? Both Bern and Lille had altered their looks and Luther/Arthur’s face was in a perpetual state of flux. But if Karla had modified her face in the Liminality, why would she have retained those scars?
I paused to unzip my pack, grateful now for the biscuits and plums that George’s wife Iona had made me take along, as well as a bottle of sweet well water filled from their tap.
It was dead silent out here except for the wind. For the first time, perhaps in my life, I heard not a single internal combustion engine.
I looked behind me at the lights of Braemar, surprised by how far I had come already, how high I had climbed. My progress encouraged me, but I also couldn’t help wondering if it would have been smarter to take George’s advice and spend the night in town, even if it had to be in another nest of cardboard. It was terribly lonely up here.
