Snow ✓

Going Home

With a sour stomach and that damnable book making the strap of his satchel dig uncomfortably into his shoulder, Mat stood in the apple orchard at the far end of the backyard of his childhood. He had picked countless apples here, climbed the trees and napped at the boughs, but these memories were not the ones he dwelled on now. It was late autumn. Most of the apples had fallen, the sweet stench of their rot adding to his nausea, but he knew the real culprit was the memory of the last time he was here, when tears had blurred his vision as he looked back, Gran's hand tight on his wrist as she had dragged him away, his mother nowhere to be seen, likely right where they had left her: barring the entrance to her laboratory, where, prior to Gran's unexpected arrival, she had been dissecting a human heart, a fresh transmutation circle drying on the floor.

He had thought to stop, to turn the boat around a dozen times, but whenever the inclination had niggled hardest in his chest, he had rowed harder.

Now a man grown and his hands bloody with splinters, his heart was drafty looking at those warped boards that made up his mother's house, a wart on the base of a mountain. He felt it: he would find no peace here, but he hadn't come for that.

He had wondered ever since Elis' tale about Elsie, about Eliwood, whether it wasn't one his own mother might find familiar. Like Eli, she liked to experiment with living, breathing things. Like Eli, she had taken a mysterious hiatus from her family. Maybe they had vacationed aboard the same airship. Maybe she had an idea where he might find the wizard, where Elis might have boarded the airship, and where it might land again. She was the only lead he had. So, with leaden feet, Mat left the comfort of the orchard, feeling very much like a scared child again. A boy with nowhere else to go but home.