Asher and May walk along the grassy turf, the sun warming their shoulders. He had put it on their left side when they set out to ensure they held their course, but now in the middle of the day it proves a less useful map and he scans the terrain for a shady place to rest. It seems that every time they come over a hill, the land has shifted. Trees that before had appeared solitary are joined by a hundred others, ponds materialize into view; he wishes he could fly so that he could see the entire scope of land at once. He points ahead to several large flat rocks in the shade of a timber of trees. "Let's head there."
A stream, which they hear before they see, flows through the grass by the stones. Low in the hills as they are, the water has pooled and spread, and Asher quickly discovers that, though the earth looks dry, it is shallow water and deep mud, covered by clumps of grass. He groans when his foot squelches and sinks up to his ankle in the mire, but May giggles gleefully and runs through it, her bare feet making slip schlop noises in the muck. She reaches the stones and sits down, giving Asher no choice but to follow. By balancing on clods of grass and higher earth he is able to avoid sinking too much, but all the same, by the time he joins May he's forced to remove his sandals and lay them out to dry, grumbling as he does.
"Had you been wise," May says, "you would have taken off your feet cloths before walking through the wet."
Asher shoots her a sideways glare, and she cedes to look away with an apologetic smile.
YOU ARE READING
The Unending Epic Written to Appease a Friend, Tell a Tale, an...
FantasyEach day, the story grows. The tale begins when two lives are suddenly and irrevocably twined together, and a boy from a lonely farm and a girl without a people find themselves each other's only friend. Little by little the fabric of their lives wea...
