COBALT: The Red Phantom (Book One)

Chapter 25: A Sprinkle of Pixie Dust (Part 1/4)

          "I feel like we're going to get murdered."

          Káel had been stumbling through the bumpy trail for a couple minutes now. The forest had closed behind him, its thick canopy consuming every fleck of starlight that fought to light his path. Despite the shroud of blackness that blinded him, he didn't dare to conjure his own light in the forest filled with demonized fairytales. 

          He just had to hope he was going the right way.

          "This path looks rushed," Phantom said, they were his first words since stepping into the forest alongside Káel, and lacked the comfort he was hoping for. The dark seemed to have captivated his attention more than conversation, likely because, like Káel, he didn't trust the forest's occupants one bit.

          "Zalius made it though... right?" Káel whispered, his shoulders flinching as Puff snapped a twig. "It's too old for anyone else to have done it."

          "Yeah, it was probably him. I just don't recognise it," Phantom replied, his towering form casting a wall of black in Káel's corner vision. "There's a log up ahead, watch your feet."

          Minutes crawled by as Káel maneuvered blind, his body shaking from an unhealthy mix of chill and fear. The forest had started to glow in sparse patches, what Káel had first feared to be hungry eyes, now debunked as luminescent plants and bugs, their powerful glow giving a strange and tingling buzz to the air.

          Káel kept his brisk stride, the forest lit enough by its own strange glow to show the shaky trail in all its crumbled glory. It was nothing like the trails he'd walked through the forest, barely two men wide and infested with jutting roots and stones. It couldn't have been a matter of simply being overgrown, the trees knew to move away and form a path, and they took the hazards with them.

          This trail was most definitely a rushed job.

          Káel's heart sunk as he thought about the last dream he had of Zalius, two padded thuds that cut the whistling arrows short.

          Was that why the trail was rushed?

          If it was, Zalius had made it further than Káel could ever dream of as a dead man walking. His darkened thoughts now praying he wouldn't have to pull the journal from the cracking clutches of a thousand year old corpse.

          "That glow up ahead," Phantom spoke, tempting Káel from skimming the ground to face the obstacle before them. "It's the heart of the forest."

          Káel could make out the sight if he squinted past its silver glow. A blackened silhouette cracking through the brilliant white crown of a tree. 

          A few steps closer and he could see the amethyst skin it bore in a coat of rough scales, cradled by a shallow pool of water that refracted its brilliant light. Strange, entrancing, and all too familiar throughout his stay on Lumi.

          At least he knew where that stick came from now.

          Phantom brushed up beside Káel as he stopped at the foot of the stilled puddle, his shoulders clenched in equal awe and confusion. "I thought it was strange that the forest had gotten so touchy about guests. Spirit trees have a horrible love of paranoia."

          Káel pulled Puff back when the dragon got to close to the water, the buzzing air tickling his nerves as he inspected its ethereal canopy from a safe distance. The tree, although large in its own respects, was dwarfed by its ancient familly that didn't allow a speck of sky to peek past the thick net of foliage caging it. Like a beating heart, it didn't draw its life from the outside, hidden from all in the body of the forest.