Mythic (NaNoWriMo14)

Chapter 7 - Reclaimation

Shout out to SqueakyMouse, your guessing skills are nearly perfect ;D 

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Chapter 7 - Reclamation 

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Cayden woke up when the moon was still high. 

He lay on his back, the lump of his scabbard under his pillow well worth the physical discomfort it provided. The buckle of his belt dug into his hip and he knew by morning, his body would be stiff from lack of movement. Despite several suggestions, he hadn't been able to make himself remove the ley vessel clipped to his side. 

His fingers slipped down the armour he hadn't bothered taking off to touch the smooth, glass surface of the vessel. To reassure himself that it was there, ready for use, though he couldn't figure out why. 

As the minutes passed, Cayden automatically attuned himself to the forest around him. The rustling of leaves as the wind stirred their tips and small night scavengers scurried around in the undergrowth. The grass was still around the clearing, the tips glistening with perfectly balanced beads of dew in the light of the moon. 

Thoughts still foggy from sleep, something didn't seem to add up. 

Shouldn't the wind be stirring them enough for the dew to fall? He tilted his chin up, studying the tops of the trees that were eerily inert as the sound of something rustling continued to grow louder. 

Cayden analysed the rustling into individual sounds. 

The snap of twigs, the quiet groans from the trees that surrounded them, specifically, the ones furthest from the road, closest to the heart of the woods, the thick forest that the Order had no use for and thus left to the wilds because there were no ley hotspots within them. 

And voices. 

Hushed, intoned whispers that he couldn't hear, but that didn't fit the soundscape of the night upon the forest. They weren't the chitterings of small scavengers. They were intelligent. They were communicating. 

"Cayden?" 

Cayden's heart jumped at his name. He rolled his head to find Rena, still curled up in her loose blankets, her large, dark eyes of violet wide and watching him intently, like she'd been trying to decide whether to wake him for several minutes. 

"Rena? What's happening?" 

Her voice was as soft as the nonexistent wind. Cayden had to strain his ears to hear it, and even then the syllables escaped him. "Nothing. Yet."

He felt ridiculous parroting her words. "Yet?"  

Rena shrank inside her blankets, nervously biting her lip. "The ley is awake. It's coming through the trees. Stronger than I've ever seen it, filtering through like the silent mist."

Cayden had heard of the silent mist before. In the time not long after the deities merged with the ley and bound humans and Mythics together, it was said the mist was made of the spirits of the Mythics who'd been left behind, that they wandered the lands seeking their brethren, seeking revenge for their lost fates on the Mythics they deemed to have abandoned the true ways. It was, at best, a bedtime story for misbehaving Mythics told by the Order, but for Rena to look so shaken...

"Where?" he asked. 

Rena's finger pointed towards the trees where the voices were ghosting through the vegetation. Cayden followed her gesture, half expecting to see an actual mist, until his mind woke up enough to remember. 

How she found the Unbound. She could see the effect it had on the air, the traces of ley it left behind.

His mind latched on to one word.