The Dreamfarer

32

Mae woke up with tears in her eyes. She rolled over and got to her feet anyway, brushing the dirt from her fancy blue dress and cringing as pebbles dug into the soles of her feet. She wished that she had planned ahead and changed into other shoes before Dael had come in, but what was done was done. She would rather be barefoot than be wearing tall heels; it gave her less of a chance to twist her ankle, and unfortunately, she feared that she was not yet done running.

Deciding to leave Folco behind her was incredibly difficult. The only thing that made her feel better about it was the fact that she knew it was the right thing to do. She could not choose someone she had met days ago over her family - at least not Viv, and not when she would be risking Viv's very life. It was not a choice; it was a sacrifice. But it was one she was willing to make for her sister.

She turned her head to look over her shoulder, but could not see The Underworld anywhere behind her. Good, at least I covered a bit of ground in case Dael sends search parties out after me, she thought to herself. She figured that he would, but it would really depend on the extent of his knowledge of her abilities. Did he know that she was blatantly incapable of transportation by magic? Or did he know little enough about her powers that he would be fooled by her trick?

Either way, she wanted to get moving. Tilting her head slightly, she wondered if she would be able to manage a spell that would prevent the soles of her feet from getting cut up as she ran over this rocky ground. If she were to pierce her feet with anything sharp, or chew the soles up enough that she could not take the pain of running any longer, it could ruin her plans just as surely as it would if she twisted her ankle. 

As she lifted one of her feet from the ground to give it a try, Mae noticed that her previous spell - the one to make her skin reflective - seemed to have worn off. She cursed under her breath and looked around furtively, worried that someone would spot her now that she knew she was in the open with no cover at all. 

Evidently, her magic had not been strong enough for such a spell. It had lasted only minutes before using up all of her energy and knocking her out, and she did not want to risk such a consequence again. She was probably just lucky that she had run a far enough distance that nobody had yet happened upon her, or perhaps she had just ended up landing somewhere that none of these underground creatures ever really ventured through. She thanked whatever greater powers might have been watching over her for allowing her spell to hold long enough for her to get away, because though it would have still come in handy now, that was all she had really needed from it.

Mae scrambled into the nearest tunnel and discovered that it was larger than it had seemed from the club. It was at least ten times her height and twenty times her width, even if her arms were spread out to her sides. She wondered if every tunnel branching from this cavern was the same, and she thought that they probably were. She could only hope that she would not be entering a huge maze when she went through this tunnel; she could think of no odds that would be in her favor if she got lost down here. Besides, she needed to get to Vivienne as soon as possible.

Leaning against the wall, Mae laid her palm flat against the bottom of her foot and willed her magic to create some kind of thin layer between the sole and the ground. She hoped that that would require less energy than actually creating steel or turning the soles of her feet into some kind of material that would prove resilient to whatever she might step on on the ground. She even briefly considered just blocking off the nerves in her feet so that she didn't feel the pain until she removed the spell, but she figured that would be much too intricate of a spell for her small amount of power to be able to produce, let alone do right; she would just end up hurting herself in more ways than one.

Thankfully, a substance that looked and felt like a sort of gel spread from under her palm and along the bottom of her foot. She pressed a toe experimentally against the ground, and when the gel remained firm and did not just stick to the floor, she quickly proceeded to cast the same spell on the other foot. She had no idea how much energy it would take from her, but at least for a time, it would allow her to move faster.