Iwake up inside a cave.
It’s a struggle to open my eyes, but when I do, I’m met with darkness. I’m so deep inside the cave that the rock walls surrounding me are barely visible. The only sound to greet me is the heavy rainfall outside that tells me it’s still storming.
How long was I out? It’s impossible to tell from the back of the deep cave where I’m lying on a slab on my side. Long enough for my clothes to become damp and for my mouth to feel dry and sticky from thirst. I can still feel the sweat, fresh water, and fear clinging to my skin while my hair is a dry, frizzled, and tangled mass.
I clutch my head with a groan as I sit up, and then I wince and hiss when I feel the wound and dried, sticky blood caked at the back of my head.
What happened?
The last thing I remember is the river. The storm caused a flash flood, and Bane and I fell in.
Bane.
He was awake.
My muscles immediately coil with apprehension as I look around the cave, but I see no sign of the alter.
“Hello?” My voice is carried away on an echo, but no one answers back. “Bane?” I try again. “Are you there?” When nothing but the sound of the storm answers back, I finally accept that I’m alone. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or bad, and I won’t know until I get a good assessment of just how fucked I am, so I rise from the slab.
I’m immediately bowled over by nausea.
My bow and quiver are resting on the slab, but my arrows are missing, likely lost to the river. I grab them both and sling the bow over my shoulder before uselessly clipping the quiver to my hip.
Leaning over, I place my hand on the damp cave wall and I use it to hold me up as I inch toward the faint light coming from the entrance. I see moss growing on the ground as I get closer to the front, and the moment I feel strong enough, I let go of the wall and quicken my steps toward the mouth of the cave.
It’s rockier toward the front, with stones ranging from small pebbles to large boulders. I roll an ankle as I step on one of the smoother ones, and only then do I realize I’m not wearing shoes. I hadn’t even noticed the feel of the ground or the mud between my toes because everywhere else on my body hurts like hell, so why not my feet too?
I consider going back into the cave to search for them, but a voice in my head warns me to leave them, that I only have a small window of time to escape the cave, so I keep going. There are vines hanging from the top of the cave’s entrance, partially blocking my view like a privacy window. I burst through them and brace myself to be immediately drenched in the rainfall all over again, but there’s nothing. The sky is gray from the storm with no sign of the sun or even the moon anywhere, but the air is impossibly dry. How? It’s impossible to tell what time of day it is. Suddenly, I’m regretting not stopping to grab my watch—and choosing to leave behind the radio.
That was stupid.
The cave, as it turns out, is built into the side of a steep cliff that immediately gives me vertigo when I look down at the mist and fog blocking my view for miles. It’s only a few steps from the mouth of the cave to the edge of the cliff, and with the windblowing hard enough to bend and blow down a tree, it feels incredibly risky to leave the cave.
But I have no choice, so I don’t turn back.
Instead, I look around in search of landmarks to try to figure out where I am. The storm makes it hard to see anything, but when lightning strikes and some of the clouds part at that exact moment and I see everything previously hidden from me, my chest tightens painfully.
This high up, I should be able to see each of the mountain peaks in the distance, but there’s nothing. Nothing but more trees—though not nearly as dense as the foliage I’m used to seeing—and a stretch of desert that tugs at something from my memory.
Like I do onstage to recall the steps of my routine just before a performance, I close my eyes as I draw forth the image of the map.
There’s Little Bear where my plane crashed at the northernmost edge of the range.
Maia has the sheerest drop and the most foliage. It’s also where the hot springs are.
Big Bear has the widest mass and tallest peak. An insurmountable and unpredictable bitch of a mountain that I’m eager to get back to.
The Cold Peaks mountain range forms a rugged arc with the wide mass of Maia encompassing most of the curve and Little Bear and Big Bear forming the endpoints. The valley and all the wilds within that curve are my way home, but instead, I’m staring back at an unfamiliar sight. A dry wasteland where even the storm won’t reach.
Damn it.I’m on the leeward side of the mountain. I’m in the shadow of the storm. Or at least partially. It’s why the air is dry even when the storm is so close and why there are small signsof vegetation even without precipitation. The cave must bestride both faces of the mountain.
It means life points the way home.
And if I had to guess, I’d say it was Maia that I woke up on.
Suddenly, Thorin’s insistence on making me study the map of the Cold Peaks for an hour each day doesn’t seem so unnecessarily cruel now. Without those sessions, I’d be completely fucked with no chance of mapping a way home. There’s still a chance of me getting lost though, since Thorin and I never got to the part of his plan where he’d drop me off somewhere random and force me to find my way home.
It won’t be easy barefoot and without my pack, but left with no choice, I start down the rocky slope that Bane must have carried me up. The thing I’ve learned about traversing mountains and untamed landforms is that you often have to go around to go through and up to go down, which is no less true in this case. By the time I reach the foothills, my feet are scraped raw and blistered from being ravaged by the ground. I’m leaving bloody footprints in my wake, and I’m limping by the time I reach the foothills.
