The Farastar Forest,as the woodland was called, was a thick band of trees between the flatter lands and the mountains, and it stretched as far as we could see. Whoever had created the game hadn’t fully taken into consideration how actual topography worked, but somehow, here, in the game’s dimension, it worked. Rivers flowed in directions they might otherwise not, and biomes were delineated with more definite boundaries.
I thought about Otsiano and I wondered if he and the Glass Unicorn were watching us. Did they know where we were? And would they be able to help us should we run afoul of the mountain creatures? The journey ahead seemed darker than all we had come through, even through the stark white layers of snow and ice we were facing.
Reggie pointed out a couple of bushes. “Bilfa berries. Even just a handful will be enough to keep your stamina from flagging too drastically. Gather as many as you can find. These will give us a leg up on our journey.”
The berries were surprisingly plentiful and had dried on the vine. By the end of a little less than an hour, we had gathered enough to keep us for several weeks. And that they had dried only meant they wouldn’t go bad on us. I ate a small handfuland immediately felt revived. My mood lifted, but I wasn’t sure if it was the berries or just the extra nutrients. We divided them up so everybody had a stash, and—after drinking our fill and refilling our water bottles—we returned to the path.
“Shall we set off?” I said.
“No time like the present,” Thornhold said, but his voice quavered. Like the rest of us, I could tell he was apprehensive.
“We’ll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as I was trying to encourage the others. “Okay, let’s go.” And with that, I took a deep breath and set out on the path toward the mountains.
CHAPTER 50: CAVERNS & TUNNELS
At first,it was hard to see anything. I turned on the flashlight on my watch and looked around. As the light pushed the darkness aside, I began to see a glimmer from the walls, and I could also see my breath forming in white puffs. The others turned on their flashlights as well, and we spread out.
The cavern we were in was about twenty feet long by thirty feet deep, and as we approached the back wall, we could see several openings—tunnels leading into the depths of the mountain. The walls were granite, sparkling with quartz. I ran my hand over the stone. It was dry, but cold.
Stalactites jutted down from the ceiling, while stalagmites thrust their way up from the floor. They clustered, providing some cover, but the cave was empty as far as we could tell. To one side, we found the remains of what must have been a campfire, ringed with smaller rocks. Only ashes remained in the firepit, and it was impossible to tell how old it was, or who had been camping here.
The openings had me a little worried. For one thing, there were four of them, which gave anything hiding in the mountain four opportunities to surprise us.
“If we camp in here, we’re going to have to keep watch. We don’t know where those tunnels lead. But it’s growing dark, and I don’t want to try to find another camping site. We can’t break for the evening on the trail.” There wasn’t room on either side of the path to set up our campsite, for one thing. And it was far too cold to shelter in the open.
“We’re lucky we found this cave,” Thornhold said. “Why not sleep a little extra, and that way we can have three on watch for the first shift, and two for the second shift? Dawn’s coming later each day.”
“That would work. We can do four three-hour shifts. I know that seems a bit excessive, but we need our rest to make it through these mountains, and since the sun rises early and dawn comes late, we don’t want to be traveling in the dark anyway. I think that a twelve-hour stint on the road is about all we can manage at this point.” I slid my backpack onto the floor. “We brought wood, correct?”
Brynn nodded. “Some, but I doubt if we’ll have enough for more than a few days. We’re going to have to secure some other way of cooking and heating up the area.” She and Thornhold were carrying several sacks of wood, but we knew that wasn’t going to last us the entirety of the trip.
“Gather as many small rocks as possible. If we built the fire on them, they’ll heat up and stay warm longer,” I said.
“We should build the fire near the front of the cave so the smoke drifts out rather than fills the cavern,” Thornhold said. “Why don’t you and Ray get started on the fire,” he told Brynn. “Erenye, let’s survey the food and actually make dinner. We could use a hot meal.”
“I’ll gather snow to melt so we don’t use up our water,” Reggie said.
We split off, getting to work. Thornhold and I gathered all the food we had in our packs and separated it into meals. Wehad enough for two weeks if we ate three times a day. We could stretch it to twenty-one days if we only ate twice a day. I wasn’t sure if that was enough to get us through the mountains, but if we had even one day’s delay, we were going to have to find some sort of food along the way. By the time we finished sorting out everything, the fire was built, and Reggie had brought in enough snow so that we could melt some for tea and cooking, and also for cleaning up.
“Would you rather eat two meals a day for three weeks or three for two weeks?” I explained the situation.
“I think we’d better expect some sort of delay up here. Why don’t we start out with two meals a day, and if that’s not enough to fuel us, we can go to three. Meanwhile, we keep an eye out for anything that we can eat. There has to be some sort of animal we can hunt,” Thornhold said.
“I agree,” Brynn said. “We’re going to need stamina, and that doesn’t come without food.”
“At least we have the bilfa berries,” I said. “We can’t forget those. We have enough to get us through the mountains if we eat a small handful a day each. That will go a long way in helping. I suggest eating them in the morning before we start out.”
“How about this?” Reggie said. “We eat the bilfa berries for breakfast, then a solid lunch and a small dinner.”
After we had all agreed on Reggie’s suggestion, I got to work making dinner. It was simple — rice and dried jerky, with a few seasonings thrown in, but it would fill us up and warm us through the night. After we had eaten dinner, we set up a tent for extra warmth, and then huddled around the fire. At least the walls of the cavern prevented the wind from coming in, and that helped a lot.
The crackle of flames popped and sizzled as we relaxed, yawning our way through till bedtime. Nobody had much tosay–it had been a long, tiring day. Finally, as my watch showed nine o’clock, Brynn and Thornhold crawled into the tent, while Ray, Reggie, and I stayed near the fire. We didn’t want to waste wood, so we let the flames burn down, keeping the embers alive by feeding them an occasional stick of wood. But the rocks we had built the campfire on emanated heat they had stored from the flames, which helped.
Three hours later, with only the sound of the wind howling outside, we woke Thornhold and Brynn and traded places. In another three hours we were awake again, settling down for our second watch period.
As we changed the fourth and final time, I thought we were going to luck out and make it through till morning without any incident. But shortly after Reggie, Ray, and I had fallen asleep for our second sleep, we bolted upright to the sound of shouting outside the tent. We dove for the tent door, scrambling out into the cavern just in time to see some sort of creatures dragging Brynn into one of the tunnel openings. Thornhold was on the ground, out cold.
“Look after him!” I yelled as I started after Brynn.
