“Go on,” she prompts with a nervous glance over her shoulder as though she fears discovery.
I turn my back on the dense foliage that hides our cave and take my first step down the slope, moving through twisting curls of mist. Notourcave.Theirs.Always theirs.
“Arden.” It’s the only time she’s ever used my name. I glance at her with her fur boots ankle-deep in snow and her topaz eyes intent, as though she can will me to believe her next words. “You can do this.”
Nodding, I wonder who she is trying to convince. Me or herself.
Turning, I start down the mountain. The snow here is so deep and vast and blinding white that it offers its own source of light. Even in the coldest months back home, I never saw snow such as this. It covers everything. An endless white sea.
Dawn encroaches, pushing out the dark until the light of day creeps over the horizon like a slow-moving hand.
I never expectedit to be easy, but this is something else entirely.
Something more than difficult. More than cold. More than exhausting. More than grueling.
It might very well be suicide.
Danhy must have known that. It would explain her almost regretful attitude when we parted. It’s comical now when I think back on it...how very easy I made it for her. I handed her my death—that very thing she had wanted since the start.
After a few hours I conclude that Tage must know I’ve left by now. I envision Tage returning to find me gone. I assume he will look for me. He will take to the skies and search. I can well envision that, hear the desperate pounding of his wings on air. But that’s the part of me that believes what happened between us was more than a hedonistic coupling, somethingbeyondimpulse-driven lust, something deeper, something a lot like a true connection.
Maybe I’m the one to make the hard decision to end it, but now that I have, I’m convinced he will be relieved and see it’s for the best. I did him a favor.
He might look for me, but after a perfunctory attempt to find me, he will give up and let me go. I choose to believe this because it’s the most likely scenario. The thing thatoughtto happen.
I walk throughout the day, following Danhy’s instructions withthe leafy umbrella over my head. I trudge forward through the ache and strain in my arms, ignoring the icy burn in my lungs. I walk long past the point of exhaustion. It’s only day one.I have to be stronger than this.
If any dragons fly overhead, I don’t notice. Still, when night drops, I’m relieved to lower and relax my weary arms.
And that’s when the cold sinks its teeth into me, when the paltry sunlight that breaks through the chronic fog fades completely, giving way for the rule of night.
I push on through the steadily falling snow.
I don’t stop walking for fear that if I do, I might perish.
I might lie down and never get up again.
I trudge through banks of snow, through the blinding screech of white, until I can walk no more, until I have to stop and rest.
I take shelter in a crevasse. It’s not a proper cave, just wide enough and long enough to shelter my body from the worst of the night.
I doze fitfully until morning and then I set out again, carrying that umbrella with my sore arms overhead through the long hours of the day.
The snow falls steadily, so there’s no fear of my tracks being discovered. When I finally hear the roar of the Great Falls and register what it is, jubilation fills me, injects me with a fresh bolt of energy. My steps quicken through the drifts of snow. Panting, my legs work, churning to reach the Falls, to see my first sight of—
The earth gives way, ripped out from under me.
My cry is lost, swallowed up with me...the sound bouncing, tinny in my ears, as I’m sucked down, down, down.
Into the great jaws of the mountain.
Deep into the darkness I go, the ground gone beneath me, my mouth wide with a scream, arms and legs pinwheeling in the subterranean freeze.
The circle of light above me grows smaller and smaller and smaller, shrinking into a dot, then a speck as I descend.
It reminds me of flying. Only I’m falling.
Only Tage isn’t here.
