Escape

A.N: Hi and thanks for reading! I'm not 100% about punctuation, so I would be very thankful if you alerted me to that. Otherwise - enjoy! And remember to tell me anything that feels icky to you.

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The half moon must have risen over the clouds again - the melt water stream he walked beside was dyed a milky white. Adden imagined one of the village ewes standing in it upstream, bleating at the milk flowing from her udder. The fragility of the scene arrested his breath, but he would have preferred the pitch blackness of a starless sky. He kept his shoulders ducked; bundle wrapped securely around his waist, he followed the stream past the watering hole. The going was mostly easy. This path had been worked out of the rock for decades, since the first settlers took to the harsh piece of rock nestled in the armpit of Apa mountain. The boy tried to maintain a steady trot until he met the point where the stream dropped into footless territory.

Footless was the word the Mamadai used for any region either prohibited or impassable. His descent turned out to be some of both, though he made it over the lip of the plateau without slipping down the sheer rock-face awaiting him metres ahead. Gripping the edge of the promontory, he swung first one leg over, then the other, and after a moment's indecision let himself drop. The darkness was only several feet deep, and the crunching sound his feet made on impact with the stony ground was masked by the rushing of the stream. Allowing himself a minute to calm the rate of his pounding heart, Adden tried to orient himself in the sudden gloom.

The shelf upon which he balanced ended in the cliff face only metres ahead. Below, a snaking, smooth, level area wound its way up the mountain face through what the villagers called the ocean, a massive coniferous forest. It appeared to the villagers to be one of a number of such serpentine structures. This particular one circumvented a rock to the south of the village, then joined the latter part and made a smooth route through the mountain pass the village was situated by. Although it was essential to village trade and passage down the other face of the mountain, the west-facing path was strictly prohibited.

The moon hadn't risen far, and a lengthy shadow extended from the lip of the rock to several metres ahead of where he crouched. It stopped just short of the precipice, however, allowing him a reassuring measure of distance. To find the edge of the forest, he would have to continue to his left for several hundred metres. If his daytime observations were to be of any avail, that should be where the precipice lost its height and the forest joined up with the rock shelf he now crouched on.

The darkness held him to the wall behind him. Moving as quietly as he could, his back to the village rock, Adden made his way towards the dark mass that he knew to be the forest. The diffused moonlight distinguished the tops of the trees painted in blacks and greys against a silvered sky. A pebble, perhaps loosened by his passage, tumbled down from the promontory, provoking a shower of small rocks that lasted for several seconds. Adden increased his pace.

He knew that he was far from safe. Even once within the forest, the villagers would probably not give him up too soon. His father, especially.. his father would not give up on him, ever.

Several hundred metres on, where the hulking mass of trees kissed the stone face of the village rock, Adden melted into the forest.

The first tree was a woman, tall and dignified, a sentinel. The second seemed to watch him, where he had been beneath the notice of the first, and the third pulled at him with needled hands. He passed further, and the soft, dense, deep smell began to call to him.

The descent was sharp. While his village was built on an even plateau that seemed almost carved out of the rock of the mountain face, to enter the forest unseen one had to leave that level plain and descend into a very steep, very dark under-world.

Adden remembered nights in the smoky warmth of the hive, his father's sleeping arms wrapped around his undersized body. Tamen had always been overprotective; even in sleep he shielded his son.

He remembered the sound of his father's rustling breath in the night-time, and what it looked like, painted against the blue mountains and the grey morning sky behind them in snakes and coils of silver smoke. Even as he stepped further into the mossy darkness, he saw his father pull in a lungful of searing, freezing morning air and stare with a fierce concentration of his brows at the roiling sea of fir trees beneath him. Not for the first time, he asked himself exactly it was he thought he was doing.

The trees began without warning: at an acute angle to the mountainside, a definite marker in verticality. The lowest branches began some feet above his head. Below them a quietly dignified silence reigned.

Deep, thick moss extended all about, flowing up the trees like a blanket. It stifled the sound of his steps, but the sound of his breath echoed in his ears like a bat's wings beating in a cave.

The trees were taller than was imaginable from the shelf of stone that overlooked the ocean. At Adden's height, the horizontal branches were nearly entirely bare, naked and vulgar. To his frightened eyes, they looked almost like the wrinkled brown hands of the oldest woman in his town, the one who had told him to kiss her on her name day. Like her fingers, they grabbed at his sleeves and caught in his hair. It seemed almost as though the forest were putting up an active effort to repel him - chew him up and spit him out.

He felt wrong. The darkness concealed oncoming branches. Exposed roots and fallen boughs littered the forest floor about him. In the gloom afforded by the moon above, tree stumps and pine cones seemed to leer from the shadows, and every obstacle put in his path lay with explicit intent of sending him down the sharp slope. A kind of frenzied panic overtook him. Was it too late to go back? His footsteps fell faster.

He could feel it coming. The disorientation. Not now, not now, not now. A heat had started moving in his stomach. As he ran, it moved to his solar plexus. Then a well-known sense of incognition rushed through his heated brain and seared it, and all was blank. The curious thing was that while he could not think, he could feel. The white spread from his mind almost instantly, but there was a time lag. First to burn was his mind, then his sense of smell; his fingers became insensible, and soon his entire body, keeling over a loose rock set in the moss, was dead. Last to go was sight: as he fell, the trunks of the trees about him converged to a point directly over his head, then blinked out.

A blanket of moss and pine-needles rose up around him, and he grappled to gain hold of the foliage before he tumbled further down the slope.

It was over as quickly as it had begun.

Yet there was a difference. The needles no longer rustled as they had, sovereign of the breeze. The moonlight seemed almost benevolent, permeating the scene around him with an indiscriminate suffusion. Shakily, Adden got to his knees. Yes, there was a difference. He could hear.

Adden knew nothing of the forest; his people didn't pass much further than the frontier close to the village. It was a forbidden place, and for good reason. People drowned in the ocean. Tamen had told him - they entered, but they never returned.

He closed his eyes. He could smell. He inhaled. He could feel.

The night awoke in sound as he breathed in the bitingly cold, resinous air. A faint scratching sound coming from the trees above him, and an army of ants, marching in great rivers up and down the trunks, swam through his mind. Tiny creatures burrowed beneath his buttocks, and he felt the vibrations of their wriggling, segmented forms travel up through his body. In the darkness behind his eyes, the scent of the deep forest intensified. The musky tang of the pine resin about him enveloped his small, boyish frame, the sack of provisions on his lap, the roll of sleeping fur. From all around him, the taste of the air accosted his mind. A passing elk had left a streak of fur on a neighbouring tree. Slightly aged wildcat spoor decomposed beneath a heap of upturned moss a metre to his right. And the birds.. Adden opened his eyes. It was too much, too much to take in. More so than he had ever been, he was overwhelmed. Yet he feared what would happen if he turned it off again. The forest swayed in the gloom as though it had never conspired against him. He pushed himself into a standing position and onwards through the gloom.

Two hours' journey from the point where the village rock touched the forest was a small cave, carved into the stone beneath that great plateau. It was to this that Adden bent his steps. A wind rushed over the tree-tops above as Adden pushed his way through heaps of moss below. The loud rustling of small, innumerous needles pattering at each other sounded around him. Somewhere far off, a bird screamed three times.