Earth Descended: 1.07

Ming throws everything back into her pack. She trips over the dog as she grasps for her sleeping bag, and it yelps. And then she yelps. There is a lot of yelping.

She has no idea what kind of disaster her bag looks like, but it’ll have to do. In the dark, the village glows red, and billows of black smoke rise into the halo of orange around the fire. The path curves toward some spot east of the village, to the fork where she’d last seen Petro.

Ming looks back at the fire. It’s big. And there are probably raiders or pillagers or something. She’s one girl.

Petro’s journey should be two days longer than hers. She’ll be able to catch him before the fork, and together they can figure something out. Two heads are better than one, right? And two sets of hands, and eyes, and everything else. And then Ming won’t have to face scary people all on her own.

“It’s not cowardly,” she tells herself. “It’s smart! You’re not putting it off or waiting or anything. Just-”

She cuts herself off as she slings her pack over her shoulders. She’s not a coward. She’s just taking a page from Petro’s book and playing it safe for once.

Her hands tremble on the straps of her backpack, and her knees quiver over the tops of her boots. She wishes the ground would reach up and pull her down.

“Move,” she commands herself. Her voice shakes. “Just move. Go.”

Somehow, her feet slide forward, and her knees bend. Ming doesn’t think about her limbs so much as she does her heart. It pounds against her sternum, throttling against her ribs like they’re the bars of a cage. Her pulse echoes and ricochets off every vein in her body.

The anglerdog lights the path ahead, jogging ahead as Ming marches into the forest. She crashes into bushes on occasion when the dog wanders too close to the edge of the path, but she keeps walking. She stomps off the wide, black stone path and onto the dirt one that starts carving back west, towards the village. She hurries through the trees, even as they grow denser and darker, like a cage around her.

Dawn breaks as she bursts into the marshy meadow. Red sunlight drifts over the treetops and spills into the grass, and a thin coat of mist sprays everything light purple. The flowers are all closed. The forest is silent.

Ming pauses at the fork. Her eyes ache with exhaustion, and she squeezes them shut for a moment, pressing her eyelids together like a clamp. She can’t afford to fall asleep. She looks to the little dirt path that winds back towards the village. It’s so innocent and empty, just a dark line of dirt that disappears into the grass, exactly the same as the path towards the fish fields.

The village can do without her for two more days, surely. She can’t do anything for them on her own. And maybe Petro didn’t see the fire. Someone ought to warn him.

Ming tells herself she doesn’t feel guilty at all and marches towards the fish fields.

***

Petro is ahead of schedule. The fact lifts his heart and inspires bubbles of pride in his gut as he imagines Ming’s surprised face. His father will be pleased; he might even smile.

From inside his sleeping bag, Petro reaches out to turn off his lantern. The steady thump of the fish in his backpack just barely reverberates through the ground, and though Petro found it unsettling before, its constancy is almost comforting now. He smiles in the dark, and then on a whim turns over in his bag to look out over the edge of the path.

The dark expanse of the forest crawls out before him, rising and falling like waves. Tiny tendrils of orange sunset still spin into the sky, spreading and dispersing like a broken spider web. Hidden in the hills is a glowing, red spot.

That shouldn't be there, Petro thinks. He squints, focusing on the air right above the glow, and sees a cloud of fine black dust billowing into the darkening sky.

Quickly, he tries to reorient himself. The sunset is on his right, which makes that west, and that means he's looking south, towards the village. He's about a day and a half out, and if he remembers correctly, that's not far enough to completely lose sight of the village.

Petro tries to stop thinking, but his brain makes the connection anyways. Then his muscles tense, locking him into place, eyes still pulled towards the burning glow. His breathing stops.

Then suddenly, he's outside his sleeping bag. He doesn't even remember wriggling out. He rolls it up and stuffs it into his pack, just barely remembers to pick up and light his lantern, and moves.

His feet fly, trusting the solidity of the wide, flat path. He hurries so much that he spends some time jogging as well, though that makes his shoulders ache with the weight of his pack. And as he walks, he thinks.

Hopefully the fire isn’t eating up their fields. Hopefully no one is dead. Hopefully they can rebuild before the real cold tumbles in and saps away the village’s strength. Hopefully Ming is still a day away, safely removed from the fire.

She should be safe, he reminds himself. Ming is a dawdler; she won’t arrive home early like Petro will. It’s his father and her grandmother and the people still stuck there that he needs to worry about.

The sky turns pitch black. The only light comes from Petro’s red lantern and from the faraway glow of the burn. Petro’s steps thud in time with the fish in his pack, steady and unfailing. And then the path turns east, and he stops.

The wide path will take him to the junction east of the village, but there are other paths in the forest. He’s taken them before, on little excursions with his father or with Ming. He could shave off another half-day of walking if he dropped a few items from his pack and took a shortcut. There’s another path not too far south of his current location.

Petro backtracks so that he can see the village fire more clearly, and memorizes the spot. He’ll have to keep track of his direction with more care from here on, but he’s certain he can do it.

He removes his pack slowly, mind already racing ahead to simultaneously plot his course and plan what to leave behind. He’ll keep the fish; it’ll feed a few people when he makes it back. He stashes his sleeping bag and tarp and emergency knife in a bush on the side of the path. If he needs them, he can retrieve them once he knows his village is safe.

When he slings his pack back over his shoulders, it is far lighter than before. The bag and tarp were the heaviest items, after all. He picks up his lantern and looks back at his stash. Just in case, he pulls on a corner of the folded tarp so that it sticks up from between the bush’s leaves.

And then he crashes into the forest, the red of his lantern lighting his way.