Aiyana Brightwater's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The song carried Aiyana deep under the trees until it did not. She stopped where two trails split apart. Both looked the same. Same black roots. Same low branches. The next words of the old song sat somewhere in her memory, but she could not find them. One note pointed left. One note pointed right. A wrong choice would drop her into a marsh, or hold her here for days. She hummed a note, then swallowed it. She did not know it. Her grandmother had taught her this part on a night she had been half asleep. She stood at the fork and made herself breathe slow. Panic would burn the rest of the words from her head. She tried the left note. The trees did not lean in to listen. They did not answer at all. That was worse than a wrong turn. The wood had stopped hearing her. A branch cracked behind her. Something large moved in the dark. Aiyana turned, her knife half out. A huge shape stepped between the trees, taller than any man, covered in dark hair. She had heard the stories her whole life. Most people said his kind was not real. "Put the knife down," the sasquatch said. "I am not hunting you." Aiyana lowered the blade an inch. "You know me?" "Grokmar," he said. "You guided a trader's boy out of a wood once. He would not stop talking about it. You are the singer." He looked at the two trails. "You are lost." "I forgot a word," she said. The truth felt like a stone. "Without it I strand myself." Grokmar grunted. "I lost my whole forest. Loggers took every tree. I know what it is to lose the words for a place." He pointed past the fork, off both trails. "Not left. Not right. There is a cave. Old stone. My kind sheltered there when the trees still stood. It cuts under the marsh. No song needed." Aiyana did not move. "Why help me?" "You brought one person out of the dark," he said. "That is more than most." She followed him off the path. The ground rose. Roots gave way to bare rock. Then she saw it. A wide mouth of layered stone opened in the hillside, black inside, edges rough and old. Cool air breathed out of it. This was no trail on any map. No song had ever named it. "Center of the wood lies past this," Grokmar said. "The collector's house too. But the cave has its own dark. Things live in it." Aiyana looked at the black opening. She had lost the song. She could not turn back and reach her grandmother in time. She stepped inside, and the daylight closed behind her. She had not stranded herself at the fork. She had traded one danger she knew for one she did not.