Celeste's Arc

Chapter 4 of 23

Celeste found a flat rock and sat. She pulled a dragonfruit from her bucket and split it with her thumbs. The white flesh was cool and sweet. She ate fast, then licked the black seeds off her fingers. Slate sat near her, but he was not watching her eat. His head kept turning back the way they had come. Through a curtain of hanging vines, she could see a broken shape far off. The old tavern. Its slumped roof and skull sign hung in the gap between leaves. Slate stared at it the way a cat stares at a mouse hole. His ears lay flat. "What is it?" Celeste asked. Slate did not answer. His green eyes were fixed on one fogged window near the tavern's peak. Behind the soot-caked glass, something moved. A face pressed close, green and glowing, with hollow eyes and a jagged grin. A pirate's hat sat crooked on its skull. The wraith of the old captain, still guarding his ruin. It watched them leave, and it did not like it. Celeste followed Slate's stare. She squinted through the vines. She saw the crooked roof and the dark windows. She saw nothing else. "There's nothing there," she said. "Just the old building." "Mm," Slate said. He stood and turned his back on it. "Then it is nothing. Come." "You keep looking, though." She wiped her hands on the coat. "Is it a secret? Did you leave something back there?" "No." His tail snapped once. "We are not going back. That place is not for you." "Why not?" "Some doors, you do not open." He walked off between the trees. "I will find you a real shelter. Dry. Empty. No windows that look at you." Celeste stayed on the rock a moment longer. She stared hard at the tavern. She wanted to see what Slate saw. But the vines only swayed, and the glass stayed dark to her. Whatever guarded that place, it hid from her eyes. That thought did not scare her. It pulled at her, the same way the dark shape under the water once had. She stood and shouldered her bucket. "Fine. But something's there. I know it." "Then be glad you cannot see it," Slate said, not slowing. She caught up to him. The tavern shrank behind the leaves until the vines closed over it for good. Ahead, the jungle opened wider, greener, full of things she had never seen. Bright flowers. Strange broad plants. Paths she had not walked. Celeste smiled. She could not read the tavern's secret today. So she pointed herself at the next one instead. "Show me what's out here," she said. And she followed the cat deeper in, curious, ready for whatever waited.