Dom Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 10 of 14

Dom left the arch with the skull's weight still in his arms and his father's compass open in his palm. He meant to walk back to the ridge and wait for nightfall. The needle would not let him. It pulled hard west, away from the arch, away from the stag's road. He turned to follow it, and his stomach went cold. The needle was pointing home. He walked through the wet ferns until he came to a cracked stone marker he had passed a hundred times. Yellow lichen ran across its painted arrow. The arrow pointed up the slope toward his own ranger tower. The compass needle and the painted arrow agreed. Whatever the arch wanted him to see was inside the place where he slept. He climbed the ladder. The door was unlocked, the way he always left it. On his writing table sat a journal he had never bought. Its cover was tooled leather, painted with flowers he had pressed himself last spring. He opened it. The handwriting was his. The sketches were his. The dates ran back twenty years — years before he had ever held a pen in this cabin. He turned the pages with a steady hand. There, in his own ink, was a drawing of a man at the tree line with a shadow falling the wrong way. Underneath, in his own careful letters: *Today I waited at the wood's edge. He saw me. He will remember.* The wrong-shadow man had never come from the other world. The wrong-shadow man had written from this room, in this hand, wearing his face. Beside the journal lay an older book, water-stained, its cover painted with moth-stags crossing between worlds — left out for him to find, like a parent leaving a note for a child. Dom sat down on the floor. He did not weep. He understood. He was not being pulled toward another world to confront the thing that had marked him. He was the thing that had marked him, sent backward or sent forward, and the road through the arch did not lead away from himself. It led into the loop. He closed the journal. He stood up. He picked up his father's compass, and he started back toward the arch, because the unchosen rider had finally learned what he was paying to cross.