It was only yesterday, that I ran into the shadowy speckled elmcast after my younger friend; her toned muscles only slightly disguised by her quilted smock of boar and skink pelt. The light-footed, dainty way that she danced along the boughs and branches along the forest floor made me more than a little jealous of her athletic talents. I stumbled after her, carefully, in order not to give her another reason to tease me on top of my heavy breathing.
"Ooh! Zozi, come over here!" she waved me over, excitedly, before bending over, and picking up a large, black feather—the size of a pontoon oar that they use to navigate the Nightwhere. Her honey-colored hair draped over her face as her eyes widened into a bright smile, with the iridescent barbules catching the light in a way that shone an entire spectrum of colors onto her face as if it were covered in a thin layer of oil, or grease. "Look, Zoel! It's huge! What do you think could have dropped something like this? Maybe an Overfather? Or-or-or—a Gigasven!" she gasped in dreamlike wonder; as if she were describing a fluffy sheep, or a really friendly squirrel, and not a profane amalgamation of predatory feline, raptor, and cervid, and a 75-foot monstrous corvid with talons that could slice through solid rock like it was goat cheese, respectively.
"I- I dunno, Ri... It sure is big, though!" I chuckled along, nervously, in order to hide the shivers that worked their way across my feeble backside. I glanced around, with eyebrows raised, unwilling to let my guard down for more than a single moment, even though I was doing my best to appear brave for my friend.
She had a bad habit of losing track of which level of forests we were in, so it was my responsibility to keep her from wandering too deeply. The truth was that we were no longer in the Sunlight Domain at all, and if I were doing my job right, we should have turned around 70 paces ago. I was worried that we might have gotten in over our heads. "You don't think whatever it is... is still around, do you?"
"What, are you scared, you big baby?" she chuckled, waving it around like the calamus of the feather was the hilt of some great, fan-shaped sword; and she was every bit the pioneer that her grandatha was. "Do you wanna go, huh? Run back to your Abba like the crybaby you are?"
"Am not!" I managed, despite myself. There was no one around after all, I made certain of that, personally. 'What danger really was there, in letting her swing a little feather around?' I thought, to myself. The silver eyes of something in the canopy darted sharply to follow our moccasin-clad footpath, reflecting whatever shallow levels of ambient brightness with the utmost fervor. Such a sight was ubiquitous in The Sunset Domain, though. It was likely some kind of bug-eating bird, or a rodent—nothing to get too excited about. I hopped over a mushroom the size of a pig, and turned back to watch her repeat the motion. When she followed through, I caught the blade of the feather, with my fingers, and promptly drew it from her grasp before she could react to my thievery. "Hah! Now, who's running home?"
"Hey! Give it back!" she whined, but I held it aloft over my head, in a realm that she couldn't hope to achieve for many more years. "I found it, Zozi, it's mine!" She dove after me, in a hurry, but I was already out of the way.
"Nuh uh," I laughed, circling around the back of her, and heading off in a direction parallel to the depth of the forest; the blade of the feather alarmingly heavy for what it was. Its broad vanes caught the air as I ran, pulling me with such resistance that I felt the need to trail it behind me or risk spinning around in place, like if my arm were tied to a post by an elastic rope. "I'm nearly eleven now, and that means I am the boss of you. And—you know what?—I think I've decided this is your birthday gift to me!"
"That's not how that works!" she scrambled over a boulder, half buried in the soil underneath, and lunged for me, but I had already developed a novel strategy of turning the feather on its edge so that it sliced cleanly through the air, and was suddenly nowhere to be found. Her keen senses were infallible, though, and my plodding footfalls exposed exactly where to turn before I could get far enough to hide, effectively.
I skidded to a stop, in order to properly send home the point that I was sharing some great, sagely advice, before cooking up some convenient story that suited my purposes. "It is, when you're my age. Trust me, there was a whole ceremony after my tenth birthday, where they explained the new rules, and everything." She stopped as well, as if trying to consider the possibility of this point, honestly.
"You're lying!" she said, immediately; balling up her fists, and stomping the spongy earth, in order to punctuate her point.
"Am I?" I rested one arm on my hip, and stared at her in a daring way. "Prove it."
"That's not fair!"
"Haha that's just life, kiddo! You get more rights as you get older and more responsibilities. Hasn't your Atha taught you even that, yet?" She dove for the feather again, regardless of what I had just said. "H-hey! Cut it out, It's mine now!"
"Prove it!" she parroted, sticking her tongue out, and clutching another spot on the feather's tough central shaft.
"I don't have to prove anything, I'm older, and you havta listen to me!" and I tugged back, knowing that this was a losing battle. I might be taller than her right now, but she's always been much stronger than I.
"Well, I'm prettier! Let go, you're gonna ruin it!" she dug her feet into the earth in order to put all her weight into the motion, as well; almost sending me to the ground behind her.
"Yeah, well of course you are!" I shouted, without thinking. "It only makes sense for a girl to be prettier than a guy, stupid!" but she surprised me by releasing the feather, suddenly, and sending me reeling to the muddy earth behind; nearly scattering the spores of a lichen patch behind me. "Hey, watch it, Ri! That thing could've been poisonous!"
"Y-you really think that?" she stared at me with abject fascination.
Dumbfounded by this sudden act of callous disregard, I snapped back. "Oh, ha ha ha, sure! Laugh it up, okay?! What if I can't tell yet what's poisonous or not? I'm not some crazy stalker like you who spends all her time thinking about trees and toads and spiders!" I slowly climbed onto my feet, ever-so-carefully, so as not to disturb the slumbering powder that may still very well prove to be fatal in some aspect or another.
She punched me on the arm, almost hard enough to send me right back where I came from. "Ow! What the five was that for?!"
She scowled at the ground, and muttered just barely out of audible range, "...You stupid head."
"You're a stupid head! I don't know what your problem is! Take your dumb feather back, I don't need it anyways!" and I swung I back toward her, eliciting a tight whistle, as the air scraped against the hollow lip of the rachis.
"No, you keep it! I don't want it anymore, either!" she screamed back; utterly confounding me in every way.
"What are you even talking about?! Here, take it back." I offered back, as calmly as I could manage, pushing the thing into her face. She slapped it out of her way, as if it were completely abhorrent.
"No! It's yours! Happy Birthday—You can have it, you stupid, stupid dumb—!"
"Stop calling me stupid, loudmouth brat!" I shouted, adding to the cacophony.
Not one to be outmoded in a screaming contest, she continued unabated, as if she hadn't noticed my saying anything, "—selfish, stinky, scaredy-cat, whiny, little boy, with no manners or respect for a pretty pretty fairy—!"
"Oh, here we go again, with the fairy thing again! Listen, that was cute and all when you were six or seven, but you're nine years old! Fairies aren't real! Stop bringing that up. And how am I being selfish?! I'm literally trying to give you back the feather! You're not making any sense!"
"Augh!" she screamed, in frustration, and leaped as if to take my head off. In a frenzy, I jetted off in the opposite direction; knowing full well that any physical altercation with her was only going to end in my premature death. "Get back here, you lily-livered—?! Hey, wait! What is that?!"
'Yeah right, as if I'm falling for that.' I kept running for a few more seconds, before pausing to catch my breath; expecting the tell-tale sounds of leaves crunching underfoot to unveil such untold peril as to warrant my immediate exodus. I must have waited nearly a minute, before I realized that she really wasn't coming. An unearthly groan settled through the earth in the direction I had just come from; like something large had simply appeared on the ground, between the two of us.
It was only, then, that I really drew in my surroundings. It was dark, here... unnaturally dark. The low, creeping trills of the natural fauna were loud and echoing in my ears. I caught a beam of sunlight against the palm of my hand, and it danced in the sweeping gait of a hundred different layers of leaf coverage; always changing shape in the eagerness to starve out the competition in the marshes below. My soles were thick with heavy mud, that clung to a mess of leaf litter and half-soaked twigs along the earth, and a chill ran down my spine as I realized how very close I had wandered to the Nightwhere.
"Rilah...?!" I called, carefully, hoping not to draw attention to myself, as I slowly backed away in the direction that I had come. "Rilah, where are you?!" A slender cry rang out in the distance, that I just barely couldn't make out.
"Rilah! We need to get out of here, s-so don't move! I'm coming to you!" I heard an "okay!" in that same spot, so I started back in that direction.
It wasn't long until I heard another voice sob the words, "Zozi, I'm scared..."
"Don't worry, Rilah...! I'm on my way," I assured her, just loudly enough to hope that she could hear me. "I'll be there before you can—" A sharp cry filled the air, before I could finish my sentence!
"Zoel!" Rilah screamed, with all the force her tiny body could muster, "I-it's moving!"
"What's moving?!" I called back, speeding up my gait, but all I received in response were more and more panicked screams. "Rilah?! Are you okay?"
I was almost sprinting, now—to the fifth with the consequences—and I kept trailing after the calamitous blood-chilling screech, that now seemed to come from all over; ringing in my ears as if accosted on all sides by miniature replica Rilahs in equal amounts of distress. I slowed to a crawl, and turned my head left and right in order to focus on where to go next, but I genuinely couldn't tell. She was before me, and she was behind me, and she was above me, and she was to the left and she was to the right, and every direction beyond that.
"Rilah?! Are you still there?!" Pleadingly, I tried again, in vain, but my words were drowned out by the noises of constant, incessant screaming. It didn't seem to make sense. I didn't understand it, and I was surrounded. "Please, I just need to know where you are..."
Then, a seemingly human scream resounded from a position directly overhead, and I knew that something was wrong. I looked up, to see two glowing orbs of light peering down at me. I could barely make out the shape of a hooked beak in the pockmarked light source as it cocked its head and released its shrill recording. From the mouth of that avid, came the voice of Rilah's final lament.
I was chasing a ghost, and this was the vestige that remained to mock me.
"I'm sorry, Rilah..." I trembled, ashamed at what I was going to do. I couldn't find her, now. Not out here. "I'm going to find help! I- I'll be back!" I promised, but with tears in my eyes, I knew the truth.
She was gone.