Chapter Eight — Avalon Bound
He slept at last, emptied of everything but bone and the last thin thread of terror. For a while there were no whispers, no hung mouths, no tree‑shadows counting him with their roots. He let himself fall into that small mercy and was gone.
Pain woke him.
It came not as a single blade but as a slow, scoring heat, as though a hot rod were drawn along the length of his spine—sharp, searing, intimate. He tried to move and a raw scream unfurled through his back; the cart's timbers creaked and the floor shifted beneath him in a rude, steady rhythm. Each bump flared the pain again, carving and re‑carving soreness into a map he could not read.
Light and motion returned in fragments. The air tasted green—sap and leaf and damp earth, not smoke. He tried to sit and was rocked by the cart's slow climb; the hill rose, the wheels complained, and with every crest the back of him answered in hot knives. He blinked and saw trunks like columns, canopies braided into a living cathedral, foliage thick and plush and teeming. For an instant hope stole his breath: the sun was up, and it warmed him with blunt, human heat.
He took in the cart at last: rough‑hewn planks, iron‑rimmed wheels, a bundle of burlap, and a single, stooped figure driving. The man was old—furrowed, weathered, patient as root. His eyes squinted against the light, fixed on the road; his hands on the reins were sure and practiced. He might have been seventy. The world had worn him into a shape of steady usefulness.
A pang of hunger jolted through him, raw and ridiculous. His belly made a sound that split the thin quiet between them: a loud, shameful rumble. He swallowed; his mouth was dry. The simple thought of bread felt like both sacrament and salvation.
Should I speak? Should I ask where we go, beg for food, or keep still and take the ride? A darker thought—quick and foolish—skated across his mind: shove the old man down the slope and take the cart. He snatched the thought away like a splinter. The driver looked too frail; besides, there was something in the man's forward gaze that discouraged cruelty.
The driver did not turn. After a long moment he said, voice like gravel warmed by tea, "Thought I'd found thee dead, lad."
Words escaped before he could shape them. "I—I nearly was," he blurted, and the sentence fell clumsy. He slapped a hand to his mouth, ashamed. He had meant to be careful; the loose tongue was careless.
The old man's face did not change. He kept his eyes forward and asked plainly, "Art thou a fugitive, or some robbed emissary? Thy bearing looks of those who serve lords, or of those who've fallen from them."
Pain narrowed his world; choices felt like hot iron under skin. Lies were easy and dangerous; truth might open doors he could not follow through. If I tell the truth, pity may follow—and pity is its own slow death, he thought. If I lie, I bind myself to sharper lies. If I stay silent, I might be thrown from this cart at the next blind turn. The dilemma ran through him in small, hot rivulets.
Oddly, sympathy rose then—quick and unwilling—at the sight of the old man's bowed silhouette. He answered not with words but with a humiliating rumble from his stomach: hunger, naked and crude. The sound made his ears burn.
The old man's head tilted a fraction; still he did not turn. With one practiced motion he reached back, pulled a sagging linen bag toward him, and lifted a loaf. Steam rose from the crust—bronzed and humble; the smell struck the younger man like benediction. He reached with shaking fingers, tore off a chunk, and the bread yielded beneath his teeth: crust cracking, the crumb warm and moist and faintly sweet.
It tasted of sun on soil and of patient seasons. Each chew unspooled relief: salt, a whisper of sweetness, the oil of warmth on his tongue. Pleasure moved down his spine, loosening something clenched since the Tree. He felt small and grateful. The act of eating steadied the world—less myth, more mortal.
The old man watched without turning. "Thou breakest bread like one saved from famine," he observed, matter‑of‑fact.
He licked crumbs from his lips and could have told everything—the glowing seed, the hand crowned in stars, the burning city—but the memory burned like coal. Instead he asked, quietly, "Where are we headed?"
The old man's jaw tightened. For a long moment he looked to the horizon, then slipped his gaze back to the road. "Avalon," he said, and the name settled between them like a stone dropped into still water.
At that word the cart seemed to hold its breath. The landscape ahead offered a distant line of dark silhouette where walls and towers rose—faint and uncertain. Avalon felt to him like promise wreathed in warning: an island of old songs, or the end place of many pilgrimages.
"Is it far?" he asked, voice small and raw.
"For as far as a man must go," the old man answered, plain and oddly tender. "We mend what we can along the way; what cannot be mended we put aside."
He lay back on the rough planks, bread settling inside him like oil. The pain in his back still glowed; the seed still thrummed beneath his ribs—a secret clock—but the city's screams were a room he had left. For the moment the cart rolled, the old man guided, and the land opened before them: vast, indifferent, and full of possibilities neither dared name aloud.
He had survived.
He smiled.