Through Flame

Part 6

            Uny ached.

            Her entire body throbbed in pain; most of her skin was bruised, bleeding or raw from the past five days of punishment. Her mind had stopped registering much of the pain by the third night, and she had been able to sleep for an hour; the first time sleep had graced her with unconsciousness since she had been stolen away by the Nefelyn. A part of her had left her, like something in her mind, or her heart had died. She guessed that it had been her soul, it had been killed, or fled from her flesh, leaving her hollow. The cage that she was in, and had been in for five days, except when the blue skinned Nefelyn took her out, was small; she could only crouch in the cage, neither stand, nor sit. There was no solid floor or ceiling, just iron bars that held her, and left her exposed to all the elements. The metal bars that made up her cage left room for her waste to drip and fall through, but they were thick bars and leaning on them only left parts of her body asleep from the loss of blood circulation. Still, they were wide enough that she could see relatively unhindered, which was more of a curse than anything.

            Her small cage was loosely strapped to the side of a large wagon, rope as thick as her wrist bound the cage to the outer side of the wagon, which was one of five other similar vehicles. With every jostle and bounce that the wagon took in the forest sent her cage careening into the wooden side of the wagon. Uny’s entire body was black with bruising from the constant banging against the side. Along with the cage, other supplies the Nefelyn carried were strung to the outer walls of the wagons; tents, tools, weapons, anything needed by the small army of raiders were on the sides. Uny was the third wagon in the caravan, and had a good view of the other, similar wagons, both from the front, and the back.

Each wagon was pulled by six ugly beasts of burden; Uny had never seen the likes of the creatures before. They were easily twice the size of a war horse, their thick hides were a ruddy red, and natural bone plates covered much of their backs, chests and rumps. The stench that the beasts emitted smelled like sulfur, and if there was little in the way of a breeze, their odor made her eyes burn and water. The wagon that each group of six beasts pulled seemed to be attached to the bony plates of the beast, hammered into the bone with large metal spikes. When Uny looked at the spikes, it reminded her of a blacksmith shoeing a horse, but blood ran down the sides of the beasts from the spikes driven into them.

            The wagons themselves were nothing of note, thick planks of wood made up the wagons, wide wheels reinforced with steel bands rolled through the forest, easily rolling over rocks, roots and other forest underbrush with ease. When the wagons were not on a large road carved through the forest by Dashar, when the trails were narrower, the massive beasts pushed through the forest effortlessly, uprooting all but the widest of trees. The wagons rolled over almost every obstacle the forest could put in their path; and what they couldn’t roll over, or go around, the beautiful Nefelyn cut through savagely.

            Every time Uny looked up into what the wagons held, her breath grew short, and her stomach lurched, more than it did with the rough bumping of the moving wagon. The inside of each of the five wagons was filled to the brim with a brown colored mold type substance. Mold was the best way Uny could describe the stuff, it had a fuzzy looking top layer, but with a consistency of curdled milk and mud. The stench that came from the brown mold was almost as bad as the stink from the creatures that pulled the wagons. Uny could see the brown mold as it spread, spilling over the sides of the wagons, growing down the wood. Some of the mold had slopped over the side of the wagon in front of her and fallen on one of the impossibly large wheels; it now grew, covering almost the entire wheel.

Planted in the center of every wagon, the roots digging deep into the brown mold was a single, giant flower. The flower in each wagon was unlike any plant life Uny had ever seen. Had she not seen what the flowers were capable of doing, she would have described them as beautiful; but they were terrible, and she feared the flowers almost as much as the Nefelyn. Living off the forest of Ralquar, Uny had become intimate with many of the natural herbs and plants that could be foraged; as a result, her ability to appreciate the horrible flower in the wagon was magnified. One single plant was large enough to take up room on one wagon; the diameter of the flower with petals open was as large as Uny’s whole house. The flower petals were large and bright and a colorful purple, they looked almost translucent as they splayed open in the wagon. The stigma in the center of the flower remained erect on the style, its shape was similar to that of a bird’s beak, and the stigma was sharp, she had seen it open and cut a Dashar man in half when it snapped shut. The ovules, bright orange polyps, sat directly in the “mouth” of the stigma, so that when the stigma, or mouth of the flower, opened, she could see the bulbous, jelly-like polyps wriggling. The stamen, or tentacle like protuberances that rose up from the base of the flower moved with minds of their own. There were roughly four to six tentacles for each flower, and each tentacle could move of its own accord. On the tip of the tentacles, where the anther would be, were the same polyp-like ovules from the mouth of the flower. Bunches of four or five polyps clung to the end of the tentacles.