Shredded Moonlight

Chapter 24

            Warm sunlight and the singing of birds woke me pleasantly at dawn and I made a pleased sound, nuzzling the soft pillow I was laying on. His hand stroked my back lovingly. “Good morning, Little One.”

            “You know, I’m still not very little.” I mumbled in response and my head shook with his laughter.

            He sat up, bringing me with him and meticulously picked small leaves out of my hair. When he finished, he kissed my head. “You’ll always be little to me.” Nox took to his feet and surveyed our location, hands on his hips. “Well, I suppose I’d better go get breakfast. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to hunt, though. I forgot to bring a spear.” He frowned in thought.

            “Can’t you make one?”

“I could, but it would take most of the morning. Check the pack,” He suggested. I dug through the grass around me until I came up with the deerskin pack.

“Matches…herbs… a switchblade- How the hell did Ivy get a switchblade?”

“The same way she got the matches. Raids. Here, give me that,” I tossed the knife and watched as he examined it, turning it this way and that. “This should work. Will you be alright here by yourself?”

“Why can’t I help?”

He fixed me with a look. “Shadow, I’ve been trained to hunt. Let me.” I glared at him unhappily and he came over and laid a kiss on my forehead. “If you want to help, you could start a fire.”

“Fine,” I grumbled and took to my feet. Nox sent me a wink before he headed off into the woods, his tail streaming behind him. “I could probably hunt. I could do it all by myself…” I continued to mutter to myself and began a pile of sticks on a patch of bare ground. Soon I’d cleared the entire area but I didn’t come away with very much. Uncertainly, I looked into the trees. “I better not get in trouble for this.” Without a look back at camp, I ventured deeper into the trees.

It was quiet for a long time, only the sound of my feet crushing leaves broke the silence. As I walked, I thought back to a month ago, or had it been longer? I couldn’t even remember. I wondered if my mom missed me at all, or if her heart had hardened against me entirely. And Alara. What was she up to? Did she miss me at all?

More present in my current location, my thoughts turned to Cyrus. His hurt looked the last time we’d seen each other burned the inside of my eyelids. I felt a tiny stab of guilt that I had to turn him down, but there had never been anyone but Nox, and no one could replace him. I did hope that we could still remain friends after this whole mess was sorted out and taken care of, though. Somehow, I was desperately hoping that this conflict between the tribes would work itself out. Otherwise I had no idea what they expected me to do about it. They’d already been fighting for years. It still struck me as odd that they needed a complete outsider to tell them they were being stupid.

The sound of rushing water shook me out of my thoughts, and I sniffed and listened. Pinpointing the correct direction in seconds, I sped up my pace and approached the thinning line of trees. When I broke into the open, my eyes widened in awe.

Before me was a large open meadow, much like the one we’d camped in the night before, this one edged in by trees on nearly all sides. Several feet to my left a hillside made out of stone catered to a small but beautiful water fall. The crystal clear water splashed down the small incline and turned into a small creek that twisted at one point to just a foot in front of me before it flowed alongside the field and wound farther into the woods. A sheer, short cliff-face was pointed toward the majority of the field. I headed forward, using the bigger stones to step on until I was on the other side. I immediately headed for the cliff-side and investigated the rock making up the strange formation. A large pile of smaller stones had fallen to cover the far end, looking like perhaps a rockslide had happened, but they were stacked oddly. My hands slid against the smooth worn stone and I knocked on one inquisitively.