One girl. Two cats. A world full of adventure.
Abbernathy Tells is a twelve year old girl who prefers the companionship of her two cats and a dying tree over others her age. When a horrible tragedy strikes on her thirteenth birthday, robbing h...
☆ New Chapters from here on out. I apologize to those who have read further than this, but this is the story, how I first imagined it, how I first wrote it. It's not perfect by any means, and some parts are probably better in the version you've already read, but to me, those parts lost something that made me love the story so much in the beginning. So here it is, pure and rough, Abby's full story, as I'd originally envisioned it. I hope you will come to love it like I have.☆
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Each step Abby took further into the forest plucked at her nerves. The entire ground was littered with things that annoyed the girl. Thorny thickets tore at her stockings.
Pluck.
Sticky brambles caught the hem of her dress, covering Abby's brand new birthday outfit in spiky brown seedpods.
Pluck.
Her foot caught on a bulging mass of black root that erupted over the ground like lava causing her to lurch forward and almost fall.
Pluck.
She saved herself by grabbing a nearby tree branch that grew as straight as a column and was almost as wide. Egg-shaped red fruit, that Margo had called 'lantern fruit,' pulsed with a faint light that reminded Abby of dying embers.
She grumbled as she stood upright, sick of the Aelurian forest and more than a little peeved at Margo, who'd never once bothered to offer Abby help. Instead, Margo'd taken to looking under any rock for one of the missing cats.
"Could they have gone somewhere else?" Abby asked as she pushed her way through yet another growth of flowers her height.
Their massive stalks of jade shot up from the ground like mountains. Lantern fruit illuminated their tops where flowers sat like wreaths colored a translucent sort of orange reminiscent of permission jam. A warm breeze rustled through the forest, making the leaves dance, the fruits sway, and the giant flowers grin at Abby with their oddly expressive petals. It tousled Abby's hair in front of her face, and as she reached up to smooth it back in place, she realized her bow was no longer in her hair.
Pluck.
Abby's fists balled together at her sides. This place of over-sized plants and trees and blood moon and warm air had taken her cats and now, her bow, and plucked it clean off her head. Abby wanted to swear. No, she wanted to swear a lot. Swear more times than she'd ever sworn in her thirteen years of life. She wanted to find new swear words and string them together with the swell of other swears she already knew. But before she could open her mouth, Margo hefted a small boulder over her shoulder.
"Those idiot cat brothers couldn't have gone somewhere else," the mouse-woman said, frowning as she looked at the ground. Instead of finding a cat or two like she'd hoped, a caravan of brown caterpillars, as thick and greasy as breakfast sausages wriggled on the ground, beady black eyes glaring at Margo. With a disappointed gaze Margo tossed the rock back onto the ground, on top of the heads of the now very relieved and grateful caterpillars. "The road only opened to Aelurus. If they aren't here, they fell off."
