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Chapter 40

It's as if the gods above are dumping an endless bucket onto our heads, or perhaps a trough- The heavy sheets of rain come out of nowhere, with enough force to hurt, as drops the size of marbles pound my head.
"Oh no..." Stone breaths in horror, looking panicked for some reason. He presses a hand to the right side of his face, and turns away from me, seeking cover next to the great, looming wall of the mountain to our right, always to our right, as the wind picks up, and, luckily, blows the rain away from us, the mountain taking the brunt of the storm.
"What? It's just a little rain," I frown, as Stone turns away from me again, and I follow him, leaning back against the rock wall, purposely crossing to his right, but, keeping his hand firmly clasped across his face, he crosses back in front of me, keeping the left side of his face to me.
"It's nothing." Stone replies, much too quickly to appeal to my paranoia. I narrow my eyes, senses alert, and continue.
"Then why are we stopping?"
Stone bites his lip, apparently searching for a legible answer, then, too exactly to be an accident, abruptly he crumples to his knees and presses his face to the ground, which is becoming muddy, as the fine dirt coating on the rocky path is moistened by the rain.
When he picks his head up, the entire right side of his face is coated in a thin layer of grayish mud, concealing whatever he's trying to hide.
"Tripped." He says as I stare at him, a little concerned. Okay, my life is weird, granted, but how many times have I watched as a young man next to me decides to rub his face in the mud?
"You weren't walking." I point out, and we begin to walk again, Stone keeping on the inside, closest to the wall of the mountain, out of the rain. Yeah, what a gentleman...
"Who says you need to be walking to trip?"
"What are you hiding!?!" I finally cry out in desperation, after another ten or so minutes, grabbing his shoulders and pinning him to the wall so he can't escape my gaze, and I glare at him with slate gray eyes, staring into concerned blue ones.
This time, he doesn't make any sarcastic comments. He doesn't shrug off my question with a lame joke, or suddenly change the subject. Instead, he holds my furious gaze for a moment, then drops his eyes, as if in shame.
"I'm sorry, Ash. I really am," He adds and I glare harder. "I want to tell you. But I-I-"
"Can't," I finish for him, still shaking because I can't stand it anymore. "Yeah, you've said."
"I really wish I could!" He cries, begging me to understand. "But you would never see me the same way again if I told you. You'd hate me for it." He finishes weakly, but he shrugs his shoulders and ducks out from under my grasp, continuing onwards.
I stand for a moment facing the mountain, blinking at the spot where he had just been in disbelief, before hurrying to catch up to him.
"Why would you care if I hated you?" I say, still trying to milk it out of him, though I know it's too late. So close! I had been so close, but now his eyes are icing up again, and he shakes his head irritatedly, the storm clouds above gathering and swarming by the second, plunging the world into darkness, and now I can barely make out his face in the shadow, save when lightning flashes occasionally.
"I'm done, Ash. I won't tell you." He says angrily, just as thunder shakes the trail beneath our feet, and a small rockslide cascades down behind us. A flash of lightning illuminates the world of premature night, and his face is thrown into stark, blinding white, dark eyes and hair standing out, his eyes overshadowed, giving him a haughty look. The light vanishes, sun spots dancing on the insides of my eyelids when I blink.
The rain is still coming down hard, but, like I said, little of it reaches us, and the amount that does is only when the wind whips around irregularly. Thunder roars frequently, followed almost immediately by lightning. The storm is right on top of us.
In seconds I'm drenched to the bone, my dress slapping and dripping against my legs as I walk. If I were wearing shoes, they would have squished under my toes as I walk.
"Thank God," I say, as the path takes a sharp turn- right into the mountain. A narrow, dark cave stands out like a wound on the slick rocky mountainside, and we gratefully stumble into it.
We shake ourselves off best we can, then stand for a moment, panting from the hike, which has been steadily turning to a climb. Stone is dutifully keeping the right side of his face turned away from me, looking grimly out at the storm raging outside. Thunder rolls, lightning flashes, and his blue eyes glint with a cold light.
Stone turns to me just a little too quick, though, right before the light vanishes, and I can see in his eyes he knows he made a mistake, as I glimpse a pale white line running down the right side of his face. Then the white light vanishes, and I blink, but the image is burned into my vision, and even in the darkness, the scar stands out from my memory, implanted onto his face.
My eyes widen, and he sees that. But I don't see why he's been hiding it from me- It's just a scar. Why should he hide that?
He says nothing, only stares at me in terror, waiting for me to say something. Finally, I speak.
"Where did that come from?" I nod at the thin line on his face, stretching from an inch above his right eyebrow, over his eye and down to the right corner of his jaw. No Beast gave him that.
To my great surprise, Stone sighs in relief. What had he expected me to say?
"Well?" I press, an eyebrow raised, though he probably can't see my expression in the darkness.
"Sword." He says shortly, shrugging off his pack and letting it fall to the ground at his feet, bending over and fishing around for something.
"Who was holding the sword, Stone?" I say. Somehow, I feel the origin of the scar has something to do with whatever secret he's keeping from me.
"Person." He mumbles, and lightning flashes, glinting off the knife blade in his hand. A bolt of terror races through me, though I know he won't hurt me... The look on his face the first time I thought he was going to kill me, though... Had he truly been aiming for the Beast behind me? Or was Stone truly, slightly crazy? Why would he want to kill me, anyways?
"What person?" I press on.
He looks up at me from the ground, and suddenly his eyes are lit by golden fragments of light, when he strikes the knife blade against the flint. Pushing other thoughts aside, I kneel to dig our last piece of firewood from his bag, a nice thick piece of wood, setting it on the cave floor.
Pulling out the bandages and vial of rubbing alcohol, I soak them in the stuff, wincing as the burning liquid soaks into the hundreds of tiny scrapes on my fingers and palms. Once I've wrapped the oily strips of cloth over the end of the stick, I hold the torch next to where Stone is striking the stone (Haha).
He strikes once, twice, and the torch bursts to life. As the welcoming flame grows, warm red light spreads throughout the cave, stretching along the walls, sending our shadows towering upwards, to the invisible cave roof, somewhere high above us, hidden in the lingering shadow our meager fire can't reach.
"Man, I hope that storm ends soon." Stone says. It's a simple statement, but we both know what he's implying. Once we reach the end of the cave, and the path is out in the open again, we'll be exposed to the ravaging storm. But if we remain under shelter, in the cave, the storm could last for days... And we barely have another couple day's worth of food. Starvation is now a danger lurking at the front of my list of ways to die, which, by the way, is practically endless when you're me.
"Yeah..." I agree, and we begin to walk again, the light from the torch spreading out ahead of us, the cave always illuminated only about ten feet out in front of us, and behind us, the walls pressing in on either side of us, threatening to squish us. As we walk, the flame, of course, moving with us, darkness swallows up the path behind us, until we can no longer see the opening we came through. For a while more, the sound of the raging storm is still audible, wind whistling through the crevice, but, eventually, that too fades, leaving us alone in the unnatural silence, deep within the mountain...