Callisto

Path of Light (pt. 2)

"Twenty-five!" she yelled in fury,

She knew how to behave and always knew the right way to fight through pain. It was an illusion to the warrior who would hunt in the light of the Great Spirit. The hunter didn't appraise the world through her feet. She did so through her eyes.

She focused. Even knowing that her soles were slowly blistering on the road, she focused on any openings in the ruins that flanked the path.

"Fifteen!" came Jespar's grunting shout.

A stitching pain still lived in her abdomen, and she cursed herself and her body, though she knew that doing so was as pointless as screaming at the clouds for the thunder they belched at the earth or blaming the fire for burning the skin.

"Ten!"

There, she thought, and she held on to the sight of the blackened doorway that afforded entrance to the charred skeleton of a building on their right, next to the corpse of a six-wheeled metal monster. She held on to that sight with such determination that she almost didn't register the charge race through the air as an electric sun burst into life on the street once more.

When she jumped through the doorway, she scrabbled to get as far into the building as she could, digging her nails into the scarred dirt and throwing clods behind her.

Then she was released from her instincts and whirred around in realization.

"Jespar!"

She had time to catch him as he ducked under the reaching blue tendril of a lightning arc that had been spat at him from the end of the street. She cradled him in her arms and barrel-rolled with him into the building as another finger of crackling death bounced off the four walls above them before fizzling out of existence, and they felt the definite, droning anger of the sprinting spark as it missed its quarry once again.

She smelled something like the crisp, sizzling aroma of burnt meat beneath her and looked within her arms at the dog, still trying to run within her grasp. Only now did she realize that his small form was secreting small whisps of smoke.

The jolt had just passed over him – she could not see any direct marks of its touch on his body, but it had been enough to burn some of the hairs on the top of his back. She withdrew her hand and felt clumps of them come away in her grasp.

She hurried to give him some kind of resuscitation when he turned and looked at her with wide, mad eyes.

"Gotta start counting again, Chief."

She looked at him with new eyes as he spoke, his voice tinged with a kind of determined righteousness she'd never seen in him before. She lingered on his ruined half-ear, his bruised underside, and now his patches of withered hair across his back. Her own shoulder reacted instinctively to her understanding of the pain they'd both been through to find this object of legend.

He was breathing heavily, and his feet would not stop stamping with the burning energy to run – to survive. She thought she might have been wrong for a moment – maybe the jolt had struck him. But he was correct; there wasn't time for delay.

She could feel it retreating down the path again, bathing them both in monochrome luminescence. A blanket of both light and dark stretched across them from the open doorway of their hiding place. They saw each other under that light and knew that if they'd come this far, they'd be willing to give anything to go further. To see this journey through to its end.

"I ain't gonna die, Chief," he said, out of nowhere, unprompted – as if he could reach through her eye sockets and tap away the thoughts she was having at this moment, thoughts that caused her to shake on the shuddering ground.