Love Is Blind

Your Silver Sly Design

"Where are you taking me?" I playfully laughed as Asa tugged me along the dirt pathway towards the thicket of trees. He turned his head back slightly, a grin tugging at his lips, then suddenly he bursted into a sprint.

"Wait!" I called out as I stumbled over my feet from the sudden change of pace, my hand slipped from his and I started laughing loudly. My feet picked up their own pace now too as I attempted to catch up to him as he slipped into the forest. We waded through the trees for a while, carefully jumping over the roots sticking up from the ground, until finally he abruptly stopped and turned to face me. I nearly toppled into him, but he grabbed my arms and smiled warmly down at me.

"We are here!" He said, and then he leaned against a peculiar looking tree. I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows at him, but he just cutely started to smile again, his dimple showing itself off on his right cheek.

"You took me... to a tree?" I stated slowly, but couldn't resist smiling. I was full of adrenaline and happiness at that moment.

"It's not just any tree!" His voice got a little higher in defensive, and then he took my hand and led me a few steps forward close to the tree. "This tree here is obviously not any normal tree."

"Then what kind of tree is it?"

"It's my favorite tree!" A cheesy grin fell back onto his face as he reached out to the flaky looking tree and pulled off it's papery bark. "Can I see your book?" He asked as he pointed to my satchel. I looked down at it and pulled the leather back to retrieve my journal from the inside. Then I handed it to him suspiciously. He put the book open to one of the blank pages and placed the thin papery bark onto the page and closed it.Then he handed me back my leather bound journal. "This tree is an acer griseum, and it's my favorite tree because of it's layers. It reminds me of you, you're a very complex person, I always feel like I'm pulling back a layer of you and finally discovering who you are, only to find there are more layers underneath." Then he paused, his face has grown a bit more serious as he gazed at the tree, his thumb running across the rough thin tree bark. "It reminds me of life too. Life is full of layers and always changing."

I gazed at him with big eyes. Taking in the once humorous moment in a more serious manner. He had just told me something from his heart, and it made me feel like I was glowing inside. I stared back down at the leather journal, realizing he had just put a part of himself into my journal, because he wanted to make sure he was in there. What a silly boy.

I grabbed his arm lightly and turned him towards me, his eyes immediately softened when he looked at me, and I leaned forward and kissed him lightly. As I started to back away he grabbed me back quickly and went back in for a more passionate kiss. And for the next few seconds we shared that moment of bliss next to the acer griseum tree.

-    -    -

 "I guess some things never change." I muttered to myself.

"What?" Rain said his voice growing louder as he continued to speak, "Did you say something?" I ran my hands along my thighs and shook my head. Something in the distance howled. It sounded very familiar to a wolf but not actually the same.

"Nothing, I was just thinking out loud."

He grunted as he stepped towards me, the leaves crunching underneath his feet. Almost immediately the smell of burning flesh consumed my sense, and he was putting a few morsels of meat into my hands. My stomach churned immediately.

"I don't want to eat rabbits. It feels wrong."

"Rabbits repopulate more than humans Temperance, don't feel guilty, we need to eat." Maggie told me. I sighed as I felt the warm meat in my hands. Against my own personal feelings I placed the bunch in my lap and ripped off a section of the meat and brought it to my lips slowly. The burning smell was stronger, but I tried to push the thought aside as I popped the meat in my mouth.

The taste was raw, it was heavy and not very pleasant. The meat wasn't tender and it was very chewy and stringy feeling. It was something to eat though, now with us being refugees it is what it is and I was going to have to get use to it.

The howl came again, this time sounding more distinct. They shifted next to me, curious as I was. But as I finished another bite of the grimy rabbit meat it came to my thoughts. In all my years of living here in Harmony, growing up here as a child, I had never heard wolves in the forest, they were more common in the mountains of Ioney. What were they doing in the forest, why were they not in the mountains?

"Something not right." I pointed out as I took another bite.

"I was thinking the same thing," Rain said, I heard him move again, and the sound of the fire roaring echoed across as he put another log into the flames to leave it to its feast.

"Are you sure it's okay to stay here in the cave?" Maggie asked, her voice laced with concern. It occurred to me that she must be more nervous than me about being lost in the woods, unable to return home. Her whole life is changing because she decided to follow me, to help me. Things weren't going to be the same for the either of us. Her entire life she grew up in the palace with me, bracing through the tortures of royalty with me, teach me how to be a lady, handling my outbreaks and my stubbornness. You would think after having to deal with my bratty spoiled self she would have grown tired of me and not cared.

"The caves are higher up, so they wont be able to see our fire, but they are far away, we will just have to be careful when traveling."

"We don't even know where we are going," I sighed as I continued to eat my meat little by little.

"We will go back to Dublin, we will go back to Echo."

"No." My lips formed into a frown, my head turning to the sound of his voice. "They will be looking for us there, they will be expecting us to go there."

"Where else are we going to go? Winter is coming, Echo will take care of us, the townspeople will, they will hide us," Rain argued, his voice growing more stressed.

"I refuse to put them in danger, besides its a far travel, we wont make it before the winter, and they will have hunters along the paths waiting for us to show up."

"You are right, do you think I haven't thought of that? We will just have to go the long way."

"But the snow..." Maggie moaned.

"We won't make it Rain, the winters are to bitter, we don't have clothes, food, anything." I continued to argue as I pushed the meat off my lap and onto the ground.

"Again, where else are we going to go? It's the only chance we have to survive." He was pacing back and forth now, his feet crunching every dried up leaf in his path.

I closed my eyes, putting my hands against my head as if it would comfort me and shield me at the same time. The conflict inside me was alarmingly difficult to decipher. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to decide. At this point though, it seemed there was really only one choice. Because we couldn't move backwards, we could only move forwards.

"Well then, lets get some rest, we have a large journey ahead of us."

-   -   -

When the birds started chirping, I knew dawn was upon us and we would be leaving shortly. I didn't get much sleep that night, my mind had been racing about all sorts of possibility that could happen, things we could encounter, the worst of the worst ran through my mind that night. I heard someone rummaging in the short distance of the cave.

"Who is awake?" I asked quietly from where I was curled up.

"Maggie." She whispered quietly back. "I'm just packing up for the trip ahead of us."

"Are you nervous?"

"Not at all." She said flatly.

"How? I'm a nervous wreck."

"Well you have things to lose, I have nothing."

I frowned and rubbed my eyes, suddenly a ping of guilt filled my being. I never really thought about her personal life, and it suddenly occurred to me how lonely she must be. "You don't have to follow all the way through with us. You can start a new somewhere, some village we may pass."

I was left in silence.

(I wrote this up a long time ago, and I decided to update and share it even though I not entirely done with this chapter. It will take me a moment to get back into the character and plot of this story since it's been 2 years. But enjoy.)