Child of Harmony

by Shilic

shelter

Starving and scragged, Flurry trudged through the endless icy wastes. She didn’t know how long she’d been walking; it could have been hours, days, even weeks. As far north as she was, under the endless snowstorm, the sky was no help. The only marker of her progress had been the mountain, the sole feature of the otherwise empty landscape, getting steadily larger as she walked towards it.

She was tired, she was cold, and she wanted nothing more than to stop, fall to the ground, and curl up in a ball. But she didn’t, because she knew that if she did, she would never get up. The longer she walked, though, the less that sounded all that bad. At least then she could rest.

The mountain dominated her vision now, towering above her. She had been moving towards it for so long she had almost forgotten why she had made it her destination. It was a surprise, then, what she found at the base: An elaborately carved opening in the rock, leading deep into the mountain itself.

Motivated by the idea of respite from the harsh wilderness, Flurry quicked her pace as much as she could, even taking to the air briefly before being grounded by the strong winds. She barely spared a glance at the eccentric runes carved around the entrance, too exhausted to care exactly what kind of place she was taking shelter in.

She had expected it to be dark inside, but it wasn’t. Instead, colored gems of all shapes, sizes and colors dotted the walls haphazardly, with no pattern to speak of. Flurry found herself walking deeper and deeper inside, following the cave’s twists and turns until she could no longer see the outside, before pressing up against a wall and curling up on the ground, passing out almost immediately.

Her dreams were muddled, a feverish medley of past, present and fantasy. Twisted dark shapes and burning angelic figures too bright to look at, unbearable cold and searing panic, the image of her father charging into doomed battle and her last sight of her mother’s face… And something else among it all, something coiling around the edges of her vision, observing but not inverveing. Something strange and alien, but not hostile.

Something that seemed to be urging her to go deeper into the caves.

Eventually, Flurry returned to the realm of consciousness, though it took a while for her to gather the energy to actually stand up. She may have been more rested, but the sleep hadn’t filled her belly. Now she wasn’t being pelted by ice and snow and had found somewhere where she could rest, the weight of her situation began to set in. She had no idea where she was, she was alone, and her family…

For a while, she just lay in place and cried.