Riven Wings-Chapter 1
“Watch your step!” Halogen called after his sister.
Rabitha didn't respond, but slowed her rush as she approached the edge of the Rift.
Finally looking back at him, Rabitha said, “It looks like it got caught on a shelf in the cliff face pretty far down. Where it's wide enough to have a couple of trees and some scrub.”
Halogen frowned. “Too far for our rope?”
Rabitha squinted downward. “I'm not sure. It would take us half the day to get a longer one from the village though, and we might have to explain to Martin why we needed it. You get to do that part if it comes to it, by the way.”
“I'm not the one who let the wind take the book!”
“I'm not the one who brought one of our few books outside Poteny. There's no need to assign blame yet anyway. Let's see if we can retrieve it ourselves first."
They'd been walking in them long enough that they felt oddly light without their packs on. Halogen pulled a sturdy climbing rope from his pack, noticing a handful of nuts loose in the pack from a hike a few days ago and stuffing them in his mouth as he scanned for an appropriate anchor point near the top of the cliff. He wasn't about to belay his sister without a very firm anchor indeed.
Suddenly he grinned. “I don't know if I trust this old oak tree to support your weight, Beth.”
His sister tried to throw something at him in retaliation, but there were no loose rocks within easy reach. At least not small enough to avoid real damage. She threw a leaf instead. “That tree looks like it would support a counter-weighted war machine, let alone one li... not so little girl.” Mentally, she cursed the slip.
Halogen's smile widened. “Little, or not so much, it's your reasoning that can't be supported. You were the instigator of this whole adventure. I'll happily admit to being little more than your minion this time around. Especially with the book.”
“Shut up and tie the rope off. I don't trust you not to drop me for a lark.” Her brother chuckled. She had pulled a long leather strap from her own pack and was inspecting it for wear prior to tying it into a harness for herself. She also pulled out the hand forged carabiner and figure eight that were the reason she was the one descending. She had ‘demonstrated both a sufficient head for heights and sufficient skill’ to be given the equipment by Ferbius, the head miner, so that they could scout for ores as they walked the rift.
“Come on Genie,” she called to her brother. “I want you by the edge so you can see my signals in case you can't hear me."
Halogen was still tying off the rope. "Calling me genie won't make me suddenly able to grant wishes with a thought. Wait a bit, I want to be certain this knot is staying put if I'm to trust even my least-favorite sister to it."
"I’m your only sister. Just tie a bowline with an overhand knot to stop the end from shaking loose. Let's get this done, daylight won’t last forever."
Halogen finished his fiddling with the anchor and walked over "Ready. Where's the book? I see... It's pretty far down. I hope you can reach it. Be safe, alright?" His tone was suddenly serious.
"I always am, little brother." She had already clipped the carabiner and figure eight to her harness, and quickly looped the rope through and over her figure eight. Then she leaned backward over the edge of the rift, slowly walking down to avoid building heat in the rope or metal.The twisted fibers of the rope gave her a slight tendency to spin to the left, but she only really noticed during a section of free rappelling when the cliff face retreated away from her and she hung suspended in the air. Her harness cut into her legs and lower back slightly as she shifted to look down. The drop below didn't bother her, even with no bottom in sight.
Most people she knew thought that the rift truly was bottomless. Perhaps a relic of an ancient sorcery of some kind.
Her current target, however, was not at the bottom.
Which was especially good if there wasn't one, she thought. The ledge she was headed for was slightly to the right of her rope dangling below her. She walked sideways along the cliff face to avoid a large protrusion, not flat enough to be a ledge, smiling at some purple flowers that grew in a crack along the side of it.
Continuing down, she paused to consider the edge of the protrusion. Her rope would lie against that surface if she went much further. Carefully she selected a place that was more round than sharp and made certain the rope went to her selected section of rock, rather than somewhere that would abrade the material more.
The ledge where the book had landed was a larger one. It even had a real tree of its own. A few of the branches rubbed against her back and legs as she made her way onto it. She did reach the end of her rope before her feet touched the ground, but only just. Holding on to the rope with one hand to be sure it didn't slide back to the side, she slid her figure eight off the end and dropped the last foot or two onto the ledge. Then she wrapped it around a tree limb. She could climb up the tree on her way back up to get the slack she would need to tie a knot about herself.
The ledge wasn't just larger than normal, it was mostly level instead of tilted. Usually they sloped outward. This one was big and felt secure. The book was near the cliff face, under what looked like a wild strawberry bush. Too bad they weren't in season right now. Looking up, she waved briefly at her brother, then pointed to her eyes and the area around her. Might as well look about since she'd climbed down so far. Halogen waved back and gave her a thumbs up. She snorted. Glad he approved.
First, she grabbed the book from under the strawberry bush, noticing as she did that the soil was unusually deep on this ledge too. In fact it looked a little like... but no. No one intentionally planted on the ledges.
Still, now that she looked more closely, this ledge was almost a perfect semicircle, extending out maybe twenty or thirty feet from the cliff. She crawled to the edge, looking down. The bottom of the ledge seemed cantilevered under her. It looked like a ceramic pot, with deeper soil near the cliff if the bottom was any indication. The tree would need more soil. She wasn't sure what the ledge was made out of, but the even tone of the material seemed unnatural. The rim of the ledge was cool against her hand, but lacked the bite of touching cold stone. It was dark grey, almost black. Looking back at the cliff face the stone was lighter gray and brown. Suddenly she noticed the tree was a cherry tree, and all the other plants she could see were either edible in themselves or grew edible parts.
Her discovery that this ledge was a garden changed everything. She now saw paths planted in robust herbs that didn't mind being stepped on, groupings of plants here and there near them. The tree was in the middle, far enough from the cliff to allow for branches in every direction. Still, the garden seemed slightly overgrown. Plants were being choked out that should be tended.
She walked along the nearest path toward the cliff, thinking to examine the join of cliff and ledge when she heard her brother coming down.
He scrambled, going much more quickly than she had, having wrapped the rope between his legs and under one thigh, across his back around his shoulder and over his chest then down to the hand controlling his descent in a no harness rappel that was much more dangerous than what Rabitha had done.
"Shhhh." His voice was urgent, straining for quiet and bursting with the need to be heard at the same time.
"Raiders." He continued in the same tone after dropping the last few feet. He had to switch to only hands on the rope at the end. The no harness method left less rope at the bottom as he pulled it into his supporting wrap. "The rope is close enough to the ground up top that they should miss it." He was quieter now that they were next to each other. "Come on." He brought her under the cherry tree.
"No point, they probably won’t look down the rift unless they've already spotted our rope anyway." She still went with him. She was scared, and the instinct to hide wasn't satisfied with a hundred feet of cliff face between her and the men. She felt much better cowering under a few branches. Go figure.
She started fidgeting almost immediately. How close were the raiders? How would they know it was safe? What if it wasn't?
"Could they have seen you if you saw them? How..." Halogen's finger across her lips silenced her. She couldn't hear anything but the breeze in the leaves of the tree, a sound she hadn't noticed before.
Putting his mouth right next to her ear, Halogen whispered, "I didn't see them as soon as I might have, I was looking down at you. I got a funny feeling and glanced around," here he paused as she stuck a finger in her ear and rubbed it. His whisper tickled. "I saw a dust cloud, mostly. A few figures, but I couldn't make out any real detail. I think they were headed for our village."
Natural Reading
I have always enjoyed reading. Well, perhaps not always, though I do have an early memory of myself looking over an alphabet book in the den of our house in Gresham even after my mother had left. I recall she brought me in and showed me the letters, and I kept looking. I must admit my memory consists largely of the picture of a lion, not necessarily including the L that must have been there also. At that age it is perhaps unsurprising that the picture most caught my interest. Given this beginning, and the frequent attempts I made to turn every toy into a flying car, or a launchpad for the same, that I made in our basement family room, one might suppose I would have been drawn to fiction early on. This is not the case.
I had somewhere formed the opinion that reading fiction was ridiculous. I was too 'grown up' for it even as I fought imaginary hordes of enemies in my own yard with sticks. There is still an unfortunate blight on a particular tree at our old house, one that otherwise would look like the perfect Christmas tree, at about shoulder level to my seven or eight-year-old self. I had no idea that the tree would learn not to grow new branches over the spot where they kept getting beaten by a stick. I didn't know trees were that smart. I would climb up the two taller trees in the front yard and shoot imaginary bows at people. Somehow I had the good sense not to actually use my dad's bow, although the thought did cross my mind. Good sense notwithstanding, this may have had more to do with his ability at hiding than my caution.
In any case, I remained convinced of the total waste of space that fiction was until the fifth grade. We read often during class in my school. I had occasionally forgotten my book, and since the other books on the shelf were short and often taken by other students, I one day took the dictionary to my desk to read during reading time because if you did not have a book you got no participation points. I surprised myself by enjoying reading it, and used the same trick many times over the years.I did try to keep it as a last resort however, and by fifth grade I felt I was running low on options from the nonfiction section of our school library. I should mention that while our nonfiction section there was very small, I had not even come close to reading every book in it. What I had done was read every book that caught my eye. There were still some I was considering reading, but I was not excited about them.
I had never asked a librarian for help or recommendations before, but we had recently had a library event of some kind where she offered to help us find a book. I asked.
I was very disappointed when she took me to the right-hand side of the library, which was all fiction. I don’t recall now whether I had mentioned my desire for a practical book, one I could learn from, or not. If I did she did not take it the way I meant it. She brought me straight to “Mossflower” by Brian Jacques. I took the book only because I felt that it would be impolite not to. The characters were all animals. I started to read it during reading time in class for similar reasons to why I had read the dictionary. I loved it. My activities underwent a radical change around that time. My trips to the nearby woods were much less frequent, and when I went I was more likely to be thinking about Martin the Warrior or tyrannical wild cats than just rambling.
At night my family would find me reading by flashlight under the old pool table that was normally covered in clean laundry by my mother in an attempt to get us to fold our own. I took books on vacation with me, and the Redwall books ( of which Mossflower is either the first or the prequel) were devoured in two days or so each. This is somewhat more expressive of the degree to which I had changed my mind about fiction if you know that the books averaged 400 pages or so and I was only in the fifth grade at the time.
Reading has always been enjoyable for me, but I have had to learn to be careful about letting it take over my life. The worlds those books brought to life for me did teach me quite a bit, but as I have grown older I have had to remember to do my own living in this world. The stunts I pulled in the woods, and elsewhere, remind me that this world has its own share of adventure.
Trapped
Lost in the dark, tangled in silken threads.
Alone in the moonbeams, trembling in piercing cold.
Collapsed in the wreckage, sorting through shattered dreams.
Broken in my mind, looping in turgid casuistry
Mocked by the presence, so temptingly near, of a carrot on a string.
Though crushed with pain and exquisite despair,
through the agony I begin, unwinding the cords
though it leaves me bare, refusing to give in.
A carrot I see only now, too late, is rotting on its string.
I tear my own flesh along with the bands, bloodied I rise to my feet.
I scream my defiance, my hollowed out joy, to the nightmare I've been in.
The carrot falls, and I cannot bear, the memories it brings.
Slowly I turn, and walk in the dark, needing someone to share my pain.