Clarity

Chapter Four

The fire was different than last time. Instead of arousing and soothing, it threatened to consume every inch of my being. It made me want to scream as it burned through my flesh and I found myself nearly begging for relief.

I kept going what I hoped was forward. My body screamed in protest at every movement and I kept forcing myself to step again and again long after my limbs felt like fifty ton weights.

And then the heat became so much worse.

I felt the tears brimming my eyes fall as I collapsed to the ground. But I didn’t stay there long. With a yelp, I jumped up, my palms blistered against the heat.

Relief flooded my body as I looked around at the slightly familiar landscape of rolling hills and tall grass. I nearly whooped in glee as the shadows trembled past.

I let out a gleeful cry, breaking into another run along the dirt paths.

While it had taken me some time to get through the wall on my own, it would probably take Jack and Valin just as long which meant I was safe for a time. Especially if I kept running.

And with the look of the sky, I couldn’t expect the night to come any time soon.

I slowed to a walk once the castle was several lengths out of sight before I even contemplated collapsing on a rock. It shivered a little and I jumped up as it skittered away.

That was probably the strangest sight I had seen my entire in the messed up Narnia—a rock sprouting thin legs and running away. If this was how the strange kids felt, I couldn’t say I would like to stay—even if it meant being Queen. It definitely wasn’t worth it.

I let out a sigh and moved on, ignoring the fact that I was probably extremely lost and headed somewhere that would get me killed. Regardless, if creatures of some kind didn’t kill me first, I was relatively sure the burning ground would get me. In the end, it was just a toss-up.

My feet already felt like they were burning alive and not going to stop aching anytime soon. It took everything I had not to give into the fact that they were ready to give out on me.

I wanted to collapse into a tree but I had the twisted feeling that it probably wouldn’t end any better than the rock had. I was mostly still surprised that I had reached the forest so quickly in comparison to leaving from it.

“Are you lost?”

I turned, looking for the source of the voice and frowned. I was already crazy for running away from the one person who could have helped me but I didn’t want to be the crazy person who heard voices and saw strange people who weren’t there.

“Are you lost?” the voice came again.

Something brushed against my shoulder and I turned sharply as a tree limb pulled away. My eyes went wide and I kept surprising myself by still being shocked at the random events that kept occurring.

First a rock and now a tree. What was going to spring to life next? An entire cliff side? An ocean wave? Maybe the flowers?

A woman stepped from the tree, her body melting from the tree and my immediate reaction was to call her a tree nymph which made even less sense than the strange Pocahontas tree.

Her skin seemed to simply appear as if he bark retracted to show her soft brown skin—more Native American than African American. Her eyes opened to flash a dark brown before settling on a cool honey within the next blink. Pieces of bark adorned her skin in bracelets and what seemed to be almost Henna-like tattoos as a deep green dress spilled around her body.

“You…You…” My eyes went wide. “You came from the tree!”

The woman smiled, offering her hand and I stared in disbelief at the soft chips of bark that actually served and shone as fingernails.