The Outcast and the Survivor: Chapter Six

The Outcast and the Survivor

  Written by Trevor A. A. Evans

  Text Copyright © 2015 by Trevor A. A. Evans

  Published by Thirteen Crossroads Publishing

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotation in articles and reviews.

  www.thirteencrossroads.com

  Preface

  The story that follows is part of a chapter-series, The Outcast and the Survivor. It has been made available on Kindle and Nook as a convenience, since it is available free of charge directly on the Thirteen Crossroads Publishing website. The story will continue with a new chapter being released each month until the last chapter is published in December 2017.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Not again,’ I think as my foot slips off the wet rock below me, causing me to fall a few feet before the rope holding me tenses.

  A sharp, familiar pain then rakes across my chest where the harness holds to me uncomfortably tight. I pull myself back onto the rocks and look down at the canyon below me, a narrow one filled with a seemingly bottomless pool of water. More cascades into it from a waterfall above me to my right, along with several others a bit further along the canyon wall.

  “You okay?” Yori calls out from higher up, his deep, scruffy voice the right sort to remain clear despite the noise.

  I look at him and nod. I don’t like feeling burdensome, something I’ve avoided with Wade for the most part, but this morning I know I’ve been quite the hindrance. Yori said this climb up the cliffs would only take an hour, but it’s likely been more than double that and we’re still only halfway done.

  It doesn’t help that the rocks are so slimy, like most everything else in the marshes. Getting a good grip is almost impossible, especially without gloves, though Yori does just fine without them. He moves seamlessly, like this is all he’s ever known. It makes me feel safe with him close by, which is something I wouldn’t have expected when I met him.

  Like Wade had suggested, he seemed a bit strange at first. His voice was quite scraggly, like an instrument out of tune after years of neglect. It made the plan he proposed for trapping the draeg in this canyon sound even crazier. But his voice has gradually become deeper, sterner sounding, and with that change, his reassurances have been much more effective in emboldening me for what I’ll be taking part in today.

  “We’re getting faster,” he reassures. “I reckon we’ll reach the summit in less than an hour. Need another break?”

  “Yeah,” I gasp through exhausted breaths.

  He puts another anchor in the rock and descends to where I have rested myself facing up against the canyon wall. Rather than doing the same, he finds a slight slope of rock that juts out a few inches and leans against it facing outward. I don’t know how he balances himself so well. He seems so at ease, like he was born on the side of a mountain. Maybe he was.

  “Quite the fall,” Yori remarks lightly.

  I turn my head to look down at the space between us and the canyon bottom, more feet than I want to count. The whole scene hardly fits the otherwise bland marshlands we’ve been traversing. Here, the tall canyon walls protect a grotto buried well below the surface of the swampy waters that surround it.

  “You don’t seem much like a princess,” he then says.

  ‘Why must people keep pointing that out?’ I think a little frustrated.

  “Is there some way I’m supposed to be?”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. There aren’t any princesses where I’m from, but we would read about them as kids. Fairy tales, I think the stories were called. Legends about princesses being trapped in towers and needing saving while flying beasts swirled about to stop any would-be rescuers.”

  “Then I am a princess,” I wink, though the thought immediately terrifies me.

  “At least the draeg doesn’t have wings,” Yori teases back.

  I suppose things could be worse, but then again, who knows how frantic the beast will become once trapped. Yori has never succeeded in cornering it, and considering the draeg’s size, I fear no high wall of rock or mountain will be enough to stop it from escaping. This could be the last climb I ever make.

  Wade has his doubts as well. He voiced them to Yori again last night.

  “If it’s so simple, why haven’t you been able to pull it off?” Wade was complaining.

  “It’s a two man job, that’s all,” Yori replied calmly, matter-of-factly. “This draeg might be a bruting beast, but he’s smart. I can’t snare him alone, I’ve tried. He’s been here for ages, well before we came. Avoids places with a single entrance, places where it’d be easier to ambush him. I think he’s been hunted before. There are scars and great gashes in the scales on his underside. The canyon has two entrances, so luring him in and trapping him won’t be a problem. Forcing him into pool is where the real battle will be.”

  Yori had just described his plan in detail, how he and Wade would use strange black powders and fire to cave the canyon entrances in, something that seemed more like magic to me than anything else. It would then be my job to get the panicked draeg’s attention while the two of them snuck up behind and lit more powders to cause the beast to retreat toward the pool.

  The edges of the pool are a sharp drop, and there is no shore or sandy area to speak of, simply a dark-blue hole that seems to descend forever. Yori said that as he had stalked the draeg over the years, he’d noticed that it couldn’t swim, so drowning it had become for him the best and perhaps only option.

  The whole thing sounded plausible to me, my reservations notwithstanding, but Wade took a little more convincing. He tried suggesting other ideas, like trapping the draeg in Yori’s cavern, but Yori rejected that because all of the tunnels beneath the marshes are interconnected somehow and there would be no way to know if the plan had for sure succeeded.

  I like to think that Wade was mostly worried about me, not that he ever said as much. But the way he looked at me as he expressed his concerns over the beast’s climbing ability, about whether or not I would be safe from it even all the way up here, just came across as more sentimental than he normally gets. It makes me worry about whether he, too, will be safe.

  “This is going to work,” Yori says confidently, smiling and breaking my stupor of thought by placing his hand on my shoulder. “No one is going to get hurt, except the draeg of course.”

  I smile back and then look down at the pool.

  “You’re not as crazy as Wade made you seem.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve always been a little different. The others knew that, as did I. Made it easier to be the first to leave everyone and come here when the reapers appeared.”

  “Reapers?” I puzzle.

  Yori stares at me for a moment, a sudden wariness in his eyes.

  “We should get going,” he says abruptly, climbing upward before I’m able to interrupt with an actual question.

  The rest of the climb proceeds much quicker, at an almost race-like pace. I find a second wind matching Yori’s quickened ascent, slipping a couple more times but hurriedly pulling myself back up. At first I take Yori’s eagerness to keep going as a sign that he doesn’t intend to tell me more, but as I think about it, I wonder if it isn’t his own anxiety he’s avoiding, like talking to me had dug up things he’d been trying to forget.

  Yori reaches the top and immediately scans the two entrances to the canyon below. I stand by his side and look as well. No sign of Wade. His job was to set the traps while Yori helped me make the climb. Until he shows up, Yori is to stay here, and I know just how I intend to use th
e time.

  “Do you not want to tell me about the reapers because you think it will scare me?” I ask.

  “No,” he replies so quietly it might as well have been a whisper. “Because it scares me.”

  “Are the reapers the creatures in the darkness that forced the rangers into hiding?”

  “It was more than them,” he pauses. “There was a greater fear, something festering in the furthest reaches of the plains like a disease, a black plague. Hiding. Waiting. We sensed it out there, tried to track it down long before the reapers came, but we failed. Over time, we hunters slowly became the hunted.”

  “What are the reapers then?”

  “If the evil here is the shadow beneath your bed, then the reapers are the hand that reaches up and snatches you away down into the nightmare.”

  “So you ran.”

  “Most definitely not,” Yori replies defiantly. “I might not be a true ranger like the others, but I am no coward. I was a philosopher, a scientist, in the world we came from, and as the shadow grew, I saw before anyone else that all who remained in the south would fall into darkness. That’s why I came here, to find a new home for those without anywhere else to go, but no one would come with me. Rangers are stubborn. They’ll fight to the last man before they ever consider retreating.”

  “What does it mean to be a true ranger?”

  Yori gives a sarcastic laugh under his breath.

  “That’s a good question. I think a lot of them forgot when