NOVEL NEXT Chapter 22: Flipping Through
Without caring whatsoever about shame, I tucked my tail between my legs, so to speak, and bolted off into the forest, not mindful of all the racket I was making. I ran as fast as I could, skipping over the roots, glancing over my shoulder from time to time to make sure the old man wasn’t right on my tail - I ran until I was out of breath and my sides hurt. And even then, when I stopped and pressed my back against a tree, the fear that the old merchant, dagger in one hand and collar in the other, might emerge from behind one of the trees at any moment, still gripped my guts.
‘There!’
No, just a shadow of leaves cast by the moon.
‘Shit . . . over there!’
Oh, a pine cone - a bloody pine cone, or whatever falling from the tree.
‘No, not even there . . . ’
No matter how hard I tried to peer through the gloom of the night, no matter how much I strained my ears, no matter how long I waited, he didn’t show up.
‘You’re stupid, Korra,’ I cursed my foolishness and slumped between the tree’s roots.
Why would he chase me through the forest at night? That just didn’t make any sense. It would be way better to track me down in the morning than to break himself on the roots - right?
Unless . . . unless he was like me. Honestly, the way I was able to move across the moss-covered roots in the dimness of my mutated nocturnal eyesight left me a bit speechless. One massive tail and a pair of wings in addition to cope with, no shoes on my feet to make the running easier, and yet I flew through the forest like a seasoned trail runner, which I never was, far from it - I didn’t even do the morning jog.
On top of all that, I had spent over a dozen of the last months locked up in a small cell. Not exactly a place to stay in shape, however . . . somehow I still was. In fact, I felt great, short of breath, but not the least bit stiff or frail.
‘Not that I want to complain, but . . . what the bloody heck?’
Well, while my staying fit could be chalked up to my regeneration, not so much the way I moved. It was as if I knew how to travel through this terrain all along. But how could that be when all I knew of this world were two rooms? And that wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. Apparently, I knew all too well how to run like prey.
At that thought, a faint growl escaped my throat.
Or was it my stomach?
‘Just wishful thinking.’
Sure, I was starving, but as much as I tried to convince myself otherwise, the truth was that the weird-ass bug hadn’t killed the beast. I could feel it still there deep down inside me, perhaps asleep or just biding its time. As vexing as it was, for all that had happened, I was not free of it, and it would be a damn big mistake to turn a blind eye to the fact that I could go feral again at any moment. Especially when those beastly traits were leaking out whether I wanted them to or not.
And it wasn’t just the occasional growling; my, let’s call them instincts, were giving me quite a hard time, too. The humiliating shame of running away from someone who clearly wasn’t a threat biting at my conscience was quite crushing.
Was the merchant not a threat, though?
Who the heck slept with a dagger under their pillow? Besides the obvious answers, like thief or assassin, after thinking it over a bit, I had to say - alone, in the middle of dense forests - any sane person. In a way, it made me the crazy one, running fearlessly through an apparently dangerous forest in the middle of the night, naked, the chain on my leg rattling loudly like a cowbell announcing my presence to all around.
But to my utter bewilderment and relief, none - seriously, NONE of the supposedly dangerous forest dwellers seemed interested in me. Straining my ears, I heard nothing but the nightly hum of the forest and my own pounding heart. Even those bestial instincts of mine were silent - no danger nearby.
Yet, I listened a little longer.
Who wouldn’t want to make sure nothing eats them or captures them before laying down for the night, right?
Well, after doing so and placing a branch in the way I had come from - sadly, my sense of direction was still basically non-existent - I found a comfy spot among the roots and let the forest lullaby rock me to sleep.
─◇─◇─◇─
»ROOOAAAAARRRR!!!!!«
Startled awake by a loud roar rattling my bones, I shot to my feet, in no way ready to face the beast. But no matter how hard I searched the forest, shrouded in the morning mist, for an animal that might consider me its breakfast, I found nothing but a couple of squirrels climbing the trunk of a tree, spoils in the form of nuts in their mouths.
‘You bloody fool . . . ’ I cursed myself silently as my heart threatened to leap out of my chest. ‘You scared the shit out of yourself.’
Realizing that one of my many nightmares had just come back to bite me during the not-so-dreamless night, I sat back down to get my shit back together. Was that roar real, or did it belong to the beast I turned into when the old man caught up with me - thankfully only in my dreams? My sore throat suggested that I had indeed let out that roar, perhaps even turned into a full beast and back; the oblivious squirrels, on the other hand, suggested the opposite.
‘So, did I turn into a beast again? No, I can’t, I just can’t deal with it now . . . ’
Chewing on my lower lip, I swallowed any fear of my inner beast taking the reins and delved into the Grid Forge in search of a weave that would help me survive in this forest. Among those available to me, there was certainly at least one that I knew would be useful to me: the Thrifty Drinker.
It appeared among my available General weaves after that deranged asshole forgot about us for three whole bloody days.
While it certainly hadn’t been that long since my last sip I was now admittedly no less thirsty and hungry as a starving . . . well, beast.
‘Come on. Where is it . . . huh, [Moss Eater]?’ Definitely a possibility, but was I that desperate? I could go a bit longer before . . .
“Sage, you are an empress? Wait, doesn’t having you make me an empress?” While I certainly didn’t feel like one, the weave I came across would suggest so - [Tail of Poison Empress] was definitely a new one. For once, though, it wasn’t hard to figure out where the weave came from, the orange apple cinnamon cloud emanating from beneath my fur, the poison that . . .
‘Wait, did it kill me during the night?’
Sure enough, when I looked through the records, I found a couple of new notifications.
- You were poisoned
- You were poisoned
- You died
- You were poisoned
- You died
With a shudder running through my body at the thought of how many times my tail, Sage, had already killed me, I put the weave aside and went back to searching for the actually useful ones.
‘[Quadruple Stride]?’
Nope, I certainly didn’t need that one, and hopefully I never would . . .
‘ . . . the fuck? [Beast]?’
Was the Lattice messing with me? What kind of shitty weave was that? Not in a million years! Never. Not after what that beast made me do. I didn’t give a shit how good a weave it might have been, but they’d have to place a collar around my neck again and force me to put it in my Grid.
Fuming, I ignored the weave, found the one I was actually looking for, and thought about all the others I could use right now.
[Silent Suffering] and [Faint Presence] would undoubtedly have helped me with my sneaking yesterday, but there was not the slightest regret in my heart for getting rid of them - if anything, the opposite.
Speaking of which, I believed I had some variations of those among the General weaves, too.
‘Hmm, what were they called?’ I thought, while flipping through the weaves. ‘Not [Hand Washing], neither [Haircare], and certainly not [Never-Dying]. Wait . . . what? [Never-Dying]? That was new - could it be the reason I, well, couldn’t die?’
─◇────────────────────────────────────────
Never-Dying
General Weave
0 glyphs - ⦿
⦿
You are far from the most for whom an untimely death entails a somewhat inconvenient life impact,
for you can always find a new way to die later as long as your body or your brain is intact.
─◇────────────────────────────────────────
‘Seriously, what the bloody fuck?’
Sure, I knew I couldn’t die, but to have it confirmed . . .
‘How the heck did I get this weave? And how on earth did it even work? I mean . . . I didn’t actually have it in my Grid, so . . . huh.’
Somehow, the name of the weave, not the one translated into Eleaden Standard, but the two original runes in the description, struck me as familiar. I had seen those lines before. Without even realizing it, my hand went to my chest, fingers tracing the scars, the remnants of the hole the damn bug had punctured in it.