“I recognize these flowers,” I say, noticing dense patches of floating petals along the lakeshore.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Wade answers. “These flowers are how I knew you’d be coming. The emblems of a dead king.”
My heart breaks at the thought of my father’s funeral an
d that I couldn’t be there to honor him. It is tradition in Kalepo to send the spirit of the king or queen off to the world of the dead with a grand ceremony. As part of that ceremony, violet and pink flowers are poured into the canals of the city from the reservoir. There are so many that it is almost impossible to see the water itself beneath the blanket of flower petals.
That’s all I remember from when my mother passed away. I was very young, but I think that an image like that has a tendency to stay with a girl even as little as I was. I want to ask Wade how he knew to look for the flowers, but stop myself. He’s not going to tell me, so there’s no point.
“Drink as much water as you can and then refill your canteen,” he instructs.
I do as he says without questioning it, but he still does me the courtesy of explaining why.
“This will be the last time we see water today. Outside of being in the light, places with water are the most dangerous.”
This makes sense to me. The few predators in and around Kalepo tend to hunt for prey near the ponds and streams that surround the city. I remember one time coming across a dead sheep near a small pool of water, a victim of wolves and the neglect of its shepherd.
With everything ready to go, we journey southeast, cutting our way through fields and meadows. The landscape doesn’t seem much different from the plains on the other side of the river at first, with the exception that it is covered with white Aspros
flowers as the name suggests, but after an eventless morning, the land slowly transforms into something more rugged, filled with weeds and thorn-covered plants of all kinds. The grassy stalks producing the Aspros flowers seem to be the only constant, capable of growing out of any patch of land, be it rough and rocky or fertile and green.
We make camp in another patch of trees when the night comes, which passes with little incident, though every sound I hear makes me feel like something is creeping up on us. Wade is able to once again fall asleep with little problem. I eventually dose off as well, waking up periodically but nodding off again in little time thanks to my exhaustion.
The next morning is much more pleasant, greeting us with a calm, warm breeze instead of the spectacle of a life-or-death struggle. I find it so peaceful that I want to enjoy it, but Wade ushers us on our way as soon as he deems it safe. I am completely spent by the time the evening comes and we find more trees, but Wade warns me that the worst is yet to come.
“Tomorrow, we will be taking a sharp turn north,” he whispers. “The land will be flat and lacking in foliage or cover. This will be the hardest part, two days of moving as fast as your body will let you. It’s going to make you hate me, but the only way we survive the final stretch is swiftness and luck.”
Our race north turns out to be everything he promises, making me grateful for all of the training I did to prepare for this. Still, Wade pushes me to my limits, but I don’t want to let him see any weakness in me. Even though I’ve always tried not to let things that people say bother me, I don’t take it well when someone questions my ability to handle myself like he did the day we met. Every mile I go without complaining, I feel like I’m proving myself to him as being something more than a frail princess who needs his protection.
On our second day, he tells me about the final obstacle standing between us and Sanctuary, a series of canyons referred to as the River Pyri. It’s not a river of water, but of flame, and consists of a number of tunnels and trenches, together constituting an elaborate network of streaming lava.
We are unable to reach it by the end of the day, nor are there any trees around to sleep in, so we are forced to seek shelter within a cave. We make some torches from what remains in my pack and journey down into it, finding a difficult to reach platform deep inside and making camp there for the night.
The makeup of the cave is much different from what I experienced beneath the mountains. Not only is it dry, but it is also quite warm, almost to an unbearable level. Wade attributes this to the several lava vents throughout the cave, a sign that we are getting very close to the canyons.
Not long into the next morning, we reach the first canyon. Even though it is devoid of vegetation, I find it stunning and beautiful. Two distinct kinds of rock make up the canyon walls and floor, a black sort that is produced by magma and a red sort that I’ve never before seen. The way they fuse together and combine with the orange and red glow of the mist high above us creates a vibrant aura of activity and life, one that I find much more exciting and energizing than the arid region we’d been traversing the last couple of days.
“This is where it gets tricky,” Wade says as we work our way down to a bridge of rock that crosses the canyon. “There’s no trail around the lava in some places, so there are narrow paths and crudely constructed causeways that will take us across it. They’re not the most reliable, so we need to be careful.”
“Where is Sanctuary, exactly?” I ask. “Is it hidden within the canyons?”
“No,” he answers, pointing toward a small plateau, one that reaches up into the distant mist a long ways away.
I had hardly noticed it before because of the rest of my surroundings, but as I take a closer look, I realize that it doesn’t seem much different from where Kalepo is, though it’s not as wide or tall. I can see the walls of the mountains north of Kalepo to our west, which stretch into the horizon. Compared to it, Sanctuary appears tiny, but its existence itself shocks me since I had always assumed that the mountains by Kalepo were the only ones anywhere around.
“It looks like the plateau where I come from,” I say.
“I wouldn’t go that far, not that I would know,” Wade replies. “The people of Sanctuary live inside the plateau, not on top of it. It doesn’t go above the mist, at least I don’t think it does. Otherwise, I’m sure there’d be people fighting over it instead of leaving it alone.”
Once again something he says produces a number of questions I want to ask, but this time I don’t quell my curiosity.
“Why would people fight over it?”
“Because these plains are filled with the worst kinds of people and creatures. It’s a lot harder to survive if you care about protecting the weak or doing the right sorts of things.”
“Then how does Sanctuary keep safe?”
“Two things, really. I think that preserving its existence helps the more wretched of people feel like they’re not as evil as they are. Then there are those who try to hold on to what goodness they have left by volunteering to keep Sanctuary safe. We’ll pass by their outposts before we get there. That’s the point at which we’ll really be out of the woods.”