Chapter Six

I am hungry and cold, lost in a strange place. Wild, unfamiliar rolling hills blanketed in mist as thick and gray as Irish wool. The ominous sort of mist one expects to see in old black-and-white Sherlock Holmes movies, usually when a bloodthirsty hound with eyes as red as the devil sinks his teeth into the neck of a poor, unwitting wanderer.

I stop walking and strain my ears to hear something, anything, but the world is portentously silent, save for the low, steady tom-tom pounding in my chest.

Thud, thud. Thud, thud. Thud, thud.

I begin climbing up a hill of low growing shrubs covered in forlorn, withered purple flowers and long, slender thorns that nip at my ankles. Each step I take the mist grows heavier, thicker, as if it means to smother me. Mist so thick, so densely layered, that not even the most brilliant and slender ray of sunlight is able to penetrate it.

That is, if it is indeed daytime. It could be night in this netherworld of mist and hunger and cold.

I climb and climb. The terrain alters. The thorny bushes replaced by fields of scrubby grass littered with lichen infested boulders that look like tumbled tombstones. I want to move closer to the boulders, to study them, but fear seizes me by the throat, pulls me brutally along.

Is my name etched upon one of those headstones?

A voice slides through the mist, hissing in my ear.

“Remember as you pass by,
As you are now so once was I,
As I am now, so shall you be,
Prepare yourself, you will follow me.”

I climb and climb, my feet sinking into strange, spongy ground, the mist growing thicker, the icy air biting my cheeks, until I am nearly blind, moving through wild country without the benefit of sight or the security of the familiar.

Hunger gnaws at my insides like the bloodthirsty hound with eyes as red as the devil gnawing on the neck of his wretched victim.

I am hungry and cold, still lost in this strange place, my hope ebbing, flowing out of me along with my strength.

I should give in now. Quit. Concede that I will never find my way out of this nightmare, never find my way out of this darkness, never find the place where I feel safe and warm and content—a contentment that invades my being and settles itself deep, down deep in my bones.

Just when I think I am lost forever, cocooned alive in an icy blanket of mist and despair, I reach the top of the hill. The mist remains at my back, like a hound, nipping at my heels, but ahead the horizon is clear, the skies an enameled cobalt.

A cobalt so smooth, so beautiful it seems to beckon me.

“Come. Come closer. Lose yourself in my vastness, in the potential, the promise of what could be. All you have to do is . . .”

I feel a presence behind me and I know I am not alone on this hill. Not anymore.

“Do you trust me?” says a deep, masculine voice.

I turn around, but the mist is too thick. I can’t see his face, can’t determine if the voice is that of friend or foe. Though, I feel my hope and strength returning.

“Do you trust me?” he says again.

I do. I do trust him. I trust him in the way a babe instinctively trusts their mother.

“I trust you.”

“Then leap, Tara. Leap and I promise I will be waiting for you when you land.”