Vanja Follows the River

Outside of Secondary Camp - Mountains West of Jorung
34 Winter 217

After leaving Bax to sleep and recover, Vanja sets off into the sparse mountain woods. The trees here are stout, ancient things, roots twisting to find purchase in what little earth there is between the stone, branches bent permanently against the wind. The trees are so unlike those near Vanja’s home, where her family’s careful work ensured the pines grew straight. New growth, but hardy and tall, with strength meant for building. Still, there’s a familiarity, here, in the simplicity of the wild. One woodland is much like another.

Vanja is nominally hunting. Her shortbow held loosely in her hand, arrow nocked. She’s left her pack and axes back at camp, hoping to move more quietly. She’s good enough with the bow, but as she walks, she sees no sign of game. No scat. No small footprints in the snow.

As she walks, Vanja thinks back on what Bax said - his advice not to try to understand the River, and yet to somehow explore the branches and pools of new and deeper magic. It seems an impossible thing. To learn to navigate something so powerful. So boundless. When she had only channeled and redirected what had flowed to her, before.

She lets out a held breath, slings the bow across her back, and keeps walking. She has no destination in mind, but it feels good to be moving. To focus on her breathing. On the soft sound of her own footsteps.

For the first time in a grasp of days, without using riverlight to dull her emotions, Vanja is calm.

The wind is moving, now, just slightly, blowing in a low fog. Picking up snow from the ground and adding it into the air. Slowly, Vanja realizes she can see fewer trees. The distant mountains are gone altogether. Vanja stops walking, waiting for the white out to pass.

It doesn’t pass, though.

Vanja finds herself in a white space. She can feel the ground beneath her feet, still, and the air moving around her, in gentle swirls and eddys. Then, Vanja sees it - a thread of green light. The River.

The light grows brighter, stronger, and Vanja lets the riverlight flow over and around her. Through her. She’s aware, distantly, that her feet are no longer touching the ground. There is a brief thrill of fear, thrumming through her chest, but then that’s gone too, and there’s only the serene calm of the River.

Vanja blinks, expecting to find herself swept somewhere else, but there’s nothing but the white fog and the light of the River, rushing around her now, the light shifting and flickering, green and gold. Vanja is still. Floating.

Vanja takes a breath. Then another. What had Bax said, earlier, when he described his own new magic. That when he was between targets, in the nothing space of blackness and stars, he could only focus on one thing. “A single thought keeping you hitched to the world.”

Vanja closes her eyes.

I want to go back to camp.

The riverlight dissolves into the air. The fog clears, revealing the campfire, burning low, now, with no one tending it, and beyond the blurred edge of Sav’s magic shelter. Vanja feels the ground beneath her boots again, and suddenly her body feels too heavy for her feet. She falls back, sitting hard on snow-covered stone.

Vanja laughs, and climbs to her feet, brushing the snow off her leggings and out of her hair.

She’d done it.

Back to:

YMDT

Explorer

Vanja Follows the River