Cold obsidian
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They didn’t hurry. Vlada had accounted for everything. They had to make their last camp by the very border of the White Region because camping beyond that point was not possible.
As the day drew on, Kangassk started to notice the first signs of the vision disturbance: a white leaf here, a white patch of grass there. The further Vlada and he went into the forest, the more uncanny white spots they saw and the bigger these spots became.
“It reminds me of snow,” said Vlada with a careless smile. She even stopped her charga to take a better look at the ancient oak crowned with white gloom. “An oak silvered by snow! Very poetic.” She turned her face to Kan. “Alas, things are going to get real ugly, real soon… Let’s camp here. And since we have some extra time on our hands, how about a little swordplay? I promised to teach you, remember?”
The lesson was long… It reminded Kangassk of his training with an old Wanderer who had stopped in Aren-Castell once and spared some time for a certain boy-freak too persistent to ignore, too useless to take as an apprentice…
Vlada was way more gentle with Kangassk than that Wanderer, old Osaro, had been. She still smacked him with her wooden sword whenever he failed to dodge or parry but did her best not to hurt him too much. Kan wasn’t even sore by the end of the lesson yet that experience was enough to prove once again that him surviving back then, in the fight with the caravan raiders, was pure luck. Every gentle nudge, every careful smack of Vlada’s wooden sword would have been fatal if they fought for real and he missed dozens of them.
Later, when they were washing the dust and sweat off their faces by the icy cold stream, Kangassk tried to crack a joke.
“I feel like a little green tomato now,” he said. “Someone tuck me into a felt boot and put me out of sight until I cease being a greenie!”
To his surprise, Vlada laughed, giving him that wonderful silver laughter again, the one he had always enjoyed so much.
“Do tomatoes grow in Kuldagan?” she asked.
“Suuuure,” Kan drawled, nostalgic. “With so much sun, everything can grow there if you just shelter it properly and give it enough water. Once I didn’t and the sun fried my tomatoes. Then I became so protective of my little indoor garden that my tomatoes often turned out green. Evergreen. That’s where an old felt boot came handy…”
They kept sharing silly memories and making jokes all the way back to the camp, all bitterness between them erased, everything made well once again. The chargas who had been guarding the camp in their absence went hunting as soon as they had returned, leaving the humans alone with the cold cauldron and unlit bonfire. Kangassk waved his dragonlighter above the dry firewood and kindled a fire without accidents this time. Having been warmed up by swordplay, chilled by the icy cold water, then warmed up again by the fire felt amazing.
The darkness of the young evening thickened around the little camp with a fiery heart where wayfarer soup quietly bubbled in the cauldron and two tired but happy people enjoyed their rest. Kangassk stretched on his woollen cloak beside the fire and asked Vlada to “entertain the tired warrior with a story”. He made his voice sound so overly hoarse and solemn to imitate a classic fairy tale hero that it earned him another moment of Vlada's laughter.
"Oh which story does your noble heart desire, my lord?" she played along.
"Tell me the tale of the White Region, my lady," he replied with all proper dignity.
"There is no tale, only dull scientific reports." Vlada shrugged. Her voice was her own, casual again. Obviously, their make-believe game was over. "You read the summary of them yourself, as I recall. Do you have questions?"
"Yes. You said no one goes there? Really? No one at all?"
"Nowadays, no one at all. Many explorers lost their lives there. The Region was marked as impassable and then almost forgotten. There is nothing valuable in the white gloom. Why risk your life for nothing?"
"Why didn't the explorers return? What killed them?"
"Most likely, falling from a great height did. White Region is as full of holes as ripe cheese. Nobody knows where the holes end or whether they end at all. The further you go the thicker the white gloom becomes. It's dead easy to fall into one of those holes when you can't see anything. Mapping the holes is impossible because they shift from time to time as the anomaly in the centre pulses."
"Well, I hope you have a really good plan on your mind because otherwise going there looks like a suicide."
"Of course."
"Maybe you'll even tell me about it, huh?" Kangassk felt very, very uneasy again.
Vlada took the little cauldron off the fire, placed it on the ground between her and Kangassk and handed him a spoon.
"We have the chargas with us, Kan," she explained, "that's why we'll be perfectly safe in the white gloom. I'll tell you a bit about them so you'd understand. Chargas are sentient creatures with a culture of their own. We didn't buy them for our journey, we hired them. They promised to keep us safe but as soon as we reach our destination they will go back to Border, to their human foster father. As to the white gloom, chargas don't see it the same way we do. They can still feel the effect of the anomaly but it doesn't blind them. So this is the plan: the chargas will carry us through the white gloom. They may even scare most of the sylphs away."
"Ugh, sylphs…" Kangassk shivered, bonfire and hot soup notwithstanding. “I read a lot of things about sylphs, none of them good. At least they’re herbivores… right?”
“Yes, adult sylphs are,” Vlada nodded, “but they still need a host to lay their eggs into so their carnivorous larvae would have food and shelter. Stay in the white gloom for too long and… you get the idea. That’s why you should never camp close to their territory. You wouldn’t die, of course, but being a sylph host,” she raised her hand in a meaningful gesture, “would be quite unpleasant.”
“So that’s true…” Kangassk shook his head.
Suddenly, as if by magic, the camp didn’t seem so nice and cosy anymore, imagination filled the darkness beyond the oaks with all kinds of horrors. With chargas still being away hunting the scenery looked even more threatening. No wonder Kan had such trouble to fall asleep that night. It was windless and therefore so quiet that he could hear every acorn the oaks dropped as it bumped noisily into the leaves on its way to the ground. Some animal howled in the distance? Here you go: falling asleep is cancelled again.