The Land of Broken Roads

Dirt woke several times during the night, sure he heard ghostly whispers. But each time, all was silent except for the wind, which blew in long, steady gusts. Sometimes someone shifted in their blankets, or Marina breathed loudly. At one point, Hèctor started making a terrible sound that took Dirt a moment to recognize as snoring, since he’d never heard it before. After only a moment, though, Dirt heard a smack and Hèctor rolled over and quit. One of the other two must have hit him.

Socks didn’t let him stay awake for long, though, and quickly dragged him back into their shared dreams. They walked on the clouds in an upside-down world, with the ground and buildings and hills and everything high above them; they had to hop from place to place to keep from falling into the blue abyss. They chased birds and peculiar little balls of colored light that danced and laughed any time one of them got close, and explored caves and castles of white that couldn’t be seen from the ground.

He woke with a wistful sort of weariness, regretting the dream was over and remembering the majesty of that inverted landscape, and not feeling like he’d gotten enough sleep. He lay there for a while waiting for Socks to wake up and wondered if it had been whispers that woke him up once or twice.

Did ghosts have anywhere else to go? He suspected these ones’ ability to affect the world had been greatly diminished, but what happened to them in general? Did the dead just hang around, waiting for a new body to be born in? The dryads said everyone only ever gets the same one and has to wait for it to reappear.

He thought about the purple smoke monster that had been waiting in the mausoleum for so long, the one Father had scared off. And the god, fallen from his pedestal and laying on the floor, twisted and tortured. Maybe the god was supposed to be helping the dead and couldn’t anymore, leaving them to wander. Thousands of years like that, possibly, with no shepherd to guide them to their next destination.

There was darkness in that thought. Guilt. Maybe Dirt had caused all this when he broke the world. Not only had he thrown down the entire empire, but also the gods and everything that depended on them. It left him melancholy, his mood bitter and gray like the low and roiling clouds that had rolled in overnight.

Until Socks woke up, that is. The pup woke with such a start that Dirt tumbled roughly to the ground when he leaped up to stand. ­-Sorry.-

“It’s okay. Good morning, Socks.”

The pup leaned down to sniff Dirt a couple times, then gave him one quick little lick and raised his head back up to look around warily. The pup seemed restless and when Dirt looked at his mind, he found fear and the memory of pain. Jaws from the earth. Terror.

-I sense the Devourer. We have been here too long. He is not here yet, but he will find us if we wait,- said Socks, timidly. Gone were the bravado and reckless curiosity. For once, the pup sounded like the soft little child he still was, when measured against his own kind.

Ignasi was nearby, just over by the fire poking around to see if there were still any warm coals. Hèctor and Marina were in the house by the table in the front room, where they’d pulled everything out of her pack to check it all.

“Good morning, you two,” said Ignasi, rising and spinning the stick he held. He had an open bottle of wine and took a little sip. He pointed the stick upward and said, “It looks like we’ll have to stay a while longer, noble Socks. The rain will be nasty, I am sure.”

Socks said, to everyone, -Dirt and I are leaving right now. If you want to come with us then you have to come right now, and you have to promise to hurry or we will leave you. I am only bringing you because Dirt wants to find the humans and we don’t know where they are.-

That was a surprise, but not much of one. Socks didn’t scare easily, and those scars on his stomach hadn’t come from anything they’d done together.

It didn’t seem like much of a surprise for Hèctor, somehow. To Dirt’s amazement, he stepped out of the house and said, “Understood. How long have we got to prepare?”

­-Put those things in the bag and we will leave right now.-

“You got it,” said Hèctor. He stepped inside and started throwing Marina’s things back into her backpack while she watched in confusion.

Ignasi said, “What’s the rush, exactly?” He moved slowly toward his pack and wistfully stoppered the wine.

Socks didn’t answer, instead raising his nose to smell the wind. His head turned every direction and he stepped from side to side, unable to keep still. Dirt put his little backpack on and sent Socks a mental puff of encouragement.

Marina finally asked, “Hèctor, what’s going on?”

“We’re leaving. You heard the wolf,” said Hèctor. He quickly made his way to his own pack, where he rolled his blanket back up and tied it on.

­-You are good at hurrying,- said Socks appreciatively.

“No, I feel it too,” said Hèctor. “We need to leave. There’s something on the wind I don’t like.”

Marina stepped out wearing her pack. “You and your feelings,” she said, sighing.

Ignasi unstoppered the wine, took a quick swig, stoppered it again, and shoved it in his pack. “Hèctor is, after all, a man known for his many feelings,” he sighed. “Just look at him. An emotional, feelings-driven man, our Hèctor.”

“Stay here, then,” muttered Hèctor.

“See? That is annoyance, which is a feeling,” said Ignasi. He tossed his pack on his back and adjusted the shoulder straps. Then he took out a small comb and began straightening his hair and beard. When Hèctor shot him a look, he said, “What? I’m ready to go. Why are you dawdling?”

The others were right behind, though. Marina was ready, and as soon as Hèctor got his pack straightened away, he was ready as well. Dirt used a little mana to jump up onto Socks’ back before the pup could pick him up and asked with his mind, “Are you going to carry them, too?”

-No. I am not a pack animal. And they don’t want me to, anyway. All three of them are thinking about it and hoping I don’t.-

“Oh.”

Leaving town was a strange experience. Dirt had started getting used to having buildings everywhere he looked, even though at first they’d been novel and unfamiliar. Perhaps he was merely adopting the atmosphere of it, but it was a human place and it made him feel more human. But now, the path before them held nothing but the wilds. Two rows of steadily shrinking mountains and empty plains beyond that. It felt meaningful to return to the wilderness somehow, like he was a different person out here. Maybe civilization was like the pants he had on—something he wore, but not really part of himself. He suddenly felt like taking them off, but the presence of the other humans kept them on.

No, he realized, the civilized person had been Avitus, when he’d lived in the Sunset Empire and been an old man. Dirt was the wild boy. The Sunset Empire was gone and so was Avitus. Maybe Dirt would stay Dirt forever and Avitus would never crawl out of the ruins he’d collapsed under.

Socks struggled the whole way. The terrain was flat and dry and would be until the rain came, but the pup strained to keep from going faster. The poor pup’s hackles wanted to rise and no amount of soothing from Dirt did any good.

The three humans kept up only with significant difficulty. Hèctor was the only of the three with the energy to keep looking back to see if his ominous feelings had presented a source yet, but all three of them panted and strained to walk at the quick speed Socks set. Just under the speed where they’d have to start jogging, since that would tire them out even faster. Frankly, Dirt was glad he wasn’t down there because walking that fast for so long had to be hard. The wind kept changing direction, too, and when it blew against them, they all slowed down.

After a hard-fought morning that left the poor humans enervated and hungry, and left Socks increasingly nervous and skittish, the clouds burst open and the rain hit them like a crashing wave. Gusts of wind blew so hard the rain almost fell sideways, freezing cold and sharp, and it only took Dirt until about the count of ten to decide he hated it. He’d been wondering what rain was like ever since Socks told him about it, but now that he saw it for himself, rain was no fun.

The ground turned muddy and it got much harder to walk. Marina was the first to give up—after falling for the second time, she slid out of the shoulder straps of her backpack and rolled onto her back, where she lay panting in a puddle.

Hèctor said, “We have to stop, Socks. Give us a few minutes.” He was careful to drop his pack on the grass instead of the mud, but after that he sat so hard it looked like falling.

-A few minutes,- said Socks, recognizing the impossibility of going any farther.

Even Ignasi was too winded to make any jokes, which showed it was serious. His face looked haggard and red, and the rainwater dripping out of his beard made him look colder than the others.

Dirt hopped down, landing with a splash in the mud, and was immediately annoyed at how the wet cloth stuck to his legs and restricted his movement. He looked at his pants in frustration, wondering if he really should just take them off. They wouldn’t just slide down, though—he’d have to peel them. And now that he thought about it, would that make him warmer, or colder? Either way, he was feeling somewhat miserable.

When he felt resentment start to build, however, he pushed it away. Socks wasn’t in a pleasant frame of mind either, and if both of them were in a bad mood at the same time, it might lead to conflict. That was unimaginable.

“Oh, Socks, can you try something?” Dirt said aloud, for everyone to hear. “Can you make a wall with your mind to keep the rain off while we rest? And maybe block the wind? I know you’re fine, but us humans don’t have any fur to keep the rain off.”

Socks was not, in fact, fine. He was as soaked as everyone else and being cold wasn’t helping his mood. His thoughts kept returning to his nice warm den, which was always dry, and had other pups to play with in it, and Mother and Father to feed him.

Dirt snapped his fingers and summoned his little ball of light, then another and another, until he had three like the other night. He inhaled more mana to feed them, making them grow bright, and smooshed them into each other to make one big one.

Then he closed his eyes and tried something new. He felt how the mana cycled inside him, always on the edges of his perception but no less real. Making the light had been instinctual for him, something so practiced for Avitus that Dirt could do it without knowing how. And now that he tried, the understanding didn’t come easily. There were no mental words like with wood shaping, no speaking to tell something to change. Just power, manifesting itself in an almost pure form.

Well, what he needed right now was heat, not light. If the lights got bright enough, they also got warm—he’d discovered that with the ghosts. He kept his eyes closed and pictured the magical blaze above him growing dim, like the soft red embers of yesterday’s fire. In a normal fire, flames were bright and yellow, but the dull, quiet red embers were much hotter.

He felt the heat on his skin, subtle as it was, and let that perception shape the magic instead of his eyesight. Dirt didn’t need eyes to use magic, since the trees didn’t either. He tried adding mana, and that made it a bit warmer, but so bright he could see it through his eyelids. So then he withdrew mana instead, imagining only the brightness losing its power, while the heat kept going.

That seemed to work. The mana slowed to a trickle, but the faint heat remained. Dirt placed his mind into his mana body as far as it would go, straining to sense the world the trees understood effortlessly, and drew more mana from it. It took a shocking amount of concentration to try and separate the magical perceptions of heat and light, but they were indeed different. They had different characteristics, different colors, which wanted to blend together and become one unless he forced them apart.

He carefully fed a trickle of mana into his work, filtering out everything except heat. Pure mana was uncountable things all at once, all of creation melded into pure white, but Dirt filtered it by concentrating with every inch of his body. The trickle of mana accumulated and gathered and Dirt felt heat growing on his skin, radiating at him like the sun on a warm day. He made it a little hotter, then a little hotter than that, until if he wasn’t soaking wet he’d be sweating.

Then, with a tired sigh, he stretched out his arms and stood with his legs apart and let himself start drying out. Only then did he open his eyes. A red ember, dim and hot, floated nearby, radiating all the heat he could want. It rained all around, but not on them; an arc-shaped soft wall of force stopped most of the wind and rain, which gathered in small pools and dripped off to the sides. Dirt had imagined Socks’ mental walls to be perfectly smooth, but apparently they weren’t.

Ignasi seemed relaxed and relieved, but Hèctor and Marina stared appreciatively, both at the shield above them and the hot little ember over Dirt’s head that was quickly warming up the area. Dirt summoned another one, almost losing his concentration in the process, and sent it hovering close to Socks. The look of relief on the pups’ face was all the thanks Dirt was offered, and it was all he needed.

Marina said, “One of the first things Home told me, I think you’ll find this funny. She said that Dirt was a human. She looked me right in the eyes, got all serious, and said, ‘Dirt is a human child, and not anything else. Do you understand?’ I guess she was watching through the staff the whole time, and it upset her that we weren’t sure.”

Dirt grinned slyly and said, “I am just a human… like Home is just a tree.”

Marina snorted in amusement and said, “You’re kinda short to make that comparison.”

“But he does produce sap, so that’s one similarity. Speaking of which, dear Dirt, do you mind? I am terrified to see the state of our travel rations right now,” said Ignasi.

“Oh. Yeah. I guess I’m hungry too. Home, would you mind making some sap for everyone?” said Dirt. He held the staff up. But instead of sap leaking out of the bark, a twig grew off the side, sprouting a couple small leaves and then the buds of small flowers. The buds grew into fist-sized globes of green and dropped their petals, then darkened to red and then to purplish black.

“What’s this?” he asked the staff, but home couldn’t reply.

“Berries,” said Marina. “The dryads asked me a lot about what humans ate.”

“I think I’ve seen these but I didn’t know you could eat them,” said Dirt.

“And to think, you had almost convinced us you were human,” said Ignasi. He plucked a fist-sized berry from the twig and took a shallow bite. “Am I still human? Or did I turn into a cat? Or turn purple like the berry?”

Dirt tossed one to Hèctor, who hadn’t moved, and Marina, then plucked one and almost took a bite. Instead, he turned and threw it to Socks, who snapped it out of the air and stood up, wagging his tail.

-I want some more. I want enough to taste them,- he said, sniffing eagerly.

“Sure. Home, can you make a bunch for Socks?” asked Dirt. The tree obliged and produced about thirty, in groups of eight or ten. Dirt threw them all in at once, and that was enough for Socks to mash them with his tongue and chew them and get a good taste. He could tell the pup liked it from how some of the tension in his muscles faded. Dirt reached up and patted his friends snout, right above the nose, and gave it a good scratch.

When it was Dirt’s turn to finally eat one, he found that a single berry filled him up and reenergized him in a way he hadn’t expected. He felt it from his wet, chilly toes to his slowly-drying hair. “Oh. Oh! She put mana in them! Home, next time I visit, you have to teach me how to make these.”

Marina held up her hands, which were red from the cold rain, and flexed her fingers. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

Hèctor stood and said, “Let’s go. I still feel it.”

A flash of light blinded them for an instant, followed in the same breath by an ear-splitting crack that hit them like a slap. Dirt screamed and ducked down, too shocked to react any other way. Socks and the humans jumped in startlement, but he quickly recognized they weren’t as scared as he was. He stood back up and shouted, “What was that?”

Hèctor started answering, but was interrupted by another flash of light, farther away, and another loud crack that was more of a rumble. “Just lightning.”

“Lightning?”

“Just lightning, boy. Haven’t you seen lightning before?” said Hèctor, trying not to act too impatient.

“No, never. Or rain. This is my first time,” said Dirt. “Is it dangerous?”

“Yes. Don’t go under any trees. It’ll kill you if it hits you.”

Dirt sighed, trying to calm his racing heart. Another flash, followed by another peal of thunder, kept that from working.

“We really need to get moving,” said Hèctor. “Right now.”

-Yes. It is him. He has found me. He is trying to slow me down while he comes.-