Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 91
91
- out of the snow and back into the waking world, where pain and death were more than mere phantoms. Snow tumbled down his face and slid off his back. He was quite possibly colder than he had ever been in his entire life, but Kiana's lips were warm against his own, her touch soft and caring. It was a moment of quiet, a moment of respite and mercy before the horrors could come screaming back.
Their kiss ended, as all kisses eventually must, and she pulled away from him, gasping for air. They never broke eye contact in all that time, even as clumps of snow broke free of her shoulders and the frigid wind whipped through her hair.
"Andrew! Kiana!" Sarah knelt down beside them, absolutely frantic, trying to tend to both of them at once. "Are you all right?"
Kiana's hands immediately went to her stomach. "I... I think so," she said, bending forward slightly and folding her arms across her midsection.
"And you, Andrew? Andrew?"
Ander could not answer, because he could not hear. Perhaps it was just a trick of the stuttering torchlights, or a holdover from that empty world, but for a moment there he could have sworn...
"Andrew, are you hurt? Please answer me!"
...there was a massive handprint of blood smeared across Kiana's stomach, each finger tipped with a long, sharp claw...
"Andrew!"
Sarah shook him by the shoulder, and the last vestiges of his dream, or vision, or whatever it was, disappeared and he was back in the real world.
In many ways, it was far more horrific than the black, empty world of his dream.
There was snow everywhere. The feeble light of the few remaining torches reflected off the uneven piles as hundreds of golden crescents, weakly pulsating and flickering in the night. All he could see of the wall were the posts. They used to line up so neatly, but now they jutted haphazardly out of the snow like broken fangs, each one seemingly pointing in a different direction. Foxes ran back and forth among the confusion, yelling and shouting. Some of them had torches in their hands, making their shadows swoop around and around as they passed each other by, but most were just indistinct silhouettes, waving their arms.
He recognized one of the silhouettes as Nilia, bent over and digging frantically through the snow, her bearclaw necklace swinging back and forth. She suddenly plunged her whole arm into one of the drifts and ripped an entire Fox out by the hair like a living potato, spluttering and coughing. She took a moment to check if he was all right, and then, before he could even get a chance to regain his breath, she swooped him up into a massive bearhug, crushing him to her body so tightly that, even in this darkness, her muscles stood clearly defined.
"Nilii! Niliiii!" the poor Fox gasped for mercy, frantically tapping her on the back while his eyes bulged out of their sockets and his crossbow swung uselessly by its leather strap.
"Where's Father?" Kiana said, looking all around, squinting into the darkness. "Father!"
"Here I am... urgh..." He came stumbling out of the shadows, absolutely covered in snow. It stuck to his hair and clothes in a thin white layer. There was even a small pile of it sticking out of the bowl of his pipe.
"Father!" Kiana embraced him like a child, shivering in the cold. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah... just a little... winded, I guess," he said and kissed her on the cheek. "You?"
"I'm fine." She looked around, shielding her eyes from the wind. "I think... I think everyone is."
No, Kiana. Not everyone.
Underneath the shouts, underneath the roaring gale, underneath the shifting whisper of the snow, there was another sound; the sound of weeping.
Renna was still partially buried, but she wasn't making any attempts to dig herself out. She only sat there, weeping into her hands as the snow drifted against her back. Hezzi was there, on his hands and knees, talking to her and brushing the snow off her face, perhaps trying to get her to move, but she only shook her head, barely able to breathe through the sobs. And who could blame her? She just saw her own mother getting buried alive.
Buried alive...
Ander forced himself up on his feet and almost immediately fell over again. The numbness in his legs was bad, but the most disorienting thing was the way the world had tilted at an angle. It constantly felt like he was on the verge of falling over.
"Andrew, are you all right?" Sarah said, helping to steady him. "For the love of all the gods, speak to me!"
"No, Sarah! I'm not all right!"
"What are you - Where are you going? Andrew!"
Ander made for the jagged line of broken posts, realizing that it wasn't the world that had gone crooked, but the wall they were standing on. The snow on the other side must have pushed against it hard enough to shift it by a good twenty degrees, maybe more. If he hadn't built it with an outward curve to absorb most of the impact the whole thing might have fallen flat.
He finally reached the line, so much like a broken jaw filled with monstrous teeth, and looked over the side. The difference was... staggering.
On the valley's side of the wall it was utter chaos, filled with the hustle and bustle of Foxes and Wolves, digging through the snow, calling out to each other, double and triple checking to see if everyone was present and accounted for. But on the Cora's side of the wall, it was just... gone. All of it...
Where there once was a sharp drop-off into a rocky pass below, there was now only snow, barely three strides down. It almost looked like the entire wall had shrunk down to the size of a fence, but of course Ander knew that was only an illusion. It wasn't the wall that had shrunk, it was the pass that had filled up. There was absolutely no trace of the invading army. No Wolves, no weapons. No snarls or growls. It was completely empty, save for swirling eddies of snow and gusts of wind. It was as if everything had been erased in a single instant. It was just...
Empty.
Ander vaulted over the side and his legs promptly disappeared all the way up to his knees in the freshly powdered snow. He struggled on through, partly running and partly crawling, dragging himself along.
"Andrew!" Sarah called from somewhere behind. "Andrew, what are you doing!? It's not safe out there!"
She was right. There were still dozens of thin white streams flowing from the cliffs overhead, and huge chunks of snow and rock were still breaking off and slamming into the pass's brand new floor completely at random, but the thought of hundreds of Wolves beneath him spurred Ander on to keep moving. He had to.
A dead pine, most of its branches stripped clean, suddenly fell from the sky less than five strides ahead, kicking up a shower of snow, but Ander simply crawled his way around it, sniffing at the frigid air.
"Andrew! You're going to get yourself killed! Andrew!"
She was around here somewhere, wasn't she? When it... when it all came down? He remembered she was standing with her arms outstretched, looking straight up at the mountain of snow falling from the sky while everyone else came rushing past, either panicking or still trying to attack the wall. But how far was she? If only he had some kind of landmark to go off of, but all the boulders and rock formations he had grown accustomed to while building the wall were now buried under who knew how many feet of ice and snow!
Ander turned in a full circle, feeling completely and utterly trapped. The walls of the pass were folding in on him, slamming shut like the pages of a gigantic tome, pure black shadows on all sides, lined with rows upon rows of icicles, sharp as teeth.
His foot suddenly struck something beneath the powder, something solid, something that wasn't snow. He bent down and brushed the icy crust away, revealing a set of teeth, claws, and talons bound together by a long piece of twine.
It was Father's necklace.
Ander fell down to his knees and began to dig through the snow with his bare hands, shovelling it away as fast as he could. He stuck his face into the shallow hole and sniffed, but there was nothing, no scent at all. It was just snow and more snow!
"Damnit!" He shoved his hands back into the freezing cold and just kept on going, digging until his fingers started to tingle and burn. After a while, even that unpleasant sensation faded away and he couldn't feel his hands at all. He knew that couldn't be a good sign, but if it was already this bad up here, how much worse must it be down below? He plunged them back into the growing trench, scooping out armfuls of snow at a time, refusing to give up. "I can't let it end like this! Not like this! Not like this!" He took in a huge breath of freezing cold air - flakes of snow landed and melted upon his tongue like drops of burning poison - and bellowed into this grave of purest white: "Motheeeer!!"
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