#wisplight

It was too early yet to be awake, and yet no part of sleep appealed to her now, with the shadow of the nightmare lingering at the back of her mind. Branches stretching towards the sky. She shook off the memory and forced herself to move, quietly creeping about the cabin as she laid another log on the fire and then retreated to her worktable. On the top of it lay the slim brown tome, its weather eaten covers gray in the dim light. For long moments she stared at it, and then finally she lit the small lamp and sat at the bench, huddling back over the book and its ragged pages.

The narrow print of the book’s main text was difficult to read, elegant and archaic, a relic of some ages past perhaps, or maybe only designed to appear as such. Wolf wasn’t sure, but the story written out on the pages was clear enough and her fingers caressed the ink on the title page reverently. The Parables of the Wanderer. Wolf knew these stories, most of them anyroad, in one form or another. Stories recited to her by her grandfather, teachings she’d taken to heart. And yet, the stories themselves weren’t what was so interesting about the tome they’d brought back from Amdapor.

With a slow hand she bent back the book’s spine and flattened the water damaged page that had been jammed into the space between the title page and the first of the parables. The looping handwriting there was much more modern, easily legible despite the damage done to the faded page it was written on.

Nights are growing long, and it’s getting colder. Perith reckons it to be about the first sennight of the sixth astral moon, but it feels later than that to me. Her man has taken ill, and his breath rattles now. Some want to venture further into the city, to see if we can find supplies, but I cannot shake the feeling that all that lies below us is death. We need to keep searching for a way through the walls if we’re to escape this prison before something in here consumes us or we die of starvation. Already the rations grow thin, though we’ve supplemented as best we can.

The bottom of the page drew out into notes about the rationing of what foodstuffs were left, but Wolf didn’t have the heart to read it again. There were dozens of notes like this one scattered throughout the book, most written on paper clearly torn from other tomes, many pages only half decipherable amid the mildew and water damage. Even so, the story they told was clear. The tree people they had met and fought in Amdapor had once been Gridaninans just like her. They’d been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not innocent perhaps, but certainly not the types of criminals that would even end up in the least of the Gridanian gaols. Yet they’d ended up here, victims of whatever it was they’d witnessed. Trapped within Amdapor’s walls as they slowly declined into starvation, and transformation. The entries Wolf had picked apart dwindled into near illegible scrawl, as if the owner had tried to keep recording their story long after their limbs had grown incompatible with the process.

Wolf flipped through the stack of pages she’d gathered, adding this one to the place where she thought it most likely fell in the timeline. As the pages slid in between the others she noticed something, a scrawl on the page below it she’d overlooked. The passage itself was an early one. The author, whoever they’d been, hadn’t described what had landed them there in detail, only that the wailers had let them past, as if familiar with those that now ordered them to look aside as they cast the small group into the ruined city. Judge and executioners. The thought of it made the sour taste of rage rise in Wolf’s belly as she stared at the mark.

Why was it so damnably familiar?

The thought dug at her as she flipped through the book of stories, her fingers ruffling the pages as she searched for any other scraps that had gotten stuck between the damaged pages. A flash of linework caught her eyes and she stopped suddenly, backtracking to find the page that had flashed by.

There it was again. The same symbol. A circular pattern of lines that trailed up to resemble a lick of flame. Wolf ran a finger down the page, squinting in the lantern light to make out the name of the parable the symbol had been paired with.

The Parable of the Wisps in the Dark.

Wolf frowned thoughtfully, her hand rubbing at her mouth as she considered the text. The story was a simple one, even among the other parables that were held in the small book. Two men were on a journey, and became lost. One sought to go it alone down the dark path and met a tragic end, while the other followed the light of the Wanderer’s wisps, which led him to friends and comfort. The story and its simple moral was a tale she’d heard before, but what connection there was between it and the words scrawled on the scrap of paper she couldn’t fathom.