squirrelwrangler:

Started writing the sequel to this.

He has found his parents. If he keeps repeating this, reminding himself that the time to fear is over, to calm his racing heart, wipe away this sweat that makes him shiver and cold, it will stop. Mother has knelt in the forest floor, knees crinkling and crushing the decaying leaves, and has opened her arms wide. She calls for him to run into her arms so she may devour him into a hug, her mouth split into a wide smile, the white of her teeth shining like a wisp-light in the darkness. Father leans beside her, neck bent oddly but his face smiling with relieved delight, eyes almost hidden by the creases in his face from the sharp grin. The boy wonders what has happened to his father’s bow, for his hands are empty. Neither parent is carrying their travel packs, and the boy wonders if they lost all the family supplies, if that is but one minor calamity to have happened when they became separated. He has never been separated from his parents, never for this long, and some disaster must have struck to have kept them apart for so long. The boy asks what had gone wrong, how they had become separated from another, why his parents had not heard him calling for them. He had been calling for a long time. Scrambling down an outcropping of rocks, hands skidding on the stone, scrapping away a layer of skin, the boy ignores the pain that blossoms in his palms to reach the lower incline where his parents wait for him. Pressing his injured hands to his side and ignoring the blood, the boy feels the sharper sting of irrational anger. He had called and searched and had panicked for so long because his parents had disappeared. That should not have happened, but it is now over, and his parents are here. And yet his heart is racing like a hare in one of his father’s clever snares. “Where were you?” he shouts again.

His mother does not answer the question, nor any flicker in her eyes show that she acknowledged it. “Come to me,” she calls, her voice low and sweet.

His mother never croons. She has a pretty singing voice, but when she speaks it is always loud and harsh like a jay, and Grandmother bemoaned that her middle child was fortunate to have found a spouse that could handle her thorny temperament. Father is like that, calm and soothing, but he is too quiet, has said nothing.

“Come here,” Mother pleads, as soft as there would be tears in her eyes. But there is none.

Her eyes…there is nothing.

“Come here,” the voice commands. This time the underlying sternness spoils the sweetness. The fingers of her outstretched hands twitch and curl inward like spider jaws. The boy does not run to her, pauses and shifts his weight back, presses against the rocks behind him. 

Something is wrong.

“Hurry to us,” his father says. “It is no longer safe here in the woods. We will take you to a safe place.” This is his father’s voice, and his father’s face, handsome and pale, his black hair grown long to swing around his ears but still recognizably him. And his father is wise, rightly praised by the rest of the Forsaken as clever and cautious. The boy was instructed by all his family that he should never doubt his father’s wisdom, that his sight was keener and clearer that his mother. The boy knew his grandparents believed his mother to be too reckless, but staying in one spot close to the shore would not find them Great-uncle Elu the missing king. But the boy wishes his grandparents were here, or uncles, even the long missing one. Because something is wrong. And his father has not called him as he normally does, has not said my son. My son, my son, said with such love, such joyous pride, as if there is no other name worthy of the boy, no other words that could contain such deep emotion.

“Come here,” his mother says.

The boy does not wish to disobey, wants nothing more than to run into his parents’ arms, feel the embrace of reunion squeeze away this panic in his chest, but his bloody hands stick to the rock at his back.

Something is very wrong.

Halloween Reblog