02.
Dreams Realized
Two things were different from the dream that had startled Min awake the night before. The first was that, as she ran through the trees, Min was frantically looking about for an escape while the beast chasing her roared and bellowed in anger; in the distance, from far away, she heard her mother shouting, calling her to come back.
But there was a second, crucial difference between the dream and the waking world: Yasemin was a witch, a psychic with power beyond just the strength in her legs. She wasn't defenseless, and in spite of her panting breath and dripping body, she wasn't afraid.
Actually, she was terrified, but Min wasn't so frightened that she couldn't defend herself. Pressing a hand to one temple, she made an effort with a single thought and her vision took on a blue tint as the power of
aku
filled her head. A witch's magic was essentially limitless, but drawing in too much of it would leave her exhausted with a ringing headache, or worse--Min had learned not to use too much power all at once if she didn't want to be bedridden for the rest of the day.
She heard the beast roar again, saw him less than a stone's throw distant and closing fast. She spotted a large, flat rock covered with moss, opened her hand towards it, and made a sweeping motion at the bear. There was a pressure in her head, a slight discomfort that instantly vanished as the stone went airborne, crashing into the monster's muzzle.
The stone caught the animal in his jaw and the side of his head, rupturing the huge mass of tissue covering the left eye--the resulting mess of fluid, blood, pus and other nastiness was so foul that it almost turned her stomach. The bear roared in pain and anger; Min saw blood and yellowed teeth go flying.
For a moment the bear stopped chasing her, batting at the ruined side of his face with one paw, as though trying to hold it in pain. Min could sense the beast through her magic: she could
feel
it's hatred for her, a singular need for blood, to sink its teeth into her flesh and rip her apart--it was like staring into a black pit of nothingness.
Pressing one hand against her temple again to ease the uncomfortable pressure, she waved a hand from side to side across the bear's field of vision--the sun shining through the trees didn't get any brighter for her, but it blinded the beast, made it roar again and rub its head harder into the dirt to compensate for the pain.
She ran away from the hut and away from mother. If this was going to end the same way as her dream, only one of them had to die--she wouldn't put Erden at risk. As she ran, Min prayed a fervent prayer to Mylan, a prayer for salvation...or at least for a quick, painless death.
The trees were thinning out and she recognized where she was, saw the rise in the earth the same as in her dream. The bear was right behind her now, swinging his huge paws, pushing younger saplings over and tearing huge chunks out of the larger trees, never even slowing down. One side of its face was coated with pus, blood and dirt, but the remaining good eye was glaring at her, burning with hate, anger and worse: hunger. Min reached the little ravine she'd jumped over in her dream, but doing so meant death, and hardly a pleasant one at that. She didn't want to die. She didn't want to leave her mother alone.
With a scream, Min jumped into the gap and fell down to her side. The hard, packed dirt drove the breath from her lungs and something flashed red in her vision, but she was whole and alive. The tiny ravine was just deep and wide enough so that she could lie prone, but she wasn't out of danger yet. She heard the beast roar again as it began to slam his paws against the earth, scratching at it, reaching in with one paw and an impossibly-long arm, swinging its claws at her.
One of them was just long enough, and it scored a hit across her bare shoulder. Min cried out and rolled to her belly, pressing herself into the dirt and dust at the bottom, too terrified to look up. The ravine stretched ahead of her into the dark, so long she couldn't see the end of it; the open scar of the earth closed over a few feet away, and then it was all blackness. But blackness was better than the beast trying to murder her. Ignoring the pain in her shoulder, the fluid dripping down on her head--spit, blood, and goddess only knew what else--Min crawled for safety. The dirt scratched at her breasts, ground into her belly, dug into her thighs, but she grit her teeth and kept going.
Then, overhead, the bear broke off the attack. Min stopped moving, dared to look up--she saw the beast's head from below, muzzle so speckled with foam and blood that it seemed completely mad. Then he roared at something she couldn't see, and leapt to attack some new threat.
"No! Mother!" Knowing it was suicide, not caring, Min pushed to her feet and jumped for the edge of the hard earth. "Down here! I'm down here!" she cried as her heart pounded in her chest.
Min listened for her mother's scream but never heard it. Instead, it sounded like another animal had joined the fight--smaller than the bear, perhaps, but no less vicious. For all her trying, Min couldn't reach the top of the gap or spy out to see what fighting was happening.
There was a sound of pain, a loud cry--one of the animals was hurt. It was followed by heavy breathing, wheezing and pained and the bear's muffled horn of a cry, like the beast wasn't sure what was happening. There was a final call, a heavy crash as though a tree had tumbled to the earth...and then silence.
Min didn't know what was worse: the fighting, or the quiet after it. Had her mother been killed? Had the bear killed another creature in his bloodlust? "H-hello?" Min slid back to the floor of the little gulley, panting as if she'd been fighting herself. The sky looked especially blue and beautiful through the tree branches overhead; for a second, it felt like she was the only person in the whole world.
Then the sun went dark as a head appeared in the gap, staring down at her. For a split second she thought it was the bear and screamed, pushing against the far wall, but then it died in her throat: the head was more narrow, angular, with sharper ears. A wolf's head.
As she blinked through the glare, Min could see its features more clearly. The animal had grey fur, streaked with bits of brown across its eyes and ears. Its muzzle was darker, but then she realized that it was stained with blood. She'd been attacked by one wild animal just to be saved by another.
The wolf was watching her, holding perfectly still. It lay at the edge of the gap on its belly, dark eyes unblinking, as though waiting for her.
"Well..." Min swallowed, licked her lips. "What d-do you want?"
The animal tilted its head at her, giving a long look with shining gold eyes. Then it stood up and darted away.