58 – No Regrets

Jonny tried for five minutes or so to get Igrette to wake up, but nothing worked. Nothing he was willing to do anyway. He didn’t want to risk jostling her too much and worsening her wound, which didn’t entirely make sense, considering he had just carried her up a mountain. He knew that every step he had taken was worse than nudging her shoulder a little bit, but now that he had gotten this far, he was terrified of messing something up. What if he pushed her just the wrong way and it reopened the wound? What if he tried to shock her awake with snow or ice, and it lowered her body temperature too far and she couldn’t survive anymore? What if he tried shouting, and only scared the hawks and made them attack?

In the end, he gave up on everything else, and just sat beside her, leaning against the wall and started talking. The hawks watched him warily, but as he went on and on, they began to relax too, and the one in the nest even fell asleep.

“You’re gonna be so surprised when you wake up,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “I bet nobody even knows this place exists. All the other circles were destroyed, but not this one. Did you know that the carved word things are supposed to glow? And there’s supposed to be carvings on the ground too, and there’s supposed to be a ceiling. Do you think the other ones had ceilings too, or just the ones in caves?

“I kinda wanna go looking around for more now. I know there are nerds who’d pay a lot of money to see this kinda thing. Well, there were, back on Earth. I bet there are probably some here too. Archologists or whatever. We could probably sell the location for a lot of money.”

He looked over at the still-awake cloud hawk.

“Or maybe not. Not until the eggs hatch, at least. Tourist nerds probably won’t be good for the baby.

“It kinda makes you wonder, though. Why did they make all these places? And why does the mana get denser here anyway? What do all the carvings mean? There are some on the ceiling and floor that look kinda like pictures. Really weird pictures, like Picasso, but if Picasso was an autistic caveman.

“I guess you don’t know who Picasso is. Not gonna lie, I don’t really know who he is either. I know he’s, like, a painter, and he’s famous for making really weird-looking paintings. Famous on Earth, I mean. And weird as in everything was just in the wrong spot. He’d draw people but the nose would be on the side of the head and the eyes would be different sizes and the colors would just be wrong. I always thought it kinda looked like shit, but he was really famous, and his paintings were really expensive, so maybe I’m just too dumb to get it. I was always more of a comic book art kinda guy anyway.”

He pointed up at one of the carvings on the ceiling. The hawk followed his finger up to the same painting, then looked back at him in confusion.

“I’m pretty sure that one right there is supposed to be a man and a woman,” he said. “And they’re holding hands? Or maybe fighting? I can’t tell. The hands are really poorly drawn. And then that one there looks kinda like a bird. You think that’s supposed to be you, Mr. Cloud Hawk?”

The cloud hawk didn’t respond. Jonny didn’t even know if it was a “Mr.” but sitting on the nest seemed like a female cloud hawk thing, so he had dubbed the one on the ground to be the male. It looked a little bigger too, and it kind of gave off “bro” vibes, if that made any sense.

“I can’t really tell what the other ones are,” said Jonny. “That one might be mountains, and the one there is the forest? Or maybe a bunch of arrows? Pretty sure that one right there is a snake, and then that one might be a goat, and that one’s a wolf, and there’s a bear… Hey, that’s a buncha stuff from this mountain. Except the people, I guess, but maybe there used to be some here way back then.”

He looked down at the carvings on the ground, but he was sitting so low it was hard to make out what they were, and he was too exhausted to get up and walk around to see what they were. He ran his fingers along some of the carved text below him, and his head drooped lower and lower. Then, with a start, he jolted back awake, looking back at Igrette in a panic.

She was still alive. Still breathing. Her mana was moving near the wound in her side, just as it had before. Maybe a little stronger than before, now that her body had a steady supply of mana, but that could also have just been him imagining things.

Fuck, that was close.

He had resolved to himself that he wouldn’t fall asleep until Igrette either started doing better, or fully died. The last thing he wanted was to nod off only to wake up later and find that Igrette had died while he slept. Not to mention that he didn’t trust the hawks completely. Two defenseless humans inside their very home were very different from two humans hunting in the woods.

“Back on Earth, I actually had a pretty good collection of art,” he said, talking to make sure his mind stayed active. “I mean, pretty good compared to the average person. My manager said I should start investing in it. Helped with taxes. I paid for some absolute dogshit that I donated away, but sometimes, the painters were actually really good, and I ended up keeping the paintings instead.

“I was a real big fan of landscape paintings. I dunno why. It’s just nice to sit down sometimes and look at a really nice landscape. I did a lot of trail runs for conditioning too, now that I think about it. Coach said fresh air was good for me, and I never really liked the treadmills, so I went along with it, but I think I actually enjoyed it. Well, the middle part, at least, when I got to stop at the top of the mountain and take a look at everything. The runs there and back were a little less fun…

“I’ve never been out in mountains like this before. I mean, even if I ignore all the magic and shit—I mean stuff—I’ve never been this deep, or seen this much snow. I mean, if you told me a few years ago that the snow would be piled so high in some places that I could literally camp inside it, I would called bullshhhhh… I woulda called you a liar.

“I’ve had a buncha meats I never thought I’d have too. I never thought wolf meat would taste so good. Woulda been better if we had some salt and stuff, but hey. I can’t really complain. I know I should feel a little weirder about eating wolves when they’re so close to dogs, but I guess when everything’s trying to kill you, it’s all fair game for food too.” He looked up at the hawks. “Which means you guys are safe… For now…”

He stretched out his legs, groaning slightly as he did, then turned toward Igrette. He watched the slight rise and fall of her chest for a few seconds before sighing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever talked this much before,” he said. “My voice is gonna go hoarse if I keep this up. I don’t even know what I’m saying. I just don’t wanna fall asleep, and I figure if I keep talking, you’ll eventually hear some of it. Maybe.”

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He sighed again, then looked back up at the ceiling.

“I really don’t want you to die. I mean, I know that’s kinda obvious, but I just realized I don’t know if I ever said it. I–”

He stopped himself, trying to think of how to word what he wanted to say. Nothing really came to mind, but he didn’t want to let the topic drop, so he switched to something else so he could try to pinpoint it.

“You asked about my past a few times before, but I don’t think I ever told you about my grandma,” he said. “I mean, I know I mentioned her a few times, but I don’t think I actually told you about her. I think you two woulda got along great. You kinda remind me of her, even though you aren’t really anything alike. She was actually much more similar to Helen than you. But you get along great with Helen, so you’d probably get along great with my grandma too.

“My grandma even had a criminal past too.” Jonny smiled. “When she was seven, she stole some candy from a local shop. When her dad found out, he got so mad he spanked her, then dragged her back to the shop and made her apologize to the owner. She was so traumatized she never even thought about doing it again. That was always one of her favorite stories to tell, for some reason.

“Grandma was pretty awesome. I thought I hated her a couple times, ‘cause she’d yell at me to clean my room, and sometimes scold me for not doing me homework, and that one time I skipped class, she tossed me over her leg and whooped me so bad my butt was red for days. I didn’t even know she could do that. She was smaller than Helen and didn’t have any magic to make herself stronger, and I was a pretty athletic kid.

“But she took good care of me. She didn’t have a whole lot of money, but she was good with it, and she had a nice job that helped pay the bills. She was really good at cooking too. I liked her beef stew so much that she even put the recipe in her will for me. She was always looking out for me, and she got me a membership to the gym where I met Coach, and even if I didn’t like it, the discipline was good for me. And then when she died…”