Chapter 11: Away from home

Meanwhile, on the western coast of Anadora, seagulls flew dancing in looping patterns through a darkened sky that were not dictated by the pitiful flapping of their own wings but instead were twisted by the screaming wind. Simultaneously, the sea roared back with its own challenge up to the sky whilst releasing its own legions of white knights crashing against the cliffs guarding the land like a castle wall. Atop this mighty fortification, the fields, bare and clear from any trees, seemed to exhibit waves of their own as the long grass swayed in time with the gale.

Below the cliffs, surrounded by spray and crashing waves, was a small wooden jetty standing perilously close to their base and groaning with the stress it was being put under, seeming to constantly be mere moments from collapse. Beside it, a galleon was moored, and it strained against its ties that were about ready to give up in their struggle and allow the stricken vessel to crash against the rocks, never to rise above the waves that it was in a constant battle against, ever again.

Fortunately, this vessel was abandoned and left to the ocean's mercy as its prior occupants were now making their way up a thin path cut into the rock itself and clinging to a handrail bolted onto its side. Despite having this rail to brace against, these people found themselves crawling for fear of slipping down into the torrents below. They made plodding progress as trying to crawl with one hand, whilst using the other to hold cloaks close to their faces to block out the stinging spray, was no easy task.

Up above the cliffs, there was one last challenge for these people to overcome as several boulders blocked their path, and they made one last herculean effort to clear them. One of the first to climb above them was a brown-haired boy, not afforded the cover of a cloak, whose ears and tail flapped loosely in the wind.

However, this onslaught did not seem to affect him as much as the elders struggling along behind him because he took a moment to look back, ignoring the screeching winds assailing him, and cynically observed how much slower his peers seemed to be at conquering the cliff. The cold looked to have no effect on him either because, when a colleague took pity upon him and offered the boy a thick grey cloak, he slapped their hand away.

This child was not in the best of moods, forced to leave his homeland behind him and cross the great ocean depths to come to a land that he didn't know and where the people seemed weak, bothered by what he perceived as the lightest of storms. He would have left them then if he could have, diving from the cliff, transforming himself into a bird, an eagle perhaps, and flying away to salvation, a place that hid through a gate. This home of sorts, he assumed, lay across the waves, back where he thought that he had come from. However, he could find no certainty in this thought and doubted his ability to find a way back.

Even if he had felt the urge to return for the moment, at least that desire was beyond him. Not necessarily because of the storm, as he felt that he would still have a chance wrestling against its strength, but because of the five blue-cloaked humans that surrounded him, watching him and several others that they had brought with them with intense interest. Out of the humans that he had known, these were the most dangerous.

Unlike the others, they were not shy in the face of the storm and instead stood proudly, as he did, willing to test themselves against it and when around them, he felt that it became harder to reach within himself and warp his body. Out of all the things that had happened on the trip so far, being confronted by bandits or crossing the seas, this was what had given him the most fear.

What if he could never change himself again even after they were gone? What if he could never fly through the sky as majestic as an eagle or run through fields with the sheer speed of a cheetah; what if he could never again warp an arm into a blade or sprout wings straight from his back?

This was all too much to think about, and so he resolved not to bother. There was no need to contemplate an issue that he could not control. Instead, he would simply have to concentrate on escaping from those with the blue cloaks with strange abilities that were like his but simultaneously different. Not affording him the time to stand in thought, one of the blue-cloaks prodded him on the shoulder and, through exerting his authority alone, forced the boy to keep on moving.

Having cleared the walls, the group, excluding the boy who had not feared the climb up, felt relief at reaching solid ground, and they increased their pace following a lightly trodden path through the wildly flaying grass that reached their waists and almost came up to the boy's shoulders. With their speed increased and his peers having legs much longer than his own, he had to hurry to keep pace with them whilst conscious of the eyes of a blue-cloak boring into the back of his head.

Each of the blue-cloaks was individually doing this as they followed closely behind their own charges whilst their own faces were concealed behind the darkness of their hoods. The boy may have concluded that they were stronger than the rest, but he still thought them to be cowards for hiding themselves in this way. With the abyss there, from behind his own brightly flashing eyes, he could hardly make anything out past their noses, and something about this bothered him like a slight itch deep within his skull.

It made him want to cry out and tell them, 'You are nothing, you age, you shouldn't be wasting your time with me when it is so limited…' but clearly, they did not have a proper understanding of this. They all seemed to be far too fixated on taking the boy and the others they had captured back to the alpha they called a king.

These others that the blue-cloaks were bringing along with them all appeared like demi-humans, as the boy did, but they were all of varying ages and genders. However, the boy knew that they were not like him. It seemed that these blue-cloaks were again acting differently from the other humans in recognising that those they had captured were all from different species. Perhaps this is what they had intended to achieve from the start, to take a variety of creatures back to their king. Whatever their reasons were for this abduction, the group of captives all being from different species had made it more difficult for him to gain any degree of comfort from them. Instead, he had hardly spoken since the trip had begun.

He had to think way back to remember the last time that he had simply talked with someone beyond the bare necessities of a muted greeting and, as such, he had been alone, and he knew better than most what being alone meant. He had been apart from those who had raised him and those that he had once lived alongside for a long time now, a time that was made longer by his ability to remember every second of it passing; so it stretched out behind him like a thick chain pulling him back to where he had come from. However, this was not an option. It had not been an option for a long time, even before meeting the human blue-cloaks, and he lamented this loss.

Had he still been with them, had he not acted rashly in his past, then this whole journey would never have begun, and he would never have travelled so far as to gain the attention of those beyond the gate in the first place. Regret of this fashion was not something he was accustomed to, and he tried forcing himself to move on to other things as they reached the cover of trees and came to a stop to pitch a rather damp camp for the night.