Vice and Virtue

Chapter - 10

It took awhile for my despair to turn into resolve but it certainly did. I wished it wasn’t too late and started to head back. Snow was on the roof gazing at the horizon and Renae was awake and was cooking in the kitchen. ‘I know that you’re still angry with me but at least listen to what I have to say, please’ she had her back turned towards as she carried on with her work. ‘Theo was at the expedition camp last night’ she stopped moving for a second but didn’t bother to reply or turn around. ‘But the reason I was so out of loop was’ it pained me to accept it but I know it for a fact. ‘Jason’s alive’ I blurted out in haste. She was definitely surprised or shocked for her grip loosened and the knife she was holding bounced off the ground. I clenched my fists and lowered my head as I spoke out these next few words ‘Jason is an enemy now. No strings attached’. She turned around, her eyes widened as her pupils dilated, she was in a state of confusion but it was all clear when she turned around and looked at me, didn’t take a breath but just stared at me. ‘What do you mean by Jason’s alive, Ryan and what do you mean by he’s an enemy?’ she was getting flustered but tried to hide it with the guise of curiosity. ‘Before I fell off the tree, I saw him beside Theo, helping him, supporting him. Of course, I didn’t want to believe it but I sensed hi aura too, Renae. It was him but not the one we knew before’. She took a minute to process it but quickly gathered her thoughts and replied me with a single line ‘The man’s just bought himself a nasty death’. We quickly wrapped things up in the village and got ready to set out back to our own business.

We left a note for Lauriel, just to let her know that we left and would not be back for a while again. I called for Snow, when we were ready to depart but she was too focused on the horizon that she didn’t respond to me. Renae stomped outside, looked at me as I’m just worthless and waved a huge chunk of meat while she called for Snow. Apparently, a gigantic mutated arctic wolf was still a sucker for treats like a pet dog. She leapt of the roof, landing right in front of Renae and nibbled on her snack. It felt like I should’ve seen this coming but I guess I deserved it. ‘We’ll be late for the meet up if you keep dwindling here, Ryan.’ She hopped on to Snow, ready to move out and I followed her lead and got on to Snow as well. Neither of us bothered to take a look back, since we already knew what was to happen now. The path back to the Capitol was laden with fallen trees and animal corpses. There was no shortage for the amount of unpleasantness that kept haunting us, since the birth of this new world, there wasn’t exactly a time for us to just sit back and relax for a bit. As I watched her frizzled hair catch the wind while she held her head high and proud, always looking straight ahead, I never knew that to strive hard for something and to actually achieve the will to make it a reality could be so painful.

Snow dropped us off at the end of the forest and disappeared into the woods again. We walked for the rest of the distance but neither of us spoke a word for the remainder of the distance. We found Nina quite effortlessly, all we had to do was when her dragon took to the air occasionally. She was asleep by the time we reached her, so we let her be. I looked around for a while, expecting something to pop out of the most random spots and choke me. Nina’s dragon flew back down with a green-horned stag in its claws and a charred wild hog and a few other little animals in her mouth. It left the  dead stag at my feet and the rest it kept for itself. I don’t know how it sensed my hunger, actually I think everyone’s hungry since we had been on the move while fending off our pursuers. I dragged the stag into our makeshift camp and stored it wrapped in a few of the big leaves I found near the camp. Since we had something to cook now, I went out to search for herbs or anything else to go with it. I was able to get a few root vegetables and some medicinal herbs but they’re just damp due to the rain and I couldn’t find anything to use as firewood either, everything was just too damn damp. Well I just walked back to the camp with what I had, thinking of ways to cook these. I didn’t know how to react to what was happening at the camp when I got back because Kai was back and he was skinning and prepping the stag to cook it and  he also had a few spices and salt with him that he used as a coating for the venison. I was more impressed by his level of preparedness than him actually showing up and carrying on with his work as if nothing happened between us. He was boiling some water in a mud pot beside him and the heat was produced from the breath of a little wyvern he entrapped within a steel cage. I was just stupefied by how much a man can come in handy, like who else could think of using an actual wyvern for cooking, except my pal Kai. ‘uhh, Kai? Are we okay now?’ I asked him in a sorry tone. ‘What do you  mean, boss’ he didn’t even pause to look at me just minded but just focused on the venison at hand. ‘Didn’t you leave back there when I walked off without listening to you guys?’. ‘No’ his reply was as confusing as himself. ‘What do you mean no?’. ‘I guess it means, NO?’. ‘Then why did you walk away?’. ‘I had to make sure that neither of the tribes acted in haste, complicating things’. ‘So… You’re not angry with me?’ I stuttered a bit to ask that but I just had to hear it from his mouth. ‘Angry for what?’ he hadn’t shown the slightest change in his expression at which point, I decided to follow his lead on the matter.