![]() ![]() Johan crumpled forward onto his hands and knees, walking stick clattering to one side as vomit painted the flower patch. Forget injury, by all rights he should be-Īll at once it hit him, and ice filled his veins. Impossibly, all of the pain he had been in was totally gone, and he seemed to be uninjured, despite falling what had to have been at least five stories. The brunet scrabbled at the ground beneath him, hands coming up with golden flower petals on them as he managed to lever himself into a sitting position.Īs one hand wrapped around the walking stick that had followed him down, Johan patted himself down with his other hand. He gasped for breath as he stared at the distant sky – what little of it he could make out through the hole in the roof of the cavern he'd apparently found himself in, anyway. All at once, though, as if a switch was flipped, his eyes flew wide open. He struggled to even form a coherent thought, much less track the passage of time. How long he drifted in the darkness, Johan couldn't have said. With shattered arms that couldn't have possibly moved, he reached out and grasped it, pulled it close, devoured it whole.Īs all went black, a red light flashed atop a bed of golden flowers. It was little more than a mote of golden dust, twinkling in his mind's eye, but…īut something deep inside him knew: he needed it. For a single, fleeting instant, as pain became his entire world, he thought he saw a spot of light. Abruptly, though, his back slammed into the ground. Scattered faces and half-recalled places swam in front of watery blue eyes, a cerebral scrapbook filled with two and a half decades of memories. If before Johan's heart had been in his throat, now it was firmly pressed against the bottom of his skullcap, while his stomach had decided to relocate to its summer home in the soles of his feet.īefore he could do more than let out a strangled shriek, he felt his back slam into something solid and prickly, before it gave way beneath him and he plummeted.Īs he fell, time seemed to slow. "Damn," he muttered under his breath, "scared the shit-"Īnd that, of course, was when the second gust hit, taking him cleanly off his feet and sending him tumbling backwards. Johan let out a sigh, heart still halfway up his esophagus and beating like a snare drum. After a handful of seconds, perhaps a dozen or so, the wind died down. One hand wrapped around his walking stick as he braced himself against the wind while the other came up to shield his face from the sudden gust. The sun was making its slow journey downwards, though by its position he'd surely have ample time to return before night fell.Īs he stretched out the kinks in his neck and back, the wind picked up sharply, blowing off his hood and pushing him off balance. Nonetheless, he pushed forward, leaning more and more on the sturdy stick he'd found near the trail's beginning as he hiked.Ībout half an hour later, Johan finally had to stop to catch his breath, planting his walking stick in the dirt and turning his bespectacled gaze to the horizon as he filled his lungs with life-giving oxygen (and presumably other assorted gasses, but he wasn't an atmospheric scientist). Ebbot's slopes quickly reminding him of just how out of shape he'd let himself get. 'Of course,' he mused as the winds tugged at his coat's hood, 'it does help that it's nice and cold.'Īfter pausing briefly to admire a particularly gnarled and towering oak, he continued on his way, the slight incline of Mt. ![]() Johan had never been a terribly outdoorsy type, but after nearly two years of quarantine, even a shut-in like him could appreciate the chance to take in nature again. A blustery fall wind swept through the maples and oaks of the Appalachian mountains as a lone man meandered his way through the forests.
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