not all who wander are lost
Wayra doesn’t know a lot about the Chamber, but she has seen enough to understand that it is not like other places. It is not like the Field, it is not like the Meadow where she had grown up. It is another place entirely. It is a sovereign nation yes, but there is something more as well.
It has a heart that beats, and when Straia speaks, it is as if it had a voice as well. Wayra listened to Erebor, and for a single, fleeting instant her smile faltered. It was the same when he spoke. It was as if something as old as time stirred a little with every word from his lips. An involuntary shiver raced down her spine. She couldn’t be sure if it was his smile or his sense of otherness that caused it.
Wayra didn’t know a lot about most things, but she did know she had a rather fanciful imagination.
Her smile returned, stronger than before, for she was a little embarrassed to have gotten so carried away. He wasn’t the Chamber, he wasn’t Straia, he was just a boy, surely, about the same age as herself.
“Well, in that case, I’m Wayra.” She was going to continue, to ask his name, or make some benign comment on the weather when she heard hoof steps, and the sense of someone else approaching.
Where had he come from? Wayra was confused, and her expression immediately shifted from open and honest to guarded and thoughtful. She had been distracted by her company. Undoubtably, the young man had captured her attention, but surely she was not so distracted? These days she found she let her guard down very little. Her father’s happy little girl had grown watchful, perhaps a little wiser, for her travels.
But again, she was being foolish. It was just a man, a rather plain looking man. He nodded cheerily and Wayra’s expression shifted with him, back to a happy smile, made all the more determinedly happy because she had doubted him. She had thought him odd, for appearing so suddenly, when in reality she was just jumpy. A child in the woods. Wayra laughed in hardly at herself. However, his words caused her eyes to crease a little at the corners.
“Secrets? I’m sorry, I can’t imagine what you mean —” She never got to finish that sentence. A gust of wild, a gale really, stronger than she had ever felt before, knocked her backward. Wayra’s frantic brain had just enough time to register that it was him, the stallion, that caused it before she was falling. It felt like forever, though it all happened in the blink of an eye. Backwards she tumbled, and she prepared herself for the splintering of ice, and the fridge plunge beneath the water.
Yet it never came. The splash yes, and a chill that sunk deep to her bones, but there was no ice. She thrashed around in the lake, inhaling a big lungful of water in the process. Yet, it didn’t take long for her to find her feet, her panic spurring her on. Were they under attack? What had happened to the young man? Wayra splashed out of lake, bursting through the bushes like an avenging angel even as she shouted and coughed up water.
“What is wrong with you?! Attacking perfectly ordinary people you come across —” Again, she did not get an opportunity to finish her thought. The scene she emerged to was more and less dramatic than the one she had been forcibly exited from. The young man, the one she had been so worried for, seemed to be perfectly all right, and what’s more, seemed perfectly clam. More still, he was hovering above a large crack in the earth into which he should have come to considerable peril. He was questioning the stranger with a glittering, poised ferocity.
Feeling rather like a fool. Wayra rolled her eyes and gave a dramatic toss of the head, quite the display for the normally serene blue girl.
“Oh for heaven’s sake…” She muttered to herself, being sure to keep one eye on each stallion. She said nothing more, save for the drip, drip, drip of water and river grim that slouched off her soaked body. Certainly, there would be no end to the surprises that waited for her in the Chamber.