The Bird and the Wyrm-Chapter 48: Rain & Sky

Bran waited until he could no longer feel Misha’s presence before heading out into the rain. It was cold and his clothes were wet but hugged his arms to his body and kept going,

He knew he wasn’t quite right, not quite all there, but there wasn’t enough of him working for him to tell exactly what was wrong. All he could parse in his fuzzy little brain at the moment was that Misha was important and what Misha wanted was what he should want too.

After a few metres, Bran stopped under a tree and closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, and with his breath, he let his consciousness drift out among the roots and hyphae of the forest.

This was an old forest, a very old forest, and its denizens were rather cultured and took this mental interruption with grace and with hardly any surprise. They were used to monks and the like wandering their territory and probing that which could not be seen.

Can I eat you? Bran asked a mushroom.

Okay, that wasn’t quite what the forest was expecting.

Misha said he needs food, so I need to help him find food, explained Bran.

The forest knew that name to be the name of the dragon who had flown off not too long ago. Apparently it was coming back. Not a good omen.

So the forest consulted with itself on the best course of action. It wasn’t so much that dragons were ill omens, far from it, but more that this particular mountain range had eight mountains, eight ’dragons’ of its own, and the addition of a ninth had caused much tragedy many years ago.

Some of the forest elected to eject both the human asking about food and the dragon when it inevitably returned, while others thought all this about omens was all hogswash and thought they would be silly not to welcome their visitors.

Bran stood and waited as the disparate voices of the forest argued to and fro then decided to continue walking.

Every few metres he stopped for a moment and queried the bits of mushroom and fungi he came across. After a while, he stopped and turned, a fruitful bounty in his arms.

Now all he had to do was just get back to the pagoda and...

Bran stared at the trees, then turned and looked in a different direction.

Had he come from that way, or that way...?

--

My plan to get back to the flat was simple: fly.

If I had a pen, or something to write with, and clothes, I would have opted to trying to draw an invisibility spell on myself and just walking back as just another human in the crowd, but I didn’t have either. Why the invisibility though? Well, I didn’t want that boy and that librarian to get me or you, now did I? I wasn’t sure how they’d tracked us down, but I was pretty sure it had something to do with that bell I’d found in the Wishing Box.

While I was flying away with you after escaping, I thought that bell may have been a threat, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an actual method for the kid to find us. And I’d been stupid enough to touch it.

But not all was lost. The fact that neither of them immediately pursued us meant neither could fly, or at least, couldn’t fly at short notice, and the delay between me touching the bell in the box and them turning up, meant that the spell had limitations, whatever it was. Based on my brief experience in the area, I guessed that it functioned like a paintball that formed some kind of trail, but I also knew from studying your old notebooks that to have a spell like that continue working over a large distance or for a long time span was really energy intensive so it was likely it had already worn off by the time I made it to the mountains, especially since I only touched the bell for an instant.

My main worry was that they’d be watching the flat in case we returned, so I decided to not fly back directly, but instead flew north a bit more over the mountain range, then flew eastward out to sea. From what I could recall of the flight maps I’d looked at before coming to Hong Kong, the flight lanes for the airport were a figure eight with one circle on Lantau Island and the other angled upward north-east-ish. If I flew west out to sea, I’d almost definitely get spotted by some plane, but if I went east, like how I was, I could lower that chance. At least that was the hope.

As for why I was going out to sea, since I didn’t have any way to make myself invisible, I decided that the best way would be to create my own cover. If I could make it rain and thunder, why couldn’t I make it fog up as well? And if I didn’t want to make it seem too obvious that that’s what I was doing (like if I made it all foggy right where the flat is) then I’d have to make the fog appear seemingly naturally then waft inland.

It took longer, but it at least made me feel safer and all I can say was I was feeling pretty stressed out right then. I’d gotten so used to doing things with you, following your instructions and so on, that to suddenly have to figure out what on earth I was doing all on my own was incredibly daunting.

But also rather thrilling.

I still kept up rather high in the sky as I drifted in with the fog over Kowloon and had it not been for my perfect sense of direction, I would have probably gotten lost in the whiteness as well. For a moment I worried I might end up causing some traffic accidents but I pushed that thought away. As long as I got quickly into the flat without those two finding out, I was good.

When I was right above the estate I slowly started my descent. I’d never paid much attention to how tall the building was so I needed to be careful or else I’d end up as a splattered dragon on the roof. Speaking of the roof, I saw an old woman collecting up her laundry. She seemed to be muttering about something and I wondered if she was annoyed that the fog had made her laundry go all wet.

Not wanting to deal with a confrontation with an old woman over laundry, I sped up my descent and squirreled myself down the central, well-like hole in the middle of the building. I think this thing was supposed to be a light well, but all it ended up doing was make the sound from every household backing on it bounce up and down endlessly. It would have normally been annoying but I found myself grateful for it since it meant no one came looking to see what all the noise was when I ran into a few air-conditioning units. The things have gotten so big in recent years.

Anyway, to my surprise, other than two aircon casualties, my trip back to the flat was completely void of any complication and I was able to slip back through the broken glass window in your bedroom without much trouble. The shards of glass were sharp and would have cut me were it not for my scales so I decided to delay my transformation back for the meantime.

Because of the window, my fog had filled the flat as well so I let it my mental grip on it slacken, letting the white wisps go up and away as they wanted, leaving a rather soggy world behind. I hadn’t thought of that.

The door to the bedroom was, thankfully, still open so I stuck my head out to have a look.

Our pursuers were not there, of course, but I was a little surprised to find that there was no police cordon set up or even the least bit sign that someone had noticed something was up. Then I spotted the front door. It was intact.

For a moment I thought that maybe I’d hallucinated the whole thing, maybe there hadn’t been two intruders but then I saw the broken window behind me and remembered that I’d left you stuck on top of a mountain, so it all had to be real. Breathing in too much mist might be bad for my brain.

I padded over to the front door, careful to not step in any stealthy trap or spell those two had left behind, and had a closer look at the wood. Like the first time I’d seen it back when the Walled City was still a thing, the surface of the wood was incrusted with dozens of glimmering stars. I concluded that maybe self-reconstruction had been another function your aunt that installed on the door. Maybe I’d ask her about it later, once I found her.

Alright, enough procrastinating, I told myself and transformed back into a human.

Clothes were the first priority, both for me right now and for you since I wasn’t sure how long we’d be out in the wild. We’d gone out a few times to buy some clothes to replenish the supply of them, so I just grabbed a whole stack of shirts from the underbed drawers.

I was stuffing all them as well as two heavier jackets into the usual big backpack when I suddenly heard something.

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