Her eyes softened a final time and she held Baker’s face. She looked into her eyes and whispered as if there were no rush in the world, “though they take it to the slaughter, the lamb still speaks,” she breathed, “a voice is as fragile and powerful as life itself. It speaks for you too.”
Khalid stepped to the back of the horse, Baker searching her eyes desperately as she ached to call out the woman’s name, to say hello and goodbye all at once. After a sharp clap, the horse bolted forward, Baker’s breath seizing up and her body locking into a panicked clutch as the animal launched into a full gallop down the field away from the mountains.
She saw Khalid watch her go as the horizon blurred behind her. Baker blinked hard as her breath tore raggedly out of her lungs. Her vision blurred only more. The mountains beyond the field became murky shapes. The definition of the peaks, snow, and great crevices melted together.
She was sick with the jostling of the horse. The rope that tied her in bit into her body with each powerful bound.
The mountains sank and seemed to implode. Their colors mixed and smeared. A wild crashing filled the air, and she saw the blurred mountains breaking down through the trees, snapping them like sticks. It was not her vision that made the world seem awry.
The world was awry. The mountains were melting.
Black waters of Madness burst through them, crashing through the rocks and dissolving them like acid through a thin fabric of reality. The mountains succumbed, barreling down on them all, breaking over the hills and spilling over the trees with thunderous weight. They swallowed everything with a roar that erupted across the sky. Khalid watched Baker still as the torrent embraced her in a violent flash. Baker felt her head soar with disbelief and horror. The torrent burst into the valley like a swirling earthquake.
It was coming after her next, encroaching in a rush after her horse.
She held her breath in a panic, praying the animal would run faster. The rush of gray, green, and brown water chased with a bellowing echo, swallowing everything in its wake. The wave built and grew. The closer it got, the larger she realized it was. With the bulk of a building several levels high, it barreled forward. Baker was convinced that she would be swallowed.
A form suddenly raced past her in a flash, a rider moving in the opposite direction. The white horse he rode halted and reared, the man, dressed in black, slammed an extended hand with black tipped fingers out toward the wave.
The torrent of melted mountain broke against an invisible wall, splashing high into the sky with so much force that it cast a shadow across the valley with an ear splitting boom. A blast of wind billowed over them, sending violent gusts over the valley, and skinning the trees in either direction, a sign that they were protected not just from the wave, but the forces of it.
As if in a tank, the melted mountains sloshed with gargantuan echoes against the horizon, casting massive, undulating shadows that hypnotized with the breadth of their movement.
The man closed his hand into a fist as his horse jostled restlessly under him. The mountains solidified again and now something strange remained, a massive rectangular rock that seemed to stretch almost endlessly into the sky and fan out like a hand of its own. A moment later, pebbles rained down around them, pattering like rain as Baker’s horse passed the Strike that had caused the mountains to melt and then the animalslowed against all reason until it stood among other horses that remained somehow just as calm.
“It looks like the ROSE delivered a gift,” someone remarked.
“He’s going to pay for that,” someone else said. “There could have been a potential Strike in that group. Who was their leader again?”
“Vladimir, Smith, Khalid, and Hilde,” a woman replied.
The first man cursed. “It’s not a good sign that Peter just appeared. It takes a lot more work to fix something like this than it takes to break it.”
“Yun,” the woman scolded.
“He was reckless. Breaking down the mountain? Peter is going to kill him.”
The chatter quieted as the sound of slow hooves approached, rejoining the rest. Baker closed her eyes as the new horseman stopped right next to her. She could feel his eyes and so she kept her head turned away from him, her face buried under her hair. Once again, she was nothing but a rock, for the silence that the rider on the white horse carried with him was not like hers. This was not a silence that hid. It was a silence that consumed words.
She remained frozen as she was peeled from the horse, wanting to disappear all over again. Heart still racing, she was put in a nearby wagon with other crowded bodies, clutching her head in her hands as she listened to the noises outside.
Baker rolled through Valentine’s stories, trying to remember what he’d ever said about the Strike, trying to remember everything the ROSE had told her about them. The wagon jerked on, and though she could not remember Valentine’s stories, she did remember Von’s.
†††
No one spoke, and people barely looked at each other, almost as if the Strike were in there with them. The rest of their journey continued with the loose obscurity of a dream that she could only drift through without any feelings but a pervasive and quiet shock.
She would later overhear that in the events of the resistance between the ROSE and the Strike, she’d witnessed a turning point, the collapse of one of the ROSE’s three largest bases and the ruin of the King’s Mountains.
The moments beyond that point were a blur. When they were allowed to leave the wagon for the first time, Baker was relieved that the white horse was nowhere in site. With each stop to walk or take breaks after long hours, there were fewer Strike outside. When they returned back into the wagon to continue the journey on the second stop, she realized that there were fewer humans too.
This theme became so prevalent that Baker was eager for them to reach their destination, knowing they’d arrived when the wagon passed through a series of gates and tottered across a cobblestone street. Despite the passing of night and day, Baker still didn’t know how long she had been in that wagon. Time became irrelevant. She felt like a shell, watching her own body sit and act with little attachment to it. The small flameshe’d imagined inside herself only a few nights ago, was now a dampened coal, struggling for a semblance of warmth. Her world existed in pieces.
She saw people wandering outside in seeming normalcy. Their destination wasn’t frightening, not like she’d imagined. She soaked in the surrounding world when the wagon opened a final time and they were unloaded in front of a stone structure that rose on a hill in the middle of a walled city.
It was like a large rock with carved balconies and doors, jutting up ten floors and leaning back against the sky like an elongated neck. She heard one person whisper that it was the Bleeding Grin.
Baker had learned the name from Valentine’s musings. It was the home of the Strike, and the peak of their capital. She’d often imagined it, but it was never supposed to be a real place. She hoped somehow none of it was.
