Wensa led Allamu along the base of a low rise. To his eyes, the thick ferns and towering trees seemed just as thick here as along the upward slope she had guided him from. Yet, in following her, Allamu’s feet fell easily on an unhindered trail—perhaps a route opened by the movements of animals. Although their path never seemed to take them directly toward the stony spires, every time he caught sight of their jagged peaks through the foliage, they loomed larger. Like the fangs of some giant serpent poised to inject deadly venom into the open sky itself, something about the aspect of the spires of the Wicked Rocks spoke of merciless, inescapable death.
The sun had passed its zenith by the time Wensa stopped them at a split in the animal trace. As the trace diverged to the left and the right, a large clearing of sorts lay ahead. Approaching, Allamu and Wensa came upon a deep valley, like a bowl. The sparse trees clinging to the valley’s walls were shrunken and twisted like sailors’ knots—their smooth barks oozing fetid black ichor. The low cover of ferns showed a reddish cast to their fronds, and sported jagged edges to their stalks, more like thornbush than fern.
Creeping closer, Allamu saw the flat bottom of the bowl far below. These were the Wicked Rocks themselves. A field of jagged boulders twice the height of a man surrounded the base of the dizzyingly tall spires. Despite the absence of true trees, a sort of darkness clung to the maze of boulders, as though the Wicked Rocks shunned the very sunlight.
With his breath held in dread of the vista before him, Allamu could hear the distant echo of voices. They were too faint for him to make out the words or even the tongue spoken, but Allamu was certain there were people within those rocks.
He turned to Wensa. “Your family is right. It is mad for you to go where I go. You have shown me safely through the forest and I thank you.”
The islander took a moment to banish the fear from her eyes. “If you are truly mad enough to go in there, you will need the help of someone with better sense.”
Together, they made their way down the slope toward the shadow of the Wicked Rocks.
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Wayfarings of Sabit: Isle of the Wicked is copyright (c) 2016 by Michael S. Miller. All rights reserved. New chapters post every weekday. You can support this and other stories on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelsmiller