27. Love and Hope

CASCADE

CHAPTER 27

Somehow, Entin had led them true. It had taken them what felt like an eternity to dig themselves out of the suffocating ash, but when they had, the Wolves were gone. The Slumbering God had taken them with it. Once a vibrant tapestry, the landscape was now a desolate gray wasteland. It went on and on like that for what seemed like an eternity. They'd nearly given up, their spirits crushed under the weight of the endless gray, when, at last, the ash began to lessen and color gradually returned to the landscape, until they finally found themselves free of the gloom.

"If you don't stop staring at it, you might go blind," Cascade warned.

But he meant it playfully. Entin continued to gaze into the sphere but then reluctantly put it back into his leather satchel.

"Sorry, I just wish the God had told me what I'm meant to do with it," he said.

His tone was filled with frustration. Entin had seldom spoken since they'd exhumed themselves from their ashen tomb. When the four hadn't been trekking through the doom of ash and shadow, he'd usually sat and stared into the enigmatic artifact in silence. Somehow, the God had bestowed upon him a fragment of his own essence. The thing glowed with a faint, otherworldly light during the night, and Cascade felt a sense of both wonder and fear when he regarded it.

"He told you that you must find your own path. Perhaps the best thing to do is to trust here," Cascade said.

He placed his hand on Entin's chest, as his mother had done for him in her final moments. He hadn't mourned her loss, not yet, but he understood that even if she'd fled with them, they'd have all died anyway. The God had spared nothing. No tree was left standing. No deer left grazing. The streams and rivers had turned to mud. Mountainhome and everything within an enormous radius had been consumed. But they'd made it out of all that, and the ridge they sat atop now vantaged them to stare out over a vast ocean. Even the sky had cleared, though a haze of smoke still blotted out the fainter stars.

"I don't trust myself. Nothing I've done have I done on my own," Entin said.

"That's the point. You don't have to do it on your own. You have a tribe now. You have me and the others. And we'll find more. The God told you to love, Entin. And I will love you in return for the rest of my days. We will find others who are like us, and we will build something new. My mother told me that the spirit of Mountainhome lives within me. I believe the spirit of Summerhome lives in you. We can combine the best of what our people were, and we can build a new world out of the ashes of this one. I know we can. I've never believed in anything. But it's undeniable now that all of this happened for a reason. I thought I had to be something I never wanted to be. I was asleep until you woke me. You are the leader these people need. You have spoken to a god. You rescued us. You're the strongest person I've ever met. The world needs you to believe in yourself. I need you to believe."

"And what if I can't? What if I fail? What if I'm crazy, and this is all just dumb luck?"

Cascade withdrew the orb from the bag. He'd never asked to handle the thing himself. He'd been reluctant to even look at it at first. When Entin passed out in his lap within the skull, he'd slept for many hours. When he awoke, the orb had tumbled out of his hand and begun to illuminate the inside of the skull with a pale, rainbow glimmer.

It was doing the same thing now, only pulsing brighter and more rhythmically than it ever had when Entin held it. He lifted it in his open palm, mesmerized by its brilliance.

"It's speaking to you," Entin said.

"How do you know?" Cascade replied.

Entin shrugged. "I just do."

"Well then, what's it saying? All I see is the same glowing light it's shown us before…" Cascade began.

But then the orb flared even brighter, and a line of light shot from it. It was a thin beam, but it stretched endlessly out into the night, pointing north along the seashore. He spun the orb around in his hand, but the direction the light pointed stayed fixed. He turned his body this way and that, and still, the light maintained the direction it intended.

"It wants us to go that way," Entin said quietly.

"Are you sure?" Cascade asked uncertainly.

"Yes."

"Then we shall in the morning. I meant what I said, Entin. I love you. And I trust you. You need to become the leader you were meant to be, and I need to discover what I was meant to be too."

"And I love and trust you. I think I can learn to trust myself, too. But it will take time. Come, the others found a deer down by the river. We'll eat and tell them of our plans."

Entin rose and offered Cascade his hand. Cascade looked at the orb and then to Entin, and then he grasped his lover's hand and rose to join him. Their world may have been destroyed by ash and fire, but he had become convinced of love and hope. Faith had found him long after he'd abandoned it. He slipped the orb back into the satchel and set forth on a Journey unlike any he'd ever known.