Free The Temple of Heart and Bone by S.K. Evren Page B

it.
     
    He continued crawling, and the sound
of the rattling became more clear. Other sounds came to him as well. There was
a breeze. He could hear it in what he thought was the dry shuffling of leaves.
His mind grasped on to that sound. He was near trees! Why was he near trees?
    He could hear his body dragging
along the ground, causing the occasional dry crackle. It sounded like… dead
leaves, fallen leaves. Something in his mind told him that more than a few days
had passed. He wasn’t sure how long and he couldn’t put it all together. The
one thing that seemed certain was that the more he moved, the more things came
back to him. He held on to that thought and kept crawling.
     
    He crawled until he eventually
struck something solid. Reaching out with his hands, he touched either side of
the object and felt around it. He couldn’t quite feel as well as he thought he
should, but he could discern ridges on the surface. Its size and shape
suggested the trunk of a tree. He tried to lift his head and managed to tilt it
back slightly with the aid of his hands. A hazy darkness hovered before him. He
thought that he could perceive a deeper darkness where his hands had found the
tree. It wasn’t much, he admitted to himself, but it was the first thing like
sight that had come to him.
     
    He pulled at the ground with a
renewed vigor. If he just pulled hard enough or far enough it would all come
back to him. He crawled on and listened to the rattle of his movements.
Occasionally, he’d hit a tree and lift his head to view the majesty of its
blur. He’d then work his way around it and continue.
     
    He had no idea of how far he’d
come or how long he had been crawling when he first noticed a scent in the air.
It was the scent of dirt. He could smell the soil through which he crawled! It
was a dark scent and somewhat moist. And there, he thought, wasn’t that the
scent of fallen leaves, dry and musty, mixed with the dirt?
    The scent of the soil tugged at a
memory somewhere deep in his mind, but he shuddered away from it. The memory
didn’t seem like a good one. He couldn’t focus on the memory anyway, as if it
didn’t want to be found. That bothered him for a moment, and then he let it go.
He soaked up the scents around him, sensing them constantly, which seemed
different. He knew that was somehow strange, but, like the memory, he let it
pass. He was doing too well to let worries slow him down. He had to keep going.
    He began to feel moisture in the
ground as he moved with his hands, and the difference between dirt and rock. He
could feel his fingers bite deep into the soil to gain purchase. Aside from
sight, his senses seemed to be clearing.
    Even his mind functioned more
clearly. He thought about what his senses were telling him, and they told him
that he had woken up in the forest. As he continued to crawl, however, he
realized that it had been some time since he’d struck a tree. He wasn’t sure
how much time, but he was certain it had been a while. The scent of dry leaves
and loam had faded. The ground no longer crackled at his passage.
    He was out of the forest. The
smell of grass grew around him as he crawled. He felt like he was moving
faster. Partly, he thought, it was due to his returning strength, but as he
focused on what he felt, he noticed that the ground was uneven beneath the
grass. There were little mounds or furrows that provided his hands something to
grasp and his feet something to push against. As he moved over the uneven
terrain, his mind put together the image of a long fallow field.
    He thought of a farm, and then of
honey. He’d been heading to the Ferns’ farm for honey! He had no idea which
field the Ferns had left fallow, but he reasoned that if he had left the forest
to find one of their fields, then the farm itself couldn’t be far.
    Lifting his head, he tried to
perceive where the farm buildings might be, but nothing stood out to him. He
lowered his head without his hands. His neck was