Roots - Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Remnants

Oates spurred the horse on faster, barreling through the murky ink of smoke surrounding Town. The wagon jostled back and forth violently upon the rocky hillocks of the forest. Trees passing by in a gray blur, the painted wagon rattled off into the smoldering remains of Town with a fervent feverish pace.
Sweat beaded Denrir’s brow as he watched the orange glow cascade his window. His teeth ground themselves flat and chiseled away as he surveyed the damage from his limited view. Glenn shifted uncomfortably in his seat, heart racing, and prayed for a good ending to their ride. The small stone on his necklace emblazoned with a hammer and leaf grew warm between his forefinger and thumb as he went.
Oates lashed at the horses again and again until they were sprinting a break-neck pace across the plains. They galloped over bridges and streams without slowing in the slightest, kicking up dust with their hooves in a miles-long trail. The mares’ nostrils flared and their ears slicked back over their wide eyes, lungs gasping and burning as their heart pounded in their chest cavity.
Oates’ pipe bobbed in his lips with every bound, he chewed the tip and paid no attention as his tobacco would soar into the air then plop back into his pipe repeatedly. The nearly decapitated top of his hat flipped back behind like a bad comb over atop his gray head.
“Do you think they’re okay?” Denrir muttered. “Muren said this would happen, we should have been here.”
Glenn shrugged and shifted again. “I can’t say. It’s obviously bandits, but why they would destroy more than they pillage makes no sense to me.”
“Who cares what jewelry or money they take! It’s the lives they may take I worry for.” Oates inserted. “I lived here long ago, but many of the folks that lives here I still know.”
The silence thickened again like a soup of despair until they all simmered in a tangible strain. They returned to their own forms of worry, whittling away at themselves like the rain eroding a statue. Cheeks were chewed and ears strained for the slightest of sounds as the outside world passed them by without a second glance; always watching and never caring. The sentient guardian trees breathed slowly as the small, insignificant wagon trolled about through their lands; rattling and making such an awful noise as they deadened the grass beneath their wheels.
The whole forest seemed to ease away from the town as the trio approached it, blinded by the smokescreen smeared across the place they called home.
“Alas, such a misfortune as I had never prepared for!” Oates cried out in anguish with a crack of his voice. “All the chillun’ and my ol’ neighbors! Gone, gone, gone..they always go. Always.” Oates’ voice grew raspy and rose several octaves. Alarmed, Glenn looked to Denrir for support.
“Oates, there’s nothing to—“
“Always.” He concluded and slammed the wagon to a halt, mares slackened in their reigns. The small window in which to speak through slowly slid shut. Suddenly the door flew open and there stood Oates, soaking wet and dripping; eyes deadened in their shallow sockets. His face resembled chalk and seemed to glow against the black smoke that billowed behind them, where the town lay.
“End of the road, boys.” He said in an emotionless tone, hollow and resonate like an empty hallway. Denrir and Glenn knew it was no use to argue with a man in Oates’ position, so they gathered their belongings and shuffled out into the dank cold. The darkness loomed in on them as soon as Oates and his wagon turned and left back the way they came without a word.
The all too common silence reached its fingers around their throats and constricted them, leaving them dazed and confused as all that had come to pass in the last minute fell on their shoulders with an immense weight. They trudged into the darkness ahead in silence, dead quiet as the town around them, and abandoned all hope that had been to light their way.