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Rated: 18+ · Book · Sci-fi · #1127434
Chapter 3 in a sci-fi novel in progress. rough.
Chapter 3:

It had been months. We fought our way through the end of drifts that surrounded the greater terrain and forests around my village. We waded in thigh deep snow flats in the early weeks of summer. I had never heard of them. I almost died there. We spent weeks lost. We made our way down and out of the mountains into the lowland. They were woody and considerably warmer with food and water and life and I could see the sky ships more now.
It had been eighteen or twenty days since I had seen the first of them. It was evening. We were trudging through the drifts when a water ship of some sort went floating across the sky above us. It was there very close above us for a few moments then away. It left a trail of light behind it, it was large and it was frightening but more than that it was warm. It was the first sensation of warmth we had felt in many cold weeks. I later remembered seeing banding patterns of light, similar to those of the ship. I had seen them on several nights a few weeks before that first blessedly warm blast.
It was a reality crippling realization. Realities come and go, id recently learned, and my mind never really seemed to mesh too deeply into any of them anymore. it was cold again quickly and we were still lost. I decided to follow the trail of light. It was the first trail of any kind id seen in some time. Referencing the direction it had pointed to a large outcropping of rock a ways in the distance we began slowly following the future.
A pleasant thing happened about our path over the next few weeks, smell returned, with flowing water. As the land warmed around us and the air became thicker with water I began to smell and feel the world around me. It is perhaps because I had worked to dull this sensation for so much of our long walk. The smell of the drifts had been simply the smell of clean as it only really exists and that is as cold. Of late the world smelled dirty. I smelled dirt. I smelled fungi, water, flowers and decay and each was genuinely welcomed. I suppose I smelled my faithful little friend but that was something other. It was no longer something present but only something that is not absent. It was a smell to be checked on a list somewhere in the mind and never really presented for a signature. It was to the point that its absence would have been more of a smell then its actual aroma. More important was that I had begun somewhere on my journey to find seven different ways to express one single thought. This was perhaps because my girl couldnt talk. the pup turned out to be a she. She had grown a bit but the way had been difficult and she was probably a bit smaller then she might have been. She had big feet though and heartfelt affection and that was enough for me.
And so on we went the three and the four legged, as was one of the many ways I had come up with to express us, following the lights by night and their memory by day. In truth I was very grateful for her. For all my bravado I was very frightened of the ships and huddling beneath a tree underneath a warm bath of shining lights from the base of a ship that flies through the skies is best not done alone. And I was spending more time of late huddling because we were getting close. There were more ships. The scattered in all directions but soon were intersecting in only one.
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