Milo and the Dragon Cross by Robert Jesten Upton

Author:Robert Jesten Upton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction. Good and evil, Magic-fiction
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Published: 2018-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

13

The Seen and Unseen

The forest ran on and on. There were no breaks in the canopy once Milo and Bori penetrated its depths, and the forest floor lay in gloom. The road, its bed filled in with leaf litter, was only discernable from any other part of the forest floor by a relative absence of trees, leaving an open path to walk along.

Milo’s spirits had not improved from the low point of watching Einter’s cart fade out of sight. Homesick, lonely, and frightened, he dreaded the arrival of night and tried not to think about what unknowns might be afoot with full darkness.

“I like night time,” Bori offered when they stopped and Milo buried himself into his cloak and a nest of leaves. “I’ll stand watch.” Bori hadn’t followed his usual habit of slipping away for a hunt as he usually did come nightfall. “I can see just fine, and hear and smell. I’ll let you know if there’s anything out there you need to know about.”

Somehow, this assurance hardly helped Milo’s mood. If there was something out there, what could one cat—even a fairly large one like Bori—do about it? Knowing something was out there would be no better than being afraid that there might be.

“Why did I come here,” Milo whined, fighting back tears and having second thoughts about facing the forest alone. The choice he’d made by daylight, out in the open under the bright sun and blue sky, seemed to be foolish bravado now that he was alone in the dark.

“You came to look for help,” Bori reminded him. “And you’re just worried now because it’s dark. There’s no difference between day and night except you can’t see in the dark. A human limitation. Try thinking of yourself as a cat. I can see just fine. Night? Day? Same threat. Think how you felt while it was daytime. You were confident enough then.”

“No. I wasn’t.”

“Okay, so you weren’t. But that wasn’t because of your surroundings. It was because of how you felt inside. Either way, I’m here and you aren’t by yourself.”

Milo patted him. It made him feel better, and Bori’s purr was worth more than Milo could say. “Come on,” he told the cat. “Crawl under the cloak and let’s get some sleep.”

Milo didn’t remember when he went to sleep, but he knew when he woke up, so he knew that he had slept, finally, after listening to what had seemed like hours and hours of sounds out in the darkness. He knew that it was morning, or nearly so, even though it was still as dark as it had been, because the sounds he heard now were of birds twittering and making dawn talk up in the treetops. Bori was snoring. He did that. Milo lay still, trying to sort out the dream he’d been having just before he woke up. He remembered the feeling of swaying. He had been in the oak tree. He also remembered parts of a long conversation. He remembered asking the oak, “I don’t know what to ask.

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