White Tree Sound by Lizzy Ford

Author:Lizzy Ford [Ford, Lizzy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lizzy Ford

I awaken when my feet grow cold. The gentle swish of water into the cave greets me.

I’m so tired of being cold.

My eyes open. The cave is starting to fill with water from the lake. My feet are immersed in water.

“Hey, Jared,” I mumble and sit up. He’s leaning against a rock, and I’m half seated, half lying on top of him.

He stirs. I climb to my feet and stretch. I didn’t sleep as well this night, probably because I couldn’t help worrying about what happens when we reach the Ring.

He stands.

Wordlessly, we wade out of the cave and to the rocky embankment beside the lake. The moons are on the eastern horizon, two ticks closer to eclipsing than when we fell asleep.

I grab the mouthwash waiting for me and gaze out over the lake. It’s calm and serene, a cool, pretty morning.

“Elf,” Jared says, an odd note in his voice.

I hand him the mouthwash.

“Elf.”

Turning, I gasp.

The twenty foot tall, three-headed monster is standing nearby, waiting for us. Two pacballs dangle in the air above them. Three very human faces are set atop scaly green necks. Each neck wears a placard.

“The Sicilian, The Spaniard, The Giant,” Jared reads the placards. “Does this make sense to you?”

“Yeah. They should be guarding the princess.”

“You shall not pass, unless you defeat us in one of three challenges,” the three voices say at the same time.

Jared appears perplexed.

I rub my face and eyes. This is stupid, another trial meant to distract me from the journey.

“What kind of challenges?” Jared asks the monster.

“You choose. Skill, strength, or strategy,” chants all three heads.

“Skill,” I respond.

“Strength,” Jared says at the same time.

We eye each other.

“Unless you woke up with a sword, we aren’t going to win with strength,” I tell him.

“Strength is straightforward. We don’t know what skill they’re talking about,” he counters.

“What skill?” I address the monster.

“We cannot tell you until you accept!” they chant.

“How about the third option?” Jared asks.

“We have a better chance of outsmarting them than we do overpowering them,” I reply.

“Assuming it’s something we can outsmart them at. What if it’s obscure trivia?” His face scrunches like it does when he says something he doesn’t understand.

“Does it matter? You don’t even know what trivia is,” I say.

He sighs. “Strategy,” he says to the monster, displeased.

“Come with us!” The monster turns and walks away.

Jared isn’t happy, and neither am I.

The monster leads us away from the lake, past the trees hedging it and towards a small structure rising eight feet tall, perpendicular to the ground. Red tokens are stacked on one side of the structure, black on the other.

“I know this one!” I exclaim.

“Mocha gremlin,” Jared says, attention completely elsewhere.

The gremlin and her coffee cart stand beside the mega-version of Connect Four. She’s smiling, and steam rises off the espresso machine.

Uncertainty, laced with fear, drift through me. “Does that mean this isn’t real?” I whisper.

“I don’t know.” Jared is as troubled as I am.

She’s making a jumbo-sized coffee for the monster, which accepts it and goes to the side of the game with black tokens.

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