Where the Wild Things Are

[wrecking_yard]

Something didn't feel right as soon as we'd passed under the sacred rope, and it settled into a distinct sense of dread when we hit the spider lilies. It was more reason to keep going, no matter how much Miu was going to sulk about me tracking her down like this. I'd followed her past that tunnel many times - the forest itself looked different and there'd never been out of season spider lilies before, or freak blizzards that disappeared as soon as you left the tunnel, or the weird horror fog.

I tried to kick the first rock monster that came close to Miu and I, which turned out to be a mistake - it hurt my foot and didn't even seem to knock the thing off balance. There were a lot of them and no time to think, so I grabbed Miu and ran.

The only thing in my head was getting her somewhere safe until I started to run out of breath and stumbled, compounded by Miu elbowing me in the ribs. I ended up half dropping her as she squirmed loose; she got her feet pretty fast, I ended up staggering to hands and knees as exhaustion from the sprint caught up.

We were somewhere in the woods, on a game trail. There was no fog, the sun was out, and there was no sign of the rock monsters. I wasn't sure how far we were from the shrine - I could make a pretty good distance before getting tired if I was pacing myself, but I wasn't sure how far I could manage on that kind of headlong dash.

It took a good half minute for Miu to get grumpy while I was catching my breath - longer than usual; she was rattled, too.

"Kaitooooo I have legs, you didn't need to carry me!" There isn't the energy behind it she usually puts into complaints.

I shifted to sitting on the ground; she had walked over to sit with her back to the nearest tree.

Nothing around us looked familiar to me at all, but Miu had wandered more of the local mountains than she was supposed to, and I know she knew them better than I did. "Miu? Have you seen this place before?"

She blinked and looked around, squinting hard at the trees and the trail. "Mmnnnnn..... Nope."

I pulled out my phone to check the GPS map; there was no signal whatsoever, even for that. Some of the plants looked familiar, but others didn't look like anything I had heard of, and I realized another reason to be on edge - everything was dead silent, no birds, no insects. My dagger was in easy reach on my belt, but I wasn't sure I knew of anything in our mountains that would cause things to go that quiet. There was a brass compass I'd gotten when we moved out here that I pulled out of my pocket; the needle spun one way, then the other, wobbling about erratically but never stopping. Had any of the odd mineral deposits in the area been something that would mess with a compass? It didn't seem right - it'd never acted like that in the mountains before.

I kept thinking of the scroll paintings in Baasan's house, the panel with the little girl coming out of the forest with a red spider lily in her hair.

"Kaito? Do you think we got spirited away?"

She was stifling excitement; I wished I could be surprised by that, but I'd found her going out to the shrine trying to yell for any Kemonogami that might be listening to take her to their world before. I would've liked to call it overactive imagination, but between nothing familiar, no signal, the compass not working, and the rock monsters especially ... all I could do was shrug.

"Do you think we can find kemonogami friends and go on adventures like Tomo?"

She was way too happy about the idea. "You know they also demanded sacrifices, right?" Even Baasan had mentioned those stories too, and the rock monsters did not seem to be looking for friends. I was watching the woods for any sign of anything that might explain the silence, and trying to tally what I had on me.

The compass, a pocket survival whistle with a fire starter, water purifier straw, and what small tools could be crammed in, my wallet, the folding pocket knife, the dagger, my phone, the bag of hi-chews I kept for her to steal... It was meant for making sure we didn't die while waiting for a search party, not getting lost like this and needing to survive indefinitely in unknown territory.

"Ugh, you're always so depressing." (Note: Word not translating well.)

"You didn't eat anything when you snuck out, did you?" I already knew the answer; I'd thought I'd gotten up before her to get breakfast ready and there was no sign she'd swiped anything from the kitchen. I hadn't gotten anything to eat either, since I'd left it to dash out and find her when I realized she was gone.

She makes a couple dodgy noises and shrugs.

"Right, let's see if we can find something to eat." Even if it was the bare minimum of foraging, because I only knew a handful of things in the forest around the village that were edible and had no idea how much of that she'd read up on. I had an ID app on my phone, but that was going to depend on how much of the local guide it stored offline - and if some of the weirder plants were even in that database.