Up and Down
As much as she had fallen in love with the city, Cordelia was still only herself in the wilderness just outside its walls. Seahaven had been many things for her, foremost, a chance to reinvent her identity. To be more cool and confident. To express more leisurely thoughts.
On some level, though, it was driving her crazy. She had never realized how important to her it was to work from dawn till dusk. She wandered the streets with maddening repetition, scraping together enough money to get by but somehow professionally unsatisfied.
In the woods, though, everything changed. She felt as she did when she was a little girl, picking through fruits and mushrooms, skipping over streams with confidence. It was almost like a mobile meditation. She was plunged back into the comfortable position of a woman alone with her thoughts, and not at all pressured into sharing them, into being witty and sophisticated and insightful.
In the city she felt driven to shake her roots and prove that she was a talented, thoughtful individual. And she loved the challenge of it. But something about her visits to the Western forests and fields and swamps was soothing and healthful. A dose of reality in the middle of the bullshit and the airs of self-confidence.
It was always disrupted when she ran into a demon.
She’d seen them before, on the farm… they’d get into the chicken coop and everyone would wake up in the middle of the night. Once a terrifying, infected bat, easily two feet in wingspan, had found its way into the house. But they’d always been able to trap and defeat them, thanks to the safety of numbers.
Now she was confronted with what might have been a raccoon, if not for the Darkness. She heard it growling before she saw it, the gleam of its eyes and yellow, snaggled teeth in the fading evening light.
There was a tense moment where she didn’t know what to do, and they stared at eachother, feeling one another out. Finally, Cordelia feinted left and bolted, her long legs carrying her swiftly and efficiently, though she was unused to sprinting all-out. Branches and twigs assaulted her, but she kept up her pace until she found Seahaven’s walls again.
And yet, come the next evening, she knew she was going to be venturing out beyond the safe walls again. She couldn’t avoid it, danger or none.
