Chapter Text
"Chapter Two: The Smoke In The Wide, Bright Sky"
It was their first motel, and Tessa was already smoking.
Bellamy caught her in the bathroom when he got back from the ice machine, the tiny box of a window on the wall open and her trails of smoke pouring out of it.
"Couldn't go out the front for that?" he asked from the bathroom door.
Tessa shrugged and took another inhale. "Smoking's smoking. Plus it's not like we want to be seen right now."
"Our glamours should hold so long as no one goes looking at us too hard."
Tessa just stared out the window as her smoke trailed into the sky.
Why does it feel like we're on the run when we're just trying to find out the truth? Tessa wrote in her journal that night. We've only been gone for a few days but I keep thinking someone will recognize us, call someone, and suddenly whoever it is we're looking for will hop out of the hearth and get us like he got our mom back then.
As she wrote, they had left just a few days before the smoking incident.
"We can't tell anyone, right?" Tessa had confirmed with Bellamy.
"Gone," he had said. "Like thieves. Like ash in the wind. They'll never even know until it's too late to stop us."
Then they were off. Tessa had a van she'd been fixing up in her spare time, a yellow camper van that looked orange in some lights, and naturally it was that which they took off in. Bellamy tried to put a glamour on it too, but it was harder to keep the illusion over an inorganic bucket of metal than a person, for whatever reason, so they mostly made do with spray-painting it on their way out of town.
By the time they left, it was covered with graffiti'ed trees, smiley faces, bears, birds, and all kinds of symbols Tessa would never have put on it from her residence at Prospero Hall. So long as they drove carefully, they had no reason to expect it would be an issue.
The journey to Blackwood Forest from Fort Merchant took Tessa and Bellamy over the Foothills and across the Hinterlands, down most of the major highway network connecting the two and through many of the backroads too. On a normal day, it would've only taken about 6 hours or so, but even they couldn't resist the occasional stop at the Piermont Plank or similar attractions while they were in the area, and they were still figuring out where exactly they were headed in the first place.
At a diner in Creedley, they pored over a few of the letters they had found in their father's secret lockbox in his treasure room, and that was around when they got their first clue.
"He only really mentions Blackwood Forest," Bellamy said, pointing to some of the mysterious letter-writer's passages on the paper. "But I think we can pinpoint where exactly in Blackwood Forest it is from the context clues he gives."
"How?" Tessa asked, taking a bite of scrambled eggs. Naturally, the eggs were drowned in ketchup and hot sauce and were more red than fluffy yellow, which suited the fire elementalist's need to suffer just to make herself feel alive completely perfectly.
"Well," Bellamy started, "like in this one, he mentions having found what he thought was the body of one of 'his town''s missing people in the river, and describes the river as being 'not too wide, but not too thin either', almost like you could easily hop across it. That tells us two things: that whoever this is is living near a town where people go missing an awful lot, and that there's a thin river nearby that might be well-known enough to be a notable geographic feature. Wouldn't you say it's almost like a creek?"
Tessa shrugged, her fork hovering.
"Have you ever heard of Wicker Creek?" Bellamy asked.
Tessa's stare was expectant, her eyebrows raised in question.
"Well, it's a town in the southwest." Bellamy placed down a map of Inglenook's Blackwood Forest region, showing the bulk of the towns in Maynard County, which extended through much of the area. In one section, near the central-right-middle portion ofnthe map, was a town and nearby creek labelled "Wicker Creek". "See? Right here. Near Wicker Creek, a river by the same name. I don't really know anything about it, but I asked the person at the front desk when we got to our motel, and they said that pretty much nothing happens there...except these disappearances."
"Right," Tessa said, downing a massive swallow of syrupy soda from a frosted blue cup.
"The Wicker Witches — that's their local team of Royal Protectors — don't do much about them, and most people from out of town think it's just a story the people there are concocting to bring in tourists and the like," Bellamy said. "But it makes sense. Remember the letter we found? He said there was something evil in the woods, and that the people who visit that area all disappear. Just like Wicker Creek."
"I mean, it's something, I guess," Tessa said, her cup sat back down on the table.
"Exactly," Bellamy replied. "We can head there and get something started. An investigation, at least. If our letter-writer doesn't turn up, then at least maybe we can figure out why these people keep disappearing so much."
They stayed the night in Creedley. While there wasn't much there besides agricultural equipment, strip malls, Silvani restaurants, convention centers, and countless office buildings and doctor's offices and law firms and so on, there were a few other things they wanted to tend to while they were there, and by the time it was over, they were content with just watching their motel room's aetheric projector set for a few hours before drifting off to sleep on their separate beds.
They next day, they headed out, as though they had never been to the town that served as the largest city in Linden County, although, surprisingly, not its seat. Tessa's van carried them off down the highways, away from the rising sun, and toward the sprawling ash, lime, elm, and alder tree forests that comprised the Blackwood Forest region as a whole.