The Elementals

I wake up stiff and sore from running so much. Standing up, I look around for something to eat or drink, staying close to the others, remembering Terra’s complaints. After an hour, the sun has fully risen and my patience runs out.

“Alright!” I shout. I hear annoyed groans and murmurs. “C’mon people, get up. Rise and shine!”

Stella stretches, yawning, opening her mouth all the way like a cat. Terra gets up next, then Steel, and I have to walk over and shake Caelum. I turn to Coal but he’s already up, back to me. Sparky and Maple rub their eyes.

“Stella,” She turns to me. “You know healing plants right?” She nods. “Can you find some edible ones? Maple can help. Meet back here in no more than an hour.” Maple springs up at the sound of her name.

“Yes,” Stella replies in that careful way of hers. “Come, little one.” It’s almost medieval. Maple runs over and grabs Stella’s hand and they walk into the trees.

“Terra and Sparky,” I say. “Find some water and then report back to me so I can bring it over.”

They nod and Coal speaks up. “I’ll go with them.” Terra turns, surprised. Sparky claps, making mini-lightning bolts.

“Oh,” I say, trying not to let my disappointment show. “Alright then. You have an hour before we assume you fell in a ditch and broke your legs or something.” They walk off.

I turn to Caelum. He smiles. “Just you and me, huh, princess?”

I tell my beating heart to shut up. “Guess so.” I walk through the trees to the cliff edge. “Any idea how to get down?”

“Well I could just jump...”

“I mean for everybody.” I snap, my face red.

He smiles impertinently at me. “As I was saying, they could just jump and I could stop them from going splat.”

“I’m not sure telling them to jump off a cliff because some guy they barely know says he’ll save them is going to go over well.” I say.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No...” I trail off and pace the along the edge.

My foot hits a small stone and it clatters down the slope. The sound doesn’t stop echoing for a solid thirty seconds. I groan in frustration. There’s no way we’re going to be able to climb down it. I can just barely see the bottom, and it doesn’t drop into a river, like I had hoped. Caelum’s solution is the only one that I have. But I have a feeling Coal would choose staying up here than to trust Caelum. I stomp around angrily and then sit down, fed up. Caelum sits down next to me. I want to move away, get some space, but I don’t want to be unnecessarily cruel.

A few minutes later, Terra walks through the trees. Sparky follows and Coal brings up the rear. He stops just inside the line of trees. “We found a stream.” She tells me and I follow her.

“So,” I start, “I’m not sure how to get down the cliff,”

Terra thinks for a moment while Sparky yells something about flying off it. “I got nothing.” She says.

I wait for a response from Coal. I’m not surprised when he stays quiet, trailing behind, but I can’t say I wasn’t hoping. “Well,” I say, preparing for the reactions. “Caelum could change the gravity so we can jump off without killing ourselves.”

To my surprise, Terra nods slowly. “It could work,” she says, “assuming you don’t drop us.” She looks at Caelum.

He holds his hands up. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Coal continues to practice being a mime the entire rest of the way to the stream. When we finally reach it, I ball it all together into a blob. I hit a few trees on the way back, but the water just splashes around the trunks. We get to the campground and I curse myself. There’s nowhere to put the water.

“Here,” Terra says, noticing my problem.

She shifts her foot, concentrating, and then a hole appears in the middle of the earth, the dirt pushing away. I nod thanks, and dump the water into the makeshift well. By this time, Stella and Maple are back with tons of berries and leaves. I tell them the idea. They seem game. We eat and drink, then cover up any trace of our being here.

I start having doubts when I’m actually at the cliff. The thought of jumping off seems insane now.

“Alright,” Caelum says. “I’m going to go down there and make a force field sort of thing so when you drop into it, it’ll slow your fall.” With that, he takes a running leap off the rock. After a minute I hear an echoing “I’m okay” from below.

We all stand there, unwilling to go first. Finally, Terra steps forward. “Best to get it over with.” She says and gulping, jumps. Again, a minute passes before we hear her yelling.

“Come Maple, Sparky,” Stella says, “You will go next.” She too, jumps.

Sparky, I’m not sure the fear part of his brain is hardwired right, laughs manically and leaps off. After we get the assuring call, Maple looks at me and I nod encouragingly. She squeezes her eyes tight, and drops. I hear cheering and I breathe a quiet sigh of relief. I turn to Coal.

As I suspected, he backs up a step, shaking his head. “No way.” He says. Ignoring him, I grab his hand and yank him over.

“Yes.” I state, pulling him over to the cliff edge.

He frowns and steps away. “No-” Before he can say anything else, I ram into him and we both tumble off the cliff. Everything pauses for a second. It occurs to me that my arms are tangled into Coal’s, which is strange because my first thought should be that I’m in the air above a thousand foot drop. I think I need to re-organize my priorities. Then the ground starts to grow larger with increasingly terrifying speed and my heart jumps into my throat.

I’m just going to say, whoever those people are who enjoy skydiving and bungee jumping and all that stuff are crazy. There is nothing even remotely fun about falling to your death. Absolutely nothing. I twist and spin in the air wildly, buffeted by the wind. My eyes are streaming, and I’m pretty sure I’m screaming, but my voice is ripped away by the air rushing past. Then it feels like I’ve smashed through a layer of pillows and I hit the ground ever so gracefully on my back with a hard whump, and my eyes flash white for a second with the impact.

“Ow.” I moan. Pushing myself up, I blink my eyes, looking for Coal. He’s lying on the ground next to me, in the same bug-on-a-windshield position. He makes an annoyed groaning noise, mumbling out something incoherent, but it sounds like it contains about every swear word on the planet. “Get up you wimp,” I say and pull him to his feet.

“Are you okay?” Terra rushes up. “We didn’t land nearly as hard.”

“Is that so?” I turn to Caelum.

He glances down guiltily, frowning slightly, and looks away. “I didn’t expect you two to come down at the same time,” he mumbles. “You’re fine though, right?”

“Yep,” I say, though my body feels like it got tossed into a grinder. “Now let’s keep moving.”

We travel until nightfall again, Stella and Maple picking berries and things as we go. I don’t find any source of running water, but I collect the dew drops from the leaves. We stop at the base of the mountain. Terra makes the well thing in the ground again and I dump the water into in gratefully. It never ceases to fascinate me how the earth just crumbles away at her will.

I look at Coal. He grabs some sticks and lights them on fire with a flash and crackle, like fireworks. He’s looking at Caelum with a triumphant gleam in his eye, but I catch his attention and mouth, show off. He smiles a little bit. I take it. It’s the most I’ve gotten in three days. I sit down, enjoying the warmth. For once it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep.