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⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)
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Continuing from the introduction of Hybrid Shadows - The Non-Hybrid (link at bottom of section)
There was a split in the path the girl was following. Kendra slowed, wondering what she should do. She glanced up over her shoulder, toward where the colony ship should be, but instead just saw the roof of the forest.
"They cannot see me," Kendra said to herself. "Please tell me they aren’t following me."
Turning back to the fork in the path, Kendra approached it slowly. There was a deep rumbling filling the air, something that Kendra had never heard before. It was not the wind, the trees, the birds, or small animals. It was constant, and fascinating. She could feel the rumbling in the land about her. The path on the left seemed to angle downward, while the path on the right climbed upward into the hills by the mountain.
As she stood there undecided, it was as though the choice was made for her. Ahead of her, from the path on the left, came a deep, rhythmic thudding. A large, four-legged animal walked into view on the downward path. It was huge, its shoulder standing taller than Kendra herself, and the head of the animal ending in a magnificent set of antlers. It was furry, scruffy even, a deep purple hue to its fur. Including its head and antlers, the animal stood a full ten feet tall, and it nearly fifteen feet in length. It was an amazing, majestic beast.
The animal stopped in the path about a dozen feet from the young lady. It swiveled its massive head around to look directly at her. A huge hoof gently pawed at the dirt of the path.
Kendra hardly dared to breathe. This animal was awesome, in every meaning of the word. It was the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen. But it was more than its physical appearance that held her attention.
The animal glowed. There was a shining white aura all around it. And a soft whispering, a beautiful, friendly whispering, accompanied the glow. It came from the aura itself.
"What are you?" Kendra asked aloud. Feelings were flooding the girl now. It wasn't just something she could see, something she could hear. Kendra felt the animals presence. It was here with her now, watching her, seeing what she would do. And wave after wave of emotion, of feeling, came out of the beast and toward her. The emotion ran through her, and continued onward beyond.
"You are trying to communicate with me," Kendra said in realization. This was no mere beast. This majestic animal was intelligent, and it was trying to talk with her.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I cannot understand you. We don’t talk that way!"
The animal moved its ears forward, listening to her. It pawed at the ground several times with its hoof, kicking up a bit of dust. Another series of emotions ran through the girl. It was weird, Kendra could make out a pattern for the emotions, and her mind desperately tried to turn those patterns into sound. But she could not do it.
The beast then turned away, surprisingly fast for its size. It called out with a loud bark, and walked away from Kendra, down the path from which it had come.
Kendra stood for several moments, thinking. Was the animal telling her to stay away? Or was it saying to follow? Was there any real meaning at all, or was her mind was trying to construct something out of whole cloth?
Kendra kept a respectful distance from the animal ahead of her. The path narrowed, and the thickness of the underbrush made it almost impossible for to see it as it went around corners.
The rumbling ahead of her continued. It was not the beast, but whatever it was that the beast was walking toward.
She emerged from the path and the heavy underbrush into a clearing. Kendra’s breath was taken away, as she was suddenly bathed in the morning light. Before her was a lake at the base of a large waterfall. Here the rumbling was no longer deep and distant, but deafening! Water was streaming down from somewhere high overhead, falling hundreds of feet into the pool of water, maybe forty feet away. The rays of the rising sun were reflecting off of a huge mist where waterfall met lake, and Kendra was bathed in a many colored rainbow, the colors swirling around her on the path. She was suddenly aware of how drab she must have looked here, in her gray coveralls, amid the waterfall, the flashing colors of the sunlight, the lake, all of this amazing place. She felt out of place here, a plain human girl, an alien in a land of magic. There was the song of many birds, and the natural sounds of birds and water were so different than all of her experience on the colony ship, the experience of it dizzied her.
After a full minute of taking the sight in, Kendra looked around for the beast that had led her here. It was heading off to her left on the path, and was now about 30 feet away. She stood there, watching, and it turned to look at her. Again she was assaulted with the overwhelming sense of emotion, of feelings.
It made no sense, but... No, there was something in this, in the feelings washing over her. There was a pattern to them, something just beyond her, something just beyond reach. But she got the distinct feeling that it wanted her to follow.
It stood there, watching Kendra with strangely intelligent eyes. The feelings kept coming, rushing through her, over her, past her. She closed her eyes, and it felt like she was being carried on away, like she was going to be taken out of her body. She wanted to let herself go, to be taken away on the wind of those emotions. To be swept away.
The emotional assault stopped.
Opening her eyes, Kendra saw that the beast had turned again, and was moving along the path, tall ferns separating it from the water on one side, trees on the other. She started forward again, following it around the edge of the lake. They were heading up a gentle hill, a hill that started to ascend the cliff face, straight toward the waterfall.
Even with the massive size of the creature, the high ferns made it hard to keep it in view. *It doesn’t help that I am so short,* Kendra thought. But the path was clear, and the creature left a trail of trampled grass and ferns in its wake. It was not hard to follow. On she went, and started the rise up the hill along the side of the cliff. Here the size and the beauty of the falling water was amazing. As she got closer her clothes got soaked from the spray.
Up she went. She could no longer see the beast, and assumed it must have gone through, or behind, the waterfall to descend the path on the other side. This close to the water, it was hard for her to see through the mist. She put a hand to the cliff on her left to make sure she didn’t accidentally walk off the edge and tumble into the water below. As fun as that sounded, it was not her desire at this particular moment.
Closer, and now under the falls themselves, Kendra suddenly found that the cliff-face just fell away. She stumbled but caught herself, taking a few steps toward where the cliff should be. She found herself not on a narrow ledge, but in a large cave, a cave completely hidden by the falls raging just a few feet from where she was.
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