Chapter 295: Mistake
Each time the earth shook, Irene had to whisper comforting words to sammy in hopes that he wouldn’t panic and knock things over in the house she was borrowing for warmth. She could see his eyes widen by the light of the fire and his body would tense up each time.
"It’s alright," she would utter to him. "It’ll be over in a sec."
So far, he had been a good horse who didn’t scare easily and that was important in such a journey as wha they were experiencing. However, it was jarring even for her because she had no explanation except that it was a persistent avalanche. Was that a possibility? Could snow persistently fall like that?
As she lay there, her sleep interrupted by the shaking of the ground, she quietly wondered if there was simply that much snow in the arctic north. It would have been useful for her father and grandmother to tell her as such before she went.
Eventually, she stood up and offered more brittle and old wood for the fire to eat up, but she was happy to not use her own supply while she was there. It felt like her family left behind the means to survive.
Instead of trying to force herself back to sleep, Irene found her notebooks and maps and went for the one that was about the very village she slept inside of.
She lazed in the bed until she had the map open. Only then did she sit upright with her eyebrows lowered in confusion.
"What...?" she muttered to herself. "This can’t be right?"
The village on the page was far different than the layout she recalled from the night before. There were probably only five buildings that she recalled picking out, but it wasn’t a detail she thought to pay attention to since supposedly this village was one of the only ones in this area.
However, she went back to the map that brought her this way in the first place, and she realized that if she were to go too far northwest then she would go to another village that was said to be teeming with monsters which was why it had been abandoned even before the village her father came from. She realized that there was a note of this on the back side of the map. It was in handwriting she didn’t recognize but Sunstoian nonetheless.
Irene tried to reason why she would miss such an important detail. Was it because she had been reading in almost only Sunstoian? Was her comfortableness with the language made her finally take note of a small scrawling that said "back" with an arrow next to it?