sideways | WIP Wednesday

Or Thursday. This seems amusing as I am still working on the same fic as I was the last time I did something like this, over a year ago. Also a fun peek at how much something gets shaped and re-shaped in that time.

There is smoke on a horizon unseen, and Jaren’s Ghost falls out of the air.

It's bad timing. Too little rain followed by too much in endless cycle has worn away at the path down this side of the mountain and left it crumbling dangerously along its edges - when Shin steps sharp and sideways to throw out a hand and catch her, the ground sinks under his feet. It shouldn't matter, should be thoughtless ease to move to steadier footing again, but something's seizing in his chest like he’s grabbed a fistful of snapping electric wires instead, the world whiting out in a dizzying sunglare flash, and when the ground goes Shin goes with it.

He snags against a stubborn bush on the scraping, scrabbling fall down, and it slows their descent enough that the rock that follows cracks his visor and not his skull. He's still left blinking through a cloud of black spots by the time he fetches up at the base of a slope-angled pine, blanketed in dirt and shale, badly winded and aching in a way so long unfelt it might just be someone else's skin he's gone and tumbled into.