Quinne

Quinne walked alone in the wilderness, initially in an attempt to forget her troubles—troubles acquired during her previous attempt to not be alone. But the further she wandered, the more she felt she was moving toward something unknown rather than away from anything she knew. She saw faces in the landscape, in arrangements of stones, amongst the branches of trees, for a split second out of the corner of either eye, illusions that instantly dissolved when she turned to investigate them. Still, these brief apparitions felt somehow like signposts, & she adjusted her course accordingly. Later, after she'd completely lost track of time & place, she heard the white noise of a waterfall. It was the tail end of winter, patches of snow & ice reluctantly made way for the slow but insistent return of green. She followed the melted areas, which connected to form a path down to the large pool beneath the falls, then onward into a deep canyon, where the pool narrowed into a river. Concentrating so intently now on pinpointing the next ephemeral signpost, she found herself trudging steadily along the river itself, waist deep in the water, with no memory of abandoning dry land. She stopped & chuckled to herself, then felt a shock, but not from cold, for she was not cold at all. She feared she'd damaged her nerves or skin, but she could still feel the water itself: she was not numb. The water was, improbably, the exact temperature of her body (or vice versa?). She took another step forward. Now, more improbably, the water near her foot was clearly warmer. She followed the warmth, not carried along by water flowing from behind her, but pulsing from the riverbed ahead of her. Then her toes found the source of it: a ring. She couldn't yet see it, but felt certain it would be black.