Chapter 17
The Children's Guidance
Lina shares her drawings, explaining the cloud's patterns suggest a specific safe zone. Anya’s sensitivity helps convey the urgency and truth of Lina’s findings to the hesitant villagers.
The wind, which had been a mere whisper earlier, now howled like a hungry wolf around the little cottage. Inside, the air was thick with a tension that had nothing to do with the brewing storm outside and everything to do with the hushed voices and averted gazes. Lina clutched her worn sketchbook, its pages filled with the swirling, intricate drawings that had become her obsession. She’d spent hours, even when the sky was merely bruised and not yet weeping, trying to capture the impossible shapes of the cloud that had swallowed their sun.
“It’s not just a storm, Mama,” Lina said, her voice small but firm, pushing her drawings across the rough wooden table. Her mother, usually quick to soothe, simply wrung her hands, her eyes darting towards the window where the world was turning a terrifying shade of grey. “Look.”
Her mother picked up the sketchbook, her brow furrowed. The pages were filled with lines that seemed to pulse with a life of their own – spirals that tightened, then unfurled, dark patches that bled into lighter ones, and strange, almost geometric formations that Lena swore she saw shifting when she looked hard enough. “These are… curious, Lina. But what do they mean?”
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