Raun stood upon the moss-covered rocks protruding from the steaming stream. Her chest heaved from the effort needed to climb the nearby cliff face. The muscle fatigue ebbed away so slowly. They were close. The weeks of hard travel, the brushes with death, the lack of food were all part of the sacrifice. The pair agreed to endure whatever came their way for the grand promises. The promises of eternity.
Only a bit further up the path running alongside the river and they should find the entrance. August's heat and humidity pressed around them on all sides. It crushed like a giant hand, squeezing the air from their lungs, fresh oxygen barely able to find the fluttering lungs. But Raun wasn't about to give up.
She was no quitter and if Del even considered it she'd beat the thought out of him! Raun's sacrifices to be here, here on the verge of her dreams cost her much. Her family might never forgive her, even if she succeeded in returning from the pool.
The pool! It shouldn't be more than a hundred yards or so ahead. She could hear the changes in the water now. The falls that fed the pool! This was it!
"Where is that incompetent buffoon?" Raun whispered into the silent forest air. On cue, sticks snapped upstream on the right hand side of the stream. The water moved fast here, though it didn't look particularly deep and Raun wondered if Del could swim. "I never did bother to ask him," she thought.
Del parted the branches of a few small pine trees. "You comin'?" he asked. The hulking form half-turned and hesitated for a few seconds. She didn't have to answer and he knew this. Raun was all the family he'd ever known. Orphaned soon after birth, religious folk raised him and sent him off to seminary when he came of age.
There wasn't a book in those libraries that held Del's interest. He sought adventure and the good monks at the seminary knew little of that. He slipped out a window one night and never looked back. "That was twelve years ago", Del thought. He thrust the thought back into his subconscious mind and moved ahead. He heard Raun closing the distance between them.
She stopped a few feet from Del. She followed his eyes as they traveled down her lean body. They settled on her legs.
"Blood is seeping through the new bandage, Raun," Del said. "I have another clean one in my pack."
Raun looked down at the blood soaked wrap around her thigh. She had forgotten the jagged wound during the climb. Just acknowledging it again allowed the pain to return.
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