FicWad

The following morning broke warm and clear, with gentle streaks of cirrus clouds carrying the colors of the sunrise to new depths and highlights and with only the softest of breezes running through the trees and grasses and the exposed fur of the creatures sleeping on the ground. In short, it was a morning very much like the one several days ago, only different in terms of mental atmosphere from the moments before the world came tumbling down. The mentality of insects was also different, though; as with the opposite case on Nameday eve, it took Andreas longer than he would have liked to realize that their chorale had resumed. Yet while the marten had not recognized that the long absence was one of foreboding, the return registered with him as part of the process of easing back into normalcy, which Andreas could think of as a decidedly good omen for the outset of the exploratory journey.

Andreas, Hayward, Elsinore, and Garlock departed from Redwall at the same point of morning at which the temblor had rolled in several days ago, only with considerably less fanfare. This early start was a mutual decision between the four - Hayward had always been an insufferable morning person, which was quite evident to all around him; Andreas felt that longer traveling days allowed for more time to be spent on observing details, which he explained as a goal up front; Garlock, still weary, wanted to get it over with but chose to remain silent on the matter; and Elsinore had always been an agreeable and compromising beast, her only request being that the taller creatures did not walk too fast for her to keep up.

All four carried flour sacks full of enough rations for three days, as it was assumed that the forest could provide for their upkeep beyond that point, and also that traveling lighter would be an advantage when faced with the possibility of unchartedly changed terrain. Andreas had nevertheless brought the volume of records containing Lontano's map, both for general reference and for comparing the changes against the establishment. The marten also was accompanied by his personal journal, which was quickly becoming a more important record than the official book that he had left at Redwall.

But regardless of who was carrying the map, Hayward led the way on the first leg of the journey. The path was, so far, still as Andreas had always known it, but his questions as to the nature of what Hayward was leading to were met with vague and evasive replies. No matter how much Andreas insisted that scientific investigation required as much prior knowledge as possible so as to better explain the eventual results, Hayward assured him with a wholly teasing tone that he simply couldn't find the proper words to explain what he had found, and that the visual presentation was really the only way to cover it. As far as Andreas was concerned, good-humored conversation and this sort of joking were two different things, but the marten weathered the hare's dodging patiently, knowing that he would not end up actually being devoid of explanation.

The quartet continued along through the peaceful spring green of Mossflower, trees arching over the path, apparently unaware of much of the calamity that had just passed, even though individual buildings or entire little towns situated between the trees and in artificial clearings were in a range of states of disrepair, from rampant cases of fallen chimneys all the way to total deconstruction. These outposts were invariably abandoned, their surviving citizens having fled toward Redwall or the larger cities further inland as soon as the ground had permitted motion upon it rather than from within it. Thus, the four travelers were aurally stimulated only by their own conversation and by the increasing level of ambient chatter from the smaller creatures of the forest.

Slightly after the sun had reached its highest point in the sky, Garlock pointed a claw toward a little cluster of apple trees in a fringe of foliage next to a truly decimated wooden house. Still-forming fruit hung early off the green boughs while many other trees still hosted only flowers, inviting even despite the food in the flour sacks. Elsinore shifted uneasily at the proposition, a gesture that meant nothing to Garlock and to the stomach-motivated Hayward. It was only when Andreas assured her that Nature was providing where Nature had previously destroyed that the mole selected some windfalls of her own.

At first, the four sat under the arching branches of the apple tree in silence, chewing and enjoying the hard sourness while firmly planted on soft but solid soil. Elsinore was the first to open up any sort of mealtime conversation. "So...when we foind what zurr Hayward is talking abaout, will we follow those soigns or will we go on saoutheast to the big cliffs anyway?"

Hayward appeared very excited at the question, but he had to concede judgment on the matter. "Well, I would have bally well liked to check the thing out there and on the spot he first time, but there wasn't the time for it right then, wot. But we'll get there and see certain enough, and I'd say our fearless leader Mister Andreas would be able to point to the true and proper course from there, isn't that right, old chap?"

Andreas spat a seed into his paw, dug a little pit with one claw, deposited the seed in it, and gave the ground a gentle pat. "Right, we'll have to see. Though I would certainly be able to say the more likely turn of our route if I knew what we were coming upon." The marten fixed a gaze upon the hare like a teacher eliciting a response from a student who he knows is not speaking due to sheer laziness.

Hayward smirked, wriggling with the joy of this secret discovery kept all to himself.

"Why are we heading south first?" Garlock cut in. "Yes, you said the precedent is south, but if you know something is there already, why return to it? It is clear that this has had just as dire effects up north, if not worse than here."

"In order to see the control before setting out on the uncharted experiment," Andreas responded, tone simple despite his terminology.

"So then why the uncertainty of route after this? Why the hare's little surprise first? If it's the control, shouldn't you know precisely where we're going?" Garlock's gaze flicked to the overly-content Hayward.

Andreas rested his free forepaw on Lontano's mapbook. "Either way, we will have to double back over the space between Redwall and the crevasse, so it is a better method to go a different way in each direction. A more thorough look at the two paths and how they were effected before we go further north."

"And also, it's still right frigid up north, isn't it, my dear ferret?" Hayward gleamed at Garlock. "We go south first, then by the time we scoot our way back up there, it'll be spring right and proper, eh wot!"

Garlock glanced down at his chipped claws, then regarded Hayward as icily as the hare was presuming the northern temperatures to be. "I happen to find it a refreshing and preferable climate over swimming in humidity or baking in the desert."

Elsinore, having come beyond her objection to eating apples that did not belong to her, looked over from scooping several clawfuls of the fallen little fruit into her sack. "Oi think we are going in the direction we have been going and we'll be sure to go boi everything loike zurr Andras wants. We will get to everywhere we need to be soon enough."

Whether Elsinore was being merely circular or soundly logical, Hayward and Garlock seemed at least momentarily appeased by the mole's remark. Andreas shut Lontano's mapbook on cue, as if Elsinore was clarifying the route for him as well.

The quartet of creatures left no discernible dent in the amount of fruit left in the little orchard, leaving it and the abandoned farmhouse by the wayside as they continued down the path, hunger and thirst having been satiated by the sour fruit. The surrounding woods showed more and more signs of abandoned civilization as the path headed toward the coast, and the light filtering down through the canopy and glancing off the individual leaves and the dancing dust motes took on an almost unnaturally-highlighted cast as both the path and the sun aimed westward.

It was roughly four in the afternoon when Hayward's lips started pushing toward a grin of excitement that became harder and harder for him to contain as the walking continued. Clear on his surroundings, the hare slowed his gait slightly, falling out of his position as the directional leader of the party. Garlock suddenly found himself in that position instead, and just when the ferret appeared as if he were going to point out how, as the leader, he could now choose the direction of travel, he found himself at the end of the path, with an edge of disturbed dirt and an obviously ancient tree in front of him.

Garlock whirled around on his heels, displeased to come face-to-face with a positively sparkling-grinned Hayward. "What are you trying to pull, lopears?" the ferret snarled, displeasure only thinly covering a stark note of fear and alarm. "Dragging us up to some trick nowhere in the middle of the woods so you can...ah...so you can..." Garlock's accusation fell flat as he failed to think of a possible motive for such treachery.

Hayward's fluorescent grin did not dim. "No, this is the weird thing I was talking about, eh wot!" The hare gabbed Andreas' paw and pointed it off to the right. "Take a gander over there, my dear companion!"

Andreas followed the path of his arm with his eyes, looking beyond where Hayward was pointing him. His gaze crossed a small band of woodland marked by a stripe of disturbed soil that ran perpendicular to the edge of the interrupted path, then followed that stripe to where it intersected the start of another path, on the same plane as where he stood but a good twenty feet to the right and blocked by some solid upright trees. The marten's eyes widened in disbelief and excitement. He pulled his paw out of Hayward's grasp and printed the twenty feet to the other side.

Hayward lept to Andreas' side and Garlock, reluctantly impressed, trailed along as well. "Great Martin, Matthias, and Methuselah!" the marten marveled. "Twenty feet. It moved twenty feet!" It was as if the unforgettable images of destruction had actually fled his mind for that moment of the rush that comes with the realization and proof of something truly incredible.

"So that's really the very crack where it all moved, eh wot?" Pride in his own share of the discovery mixed with the inquisitiveness in Hayward's voice.

Andreas turned on the path, looking to the right again at the displaced section of road from whence they'd come. "It has to be! There's be no other reason for such a cut, particularly not with how these trees appear to have grown relative to the road. But they didn't grow there, of course, because they were moved!"

"That seems roight," Elsinore noted. At the arrival at the displaced road, the mole had dropped to all fours, crawling her way along the torn and upward-pushed line linking the segments of the road, scooping several rocks and clawfuls of dirt up to eye level for investigation along the way. She had only then come up to where the three other beasts stood. "This graoud is freshly moved and it was torn hard - the patches of rocks doan't match up and the plants are split abaout the middle, too."

All four creatures fell silent now, considering he relatively narrow line and the massive displacement, and the collective eight eyes moved in tandem beyond one section of the road and then the other, lingering on the continuation of the narrow track in both directions.

Garlock broke the silence at last. "We'll be following that line, I assume?"

"Clearer than any path," Andreas responded.

Thus, the quartet continued on its way, following Nature's own delineated route, which was indeed more true of a course than the right-angled path that had been created by living paws. The line was shockingly straight, inorganically straight almost, slicing the landscape like the purposefully-laid railroad tracks that Andreas so disliked, yet undeniably wrought by a perversion of the Nature that usually preferred to create gentle curves and tapered edges. It was sometimes little more than a stripe of cleared grass, but in other places its manifestation expanded to a thrown-up pile of dirt nearly as tall Elsinore, and in yet other places the entire forest floor on one side of the boundary was slightly lifted relative to the other side before warping back down to relative levelness. At some points, the terrain was torn outward and cracked in parallel to the main line, and in other places, the smoothness was practically unfathomable compared to what else they had seen, both by way of landforms and destruction caused by the motion.

The expedition crossed several small streams, their beds displaced in the same manner as the road and the water flowing in an uncertain trickle from one section to the other. They crossed several more roads, offset like the first though to varying degrees of extremity. They crossed one railroad line, now twisted and curved, the rails wrenched apart at the offset and broken edge. And the forest, as always, alternated between patches of dense undergrowth, more widely-spaced trees, and the occasional clearing - and the type of woods through which Andreas, Hayward, Elsinore, and Garlock traveled could be predicted by what was on the other side of the line, or even chosen by crossing it.

They walked until it was barely light enough to follow the visible trace on the forest floor, then elected to set up camp between what appeared to be two pleasingly-symmetrical massive maple trees. As they narrowed in on the spot, though, they came to the realization that these "two" trees were really one organism. The ground trace lined up with the two halves as it had with the road - the unfortunate tree had grown directly on top of the dormant fault and had been neatly sliced into two as the ground ruptured and slid past itself.

With this revelation, a camp between the tree's halves became far less comforting in its symmetry, but the exhaustion of a day of walking piled upon the exhaustion of the rest of the week also made it clear that none of the four were keen on the idea of getting up and walking further to a less disconcerting site. Thus, with their last dregs of energy running dry, it was the most the four could do to move themselves and their scant belongings to one side of the line before going to sleep.