Read Online Gardens of Mist (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #2) by Will Wight - Free Book Online Page A

left me for a merchant back in Damasca.
    “It’s not you,” she said. “It’s this place. It does things to you. It’s not natural.” She walked through a Gate, and I never saw her again.  
    I didn’t feel anything, though. The Mist was excited that day, and I didn’t want to stretch my luck.
    You’re right, I should get back on track. Adrian Corydon. I was sleeping when it began.
    Someone pounded urgently on my door, which woke me immediately. No one’s ever urgent in Asphodel. There are other things in Asphodel, worse than the Mist, and they’re attracted to signs of panic.
    I still live in the hollowed-out tree I inherited from my parents, and it’s not a big one. I barely had to roll out of my hammock to unlatch the door and push it open.
    Adrian stood there, right outside my door, his boots planted in a big puddle of Mist. It’s winter here—Asphodel has seasons like normal, though I know a lot of Territories don’t—and the air was cold enough that I regretted every second I held the door open. Adrian, though, he was soaked in sweat. His beard clung to his chest like a pile of soggy leaves sticking to the forest floor.
    His hands spasmed opened and closed, like he couldn’t wait to get his fists around someone’s neck, and he had to lean one forearm against my doorframe to stay upright.
    “Took me a long time to find out where you lived,” Adrian said. He was panting like he had run all the way here from town.
    By “town,” I mean the cluster of huts and homes around the Midnight Fields that we affectionately called “the town.” Enough people lived there that it probably qualified as a village, I guess.
    “All these trees look alike.” I held the door out a little wider, inviting him to step inside.
    As he walked past me, I smelled no spirits on him, just sweat and the clean-water tang of the Mist on the winter air. At the time I thought that meant he was sober. Later, I told myself that of course he had been drunk, and I just hadn’t noticed. Now, I don’t know what to think.
    With the Mist safely locked outside, I let my irritation bubble up from the place where I’d shoved it down. I don’t know anyone that likes being woken from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. I’d spent the whole previous day hoeing my row and picking blossoms in the Fields, just as Adrian himself had. The last thing I wanted was a mystery visit infringing on my allotted eight hours of sleep.
    “What do you want from me, Corydon?” I asked.
    It wasn’t the most hospitable thing to say, I’ll admit, but he must not have minded too much. He laughed.
    “Don’t worry, it won’t be a long visit. I need to ask you a question.”
    “Then get to it,” I said. “My bed’s not getting any warmer.”
      Adrian rubbed his hands together and blew on them, as though to capture the heat. “I don’t have many friends, you know. Nobody who would take me seriously. I haven’t talked about this much, but lately I’ve been…seeing things, hearing things. At the edge of my eyes. It’s like I can’t turn around quite quick enough, but I know something was there.”
    I couldn’t help the hint of humor that crept into my voice. “You been out in the Mist too long, Corydon?”
    Adrian wasn’t born here, like me, but he was the next thing to it. I couldn’t think of anyone who had walked the Gardens longer than he had. He should know better than to give in to fantasies born in the Mist.
    Adrian jabbed a finger at me. “That’s it! That’s just it. I don’t see anything moving in the Mist. I don’t see dead relatives, or walking nightmares, or anything else that Mist-touched people claim to see. It’s the Mist itself that’s moving.”
    “The Mist moves all the time, Adrian,” I said. The Mist, for all its supernatural properties, is still water in the air. It moves with the wind just like any cloud.
    “I know what it does,” Adrian snapped. “Don’t treat me like a new hire, you know better than