Owlflight

 Hello peoples!!!!! This is the first chapter of a story I've been working on. It's a bit long, but please read it and tell me what you think. :)                                                  



                                    It was dusk in the forest, one of those autumn evenings when the air is crisp and the leaves are crisper. Theo had just told a crap joke and Emily was laughing anyway when there was a creak and a groan and a crack and a thump and a scream, a horrible drawn-out bloodcurdling scream, and a tree was lying on the forest floor with Liam's leg under it.
   Kayla could hear someone screaming. It took her a moment to realize that it was herself. Emily was screaming too, and how could you not be screaming with Liam like that, his eyes rolled back in his head and his leg crushed and red with a gleaming shard of shinbone poking out? He didn't look as though he was breathing. Maybe he's dead, thought Kayla. Oh god, Liam's dead.
   Both Kayla and Emily had stopped screaming by then, the noise replaced with an awful silence that emphasised the growing darkness. Even the birds had stopped singing, as if the whole forest was holding its breath. Kayla wanted something, anything, to fill the space, to distract her from Liam. He had gone horribly pale.
   Theo broke the quiet, saying "Get the tree off him!", and Kayla silently thanked him as she ran over to help, dumping her pack as she went. All three of them helped, pushing the log. It was heavy. So was Kayla's heart, because she knew, she'd had that funny feeling she got sometimes, the one that told her something was about to happen. . . She put it out of her mind and concentrated on the log, lending all her strength to it. And then it rolled away and the full extent of the damage was visible, and Kayla wished she hadn't pushed.
   She thought she could see Emily turning away and being sick, and Theo just staring, his hand on his mouth. No sound reached her, though, just the thud of her heartbeat, of the blood pulsing through her, blood like the blood on the forest floor that was Liam's. His leg was crushed completely, bent backwards in the middle of his shin at an impossible, sickening angle, the bone splintered and the flesh broken. Kayla's first thought was, There's no way he's keeping that leg. Her second was a bit morbid: That is, if he lives.
   And then she tore her gaze away and the sound came rushing back to her, of Emily retching and whimpering, of Theo quietly saying "Oh, god," to himself, of the forest's awful quietness. This struck Kayla as oddly funny, how the silence could be louder than the loudest scream. She almost laughed.
   An owl hooted somewhere, shattering Kayla's trance and making her jump. "Well," she said, her voice like a shout in the absence of sound, "we should probably set up camp. Or. . . yeah." She swallowed. Theo was muttering, and while Emily had stopped trying to be sick, she was still
shivering and whimpering and rocking back and forth. Kayla rolled her eyes.
   "Guys," she said, starting to get angry, "guys, if you don't snap out of it, Liam is going to DIE! He might already be DEAD because YOU guys are being so PATHETIC!!!" She stopped and glared at Theo and Emily. They looked back at her as if she had several new heads. Kayla never got angry. Theo and Emily were the ones who had blazing arguments about stuff. "And will you stop STARING at me and stop feeling SORRY for yourselves and do something USEFUL!!!" She stormed over and kicked her pack, hard. The anger was subsiding already, leaving her out of breath and unbelieving that she'd just done that. Kayla flopped onto the pack and breathed deeply.
   "Okay. Please, can we do something, because I... I can't stand waiting. I feel..." She sighed. "Powerless. Like, I dunno, God or fate or whatever can do anything they like because we're completely powerless." She stood up. "So let's pitch camp. Or whatever."
   Theo looked at Emily. Emily looked at Theo. "All right," said Emily, her voice small and weak. "Who's got the tents?"

                  And half an hour, three broken pegs and a fair bit of swearing later, there were two small tents standing in a small clearing, not far from where the accident had been. While they worked, the sky had darkened and a round, pale moon risen, its face gazing down at them sadly. To Kayla, it looked as if it had a secret it couldn't tell.
   She glanced over to Liam, who was still lying where he had fallen. The other two were squabbling over what made better kindling, old sticks or newspaper, while attempting to start a fire.
   Kayla went over to her pack and got out the bundle of white nylon cord her mum had insisted she pack. "You never know," Mum had said, looking at Kayla the way she did when it was serious, "you might just need it. It could save your life." Kayla had rolled her eyes and grumbled, but stuffed the cord in a side pocket anyway. Now she was glad she had. It wouldn't save her life, but it might save Liam's. She also retrieved the Swiss army knife her grandad had lent her.
   Next she foraged around in the undergrowth for some sticks. She found what she was looking for after a moment: two long, strong branches, both about the length of her armspan, sturdy and coated in a fuzz of pale green lichen. Kayla whittled the splinters off an end with the Swiss army knife. She glanced up. Emily and Theo had given up the fire and wandered over to watch. Theo looked puzzled, but Emily was grinning, probably remembering the last time they'd done this. "Should I find the other ones?" she asked Kayla, who went back to whittling, smiling and remembering.
   They'd done this at school camp last year, in the Team Building exercise. It had been a nothing-special sort of day, cold and grey and not-quite-about-to-rain, and Kayla, Emily, Annabel and Sritha, the girls of group 4, had not been pleased when Kirsty, the activity manager, had dragged a stuffed wetsuit with a cloth face, faded beanie and mouldy shoes out of the wooden chest. "His name's Fred," she'd explained, dumping some rope and bamboo on the ground. "You have to get him out of the swamp." Kirsty gestured out at the course, which was a heap of platforms and squat, stumpy poles, with a short flying fox at the end. "It's full of man-eating pirahnas. Fred broke his leg and you have to - guys? Are you guys listening?" Kirsty looked behind the girls, where Otto, Chen and Jack were giving Fred granny-glasses and buck teeth with Chen's vivid. Kirsty sighed. "Anyway, you have to build Fred a stretcher to get him across, then actually get across. Okay? Any questions? No? Right, you can start." Kirsty had wandered off, pulling out her phone, leaving the girls staring at the pile of junk in front of them.
   Kayla had finished whittling: the edges weren't perfect, but they would do. Emily came back, her arms full of sturdy sticks about half a metre long, and dumped them beside Kayla. Kayla looked up. "If I do one end, then d'you want to do the other end?" she asked. Emily nodded. "Pass the rope," she said. Kayla cut a length of rope with the pocketknife and tossed it over to Emily, who caught it and began using it to fix one of the short sticks to the long branch. As Kayla did the same with the other long branch, memory swept her back to what had happened next.
   Annabel had picked up one of the short sticks and thrown it at the boys. It hit Otto's hand, making the vivid jump and giving Fred a massive cheek scar. "Oi!" said Otto. "What was that for?"
   Kayla folded her arms and shot him a death stare.
   "Okay, fine," he grumbled, handing the vivid back to Chen and standing up. "So we have to get the doll across the 'swamp'" - he made exaggerated quotation marks with his fingers - "by making a stretcher out of that crap." Otto snorted and rolled his eyes.
   "Yeah!" said Chen, coming to stand next to him. "It's not even clean crap. Look, it's got mould and stuff on it. Yuck!" He mimed sticking fingers down his throat.
   "Mmm-hmm, because crap has totally always been clean," Emily retorted. "You're such a baby!"
   "Gu-uys!" said Kayla, exasperated. "This isn't helping. Has anyone got anything even slightly sensible to say? Don't worry, morons, I'm not expecting those peas you call brains to come up with anything," she added at the boys' worried glances.
   There was silence for a moment. Then Sritha, quiet Sritha who hadn't said anything yet, stepped forward. "Well," she said shyly, "I saw this thing on Bear Grylls the other week... it wasn't for carrying a person, but maybe we could try it?"
   And so it turned out that Sritha was actually the best leader out of all of them. Under her direction, they constructed a passable stretcher, making a rectangular frame and then a base out of the remaining short sticks, and loaded Fred on, strapping him down with extra rope.
   The course itself, though, wasn't quite as easy: they kept slipping and choosing the wrong bridges, finally dropping Fred at the flying fox just before sending him over. But they did come out laughing, and knew each other much better than when they had started.
   Now, in the present, the stretcher was nearly done. Kayla tied the last stick on and sat back. They still had to get Liam on, and that was going to be hard.
   "Four shall come to the Forest."
   Kayla's head whipped round. Liam hadn't sat up, but his eyes had opened, and were staring at the darkened sky. He spoke again; he didn't seem to be quite in control of it.
   "One to speak with those departed,
    one to wield and fight,
    one to spin stories and magic,
    and one to share her spirit with the Forest."
   A rustling noise: an owl alighted on a branch. Kayla smiled, for no particular reason that she could think of. Might be the one that hooted earlier, she thought.
   "They come to save us,
    for the dark is rising in the East,
    and theirs is the power to stop it."
   The owl's head turned to look at Kayla.
   "But the four must remember:
    find the answer in peace,
    watch their backs,
    remember the eye,
    and trust in Night's mistress..."
   Kayla shivered.
   "... for only then..."
   And then she sat bolt upright. The owl wasn't alarmed, though. It just kept watching her with those great, dark eyes.
   Those eyes...
   "... shall he be defeated."
   Those eyes were almost... Kayla shook her head, but she couldn't clear it of the feeling that destiny was haunting the little clearing.
   Because something in that owl's eyes was almost human.