Eris watched Tomas disappear through the trees, her eyes following him until she could no longer make out his silhouette through the leaves. She waited for what must have been fifteen chimes, give or take a few. Eris had gotten good at waiting after sitting in front of houses for hours, waiting for her target to come out. Compared to those long, boring days, fifteen chimes seemed easy.
Still, she could feel her blood begin to boil as her senses jumped into hyper alert. She told herself that this was just like trailing a target through a crowded marketplace. Of course, in a marketplace she didn’t need to watch out for footprints or broken twigs.
Inhaling a deep breath of fresh air, she turned to wear Tomas had started and began to follow him. Or rather, she was hoping she was following him. She could see his footprints pretty clearly at first and she only looked at the ground occasionally as she made her way through the wood. However, a few minutes into it, she noticed that the entire footprint was no longer showing up in the dirt. It seemed as if the man had started walking on his tiptoes, with only about half the length of his foot imprinting itself into the ground.
Eris crouched down by the first abnormal footprint. The heel of his foot was not as visible in the ground as the tip. He obviously took the weight off his heel, right here. And when do people do that? The answer came a few seconds later and Eris felt a little embarrassed for not realizing it from the start. When they’re running, of course.
Once more content with her assessment of Tomas’s course, she straightened up and followed his footprints. This time, she kept her eyes trained on the ground more firmly, raising them only once in a while to make sure she didn’t walk into a tree.
The footprints disappeared from under her gaze after a few minutes and she realized that Tomas had changed direction here. There was an especially deep imprint in the ground, where the man had obviously turned. She wondered whether he was making things easy for her on purpose and smirked. If he was, that was probably a good idea.
After a while, the footprints became less pronounced and looked like they were slowly fading away. However, she now noticed dark impressions of leaves and some broken twigs. Even though the footprints themselves were harder to follow, the collection of stepped-on flora that littered the ground gave her an even better clue at Tomas’s direction.
She was beginning to feel more and more confident until the trees parted in front of her abruptly. The footprints had led her straight to a clearing. At first, Eris felt just a little dismayed. This was no longer a rather straight path through a dense forest. Footprints would be decidedly harder to follow in a wide, open space. However, after a few beats, Eris decided that she wouldn’t need to.
She walked around the edges of the clearing a few times, taking in the disarray on the ground. The footsteps were thrown erratically all over the ground and a pile of twigs lay in the center. There was no ash residue on the dry branches, so Eris assumed that this was meant to be a fake campsite of sorts.
She found a more pronounced set of footprints leading out of the clearing and followed it. The woman was careful to keep her gaze on the footprints as they became lighter and more elusive. After a while, she stopped and listened, wondering how far Tomas could have gone.
