Prompt: Risk

D'aw my timer went off before I got to finish what I was gonna do!

It would be risky. But everything that was worth doing generally had some sort of risk involved. She looked down at the ground beneath her, and behind her. Solid land, normal path, inviting grass and flowers and her horse tied up to the tree. The horse grazed lazily, hiding under the shade of the tree.

Ahead of her was a broken down looking path. Half of it looked flooded while half of it looked like it was going to fall apart. One side went down in a steep incline, littered with pieces of what was once a fence, but didn’t seem to have done its job of preventing objects or people from rolling down the edge into what appeared to be puddle up rain water over some jagged and unfriendly looking rocks.

“Well balls.” She muttered, pushing back her hair. The paper in her hand was telling her that she had to go through this path. She couldn’t ride her horse through it, there was no way. The girl would lose her footing and stumble, killing them both, or at least killing one of them, less likely the horse, more likely her. She had spent years trying to get to this point. Her mother had received a map from a man who’d shown up at her door years ago, ill. He told her that there were treasures beyond her imagination at the end. He was too ill to find them himself and he died in their home the next day. Her mother had hidden the map for years, believing it held some kind of curse that had made the man fall ill.

When her mother had died, she’d inherited the map and spent years trying to solve the riddles on it. It didn’t depict any land she could find on any map at all so she started looking to see if it were an interpretation to throw simpler people off and she had hit the jackpot. She’d followed clues, gone on expeditions, hit dead ends and started all over again several times but here she was now, on a path she was clearly supposed to follow without her horse. She didn’t want to just leave the old girl behind but she had no choice if she were to go ahead. She walked back over to her horse, her companion through all the trials and tribulations the years had led them through.

“Well, I’ve got to leave you here for a little while. Don’t you come running after me okay? It’s dangerous.” She gently brushed her fingers over the horse’s mane. The horse didn’t acknowledge her, it was just a horse after all. She gave it a nice pet behind its ears and then headed back toward the path. The horse whinnied and bucked, trying to get to her. “No, no girl… Don’t follow me okay? You’ll get hurt!” The horse calmed after a few moments, but looked mutinous nonetheless.

“I’ll be quick. I promise…” She moved on the path, trying to find a place to get her footing. If she were lucky she could make it across quickly, but if she made a wrong move the whole place looked like it would fall apart in a landslide and send her plummeting onto those sharp looking rocks in the water. It looked like shallow water too, maybe only a foot or two. She’d be impaled, in the very worst case and in the best case she’d break her arm and drown in the damn puddle.

“I just have to be careful… that’s all… It’s a risk I have to take.” She slowly pressed her foot to the muddy ground in front of her. She had about a foot she could walk on in width of the path. She couldn’t risk moving any further to the edge, or to the precarious foliage on the opposite side. She stood still in her new spot on the path. Nothing had fallen, nothing had even given for a moment. The horse seemed to be watching her in fear, like it knew something bad were to happen.

“Not so bad…” She smiled a bit at the horse, then continued on the path, becoming braver with each step. Something seemed amiss, the closer she got to the other side, the further it seemed to be.