Page 2 of Spellcast
From the beasts.
From death.
There is no running. No fleeing. No salvation.
My gaze darts, straining, stinging, attempting to take it all in. It is too much. I start in one direction, then another, staggering, and then falling, dropping to my knees, lips moving, speech impossible.
“Da.” I manage to spit the sound past my lips in a weak warble, calling to my father even though he cannot possibly hear me.
Suddenly, a black figure nose-dives, moving fluidly over the sky, iridescent against the night. I watch as the single beast plunges toward a fleeing figure at the edge of the village. A woman intact and not ablaze. For a moment I think she might make it to the tree line where I stand. She mightactuallyescape.
Go, go, go, go.The word pumps through my mind.
She’s plucked off the ground, swept up as the primeval beast seizes her and lifts her. Up, up, up. Too far away to make out her features, but I’m certain I recognize her. Isstad isn’t so populated I don’t know every one of its denizens.Every one of its dead or dying denizens.
Her arms and legs flail, fighting even though she has no hope. She is a small, insignificant human, a gnat caught up in those great talons.
I straighten and step back reflexively as her screams reach me.
I slide back into the trees, slipping into shadow, deeper intonight, trying to distance myself from the horror. But it will not stop. It follows me.
The dragon tosses her in the air like a child flinging a ball, and then another dragon, this one yellow as the sun, swoops in, catches the woman in a single claw, and turns, flying backward in swift strokes with the small figure clasped in its talons. The beast pitches the shrieking female directly into the jaws of another black dragon—a huge one with a jagged scar cutting down its face—that consumes her in a single bite, silencing her forever.
I jerk and clamp a hand over my mouth, muffling my shrill scream. It’s instinctive, this need to keep myself small and silent and hidden away with predators so near. Still, after all these years, I cling to life. Perhaps self-preservation is something that never goes away. Like the pump of blood in your veins, it subsists.
I am the sole survivor.
The only one left in my world, in this place where I live my half life. The place of myeverything, now, isnothing.
Rubble.
Ruins.
Death.
I drop, melt away, fade into the cold embrace of woods, the sky a red miasma before me. The sharp, pungent smell of the world on fire fills my nose as I peer through the press of trees, forever unseen. That hasn’t changed. I’m invisible still. A shadow drifting through the world. Lost to my curse. Lost to obscurity. No one left to remember me. No longer Arden. Not a girl. Not the woman I’ve become. No one.
Lonely...but now alone.
Alone in the truest sense. Alone in every way.
Part I
The Wanderer
1
A Dark Wood
Day 1
It was a tantrum of epic proportions, childlike andwithout dignity. But then I was only fourteen, a girl, even if no one treated me like one. Even if I didn’tfeellike a child as I toiled alongside my father and brothers and Meya, working as hard as any adult, until my body ached and my muscles burned. Until I was so weary at night that I could scarcely stop myself from nodding off to sleep face-first into my bowl.
This was my life. Grinding drudgery. Tedious monotony to simply ensure we had food in our stomachs, a roof over our heads, and coin enough to pay the tithes due to the crown and whatever bandits menaced our village. Childhood had skipped me. There were no lighthearted, carefree days.
I told myself I was allowed this. For once, in this moment, I was exactly what I was. Someone young and immature swept up in a temper.
My fury boiled over, and I surrendered to all the drama and spectacle allocated to youth. With tears hot and salty on my cheeks, I seized a wooden bowl heavy with the fragrant bread baked this day by my very own hands. Calmer, gentler hands then.
