Awakening (Born From Shadows #1)

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“This place is smaller than Cainva,” Tatianna noted whilst Ida trotted into the town of Bellin. “It also seems just as creepy.” She looked around at the empty streets then too the houses surrounding them. Movement in the windows caught her eyes and she noticed a few people staring at them. Their look was of curiosity but…something else. It did not help her feeling that something was off around here.

“I told you travellers avoid this town. The people here are…strange,” Nik said also looking at the few staring at them from their homes.

“So, they probably won’t have a doctor?” Riley asked, still struggling to ride his horse with an injured foot.

“If they do, they probably won’t treat you. They are very introverted,” Nik explained.

“You know a lot about these towns,” Tatianna thought, despite never being here before he knew how the people would react to an outside presence.

“I’m the Prince, knowing the people in Haveenté and the towns is my job,” he replied.

Tatianna didn’t answer but looked back towards the people in the houses who were staring at them. Their gaze reminded her of the way people in the Western part of Avalla looked. Hungry not for food but for something else. She could hear distant footsteps approaching her, running towards them. She immediately reached for her blade, “Someone’s coming,” she told the others.

Out the corner of another street emerged a man, painted head to toe in blood till it was dripping out of his hair. “Oh, my gods,” Freya whispered as he ran towards us. His frantic careen movement indicated to her that this man was not running towards them, but away from something. He did not slow down despite the obvious wounds that littered his body and continued to run till he was out of their sight, not once paying a single thought to them. He must have been terrified, she thought.

“Go to where he came from,” Tatianna said to Nik. Logic would dictate that she should be running as well, but she was tired of doing that. All she had done was run, even when she fought, she fought to get away.

“Are you sure?” Nik questioned her motives.

“Yes,” she replied, praying that it wasn’t something awful behind that corner like a creature from the Dark Lands, but rather a human who had fallen away their morality.

Ida pressed on, Riley and Freya hesitantly followed. Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw once she turned the corner. A man, if she could even call him that, was laying over a body. She could not tell the gender for the body’s skin had been carved off. It was the most horrific thing she had ever laid eyes upon. She thought it couldn’t get any worse until the man bit into the body, he was eating it. Tatianna leapt from Ida and rushed towards the man, dagger out. He did not have time to react, did not know where the blade that pierced his heart had come from by the time she had struck him.

She yanked her knife out and watched horror struck as his body laid next to the other. It was the most horrendous thing and she debated whether she would have preferred to see the Cararsak’s rotting victims over this massacre.

She looked up in a daze and backed away from the scene, the metallic smell of blood overwhelming her. That’s when she noticed the people in the houses all staring at her with the same look that this now dead man stared at the body. That hunger she sensed; it was not sexual in anyway like the rapists she was familiar with in Avalla. No, they were hungry for her, her flesh and blood. More people appeared in the windows, children too. Her stomach seemed to do acrobatics in her stomach as it churned. They were all cannibals. They were all so sick it made her want to throw up. The acid within her stomach rising in her throat.

“Now can we leave?” Freya asked her voice was trembling so much Tatianna thought Freya might feint.

Tatianna looked down at the two bodies and noticed something odd that she had missed before, too distraught to notice. The mans blood…it wasn’t red. It was more of a blackish colour, something she had never seen before. He wasn’t human, but he looked it. Were all these people pretending to be human? How many travellers have been brought here only to be eaten? She shook her body out of its frozen position and got back on Ida.

“Let’s go,” she said her voice distant as she wondered how many other towns in Haveenté have been overrun without the King and Queens knowledge. Without anyone’s knowledge. It was like a plagues slowly spreading across the kingdom and she knew that this kingdom would fall if they didn’t put a stop to it. They needed to somehow get a warning to the King and Queen. Perhaps they should return to Faithorn, although it was filled with members of the Hunt they needed to be warned.

“We need to go back to Faithorn, we need to warn them,” she said as they left the town.

“If we do that, we could all die,” Riley stated. “I say we keep heading in the same direction, leave Haveenté as planned.”

“These are your people,” Tatianna said looking behind her at Nik, “are you going to let them all die?”

“If we could send a message I would, but I am not going to risk your life in the hope that the message we send won’t be intercepted. The only way to properly warn them is to go all the way back to Avalla and that will take at least a month and we will probably die,” Nik said. “We keep going and hope the disappearances and news of Cainva has reached my parents.”

“But what if it hasn’t? Millions live in this kingdom. Our lives are not more important than every single one of them,” she protested.

“We came here to follow you Tatianna. It is your choice to make,” Nik replied placing all of the pressure onto her. If they went back and died before getting their message there would be no point, but at least they could say they tried.

“I say we go back,” she decided.

“I am not going with you,” Freya said shocking Tatianna. Freya was going to leave her, betray her like so many others just so she could have a better chance of living. Rage started to boil through her. “I would go but Riley and I are wanted criminals in case you forgot. Dying I can handle but being sent to those prison camps in the waste lands for the chance of sending a message? I can’t do that. The people you go there go mad, they lose their mind and to me your mind is everything,” Freya explained. Tatianna completely forgot about that, how they were blamed for both their parents deaths.

She didn’t know much of the prison camps, only that the labour supplied coal for the city’s electricity. Them going with her would be handing them to insanity. She agreed with Freya. No matter the scrapes and cuts as long as you could still be you it did not matter. Her ability to keep her sanity is what allowed her to survive, without it she would be no different to those drug addicts and rapists that preyed on others.

“Ok, we press on,” she changed her decision. No matter how much it hurt her to turn her back on the kingdom her friends were what mattered to her. She would not let them suffer because of her.

“Cainva is close to Haveenté, it wont take long for them to find out what happened there,” Nik reassured her decision.

“To the Hollow plains then,” her heart ached to say it. She thought of the innocent children as Ida walked towards the boarder of the Kingdom. Regretting her decision would only cause her to be distracted. Whatever happens, happens. She could not let one verdict for a morally complex choice determine what type of person she was, she could not let her choice haunt her mind.

Leaving the past behind her she pressed onto the new adventure, looking up at the starry night sky that shinned with possibilities.