Abandoned (Born From Shadows #2)

This was it. This was her last chance to run away. Tatianna stared at the abyss and clung tightly to her dagger. She closed her eyes and thought a silent prayer to all the gods before delicately touching her necklace.

“Wherever you are Nik, please don’t leave me. Please help me if worse comes to worst like you always do,” she whispered and then opened her eyes. It was strange now that she was here, but still similar to what she had imagined. It was like a wall of dark mist circled in front of her, beyond that wall, not even she could see. She had found out in her time at Kalida that her birthday had once more come and gone, that it was now spring. But standing here before this giant mass of black, it felt anything other than the season of life.

A whisper in the trees behind her, something faint muttering. Tatianna turned around and only saw the lonely wood. It’s the anxiousness, she thought and turned back to the black. But in the corner of her eye, she saw something dash through the tree line. She had her dagger out in seconds.

“Nylif, stay with me,” she whispered to the wolf as her vision went black.

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A scolding chill snapped her eyes open, she blinked rabidly trying to get a bearing but she was bombarded with questions, “who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Give the girl a second” another voice came through. Tatianna twisted her neck, the room coming into vision. Two men, no dwarves, stood in front of her. What were they doing so far South?

“Who…what?” she mumbled trying to grasp the situation. It seemed she was tied to a chair inside…a tent?

“What are you doing here?” one of the dwarves asked her. This one was dark in skin colour, his hair black and his eyes brown. The other one stood with a glare holding an empty bucket with ginger hair that was curled to the sky. She looked down at her water-soaked clothes feeling her heart tug. A pull from within her; Nylif.

“Where’s my wolf?” she asked.

“It’s outside, don’t worry it’s fine. Now it’s your turn to answer my question,” said the less angry one.

“I’m…Danika,” she said.

The dwarves looked at her, or more at her pointed ears and eyes. “Why were you going to the Dark Lands?”

“Research,” she replied. “Why are you camped in Elven lands?”

“You do not ask the questions here,” the ginger one snapped.

“Sorry, forgot this was a kidnapping,”

“You Elvish bitch,” the ginger one said and threw the empty bucket at her. She flinched, not expecting him to do that. The metal handle hit her straight in the face, cutting her nose. By the time she looked back at the Dwarves, the cut had already healed leaving only the drying blood sticking to her face like syrup.

The two then mumbled some words to each other in a foreign language, Dwarfish she assumed. The ginger-haired one soon left the tent in rage, leaving her alone with the other one.

“You heal quicker than I imagined. Now that that is over with, tell me what you are doing here?” the black-haired one asked.

“I was curious, that’s all,” she told him, lying through her words.

“Hmm…curious. I thought Elves were more disciplined, patient.”

“Perhaps then you shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” she sneered.

The dwarf sighed, running a hand through his thick dry hair. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to go to the Dark Lands and retrieve something for us.”

She remained silent waiting for the blackmail that was bound to occur. “We will hold onto your wolf in the meantime. If you don’t come back, we will assume you are dead and kill the creature. If you come back and don’t retrieve the object, we will kill the creature. You get where I’m going with this?” the Dwarf asked.

Tatianna glared down at him. She wasn’t angry before, she wasn’t frightened. Not until they decided to threaten Nylif. She clenched her fists and nodded, thinking of her own alternate plan in the process.

“Good. Now the object is a book. It was lost there a couple of centuries ago, and we need it back.”

“A book,” she said. “All this for a fucken book. How am I supposed to find a book in that?”

“You have magic. It was last seen in a cave if that helps,” the dwarf replied. Tatianna felt like punching the dwarf for pure idiocracy alone. No one knew the true size of the Dark Lands It could be larger than the rest of the kingdoms combined for all she knew. Plus it was well…dark. To find a book in that is literally like finding a needle in a haystack. She hadn’t even pointed out the fact that her magic was very uncontrolled at the moment. She could lift a rock and make a fire. Everything else was…emotional based and just happened.

“Do I have a choice?” She muttered

“No,” he replied. She expected the answer, except this time she wouldn’t accept it. She would go to the dark lands. Find the Elfir, get her answers, and then she would come back. Not to return a book, but to burn them all. She was not a slave, not anymore.

The hilt of a sword was the last thing she saw.

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She took a final glance backward at the trees of Lyracris and then back at the darkness in front of her. “Off you go,” a dwarf said, a different one from the two she saw before.

“Can I have my dagger back, or am I to go in unarmed?” she replied, her mind still a bit hazed from being knocked out.

“You’re an Elf, you’ll manage,” he said, sending her on what now seems like a suicide mission. No dagger. No defence. They wanted her to die, yet she knew she wouldn’t. Not until she killed every last one of these racist, kidnapping pricks.

She glared at him and then took a step forward without hesitation. As soon as she did her breathing felt clogged and she struggled to take in sufficient amounts of oxygen. She was choking, coughing to try and breathe. She stood there for a few minutes trying to adjust to the new climate. Once her breathing had somewhat formed a regular pattern she glanced around her only to see nothing. It was all pitch black.

She blinked her eyes a couple of times but to no prevail. She felt blind, exposed. Had she still had human senses she would have run away immediately, but now she didn’t have to rely upon her eyes too much. She still had her smell, her hearing, her touch and now that whisper of magic in her veins that could reach out to her surroundings and almost paint a picture in her head.

She first focused on the smell, poignant and burning her nostrils. It was hideously intensified and unbearable, like getting stuck in your own feces for weeks but so much worse. She decided it was best to hone in on her other senses. She scrapped her feet along the ground, taking slow steps. She felt something cracking beneath her feet, almost like the sound of twigs breaking but different. It was bones, she realised. A mass grave of individuals who dared to travel to this void. Finally, it was her ears. She could hear her heartbeat…two more. Only then was she truly panicked, for it was at that moment that she realised the length of her actions.

Could she survive being ripped to shreds by a vampire, having her blood boil and flesh deteriorate slowly by a Cararsak, or perhaps something worse by a creature unknown to her? She picked up her pace and started to run through the emptiness. She needed to find the Elfir, she needed to find her answers.

She heard even more heartbeats, they were circling around her whatever they were. She didn’t like it. And she defiantly didn’t like the mumbling that twinkled into her eardrums. It was a language unfamiliar to her, but a language nonetheless.

“Goblins,” she mumbled to herself. The only creature of the Dark Lands that had enough intelligence to actually have a language. Or perhaps this was something else, she didn’t fucking know.

The muttering kept coming closer and she searched her mind for any memory of Goblins. Most people thought they were a tale tail, they hated fire, they were selfish, greedy, they were from the Dark Lands…a bit unhelpful, she thought. They hated fire.

She had been improving on her magic, she knew this, but she also knew that the fire would have to be big. Did she have enough energy within her to do it? From what she could sense her surrounding had nothing to offer her, it was just her and Nylif that she could draw upon. What if she went too far?

The whispering grew louder.

“Fuck it,” she said and retreated into her mind feeling the power surge within her. Just like lifting a stone. She put out the fire in the white mansion, she could do this. She took a deep breath, then released it. Her arms wobbled as she pushed the energy out through her hands. A ring of light encircled her, colouring the black with red and yellow like a painter splashing colour onto their blank canvas

A chorus of squeals and shouts rang out as she watched the flames lick the Goblin’s teal skin. Just as soon as it came, the fire went out, the low oxygen air unable to fuel its hunger. Tatianna panted slightly, feeling a bit drained but nowhere near as tired as she thought she would be.

“See, wasn’t that bad. This place isn’t too bad” she told herself. She was nervous, the darkness putting her on constant edge. She thought of keeping a small fire going, but she knew that would quickly exhaust her and she needed to be up to fighting speed.

And that was when she saw it, a slight glow, the only thing shining in the entire place. She did what anyone would do if they were stuck scared in the dark, she run towards the light.

Her pace slowly halted as her surrounding slowly became visible. The ground was black, a floor of black dirt that was rock hard. From what she could see there were a few bones scattered around just as she expected, a mass graveyard.

As she approached the light it took a form, a shape which made her halt. What if it were some weird creature that used light to catch its prey?

She approached cautiously, trying to keep as much distance as she could whilst attempting to decipher the nature of the shape. It was almost human-like, but it wasn’t…

Then the closer she got to it, the more alluring it became, she felt like she needed to see it. She needed to know what it was. The light was slowly becoming blinding as she took each step. Soon enough she was within a few meters, and still, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

A part of her knew it wasn’t a creature though, it was something else. Her sixth sense wasn’t screaming at her to run away. She didn’t get the flight instinct that she was so familiar with, especially when she was a child. No, she wanted to get closer.

It definitely had a human form, it looked human from what she could tell except its features kept shifting, male to female, short to tall. Every time she blinked it was like she was viewing an entirely different figure. She wondered if the fumes of this place were making her high, because what she was viewing seemed more like a hallucination than reality.

“I warned you,” whispered a cold and distorted voice that chilled her to the bones. Each word held so much power that it made her very soul tremble. “I warned you not to come and yet you still came.”