No Dreams In Darkness by cuarthol

Nan Elmoth

Prompt: An unexpected visitor

The very trees around her seemed to shudder at her presence, but what enchantments had once lain on this land had long been left to fade, the master of it fallen in a far distant place.

Kurn felt the malice of it, but then, she was used to feeling such things.  She crept through the shadows wary but determined.  But she was an unexpected - nay, an unwelcome - visitor here.  Roots curled up and hindered her path, branches grasped at her, tearing what little remained of her shirt.  The branches shuddered in anger at her passing, but still she pushed on.

The shadows of the trees kept out the cursed sun, and so she would risk the wrath of these woods to be free of both it and - she hoped - unfriendly eyes.

It was not long enough, she felt, before she had reached the far edge of the wood, narrower than she had hoped.  Now she looked out over a wide open plain to where the mountains rose sharply against the sky.

That was where she wanted to be.  High in the mountains she might find a place to burrow down into the darkness.  She only had to cross the leagues in between, filled with the bright spears and sharp arrows of her foes.

She licked her lips and swallowed.  It was death either way, but at least death at the hands of her enemy might be quick.  At her master’s hands, death may well become a mercy withheld.  She at last let her hand dig into her pouch, clutching around the bit of hair, still inside.  It still shimmered in the faint light, stirring something in her that she could not name.

She might yet die, but some small part of her at least knew she would die free, even if that meant almost nothing to her reality.  When the sky was dark again except for the stars, she slipped from the forest, making for that dark line of the mountains ahead.