Chapter 8:
The Setting Sun at the End of an Empire
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She nearly fell over Briallen when Ivor and Ewen crossed behind her, the cold of the sea still freezing her body as she fell on her knees. It was a pity that coming back to the Hall didn’t dry their clothes, and yet it took a moment for Amelia to notice that the strange place had a warmth that she hadn’t paid to mind before.
Her eyes went down to her hands, dirtied with ink, as if she had bled black blood.
“Are you all right, my lady?” Ivor asked, placing a hand on her shoulder. Amelia blinked at him and then stared at the others. Briallen was performing some spell to heal a cut on Ewen’s head. Ector was… well, he was standing in the corner, waiting for the rest to finish. Their eyes met and Amelia looked back at the old sorcerer, nodding.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shame replacing the confusion of what had happened on the ship. “I lost your key, I shouldn’t have been so stubborn.”
Ivor shook his head. “What is done is done, lady. Once you have your strength back, there won’t be a need for keys.”
Amelia tried to smile but she couldn’t help looking down at her hands again. That door… it had opened even after being locked and the silver key not working. Was that her supposed magic, just like the one that they had used to open a portal in her house? But if it was that, why didn't it work the first time? Was she truly just tired or somewhat sick? Or there was something bigger than she needed to become the so-called Weaver they needed to go on in this journey?
“Should I help you?”
“Sorry?”
“Your clothes and bags, I mean,” Ivor said with a fatherly smile. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want to catch your death, even in this place you must be cold.”
“Oh,” she said, puzzled. “Yes, thank you.”
He gave her a hand and she stood up, then, taking a step closer, he traced her silhouette with his palms open. His hands started to smoke and glow in a faint yellowish colour. After what could have been a minute, Amelia felt the wetness of both the clothes she wore and the change from her bag dissipate. Ivor stepped back then, shaking his hands back to normal and sighing.
“There you go, my lady, all dried up.”
“Thank you,” she smiled and the old sorcerer nodded, turning around to help the others dry up and organise their weapons.
Amelia ran a hand through her still-wet hair and inspected the contents of her bag that had been saved from the sea. She took out her jumper and got out of her dry-but-dirty coat, putting the jumper over her head just in case for the next world they visited then, remembering, she shoved her hands on the buttoned pocket of the coat. The parchment was still there, eerily dry, and so was the ring with the red stone. She ran a finger along it, wishing it to be some talisman that could give her her supposed magic back, then took it out and put it on her ring finger.
She couldn’t remember where she got it, it was way too thick and fancy to be something she had purchased herself in the world she had recently believed was her home. There must have been something that had caused that door to open. If they had used the keys then why couldn’t any of these objects be something she had hidden to help herself?
Then the black from her hands came to mind again. The way she had desperately written ‘open now’ in the wood. Could that be some kind of help?
“Excuse me,” she called for Ivor and the man turned to her. “Did I ever tell you how my magic worked? If I needed something to make it work? Some spell, talisman or whatever?”
“Or whatever?” Ivor echoed her as if she were talking in another language. “I wouldn’t know. The times I saw you in our citadel you weren’t performing any, my lady. All I know about your kind is what Lord Merlian told us and what you taught him. He will surely be able to explain it better when we get back home.”
Home, he said. Not ‘our world’. Home. As if it was Amelia’s too, even when couldn’t feel more alien to these people, Ivor seemed sure she belonged in their world, whatever that was.
“All right,” she said, trying to hide her frustration at the lack of answers. “Shall we get going then?”
“Indeed,” Briallen said as she finished tying her bag, “we’re out of food. Next world better at least have some damn land.”
It was she who chose the door this time, they waited for now to come down to them instead of trying to climb. The princess was quick and swift with the key and was the first to disappear and shout it was safe from the other side. Ewen followed suit, then Amelia, leaving Ivor and Ector for last.
Amelia couldn’t help the leap on her chest when her feet touched solid ground and not water, though the relief didn’t compare to the wonder that followed next.
As the light of the portal dissipated, her eyes adjusted to an impossibly green landscape. Trees so tall that they might have been mountains… Only that after watching closely she noticed that there weren’t trees, they had to be walls. Walls covered and almost swallowed by nature. There was water everywhere too, falling from the edges of the walls like waterfalls forming small lakes. The sky up was barely visible, closed off as they were in that green monument. Still, even as they walked, she couldn’t imagine she had seen any ceiling that tall in her entire life, even if she had little memory of it.
“A ruin?” Ewen asked, circling on himself, weapon still in hand just in case.
“A castle or a temple,” Ivor answered, his hands up as if he was trying to make some spell, but grimacing. “Magic is weak, I don't think this is our world.”
“We still need to get food and sleep,” Briallen said. “If there is this much vegetation to cover a building like this then it must be animals or even people. We should explore and rest while we can. I don’t think I remember the last time we ate properly, do you?”
“We shouldn’t attract attention unless we want to repeat what happened in that sea world,” Ector said. “You and I can go hunting. Ewen and Master Ivor are enough to guard the Weaver.”
“Will you stop doing that?” Amelia snapped, though she regretted at the second his pale eyes bore into her. “I’m right here, you can actually ask if I want to stay.”
“I don’t see why you should come if you are not doing anything useful,” he said coolly. “We don’t need to find anything but food and we don’t know what kind of dangers this world has.”
“I have been locked up long enough!” she hissed. “Unless you want to be my jailer, sire, I don’t see how you can try to keep me here. You said to yourself you need me because I can change anything, and if I can do that then I might as well decide to open a door by myself and leave you all behind once I remember.”
The man narrowed his eyes, looking at Amelia up and down. First with some sort of amusement, and then with a grimace, as if he had remembered something himself.
“Yes, I suppose you would.”
“Stop, both of you,” Briallen said, putting herself between them, putting a hand on Ector’s chest and turning to Amelia. “My lady, I think he might be right. We don’t know this world nor if the place where we are is hostile. You could have died on that ship last time and even if you can’t use it… Your power might have attracted that creature too. We have seen it done with dragons in Imnalia, they are drawn to the strongest magic. Please, I know you don’t want to be kept in one place but we can’t risk anyone taking you.”
Why would anyone take her? They were in another world, weren't they day? The men on that ship hadn’t known what Amelia apparently was, so why would the people in this world?
Amelia wanted to say no, to tell them they were ridiculous, but everything they had said had been true so far, as much as it pained her to admit it; and she certainly didn’t want to feel the helplessness she felt in that ship again, so she stepped back.
“Alright then, I hope we don’t stay long,” she quipped with a strained smile, pitching her voice like she did when she had to pass a call at work. “The sooner we go, the quicker we can go to your world so we get this settled.”
Briallen gave her a sympathetic look before turning around and leaving with Ector, who gave Master Ivor a look and ignored Amelia’s glare. Once they were gone, she sat down and left her bag on the ground, sighing. Her companions were on their own while watching her from time to time. Ewen collected fallen branches and twigs from the enormous trees and piled them close, while Ivor was walking around in a perfect circle, setting wards.
She got up, paced and looked at her stained hands. That ink must have been good if the black was still in her fingers even after being dried with magic, closing her eyes, she tried to banish the horrifying sight of the creature from her mind. It had been luck, pure luck that she had opened that door, but how—?
“Tell me about your world,” she said out loud, abruptly while turning to Ewen, who gaped at her.
“What—What do you want to know, my lady?” he said setting the wood down. “I—l am not as accounted with the courts and circles of the high sorcerers to give you a good picture of what you might have forgotten.”
“I don’t care about that now.” Amelia slapped her hands on her sides. “Just tell me about it…, as your home. You keep telling me I have to save it but right now the only picture I have of it is some catastrophes and a group of weird people vaguely talking about saving a place whose existence I didn’t know about yesterday so… Tell me then, make it real.”
Ewen gave the old sorcerer a pleading look and he shrugged. “Not my strong suit, boy. I have been in the Citadel since I was younger than you are. The lady will get bored with my tale for sure.”
The boy sighed and grabbed one of the twigs, starting a drawing in the dirt. Amelia arched an eyebrow at the makeshift map he was doing but didn’t press him. Once he was finished, he turned to her, smiling.
“So, this,” he pointed to the ground, “this part here is the Island of Imnalia, except it wasn’t an island until some years ago. Huh, during the war, the Witch Queen had to cut them from the rest of the continent because of the dragons and the war, said that she couldn’t protect anyone and their island has been closed since then. I lived here, in the borderlands between them, the Moorlands and the Citadel.”
Amelia squinted, trying to understand the boy’s handwriting on the dirt. Imnalia was a patch of land, broken from the rest of the continent, but big and down south. The Brotherhood’s citadel was as big as she imagined that the Vatican was, maybe more, it fell in a strange position, between the island, another kingdom and the Moorlands, which Ewen had drawn farther north, almost shadowing the other kingdoms.
“Imnalia is ruled by women since always, all witches, the royal covens,” Ewen explained. “They don’t like the Brotherhood or the way they practice magic, they say it disrespects the Goddess and that they are at fault for the dragons and the plague.”
“And do you agree with them?” Amelia asked and the boy made a face.
“I don’t know about it much, my lady, but by the way the Moorlands got destroyed by the plague and the war, I’ll say that whatever they did, they paid greatly.”
“Don’t let the princess hear you say that,” Ivor chuckled from afar. “She is quite convinced on who is at fault about the fracture and that the punishment is yet not enough.”
“Who?”
“The Raven King couldn’t have done something like that, he wasn’t even there—”
Amelia blinked, the name sending a chill down her spine. “The Raven King?”
“The ruler of the Moorlands,” Ivor explained and shook his head. “A sorcerer that was trained by the Brotherhood until his brother died and he had to take the throne. He has a gift with shapeshifting and it is said he can transform into a raven though I never saw it.”
They kept talking but Amelia didn’t register the words, in her head there was again that image of the raven and the man that had tried to kill her. A gift with shapeshifting? Could Ector and the Raven King be the same person?
“He took a raven shape and watched over his armies during the war,” Ewen said with an admiring tone. “His son told me he was trying to transform into a bird that brought better luck, but ravens are quite fast so I never saw why he wouldn’t want to be one too.”
“You met his son?” Amelia asked and the boy smiled and nodded.
“He was good, not like his father by far, even Princess Briallen liked him.”
“How did you meet him?”
“We crossed paths while travelling, my village had been burnt by the dragons and the prince and princess were travelling to find something a way to stop them.”
So Amelia wasn’t their first option? That was a relief, at least they could still keep searching if or when she failed.
“Have you ever met the king?” she asked softly, eyeing their expressions to find any trace of lies. Ector could be a different sorcerer, could be just a man that looked like the one that tried to strangle her in those dreams, could be that he just looked like that because of the effects of the loop in the world she had been imprisoned, but somehow she doubted it.
Because it was fitting, wasn’t it? Briallen was a princess, Ivor was a representative of a brotherhood of wizards, and Ewen seemed to be some kind of explorer if not an assistant, they represented their respective people. Who was ‘Ector’ to represent the Moorlands? A sorcerer with no magic? Someone from the court? He talked little but even then he had been hostile to Amelia, as if he knew or at least suspected there was a past between them.
“I met him when he was a boy in the Citadel,” Ivor said, shrugging and looking away to the direction the others had left, “but I never talked to him much, he was a quiet lad and not my pupil.”
Evasive, he knows who he truly is, then. Amelia kept a neutral expression when she turned to the boy, who shook his head. “Only his son, my lady, I’m not exactly of the likes that meet royalty every day, unless we are looking for dragons or sorcerers.”
“And speaking about looking,” Ivor said, frowning. “Has been time already, shouldn’t they be coming back?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Maybe there is not enough game?” Ewen said. “We are in a different world, the very animals could be poisonous or something.”
“Let’s hope for our sake that they are normal animals because we have been days—”
A tremor shook the earth and Amelia shrieked as the walls of the ruin trembled and the birds flew away from the branches of the gigantic trees.
Clomp… Another rumble made her fall to the ground and she felt Ivor’s hands over her shoulder blade, keeping her down.
“Earthquake?” Ewen asked with a shout, his short sword out from its stealth.
“No, that’s something else,” the sorcerer said grimly as another tremor shook them. “Stay close, Ewen, the wards might not be enough.”
Clomp… Clomp… Amelia blinked and tried to get up. They were getting closer, she could hear them, too sudden and rhythmic to be an earthquake.
“Steps,” she murmured as she clung to Ewen’s arm and tried to stay upright. “Those are steps.”
“We need to get out of here, find the princess and Ector,” the boy said and Ivor raised his hands, Amelia’s bag and coat almost smacked her in the face, but she clung to them.
“Be prepared if anything happens but I have warded the place, we can’t leave the others.”
“Sir, we can’t fight— Whatever they are alone!”
“Giants,” Amelia said blankly, her eyes scanning the place in full for the first time. An enormous temple, bigger than any that she had ever seen or read. No human could have built something like that.
“What?”
“Those are a giant’s steps or maybe more than one.” She steadied herself and crossed her bag over her torso. “Ewen is right, we have to leave now. The wards won’t be able to—”
“Get down!”
Amelia was on the ground once more, shoved by Ewen as the blade flew over them, collided with Ivor’s wards and was repelled back to the end up in the ground.
A sword? No, more like a dagger. Another rumbling clomp accompanied it, along with a laugh that seemed to resonate inside her skull.
“Oh!” A deep voice laughed. “Oh, here they are, Wrulog, I told you the smell wasn’t far.”
“Well,” said another voice, a little higher but not by much, “those two little bastards could have lied anyway.”
The steps got closer and Amelia’s blood ran cold at seeing them. A man and a woman, dressed in heavy cloaks and carrying torches. Even as he was standing up, Ivor could barely reach the giants' knees as they got closer, the sorcerer pointed his staff at them. “Stay back, we have no quarrel with you. We’re only travellers.”
“Oh, gods, Rous, did you really throw that knife at them?” the woman grumbled. “The king wants them alive!”
“The king said the woman was useful, not the wizard,” the other giant said and hunched down until his face was visible with the light of his torch. Amelia gave a step back when the flash of big teeth flashed on a bearded smile. “There she is.”
“I’m warning you!” Ivor shouted as the glow of his shield surrounded them. “Leave us be! We’re armed!”
The giantess waved a hand and the wizard screamed, thrown back against a wall as Ewen shouted after him. Amelia caught the boy by the arm, shaking her head. “Stay inside the circle.”
“If you want to stay there, we have all night, little sorceress,” the giantess said, hunching back in one knee to their height and raising an unimpressed eyebrow at Ewen’s sword. “But that spell won’t hold for long unless you do it, so we can wait here, kill your friend and take you anyway or you can step out of there and come to meet the king.”
“What would your king what with me? I’m not from this land, I have done nothing to him nor taken anything of his property,” Amelia said the words slowly, not really thinking about them. Her eyes darted from the giants to Ivor, who lay hopefully unconscious a few feet away, then to Ewen, tense and ready to attack once the spell started to fail.
“Little witch the blue hair and her companion were hunting on the king’s grounds,” Ruos said. “He said only a powerful sorceress would make humans able to enter giant land. He asked for you, little sorceress, out of all our own witches including my own cousin here. Don’t you see the honour? You don’t have to resist.”
“I am not a sorceress,” Amelia said, frowning. Had they arrived at the place they were meant to go? Ewen didn’t seem familiar with the place, and none of her companions had mentioned giants in their world. Dragons, magic, yes, but not giants. “And I won’t go anywhere if you harm them.”
“We could just wait then, the old man there surely has some healthy bones left,” said Rous but his cousin shook her head and sighed.
“We won’t hurt your friends if you come, little sorceress, though your friends must stay here. Two humans in giant land is risk enough.”
Amelia eyed Ivor and then Ewen, they weren’t enough to fight these giants. Clearly, Briallen and… he also had difficulties. Physically they were already at a disadvantage, but she couldn’t wait for her supposed magic to spring when there was a witch in front of her that could crush her entire torso with her hand.
“All right.”
“No!” Ewen grabbed her arm as she tried to step outside the circle. “You can’t! They’ll kill you! They might have killed Princess Briallen and Ector already!”
“I don’t think they are dead,” Amelia said quietly, something told her that Briallen wouldn’t go easily, even against giants, she would probably take some with her. “Stay here and take care of Master Ivor, we’ll be back soon.”
“Please, my lady…”
“Ewen, trust me, if you are trusting me to save your world then you have to trust me to come back. Now, please, let go of my arm.”
The boy’s face contorted with doubt, desperation, anger, fear, and hope in a matter of seconds, but in the end, resignation won when he let Amelia go and kept his sword up as she stepped outside the circle. The giantess, in an apparent act of kindness, lifted Ivor in her arms as if he were a small child and placed him inside the shield next to his friend.
Amelia clenched her jaw as she looked up at Ruos’s bearded face and nodded to them, walking in between to let them know she wouldn’t be taken there like an animal hunted in the forest.
“Lead the way then, let’s see what your king wants with a telephone girl.”
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Briallen cursed every man who was able to ever do magic in any world or plane, but especially the man who was sitting in the cell next to her. Idiot. Greedy, ridiculous idiot. Typical man of the Brotherhood, never knowing when to stop and try to take something that wasn’t his. Of course, he had denied it, to her and the guard, to the witch giantess that probed into his mind and to the king himself. But magic didn’t lie and his intentions didn’t either.
Now the King of the Giants wanted Amelia Brown and Ewen and Ivor would pay the price for Ector’s greed as well as his.
“You just had to do it, didn’t you?” she said for the fifth time in the evening, though the man didn’t reply. “I told you that we had to stay away, that we could forage in the forest, but you just had to cross that wall. What did you even need that flower for anyway? What does a hunter do with a flower from another world?”
Ector made no sound in the joint cell, Briallen wanted to reach through the bars and slap him.
“Did you get hurt in the ship? It’s that it?” she asked, squinting to see his pale face. “You got hurt and didn’t tell anyone?”
Silence again, but she could see him moving. His fingers danced like a spider’s legs, counting spells he could no longer make. Had the giantess broken his mind? He wasn’t looking at Briallen, his eyes were at a point beyond her or even the castle walls itself.
The princess sighed, giving up and praying to the Goddess that the king didn’t kill Amelia Brown. She also thought of her sister for the first time in weeks, would she ever see her again? Could the Weaver find her if they got her to their world? Elora would have cracked the truth from this stupid man of the moors, she had always been better at talking than Briallen.
She wondered now if what happened to Ector had also happened to her sister and that’s why she had disappeared. She stared at the hunter’s ashy face and tried to imagine her lively, powerful sister without her magic. Their mother would probably say Elora deserved it for joining the Brotherhood and rejecting the teachings of their coven.
It was a more comforting idea than the possibility that her sister had just perished from the plague. That her brave, sweet, talented sister had died in agony from any of the horrible magical maladies that had been plaguing the territories close to the Moorlands where she had served as a healer.
For a moment, she thought of asking Ector, ask if he had met this sorceress – not witch, Elora had been denied that title when she had left – that used the Citadel’s knowledge to heal common soldiers and not just to whisper behind a king’s ear; but of course, he wouldn’t know, he was just one of many in the Raven King’s court.
She cursed, raising her hand to the door once again and reciting the words but the giantess’ magic blocking the cell made her head spin. Sighing, she closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall. It was absurd. This world didn’t seem to be falling to pieces as theirs was, what did the king want of the Weaver?
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They took her through a secret door, through bushes two heads taller than she was in a green and yellow garden. Another door was waiting, in the back of the palace, a servant’s door or maybe something that the king could use to escape if he had a need. From there there was a tunnel and then a hall, big, luxurious and curiously empty of people except for one figure she could have passed for normal if it hadn’t been obvious that the distance was the only thing that made him look small.
“My liege,” Rous said and gave Amelia a tap on the back with his finger, nearly making her fall over. “We’ve brought you the Weaver.”
The king turned around but didn’t move, he nodded and looked at his hunters. “Leave us.”
Amelia bit the inside of her cheek as the vibrating steps disappeared and the door was closed. The king had spoken with a voice that in a human being would have made it difficult to hear with the distance, but she could hear him well when he spoke and distinguish his face under his long brown-gold beard. He stepped closer, took a stool from under the table, and sat down just a few inches from where Amelia stood.
“I see you chose to come without a fight,” he said, his voice making her bones tremble. She clenched her fists and stared at him.
“You didn’t give me much choice when you captured my companions.”
“Oh, yes,” the king chuckled and slapped his lap. “The little witch and her thief, they’ll be freed after you do your part.”
“My part?” Amelia stared at him, confused, what could he want for her? For all purposes he seemed as the most powerful being in this world – or of what she could see of it – his own servants were powerful enough to protect them. “What could a king need with me? Magic or not, I am a telephone girl. Surely your Wrulog or any other practician can help you all the same.”
The giant king narrowed his eyes. “This is no time for jests, woman. We both know what I want. I want what you gave the last time you were here.”
“I think you are confusing me with someone else.”
A deep rumble came from him, a laugh as he reached out and one of his fingers touched her face sightly under her chin.
“No,” he said, “I never forget a face, especially not a human one. They are not allowed here unless they are one of those ambassadors we have to suffer for the sake of diplomacy we can’t afford. You don’t remember your time here, little sorceress? Did your kind force you to forget?”
“I don’t know,” she said, exhausted from the same question that had been already repeated in her own head a hundred times.
“Hmm.”
“Why would I lie to you?” she snapped.
“When you were here, you told me about our great victory, but neglected to tell me about the decay of our armies, about the humans’ new… inventions and the decline of my empire.”
“Maybe I didn’t know about it,” Amelia said sheepishly.
“I truly doubt that you seemed to know a great deal about this kingdom, enough to become a member of my court.”
“Then what do you want me to do?”
“Just to move your tiny hands like you did before and change the course of events to our victory.”
Move her hands? Was he mad? Amelia shook her head and looked at her hands, dirty and still stained by the ink in the ship. She had told him about a victory and now he wanted her to change the course of their events. Again that promise of her supposed great power, and somebody’s hope for her to fix it. How could she change things if she didn’t what had changed in herself? What kind of hero went around just causing more trouble?
Then the thought she had pushed away since they had left that cursed ship came back. She started at her stained hands and remembered the door that wouldn’t open with a key that was supposed to open everything. She had written something in her anger, had that made the key work? It seemed too simple, too easy, but then again, back in that looped world, she had written about Briallen and Ector finding her on a whim and they had…
Could it be…?
“I need something to write on,” she said to the king. “Something of my size, if you want me to do this.”
“Whatever for? You did well with your own hands the last time—”
“The last time I wasn’t as… weak as I am now,” Amelia snapped and then sighed. “I can’t do it as before now. I don’t remember the way.”
The king got up from his stool and gave some paces across the hall, opening a chest close to the throne and taking something out. Amelia squinted to see what seemed to be a small chair and a little table. Small enough to be toys on his hands but well on her size when he put them in front of her. “I saved them from the last time you were here. Sit.”
The chair was actually too big for her, and the desk was enough to accommodate at least three people, Nevertheless, she sat down as the giant took something from his sleeve – or maybe from the pocket inside of it. – and lowered to the table. They were several rolls of parchment, an ink pot and a quill. An actual animal quill she remembered seeing only in paintings or pictures.
“You know what you have to do, little sorceress.” the giant said, his hand almost closing around her entire torso. “If you made us lose, then you can make us win.”
Amelia stared at the instruments, it was true that they were well preserved, quite remarkably for a world where something so small could be crushed so easily, especially the quill. The ink pot was made of some metal and the ink inside had yet to dry. They were definitely something she had brought from somewhere else, maybe the part of this world that was occupied by humans.
She inhaled deeply, then submerged the quill in the ink. “It would be easier if you were not breathing on my neck.”
The king scoffed and then walked back to his stool, Amelia unrolled one of the parchments.
“You must make the Bloodstone King fall,” he said. “You must make their magic, their spears and their armies disappear.”
“I will write… what I must,” Amelia said, and the quill started scratching on the parchment.
She had never used a quill but nevertheless, the words flowed fast, she barely looked up but knew she had seconds before he could read the words out of her thin, messy cursive handwriting.
“Wait.” the king gasped and she looked up, decorating the scene with a harsh, thick underline.
And then the king of the giants fell into a deep sleep.
Once the first sentence was done, she wrote it again, looking at him as he paled and tried to get up.
He fell into a deep sleep before he could call anyone.
“Stop!” the giant cried, his voice rumbling in her ears. He was standing up and Amelia kept writing. He had to go down, this had to work…
He fell, his eyes heavy, his legs crumbling, his body lax in exhaustion.
He fell.
He fell.
He fell down.
Amelia nearly jumped from the chair as the giant fell forward with a resounding thumb that could have been a wall falling or a building being demolished. She underlined that line, the ink making her handwriting blotchy and thick. She wrote a little more, to be sure that she wouldn’t be followed.
Neither the hunters nor the guards noticed this. The Weaver was not seen by anyone. She wasn’t spotted by anyone. She left without leaving a trace.
Then she took the quill, the parchments and the ink pot and hurriedly pushed them into the big pocket of her coat. The door wasn’t locked, the guards were there, but they didn’t see her.
And they wouldn't, at least not until she was far from their reach.