A dingy way-post stood short and fragile at the foot of a beaten path that started and split in three ways immediately. The sign was crudely stained in a red dye that came off at the corners. Clearly inscribed in the block of fettered wood were beautifully calligraphed characters that seemed wasted on such an unkempt canvas.
The characters glowed with a yellow hue that stood out starkly from the red dye surrounding it. In front of the way-post the Village Chief whipped backwards towards the four boys that followed leisurely behind him.
"Tetsu... huu, you take her over to Llana. I have to return to my meeting with the delegate." The Village Chief commanded through strained breaths before turning to the other three boys. He clearly wasn't used to such physical exertion, having just jogged for nearly an hour.
"As for you three, you might as well go with him there. Do whatever you want, but just remember what I told you." He said cryptically, making sure to emphasize his words.
"Yes, Village Chief" Reltin answered for the group and the Village Chief nodded briefly in response before walking off. Tetsu was already well on his way down the rightmost path that led into an opening in the nearby woods.
"What was it again that the old man told us to do?" Arton questioned Reltin leisurely as his eyes trailed the girl that bobbed up and down on Tetsu's fleeting shoulder.
"Old man? That's the village chief Arton! Show him some respect." Reltin snapped back and yelled at him but was only met with Arton's cold eyes that moved once again to meet his.
"I don't like that guy." He stared coldly into Reltin's eyes while speaking out in a monotone voice. "He's no good, my intuition says so." Arton tapped his head with his finger a few times as he said so.
"Eh.." Reltin stared back him not knowing quite what to say. Arton's rarely ever brought up his intuition but whenever he did, it was usually right. Reltin turned back to look at the fleeting back of the Village Chief with a troubled expression.
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She continued enduring the drilling at her stomach that evolved into now what felt like a javelin jabbing in and out of it. 'Were this boy's shoulders made of steel!?' she continued to cry inwardly but soon found her salvation in the form of a small structure that the giant had stopped on the porch of. Evident by the wooden flooring that now met the girl's vertical eyeline as she hung over his shoulder. The flooring, however, was quite crude, and she could spot multiple tiny cracks and gaps between each plank.
"Llana." The giant spoke gently before knocking repeatedly and violently on the wooden door in front of him. His smooth voice sounded in stark contrast to the thunderous banging that came after it.
The girl could feel a shaking from his extraneous gesture but soon realized that it was not just his arm that shook but the entire hut that was trembling under his hand as he continued to pound on the wooden door that she looked up to find was quite shabby as well. It was a wonder to her that the thing had held under such violence.
"What, what, WHAT!?" An impatient voice squeaked from the other side of the door before opening it from the other side and squealing even louder. The figure on the other side stood short as a gnome in comparison to the giant that the girl could only assume was staring down at the woman called "Llana" from next to her. The woman had to be no more than five foot tall as she looked up with exceedingly squinted eyes and a dangerous look that the girl assumed were aimed at the giant next to her. The woman wore a dirtied, blue apron atop a simple white shirt and black leggings which were also quite bruised as well as a pair of thick, brown gloves that gave her the impression of a gardener that had just come out of an intense wrestle with a bush.
[https://i.ibb.co/jVGRTBJ/Elvi-First-Look-Gold-Eyes-1.jpg]
"This, take her." The giant spoke in the same manner of a five-year-old child before the girl felt the shoulder that supported her disappear and the world spin as she was flipped forward and presented to the lady in the hut as if she was a gift basket. The sudden propulsion left her too dizzy to protest at the continuous inhumane treatment.
"Huh?" Llana's face contorted into a frown as she looked down at the girl and seemed to study her body. Her squinted eyes trailed over the girl, stopping only to stare briefly at her stomach before she looked back up at the man behind her.
"What, is she supposed to be injured or something?" Llana snarled at him, clearly not taking the girl as a serious case. Well, it only made sense. She was, after all, completely fine.
"She fell. From Ice marrow. " The giant replied in more short sentences.
"From the top of Ice marrow?" Llana asked incredulously, answered only by the continued silence of the boy. She looked down at the girl again but this time with a much more peculiar gaze. Her face held the same expression for a couple more moments as she looked back between the dizzy girl and the boy's serious face before clicking her tongue, seemingly having relented. She opened her eyes from its previously squinted state, revealing green pupils that glowed with a similarly bright green light, taking the girl aback and causing her to unconsciously recoil at Llana's gaze.
Stolen novel; please report.
Llana's eyes trailed the girl once again but this time feeling much more piercing, giving her the feeling of being completely exposed. Her eyes stopped on the girl's stomach but only for a second before they darted up to her head and Llana's face contorted drastically. She quickly grabbed the girl's shoulders, propping her up on her feet before grabbing her hand and pulling her into the hut and slamming the door shut behind them.
Tetsu remained still outside, puzzled at the girls' sudden disappearance.
The girl's untrained steps almost caused her to trip over herself multiple times. With extreme focus, she somehow managed to keep herself upright until Llana unceremoniously pushed her down onto a bed that was nearly double her size.
"I'm going to need you to lay down for a bit." Llana said as she flitted with something on the other side of the room.
Llana sat down at the bedside and the girl's eyes drifted around the room surrounding her. The interior was about what you'd expect from a typical cabin in the woods. A few buckets sat on the ground around b what seemed toe seeds that littered the floor, above them was a tool rack on which hung a pan, tweezers, and a variety of other tools that didn't quite fit in a gardener's kit. Although she had called it a bed, the cloth she sat on was nothing much more than that: a thick fur blanket that covered a wooden frame which not even a soldier would be able to sleep on comfortably.
"Sorry, that bed was made to fit even that blockhead outside, so you'll just have to deal with it." She said, rummaging through a variety of flasks and trays on a table that covered the length of an entire wall. She seemingly found what she needed as she turned around with two flasks of a strange yellow liquid in one hand, and a tray of red herbs in the other that looked similar to chili peppers.
"Y-yeah no, it's ok." the girl spoke in a soft tone, still uncomfortable with the unfamiliar voice that came out of her mouth. Llana put the unusual vessels on a cart that was just by the bedside before putting her hand over the girl's head and asking her to lay down. The girl was still very much confused by the entire situation but feeling Llana's gentle touch and seeing genuine concern in her eyes, she complied.
"How do you feel?" Llana asked as she grabbed some tools from the rack nearby and began to do something with the ingredients on the cart the girl couldn't quite see from her prone position on the bed.
"I'm fine, a bit of a headache if anything." she replied, feeling guilty that Llana was still under the impression she was gravely injured. Llana approached and sat by the girl on the bed. Her left hand was cupped, as if she was holding something in it. She put her right hand on the girl's head once again and opened her squinted eyes to reveal her green eyes once more.
"What's wrong with your eyes?" The girl asked, inwardly cringing at how her question posed in the soft voice that came out of her sounded like the tone of a five-year-old asking why the sky is blue.
"What? these?" Llana asked, pointing at her eyes with the hand that left the girl's forehead, winking them at the same time as a bad joke. The girl nodded at her question, and she smiled in a motherly way that reminded the girl of something she couldn't quite grasp. "Have you never met a healer before?" Llana asked as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"Healer?" The girl asked incredulously, thinking the woman was pulling a prank on her, but Llana's expression remained unchanged.
"Did you not have a healer in the tribe you came from?" Llana asked, curiosity -but more prominently concern, visible on her face.
"Tribe? what tribe?" The girl asked, her mind now running in circles trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Blue monsters, healers, grey-eyed giants, glowing eyes. What the hell was happening to her.
"I think you may have a brain hemorrhage." The woman explained. "I can try to heal you but it's going to hurt. A lot." She said with a serious tone.
'A brain hemorrhage?' The idea was ludicrous at first and honestly much too scary for the girl to consider, but after some consideration it didn't seem so unbelievable. Trouble walking, a headache, coupled with the fact that she heard her own voice differently and that she was seeing things it wasn't so crazy. The idea of being operated on by a tribeswoman out in the middle of nowhere, however, was terrifying and she was reluctant to agree to go through with it. Maybe it was because Llana could see the panic in the girl's eyes, but she brought her hand down to the girl's and held it gently before speaking.
"I know it's scary but if I don't do anything, you won't survive. You have to be brave." Llana's words immediately broke the girl out of the spell of fear she was under, and she inwardly slapped herself for behaving like such a child. Sure there was some serious doubts that this tribeswoman could somehow contain the bleeding in her head, especially in a way that didn't leave her permanently impaired, but the woman seemed confident enough and if she truly was suffering from some internal bleeding doing nothing was never going to be the right option.
She took a few deep breaths before looking back up at Llana and nodding with determination. The woman brought her cupped hand up to the girl's mouth before dropping unfamiliar herbs with the texture of dry leaves into it. She brought a flask of water with another swift movement, and the slurped it down quickly, swallowing the strange substance and sending it flushing down her throat. She braced herself as she expected the woman to bring out a scalpel or some other sharp tool, but instead, the woman moved her hands over her in a strange gesture.
Llana brought her right hand once up to the girl's forehead, while her left one sat idle on her chest. Suddenly both hands began to emit the same dull green hue that shone from her eyes, and the girl began to feel an intense burning in her chest. The burning quickly progressed into strangely familiar searing pain. Her eyes closed shut seemingly by instinct and the girl felt as though she was repetitively slamming against the door to her subconscious. The door, however, refused to budge an inch let alone open. However, as if responding to this sudden raid a single black speck emerged from under the door, moving ever closer until it struck her temple causing her to feel an impossibly real physical pain from her head. All at once the memory of a certain abyss came crawling up into her mind before flooding her thoughts entirely.
The girl's eyes tore open abruptly and she howled out in pain as the memory struck her along with the already intense searing on her chest from the Llana's hands. She nearly lost her consciousness before the pain slowly faded away and she was left panting in relief, sweat trickling down her forehead. She felt as though she had just run a marathon. As she lay down exhausted, her now empty head was occupied only by the memory of the cold and unforgiving grasp of death.
And then a single thought. Something more akin to an external reminder than any kind of remembrance.
"Who... am I?"