Elurra hated her name. It meant “snow,” which fit her well and was consequently the reason she disliked it. Her father told her they chose it because she was as fair and beautiful as fresh snowfall. For her entire life, people knew exactly what to expect when they heard her name, yet she had still managed to disappoint.
She wished she could simply squish the spider, but she had no control of her body. All she could do was move forward, every step bringing her further south and closer to Amora. She had never been outside Lur Alava, and she was accustomed to the cold. Traders from the South in their large sheepskin coats ridiculed the residents of Lur Alava for living in the North. She could imagine why they thought that way: food was scarce, the weather was uninviting, and the lack of sunlight made them all incredibly pale. It was not a stretch to compare Northerners’ pigment to paper, while everyone from the South had skin like caramel and cocoa beans.
Elurra was grateful for her tolerance, even though her garments from the coronation were warm enough. However, the formal boots were not made for hiking through the snow. She wondered how long they would last before the soft leather turned to soggy pulp.
Elurra decided to put her thoughts to good use and attempted to escape the spider's control. She tried everything she could think of to break its hold on her, but her feet rhythmically trudged away from Tor’ac Roh and towards the densely wooded perimeter.
She soon crossed into the valley edged by of the Pagrac Forest. The spider obeyed Nitiri's orders by following a barely noticeable path only used in the warmer seasons for tracking game. The path was covered, and she found it hard to push her way through the drifts and into the pitch-black darkness of the forest.
The ancient pines stood stories above her head, swaying gently in the breeze. Snow drifted down from the branches, and Elurra discovered she hated how the foliage muffled every sound, leaving the grim scenery eerily silent. She had never liked the Pagrac Forest. Aleah used to tell her stories of monstrous creatures that lurked in their caves until an unfortunate soul wandered into their domain. She knew the stories were probably told to scare travelers. Anything that did live in the woods would be deep in hibernation at this point in the season, but she still felt leery.
She devoted endless hours to the task of freeing her mind and body of the spider's poison, but eventually she gave in and turned her mind to other topics.
°◌°○●○°♣°○●○°◌°
Days blurred together as Elurra dragged herself through the dense evergreens and frozen dirt. She didn't feel hunger, exhaustion, or thirst. She just felt numb. She noticed the gradual change in elevation as the forest flattened out, and she started to spot strange shapes among the trees, half-emerged in snow.
The spider would not let her stop to investigate, but eventually she realized they were stone statues poking up like drowning men reaching for the surface. There were sculptures of all sizes and shapes, their features weathered away by the harsh elements. She couldn’t believe how detailed their creators had made them. Even eroded as they were, she could tell they had been masterpieces at one point. But countless decades later, they lay in shambles, with missing limbs and split torsos.
The ancestral kings of old, before the Great War, she realized, awestruck.
She had read a little Lur Alavian history. A thousand years before, the Kutsal Stone fell from the sky and landed in Amora, bringing the Demons with it. The dark beasts feasted upon all of Incari, killing hundreds. The sky tore apart and terror reigned. Lur Alava’s evil king used the bloodshed to launch a war against Amora, with the people of Sheni and Reagn at his side. The Demons continued to plague the land and eventually people lost hope. Then the Guardians came. They drove the dark ones back with their swords of light and their powerful magic. The Guardians killed the evil rulers and ended the civil war, but the Demons still haunted the land. In the final battle, the Kutsal Stone shattered, and the Demons and Guardians returned to the ethereal plane they came from: Yamoi.
The castle in Tor’ac Roh was constructed as the new capital of Lur Alava, and the old castle in Fronn had been left to ruins and was considered cursed. New rulers were elected to the thrones of Lur Alava, Sheni, and Reagn. Each kingdom received a crown featuring a Kutsal Stone, caged in a net of terrant—a rare whitish-blue metal—to neutralize its effects. Without terrant, random rifts to Yamoi could open unpredictably. The legends said if too many of the stones were collected, a passage from Yamoi to Incari would reopen, and the Demons could terrorize them once again.
Elurra found herself walking over the once-great city of Fronn, stumbling on uneven cobblestones buried under the snow. Only half of a tower remained, standing tall and in over the former heart of Lur Alava. It was black against the gray sky, refusing to relent to the forces of nature. The wind howled around the corroded walls. She could see piles of rubble that had collapsed over time.
Elurra feared she would see bodies from the war, but she was relieved to find time and snow had erased most traces of battle. The one exception was a crude ax blade sticking out from between the cracks in one of the stone walls, though the handle had long since perished. For a moment, the blade brought a vivid image to Elurra's mind.
She was no longer in the ruins, but the castle itself. The walls were strong and impregnable, and a battle raged around her. A man soaked in blood stood pressed against the wall, his eyes wide with terror as a colossal enemy swung at him with the giant ax. The image was gone in a second, but it felt so real that, in that instant, she thought she was in the thick of battle. She shook away the thought as the spider pushed her onwards.
The farther she traveled through the remains of the great city, the more uneasy she felt. On several occasions, she was convinced she could hear ominous moaning and skittering noises. Her wild imagination convinced her skeletons had dragged themselves up from their dark graves and were following her.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
She wanted to turn her head to check, but the spider refused to let her. She could see the vile creatures padding after her in her mind's eye, with hollow eye sockets and exposed ribs as white as the snow. Despite her mad delusions, she soon found she had cleared the ruins of the destroyed castle and forged on, back into the depths of the Pagrac Forest.
The dagger weighed her down with each step. A few times during the dreary trip, the spider stopped her body mid-step to sleep. It was like her brain was abruptly switched off, and she was cast into darkness without warning. Occasionally, the spider would also make her pick up clumps of snow for water and eat if food was around. She ate like a ravaged beast when given the chance. She still clung to the hope that she would escape the curse. She knew she was being selfish. If she refused to eat, then she would starve, and Nitiri wouldn’t be able to use her death for whatever she was planning.
But she wanted to live.
About two weeks into her journey, the weather grew warmer. The ground wasn't always snow-covered, and tufts of green appeared on the exposed forest floor. The needles on the ever-abundant pine trees grew lighter, and the bark started to look thinner and browner, as opposed to the blackish hue she was used to seeing in the center of the kingdom. Soon, Elurra started to see animals she had only read about in the old dusty books from her father's library. On her fifth birthday, Aleah found her reading The Encyclopedia of Incari’s Animals and Plants. She had read the entire book, and she was glad she had. The thick volume helped her distinguish the berries and mushrooms that weren’t poisonous during her travels.
She knew it was a little less than a two-week journey to Amora by horse, but after the first day melted into three weeks, she was glad she was so small. Her tiny legs forced her to take detours around obstacles instead of forging a path directly through the woods.
As the weeks wore on and the weather grew more inviting, Elurra lost one shoe, then the other. Thankfully, she could not feel her feet, but she noticed each footstep left a trace of blood from the cuts gathering on her sole. Still her trek wore on, her injuries multiplied, and depression began to settle in her mind. She was surprised a wild animal hadn’t tracked her down and eaten her yet. She had lost all hope of rescue or freedom. She hadn't seen a single person since she started walking, and nothing broke the spider’s control.
Maybe it is my fate to die at such an early age. That is why I developed so quickly. I was subconsciously making the most of existence before death was forced upon me, she thought dismally.
Elurra finally marched out of the woods and started crossing the plains bordering the looming Kerali Mountains. She was disheartened as the uneven snow-covered peaks, marking the edge of Lur Alava, rose to meet her. The Romon Pass also came into view, although it was barely a pass at all; it was more of a crack in the rocks big enough for a horse and rider to travel through. Passing through was uneventful and gloomy. The thin road was covered in shadow, blocking the meager sunlight trickling through the clouds. Not even snow could reach the crack between the mountains.
I am the only snow in this pass. Elurra smiled inwardly at her awful joke.
She arrived at Amora's border as the sun was starting its downward descent toward the horizon. The spider took her west through the forest, parallel to the mountains, until her path intersected with a small road. A worn sign on the side of the rutted street informed her that the nearest town, Glan’ak, was four miles away. The winding dirt path was riddled with tracks from carts carrying large, heavy loads to Lur Alava and back through a more accessible pass ten miles east. The spider urged her toward the town. Elurra saw the logic of following the road.
Nitiri would want my body found so she can blame Amora for my death. There is no sense in staging an assassination that would only be witnessed by forest animals. She probably is claiming I was kidnapped or fled of my own volition in my grief.
Her stomach twisted when she spotted a house on a hill ahead. Elurra's body stopped her in her tracks, and she strained against the spider to cry out, but to no avail. She watched her quivering hands raise the cool, steel blade. Elurra closed her eyes and was grateful the spider would spare her from watching her shaky hands plunge the blade into her pounding heart.
“Stop!”
Something equivalent to the weight of a potato sack slammed into her side. She crashed to the ground, and the dagger flew out of her hands and skidded across the dusty road. The sudden jolt allowed her to regain control of her mouth for a moment.
“Look...behind ear!” she said through clenched teeth, trying to fight the spider's attempts to control her once again.
Elurra's mind lost the battle and her traitorous hands reached for the dagger even though someone was sitting on her back. From what she could tell, her mysterious hero was a man. He was obviously not an adult, considering he felt like only a bag of rocks and not a loaded cart on top of her petite body. It was a welcomed weight if it stopped her hands from reaching the knife. Icy fingers brushed aside her golden hair and revealed the spider. The boy recoiled when he saw it, then bit his lip and pinched the alabaster arachnid’s abdomen. The spider released its grip, and the boy threw it onto the road. Elurra felt her limbs return to her as she took in deep gulps of air. Her dormant nerves suddenly started working again, cocooning her body in the agony of numerous injuries.
“Get that spider!” she yelled, tears springing to her eyes as infected cuts and scrapes complained in waves of anguish.
He quickly stumbled off her and grabbed a jar from the basket he was carrying, which had spilled its contents. He crawled over and did as she asked, capturing the spider and screwing the lid on tightly. She watched him until the task was completed, then flopped down on the compact dirt road. It was hard to contain her tears of joy and woe. She swiped away the moisture in her eyes with the palm of her hand and looked up at her savior.
Her eyes widened, and she forgot her misery for a moment as she realized he was only a child, not much older than herself. She had expected someone young, but not that young. The boy's features were hard to make out in the fading light, but he had a slight frame and dark hair. As soon as he made eye contact, he took an astounded step back.
“Your...your eyes are changing colors," he said slowly.
She blinked and stared at him blankly.
“They are?” She could not witness her eyes turning from gold back to her normal icy blue as the spider's poison wore off.
“Who’re you? Where’d you come from? How old are you?” he asked in rapid succession, taking a step back leerily.
She pondered the questions as best she could in her condition.
“Mentally or physically?” she finally asked.
His expression turned from fright to confusion. Elurra didn’t understand what was wrong with her question. She had been told many times that, although she was eleven physically, she was mentally much older.
“Physically?” He repeated, a puzzled expression on his face.
Elurra chastised herself. He was clearly an uneducated peasant boy. Many peasants never learned how to read or write; even those who did never learned such words.
“I am eleven."
“Why were you trying to hurt yourself? What’s your name?” She opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn't speak. Her eyelids felt heavy, and her limbs felt like jelly.
Why is my body continuously rebelling against me? she wondered as her vision faded to black.