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Autumn
They weren’t magical creatures from the forest here to take me back to their super cool secret lair deep in the trees with them. I hated that I was disappointed because I knew better to have gotten my hopes up in the first place.
Forest creatures. I mean, really?
Obviously I believed in forest witches because I was one but I’d lived in these woods my whole life and I had never, not once, seen any other sign of magical creatures.
Why was everything in my life one giant shit show of disappointment?
Despite what some of them had done to me, slicing me open and leaving me tied up to the tree to either freeze to death or bleed out, I still wished there was something I could do to warn the people in the encampment that there were strange men here lurking in the woods.
People like Plume were good and didn’t deserve to be punished because other people were either just plain ol bad or wrong in their actions. That wasn’t fair at all and I wasn’t normally a vindictive person.
Always a team player, even when my team never wanted me.
I closed my eyes tightly and called on my magic. We were taught not to use our magic, which always felt like bullshit to me because we were witches and we had magic for a reason.
I understood that there was a delicate balance to these things and nothing came without a price but sometimes it was worth paying that price.
I always thought it was a way for the Elders to control the masses and I wasn’t surprised by any of it. Clearly it didn’t always work, look at what just happened to me.
I concentrated hard on where my blood was sinking into the ground. I yanked up on it as hard as I possibly could, roughly yanking my blood back out of the earth and sending the fat red globs into the sky.
I blinked in shock as they exploded in the sky high above me into bright red starbursts. The whole sky looked like it exploded into red light.
The camp would see it for the warning it was. Hopefully they’d be smart enough to run.
I’d done all I could for the ungrateful people who I once thought of as my family.
“Did she just do that?”
“Who gives a fuck. Cut her down from there and get her covered up.”
“This place is beyond fucked up. I had no idea places like this even still existed. This is barbaric.”
“I’m calling Rain. Even if we take her out of here, and I’m telling you right now I’m not leaving her here for anything, we are going to need more help than just us to clean up this mess. Rain called us in to check it out. We’ve checked it out, it’s worse than we thought it was going to be. We’re taking the girl with us because she’s likely to die here if we leave her. But it’s going to take more than us to clean these people out of here. Rain’s trained for that and he knows people. We aren’t. Let’s cut the girl down and get the hell out of here before whoever did that to her comes back to finish the job.”
“They aren’t coming back for her, Raven. She was tortured and left here to die. Look at her.”
“Did you idiots miss the fucking light show that came from her? She’s powerful. We need to be careful with her.”
My head swam and their words ran together.
Who were these people and why were they in our forest? The Elders were going to be so mad when they found out. I hoped they didn’t blame me for it.
I wanted to tell them to get away from me but I couldn’t get the words out past my lips, they weren’t working correctly at the moment. It was expressly forbidden to speak to outsiders. Sometimes they came to visit but only the Elders were allowed to converse with them.
I had never had a desire to talk to them before but I really did not want to be blamed for this. And if someone found me with them I’d surely be blamed for them being here in the first place, no matter I had no idea who they were.
Had I been so brainwashed by this place that I cared even after they’d abused me yet again?
I didn’t want to be here any longer but I couldn’t open my mouth to say anything to these strange men. Men I couldn’t even see because my vision had now failed me entirely.
That had to bad for me, right?
Too much blood loss and too much use of my magic when I wasn’t used to using it in large doses.
I was probably going to die here in front of these strange men.
