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Chapter One
SARAH
My consciousness flickered like a faulty lightbulb, struggling to hold onto the slippery edges of awareness. I was met with a darkness that felt both suffocating and expansive where I lay on a hard floor inside a tiny room that seemed to contract around me with each shallow breath. The air was stale, heavy with an odor I couldn’t place—something acrid and metallic, making my stomach churn.
My mind reeled, a carousel of fragmented images and muffled sounds spinning relentlessly. An echo of fear clung to those memories, elusive yet pervasive, like the hum of an electric current through my veins. My heart drummed a staccato rhythm against my ribs, an insistent warning that something was very wrong.
With effort, I tried to lift myself from the cold floor, my limbs heavy and uncooperative. It was then I felt it, the unforgiving bite of restraints encircling my wrists. Panic rose in me like a tide, swift and drowning. My breaths came quick and uneven as I tugged at the bindings, their relentless embrace igniting a primal urge to flee.
"Think, Sarah, think," I whispered to myself, my voice a ghostly sound in the oppressive silence. The room offered no clues, just shadows that danced across the walls, mocking my helplessness. There were no windows, no doors that I could discern—only the dim outline of what might have been cabinets or machinery etched into the periphery of my vision.
My eyes darted around, searching for any sign of life, any hint of an ally in this otherworldly prison. But there was only solitude, a companion as cold and indifferent as the space that held me captive.
Each moment stretched into eternity, marked only by the rhythm of my racing pulse and the tightening grip of despair. Fear clawed at my insides, a relentless predator threatening to consume me whole. Every nerve in my body tingled with raw terror as I grappled with the unknown fate that awaited me. The oppressive weight of uncertainty pressed down on my chest, suffocating me with its icy grip as I wondered what was planned for me. I wouldn’t have been left here without purpose.
Was someone watching?
My gaze took another flit around the room, this time searching for cameras while my mind raced with a thousand horrifying possibilities, each more sinister than the last.
Paralyzing dread coiled around my heart, squeezing it in a vice-like grip, as I trembled in the face of an invisible enemy. The oppressive silence engulfed me, sending my heart into a frenzied gallop. I sat vulnerable and isolated, enveloped by shadows, dreading the unseen presence scrutinizing my every action.
The door's creak announced a fresh horror. An avocado colored troll-like being shuffled into the dimly lit cell. His squat stature crowned by a wicked grin carving a crescent across his pocked, leathery face.
His guttural language clawed at the silence as he beckoned me with a gnarled hand and pointed to the hallway beyond with the glowing tip of a long pole.
"Nitek!” I had no clue what he shouted, but his intent was made clear in sharp gestures.
I shakily rose to my feet, vertigo setting my head adrift as I struggled with my restraints. Each step I took became a battle of determination, an exercise in will. My resolve not to crumble under the weight of my circumstances, a testament to a fortitude I hadn’t realized I possessed. Not that I was a coward, but waking up to this was something beyond terrifying.
As I shuffled closer on bare feet, the troll lightly prodded me with his glowing stick, sending jolts of agony racing up my arm. I instinctively jerked away. The sharp pain was like a bolt of lightning, welling tears in the corners of my eyes.
The quick touch served as a clear warning not to try anything stupid or suffer the full brunt of a prolonged jab.
Shoved out the door by my grotesque jailer, I was herded through a labyrinthine of corridors by the threat of his shock stick. With each twist and turn through a seemingly endless maze, the air grew thicker, hotter, until my lungs labored for breath. The oppressive heat cooking the marrow of my bones.
The troll's relentless march came to a sudden halt, and I found myself stumbling into a colossal cavern teeming with trolls surrounding a group of trembling bodies. The eerie glow of luminescent fungi above gave the scene an otherworldly feel. My heart raced as I took in the sea of faces, all bearing the same expression of dawning terror.
I was shoved in with the group of nine women huddled together. All of us wearing the same white, sack-like garments tied at the shoulders.
A blonde woman with haunted eyes offered me a rueful smile that spoke volumes of our shared plight. My gaze roved over the group, each with their own tale of upheaval and chaos. Like me, these strangers had been plucked from their peaceful existences and thrust into a world of unknowns.
One by one, we were brought forth and forced to our knees, a line of despair stretching across the cold stone floor. I fought the urge to resist, feeling the metal clasp of the troll's restraint biting into my flesh as a stark reminder of my captivity. Questions churned in my mind, but fear kept me silent.
The trolls moved systematically among us, wielding devices resembling crude pistols. The sharp prick at the base of my ear made me gasp. The trolls' guttural language suddenly unfolded in my mind, a grotesque complexity of sound that now held meaning for me. Instead of bullets, these guns implanted a translator device that nestled against my skin like a parasitic whisper.
"At least we can understand what they’re saying now," murmured a girl to my left, her Canadian accent placing her worlds away from my own origins in southeast Kentucky.
I wished I could agree, but I couldn't. Sometimes ignorance was bliss and knowledge did not always equate to power. If anything, it etched our predicament in stark relief, the strange conversations between the trolls we now understood only highlighting the depth of shit we were truly in.
"Where are we?" I dared to utter the question aloud, my words a tentative bridge between me and the strangers who now shared my fate.
"Far from home," another replied, her tone laced with the weight of galaxies that lay between us and everything we'd ever known.
I closed my eyes, allowing myself a momentary respite from the visual assault. But even behind the veil of darkness, images danced memories of Earth, of freedom, a time before the trolls, before this room that teemed with lost souls. I clung to those fragments of the past like lifelines, anchoring me to the person I still was beneath the fear.
I had to stay strong, search for a way out of this.
And with that singular thought, I opened my eyes, facing the alien landscape of my confinement with an unshakable resolve.
