Page 10 of Blood Red Woes

“Rune,” I ask, and I can feel the tattoo on my arm coming to life as he readies himself to answer me. “What did you do to make the empresses put you away in that crystal?”

“Soul gem,” he corrects me. “It was not a natural crystal. It was a human-made gem created specifically to house powerful souls like mine.” Now that his lecture on the differences between crystals and soul gems is finished, he finally gives me an answer, “I challenged them, and they did not appreciate it.”

“You challenged them?” I squint at the ceiling. “What does that even mean?”

“It means I did not bow to them like every other soul in Laconia. I was powerful enough to face them without fear, without cowering and worshiping the ground they walk on, and they took the greatest offense to it.”

“These empresses, are they evil or something?”

Rune is silent for a bit. It’s times like this that it would be nice to be able to talk face-to-face, so I could judge his reactions to my questions. All I can get off him now is his tone. “When they locked me away, they were not as they used to be. They’d started going mad. Paranoid. They did not appreciate me or the threat I allegedly posed to them.”

“You don’t know how much time you were locked away? If these empresses are still out there?” Rulers gone mad… it’s as believable as anything else, and the fact that they all have magic as well makes them look even more guilty.

“No. I can’t say how long I was in that soul gem, or even how I arrived where you found me. Perhaps it was fate that brought us together.”

“Maybe.” Even as I say it, I don’t know that I believe it. If fate is real, I have a few questions for it, such as why would it let my dad die on me when he was the only thing I had? Why let me go through the system, never knowing where I came from? If fate is real, then it’s cruel and we are definitely not friends.

Fate can go fuck itself.

I ask Rune, “How do you remember all of this if you can’t even remember your name?”

“The empresses locked me away. Perhaps they wanted to destroy everything I was, so they left me fractured, but intact enough to remember who the masters of my punishment were.”

Lifting up my hand, I study the glowing mark on my wrist and hand. The same color as the magic that came out of me whenthe dog nearly got me. Almost like it’s alive and has a mind of its own. “How old are you, Rune?” When I imagine a wizard, I picture that gray-bearded guy fromThe Lord of the Rings.

What was his name? Gerard? Gerald? Geralt? Hmm, no, those aren’t it.

Anyway, my point is that when I picture a wizard’s face, I imagine him old and kind of crusty. But, for some reason, when I heard Rune’s voice, I don’t picture him with a stomach-length beard and tons of wrinkles around his eyes.

I can’t really picture Rune at all, actually.

“I… don’t remember,” Rune replies. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“So young. No wonder you want to get back to your world. Your family must be missing you.”

I am only nineteen. I am young. The problem is I don’t feel young. I never have. I’m one of those unfortunate people that life forced to grow up too soon. “I—” I stop myself from telling Rune that my dad is dead and I have no family because my mom up and left right after she had me.

Just because the dude is on my wrist doesn’t mean we have to share everything.

I drop my arm and roll onto my side. “I’m tired. I need sleep.”

Thankfully, Rune doesn’t press me on the subject. He quiets, and I shut my eyes, waiting for sleep to come. Being trapped in a strange world that’s beyond dangerous, you’d think I’d want to get to the bottom of things immediately, but right now my goal is the city of Laconia, and from what it sounds like, it’s a lot farther of a hike than what I did today.

Plus, I’ve been up for forever. Got lots of shitty news. It isn’t hard to see why I’m so damned tired.

Sleep comes, and when it does, I fall into it with open arms.

Chapter Four

I’m falling. Falling, falling, falling. I can’t feel a thing. Everything is black. My body is weightless. I must be falling; if I’m not… I don’t know where I am or how I got here. Those things I don’t know, but I do know something.

I’m not alone.

Wherever I am, I am not alone. I can feel something clawing at me, something trying to get in. Something dark, something intangible, tendrils of the unknown frantically pulling at me from all directions, trying to distract me, unnerve me.

Whatever it is, it wants to come inside, but I don’t let it. I refuse. I might not know what it is or why it wants me, but I know I don’t want it inside, so I push back. I push back mentally with all my might.

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