Prologue
There
was something odd about the wind that day.
Often,
the breeze would be alive, picking up in speed as it rushed past the dense
undergrowth, only to slow down when it had reached its peak. But that was not
the case then, Brayton noted as he crouched behind the wild grass shrouding
him. There had been a continuous upwind draft wafting up his nostrils ever
since he had lain in that position, and judging from the duration he had been
crouching there, something was wrong.
Very
wrong.
It
was as though the skies above were trying to send him a message, warning him
that something ominous was stirring beyond the cover of the trees’ thick
canopy. Yet even so, the boy felt no fear of the shadows. Instead, they seemed
to entice him, the foreign scents he caught scent of, drawing him forward and
closer to the boundaries he was warned of. His curiosity was piqued, and
nothing but moving forward would be able to satiate him.
Slowly,
he shifted his weight from his forearms to his legs, lifting himself off the
grass with as minimal sound as he could manage. Once he was back on his two
feet, he then began to stalk towards the trees, his beady eyes scanning
furtively for any signs of the dangers the wind had mentioned.
There
was nothing though.
For
the first five minutes of his journey, all he ran into was a huge mess of
unkempt vegetation – thorn bushes that lay in his path, and vines that hung
from the steady branches overhead. The only thing that was vaguely suspicious
was the soft buzzing sounds that rang in his ear, and even that seemed
negligible. Disgruntlement coursed through him as he thought back to the
promise of an adventure he had been given.
How
cheated he felt.
If
only he had known earlier, he would have resisted his inquisitiveness and
continued crouching by the grass, waiting for his hare trap to spring. But as
it was, he had not, and as a result, he had wasted his time, struggling to
search for something that was not even there in the first place. He was such a
fool, a complete imbecile.
It
was then though, when for the first time, he heard a moan – a vague noise that
barely penetrated the whole forest. Brayton froze, not quite sure if it had
been a moment of folly, or a real plea.
“Hello?”
he called out uncertainly, taking another step forward. “Is anyone there?”
Hoping
to at least catch a trace of the same sound he had heard a moment ago, he was
disappointed when the only thing he heard reverted back to the buzzing and in
addition, the occasional cawing from crows.
Had it really been his ears playing tricks
on him again? He sincerely hoped that it was not the case, however, upon
thinking more rationally, it was indeed highly unlikely that anyone else asides
from his father and him would have been lurking in such a sinister location.
The
forested and mountainous terrain that bordered Roschworth was after all
rumoured to be teeming with man-eating beasts, and though Brayton swore he had
never come across a single such creature in his entire history of hunting
there, the rumours often scared off those that were curious about the terrains.
Not that he minded usually, for that meant that they had more of the roaming
livestock to themselves.
Yet
for that day, somehow the thought of being just one hanging about in the solace
of the trees failed to comfort him. He wanted something more abnormal,
something that broke out of his daily boring routine.
He
wanted an adventure.
It
soon turned out that the prospect of his desire coming true was not all that
far-fetched though. The sounds that trailed after the first one he had heard
were a lot more muffled, but having spent his full concentration on the fields
trying to detect the sound, he finally managed to pick it up. Confirming that
there was indeed something that was being hidden here, he then proceeded onto
identifying the source of the soft moans – a task in which he completed in less
than a few seconds.
Brayton
made his way in that direction, carefully parting any of the shrubs that lay in
his way. With the distance between him and the noise decreasing, he could hear
them clearer now, and he had a vague suspicion he knew what lay at the back of
his path.
Human. And he was right, for when he had
finally shoved through the last of the green forest thick to come face to face
with the source of the sound, he found himself staring right down at a girl
lying with her eyes shut against a tree.
To
say she was probably young would not have been an unreasonable guess for her
size seemed to indicate it, however the frailness of her physique, the
bagginess of the cloak she wore, as well as the dirt that marred her made her
appear older, rendering it hard for him to clearly perceive her age. Brayton
could hardly be bothered figuring out how old she was though. The foremost
thought that he had the moment he spotted her had been how anyone could have
been heartless enough to abandon someone in the midst of somewhere so far away
from civilisation and concern for her.
“Hey,”
he said as he gently tapped on her shoulder, “hey, wake up.”
It took
a moment of repeated calling before the figure ceased muttering and her eyelids
lifted slightly, taking the sight of him in.
Brayton
had no idea what to expect right then, but whatever came next took him by
surprise. Unable to register him from her memories, the girl had shot him a
confounded look before imploring.
“Are
you a wiccan too?”
A wiccan?
He
stared at her.
“Why
do you ask if I’m a wiccan?”
As
far as Brayton was concerned, he loathed wiccans. They were nothing but
monsters to him, with their brutal and sinister magic, and they were the reason
why humans like him had to live in shambles and fear, the reason why the
village his parents once lived in was now riddled in chaos.
For
a moment, he wondered if the frail girl he found was a wiccan, which could have
been why she had asked if he was a wiccan, but he soon dismissed the thought.
She did not exhibit the traits typically found on one. Her eyes were a dull
musty brown, nothing like the exotic silver the wiccans were said to possess,
and she also lacked the mysterious aura that seemed to be his defining traits
for them. To Brayton, she seemed like an innocent child, one that could do with
a bit of feeding and shelter.
The
girl hesitated for a moment, probably debating how much she ought to the
stranger she had only just met. In the end, her faith that he could not have
meant her any harm won out, and she replied.
“My
parents told me that if I stayed with them, the wiccans would find me and burn
me because I’m not like them. They said that I am a scum.”
“Scum?”
Brayton beseeched, his voice ringing higher by a notch.
He
knew the term, but it was not so much of its meaning that startled him rather than
its usage. For most of childhood, his father had tried to hide him from
learning the existence of the derogatory word humans in his country were being referred
to as. Brayton could hardly imagine any human parents willingly telling their
daughter that she was a scum. Though then again, the girl’s parents had
abandoned her, by now, nothing should have been surprising to him.
... (to be continued)
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