She woke in a very dark place.
She was not bound and could move about freely. She was wearing the same clothes that
she had on when she was captured, and she discovered that the silver necklace Zytae had given her
was still around her neck. She looked into the deep blue of the crystal and carefully tucked it into
her shirt.
She was in pain, and she struggled to stand. She wondered about Zytae, and knew even if he
had survived the sword attack, there was no way he could have lived through the fire—particularly
given the seriousness of his wound and how quickly the fire had spread.
The stone floor that she had been sitting on was cold, and she could see that there were
narrow openings in two of the black walls, as well as one far above her head. She moved first one
way and then another, and she discovered there was yet a fourth opening in the floor beside her.
Like the other three, it was long and narrow, but was something that she could easily squeeze
through. This made four ways she could escape.
But, as she continued to explore her surroundings, she found that the last of the walls was
entirely missing and was in fact a balcony that overlooked a somewhat large chamber.
She examined that room and noticed, as her eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, that
there was some kind of creature hanging on the far wall.
The individual was a very strange monstrosity. It had a very round, bulbous head attached
to an extremely short, small-diameter neck and a narrow string-bean of a body. It had immense
round eyes with large green pupils and an equally round mouth, but no nose that Akiko could see,
and its head was completely bald. The creature’s body was long and rectangular in shape, and it had
four limbs—two in the back and two in the front. All ended in large, mitten-like, white hands.
The limbs were not normal. They were extremely thin, and could bend in strange directions.
The creature’s right arm was bent backward at an acute angle no human could achieve, and that
hand was flush on the back wall, again at an angle impossible for a human.
The thing’s other arm was twisted forward, and was more human-like in its shape, but its
hand was rotated completely backwards. The legs were spread wide but then were bent straight
down in another impossible direction, with those hands each pointed away from its body. The
creature was most spider-like in its appearance.
It stared at Akiko but said nothing, and she wondered if it could talk. Then it shifted to its
right, still hanging on the wall, while its legs made a chittering sound. It now looked at Akiko from a
different angle. Then its head changed shape from round to rectangular, and its two eyes, which
had been horizontal in arrangement, altered position so that one was directly above the other.
And it smiled. It was an awful smile that made its two eyes glitter with a bright green,
malevolent light.
It then spoke, in a normal-sounding voice that somehow carried a great swell of evil.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” it asked.
Akiko was not certain an answer was required. She said nothing—and waited.
“You don’t remember me?” the creature repeated.
“There is no reason you should,” it continued, “…because I am so much different now, but
you should remember me.”
There was a long pause, then the thing spoke again. “We fought once, you and I,” he said.
“Long and hard. It was a terrible battle. It was on a long ridge in southern Adhara. I was going to
win. You were exhausted and fell, and I was going to win. But then that tall elf… the one who stood
off to one side… shot me in the neck with an arrow… he killed me, you know…”
Akiko managed to whisper one word in surprise, “Woozon?”