Escape from the Obstinate Prince ✓

Chapter 27

"O happy day! I think I'll say that again. O happy day!" (From old cartoon, Peter and the Wolf, if you haven't seen it, you should go see it.)

If I keep pestering you guys to comment, will you someday actually comment? Pleeeeeeease. *gets down on knees + tears flow freely*  

Ami chilled. Goosebumps spread up her arms. Not because she was cold, but because she could feel the dark. It was not merely a lack of light or heat, it was an evil, lying in wait. The whole ship was smothered with evil.

Ami curled up into a ball and leaned against the side of the hold. Whether she sat with her back on the starboard or port side, she didn't know. She did know that she felt safer with her back to the wood. Whatever demons lurked about, she would see coming. Or so she told herself.

To fight darkness, you unsheath the light. Light.

"They keep lanterns down here, don't they?" she stood up, bracing herself. The wind had picked up speed, and she could only guess that a gale was starting to brew. She felt her way back towards the door where Robert left her. Where do they keep these things? she felt on the other side of the door.

A glass window, less than two feet wide and two feet tall, had not been opened for a week. The seafarers hated the hold. They had all felt the evil that wisped all over the place. Only Igor had been convinced to descend into the abyss, and even then, it was only for two minutes and thirty-two seconds.

She unlatched the window and tentatively felt inside. This is the most oddly shaped candle I've ever-

"Ahhhhh!" Ami shrieked and pulled her hand back. The thing hit the floorboards with a thud.

Dear God please don't let it be alive, Ami squeezed her eyes shut and put her hand back into the blackness. Well, everything was already black.

This time she felt a round solid thing, cool to touch, and the slightest bit sticky. She pulled it out and used her other hand to pull out the matches.

"Where is the lantern?" she muttered to herself. She set the candle back inside and struck the match against the cold steel of the lantern.

Flames on top of the short wooden stick and Ami blinked several times before her eyes adjusted.

The flame licked the candle's wick and she set it back inside the lantern, making sure to snuff out the match completely.

Shadows froliced along the walls of the hold. Ami wasn't sure if she was more scared of the swaying shadows or the petrifying darkness.

She looked down at her feet. She screamed again and backed up against the wall.

A snake, about a foot long, was content to lie, doing nothing.

It didn't move and was suspiciously dead looking.

The poor snake's life had been short lived. It was born, only a week before on an island with lush greenery and bright sunlight. Then the storm hit. Gray, gray, gray. Nothing but gray for hours and hours. The snake started to get quite chilly and a soaked to the skin.

Not far from where the snake nested, two men in grubby clothes, huddled next to a fire. One was a large man with a round stomach and arm stained with black art, the other was just as tall as the large man, but not nearly so pudgy.

The snake decided that the larger man would provide more warmth than the lean one, so he slithered through the blades of grass (he blended in quite well with the muddy green) and up into the older man's coat. The snake was, of course, much smaller at the time, only measuring five inches and half an inch in long.