From The Ashes | The 100 S5 [Bellarke]

|8| Little One

9 months after Praimfaya

She was alone.

Madi thought she was dead. Things were gray and hot like in the stories about the Under her uncle had told her about. And everyone she found was nothing but crumbling bones, blowing away in the storms.

But she was still hungry, and so she hunted, even though there wasn't much to find. Rats that crawled into small corners and bit her fingers when she grabbed at them, their raw meat warm and stringy in her mouth. Flat bugs that she found under rocks and burnt trees, the taste of them cold and squishy.

Water was hard to find, too. It burned her stomach and made her cough up black liquid, though the water from the sky didn't hurt her.

Madi wished she had died in a better place. She wanted to curl up and forget everything.

She wanted to forget when the sky was fire and she had hidden from it in the bottom of her home, the rock walls smoking and steaming from the heat. She wanted to forget the loneliness. She wanted to forget and fade away, like the bones she found.

It was when she was sitting, rat blood sticky on her fingers and mouth, and wishing again to forget when the sun woman came.

She didn't belong in the gray and the hot – she was too pretty for that. Her eyes were the color of the sky before the fire burned the blue away into ash, and when she saw Madi, she smiled.

"Hello, little Nightblood," she said.

6 years and 8 days after Praimfaya

Madi didn't go to the village.

Instead, she followed the sky people as they took Clarke away. This time, she was quiet when she walked, her feet almost silent on the forest floor. When she wanted to, she was very, very good at being quiet.

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VERY short chapter here, yep. But I'm going to make it up to you in the next one when Clarke comes into the Eligius camp.

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