Broken and bruised,
Hated and abused,
Is the girl of fire,
A child that seeks to inspire.
An original novel by M.G. Gorman, all rights reserved.
Genres: fantasy, adventure, romance, mystery
Full Cover: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AwVTo_RIOEcD...
The world froze. Not a creature dared to move in that second. The terror ran through Asaliah like glass in her bloodstream, tearing her apart from within. The woman would have sworn her heart skipped a beat in that moment in time as she stood there, holding Neha and staring into the man's drunken eyes.
Her breath became shallow as she gasped for air, every muscle in her body trembling with fear. The man opened his mouth to speak as he began to pull her away from the door, "Come with me, beautiful-"
Asaliah let out an ear-bleeding scream of pure trepidation. "No!" she spat struggling to pull away, "Let me go, you son of a-"
The man dropped her wrist and slapped her flat across the face with such force that Asaliah dropped Neha to the floor. Her pale, delicate skin turned black and blue as the rest of her body tensed. She had not been prepared for that blow, so she was not able to push the pain away. Instead, she just stood there in painful suffering, the terror still eating at her from the inside.
"What is going on-" Neha said, squinting as she fell out of her dream of the memory and into reality.
"Run, Neha, run!" Asaliah screeched, her voice cracking as she called, but it was too late, the drunken man grabbed hold of Neha's hand as well, throwing his bottle to the floor.
The bottle hit a wall and shattered in a disarray of glass and liquor. "Listen here, darlins'," The man grinned, revealing his rotted teeth, "You don't get to just come into my house without receiving proper punishment. I don't know what you want but I need to make sure you two will never come back," he grinned, his breath making Neha and Asaliah want to gag.
Asaliah was shaking so hard now that Neha feared her delicate frame might collapse. Neha still knew very little about the situation, yet she had picked up one thing. The two girls needed to get out of the house, now, before the man could do anything. By the way he was eyeing Asaliah, Neha was pretty certain she knew what her punishment was going to be from the man if Neha did not get her out.
Her mind may not be able to think up lies in a rush, yet for some strange reason, she could think of a way out no matter how many fears attempted to blur her mind. The idea came so quickly and easily that it felt as if she had almost been in this exact situation before.
Neha gazed into the man's eyes, burying her gaze through his eyes and into his soul. Her gaze burned through him without letting go. There was something in his eyes that she did not fear and when she spied it, she knew she could fight.
Neha took a deep breath, thinking the idea through once more and then gave her all. Within a split second, she dived under her own arm, taking her body one way but twisting the man's wrist which dug into her skin the other.
The man cried out in pain as he let go of her arm. "Asaliah!" Neha cried, "The mind!" she shouted in the Kellestri language. As soon as the words left her lips, she herself was surprised. The child had never learned that yet there was no time to get lost in thought, not now that is.
Asaliah understood and tensed, clearly taking all pain from her body by focusing on something deeper. In doing this, she clung onto the railing to the stairs and Neha stood ten feet away on the other side of the room.
In doing this, the man could not reach Neha without letting go of Asaliah and she knew the man would much rather keep the seventeen-year-old Asaliah rather than the fifteen-year-old Neha. However, the man was still not pleased with the thought of Neha getting away.
She could see his eyes burning with rage, yet she knew this was nothing compared to what she had to do to get Asaliah out of here.
Neha, staying just far enough away, walked around the two of them and into the kitchen. She took a deep breath before she did so.
"Be prepared to run," Neha said to Asaliah in the Kellestri tongue once again.
Closing both her hands around the necks of two different bottles the man had just brought back from town, she threw them across the room where the expensive liquor was wasted on the floor.
"You stupid girl!" the man shouted, letting go of Asaliah's wrist and bolting toward Neha to take out his rage. Directly before the blow hit, Neha could see Asaliah dart out the front door and into the snow almost without the man noticing at all.
"Bam!" It hit her flat on the face. Even though she could not feel the pain, she knew for sure that it would leave a nasty bruise.
She may be the stupidest Kellestri to Asaliah, the weirdest girl to Leo, and a mistake to all the Kellestri in Merveille, yet she did know some things and at this point in time, that was to run.
Her feet propelled her toward the door yet when he reached it first, her mind panicked on what to do next. Luckily, that is when her instincts took root. Turning directly around and running in the opposite direction, it took a second for the man to see that Neha was gone.
Neha flew up the stairs, taking a left at the flight of stairs and running to the end of the hall where she reached both her hands up to yank down a ladder, she did not know how she knew was there. While her mind panicked, her body took control of climbing up into some room, yanking the ladder up after her, and closing the hole in the floor, praying all the time that the man had not seen her come up there.
Knowing she only had a second or two, she ran over to the only window that looked over the front yard. As she stood in front of it in the attic, a memory begged to resurface itself in her mind. Yet whatever the Nostro Lumine had done to her human memories, it was firm. She was unable to know that this certain attic happened to be one she would visit often as a human around midnight.
Taking a metal bar-like object from the floor, she shoved it into the window, breaking the glass. Using her bare hands to pull away the shards of glass further, she cut her hands. Even though she could not presently feel the pain, the warm blood still trickled down her fingers, making an awful mess.
Neha climbed out into the snow and onto the roof, not hesitating to do so for fear the man would find a way to enter the attic. Taking a deep breath, she jumped.
For a second, she could feel a sensation that sent every nerve in her body one edge. She was falling.
The air rushed past her ears, reminding her of the few times when she had left the earth with her wings. However, when her feet landed onto the snow, it was not the soft landing she remembered.
Because she could not feel the pain, the girl was oblivious to the fact that she had just landed on her left foot sideways. Running on the injured foot, the child chased after Asaliah's fading footprints in the snow.
As the blood from her hand trickled into the snow, she could hear the faint sound of someone in the attic of the house, shouting at nothing. As the sound faded behind her, she still did not dare to look back but instead continued to run.
The child ran, her weakened body and mind causing her to let go of the memory and therefore begin to feel the pain once more. The snow may have helped numb the pain, but it was still there, clear as day. As the child continued following the footprints, she slowed to a walk, limping over her left ankle as the tears began to fill her eyes.
Continuing to limp as fast as she could, Neha walked deeper into the heart of the woods, following the footprints to who knows where. The winds filled with snowflakes roared around her, covering the footprints quicker than ever. This brought some peace of mind to Neha knowing that the man would not be able to follow her, yet also made her nervous that she might not be able to find Asaliah in time.
Her limping walk turned to a sort of bouncing run, the poor child grimacing at each step. Neha attempted to focus on the memory and take the pain away, yet she was unable to pull her mind away from the agonizing feeling in her ankle.
Finally, after what felt like ages, her eyes rested on it. Twenty feet in front of her lay a small building. It was a cabin-like building, no bigger than a shed, yet the footprints led exactly toward the front door. Neha could see the smoke coming from the chimney and her heart begged the wind that it could possibly be a fire inside.
When she approached the door, shivering all over and the tears running down her cheeks in rivers, she knocked on the door, begging Asaliah to open up. Creaking the door slightly, Neha's eyes met Asaliah's bright blue ones, Asaliah's still filled with fear.
"Oh my, Neha! Come in!" Asaliah cried, her fear melting into care. The hint of hate was gone from Asaliah's eyes as she helped Neha sit in a chair near the flames of a warm fire Neha greatly appreciated.
Asaliah's hands worked studiously, working gently around Neha's ankle. She melted some ice on the fire and removed the glass from Neha's palms, cleaning the wounds with the water afterward. After she had placed Neha's ankle in some ice and finished bandaging her hands, she too sat by the fire.
The woman's eyes were on the ground. She felt sick at the thought that she could not even teach this Kellestri without frustration, yet the child could have been killed in her attempt to save her. It brought a sense of guilt to Asaliah's conscience as she sat by the fire.
Not a word was exchanged between the two of them, yet not one was needed. Neither of them truly felt the need to speak and neither had anything to say. They just sat there, watching the flames of the fire crackle away.
Shortly after Asaliah had fed Neha a small bowl of soup she had made, Asaliah laid down in her bed. Both the girls lay their heads back, still shook from the events of the day. It certainly was not a day to be forgotten any time soon.
As the two of them fell into sleep--one of the two was swept away into a deep dream. Neha smiled as she noticed a familiar beacon in her dream, shining as beautiful as ever. It gleamed in front of her and seemed to be smiling directly at her.
In the dream, Neha sat on the ground and watched the light, perfectly content. Then, she heard it. The familiar hiss of words spoken from the Nostro Lumine:
"For Sacrifice, Your First Litterae Is 'M.'"
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