Chapter 7 #2
Rose should have been terrified, she supposed.
There should have been some kind of fear, but she only felt a little spike of excitement that she wouldn't be here anymore.
They could do with her mortal form however they wished, but she would finally be free of this place.
The king had given her the perfect opportunity to flee into the realm of her own making.
"Stay here," the guard grumbled, and then he left. She didn't have anywhere to go, so she stayed right where she was as doors all around her opened and men were shoved out.
Some of them were tall and broad. Clearly workers who had spent their entire lives using their bodies. Others were thin, weasel-like, probably surviving in this place through wit and wit alone.
There were even a few trolls, which shocked her.
They were massive, lumbering beasts. Their tusks glinted in the sunlight that beamed down upon them, but all of them seemed to be handicapped in some way.
One of them had his arms tied behind his back.
Another appeared to be strapped down with weights.
And a third wasn't given a single weapon when everyone else entering the room was armed to the teeth.
It wasn't a fair fight. But the trolls weren't even looking at her. They were looking at the human men with disdain and anger.
"Let the fight begin!" The king shouted from somewhere above them all, and a giant gong rang throughout the room.
Rose didn't even have a moment to flinch. All the men sprinted at each other with cries of rage, anguish, and brutality as they struck together in a wall of muscle that she swore she could hear. It was as if someone had thrown her into a battlefield.
Rose had been confined to a single room for years. This was too much space. Too many bodies. The sounds were overwhelming, and the blood even more so.
A man sprinted toward her, and she didn't even have time to react before a sword passed through his neck. The blade got stuck somewhere halfway through, and while the other man was wrenching at it, a third man cut the killer down.
Blood splattered across her face, and suddenly the heat of it, too warm, reminded her where she was. There were people dying all around her, and she was standing still.
Gasping, she raced away from the men who were fighting, only to realize there were men fighting everywhere around her.
She was surrounded on all sides by so many people.
The only sounds she could hear were the screams of the dying, the grunts of those who were killing them, and the hopeless moans of the wounded.
No healers existed for those who lived in this labyrinth.
A sword swung by her face. She felt the wind of it brush her cheek and fell back trying to get away from it. Staggering, she twisted at the last second to land painfully on her hands and knees in the darkened earth.
The dark patches that dotted everywhere around her were blood. The stains spread out all around her, beneath her hands, coating between her fingers. It was brutal and awful, and she shouldn't still be here.
"Rhydian," she whispered as she crawled through the carnage. "Rhydian, please. Let me come home."
She swore through all the madness, she heard the elf's voice. "You have to see, Rose."
"Why?"
A hand dropped next to hers. Not attached to a man. Just a loose hand that now had no owner.
"Because you cannot hide from everything. You have to be aware of where your body is and how much danger you are in. If you are dead, then you cannot learn."
Rose didn't care about their lessons right now! She wanted to be away from here. She had earned that right. She had suffered, had she not? The elf knew what was happening around her, to her, he had to know.
If she wasn't careful, she was going to die. Someone was going to accidentally stick a sword through her back, and this was where it would all end. Crawling forward, she tried to get to safety. Tried to find where that safety might even be.
But as she scrambled to get away, the sounds of the fighting dimmed. Lower, lower, until there was only the ragged sound of a few people still breathing.
She looked up to see the three trolls were still together, although they were all covered in ragged wounds that didn't look like they would heal well. They'd been backed into a corner by a group of men who seemed to realize that the trolls were no longer fighting and turned on each other.
Each one of them tore and bit and ripped until there was only one man left standing.
He was a massive human, rippling with muscle and splattered with so much blood she couldn't tell how much of it was his and what was someone else's. But he turned to look at her with a grin on his face that promised pain.
As he marched toward her, she said out loud, "I have seen it, Rhydian. Don't make me suffer through what comes next."
As she descended into a world that wasn't this one, she had the faint sensation of that massive man lying atop her. The last thing she heard was the roar of the crowd. And the last thing she saw was the pity in the trolls’ eyes as they were rounded back toward their cells.