***Please be kind. I wrote this when I was still in high school.***
Through the dark and silent forest of White Bone, a raven haired beauty with flawless skin and the beauty of the ocean contained in her eyes, ran as swiftly and silently as she could, trying to evade and lose her pursuers. Fear pushed at her to run for her life but the instinct to protect pushed at her even harder. She quickly pushed her way through shrubs that blocked her unmarked path.
Thinking she had cleared the shrubs, her next steps were quickly stopped because of the sharp tug at the back of her head. As she frantically turned to look back at what had caught her, she saw a lock of her silky long hair snagged on a white gnarly branch of a leafy black shrub. She cursed silently as she tried to rip her hair from the stubborn grip of the naked branch.
The woman froze completely when she heard the snap of a twig in the distance. No longer caring for her hair, she let the branch keep the mass of hair it had grudgingly won. Ignoring the pain of the hair being ripped from her scalp, she turned and started running again. Her heart jumped into her throat as she heard the footfalls of her pursuers drawing close behind her.
The little bundle of warmth in her arms started wiggling awake as she changed her direction. She sprinted as fast as she could as her eyes scanned her surroundings for a safe place to hide. Looking back over her shoulder as she continued to run straight, she saw that her pursuers were hot on her trail. She changed directions and ran as fast as her legs would carry her.
After she had passed the fifteenth bone white tree on her winding path, she came across a dark gaping cave in between two marble white boulders that was bigger and thicker than she was tall. Seeing as how the path seemed to go on endlessly into a pitch black abyss, she took fifty stumbling steps into the swallowing darkness of the cave. With the cave wall as a guide into unknown territory and her ears straining for any other signs of danger, she swallowed the fear trying to consume her rationality. She realized that it wasn't just her own life on the line but it was also for the sake of the life she carried in her arms.
Her baby that she'd given birth to had only existed in the vast world for only a couple of months. Her child started to struggle even harder within the confines of its blankets after all the jostling from before. Her little bundle then started to make heart wrenching cries, desperate for attention and care. To keep her child from crying any louder and harder, she sang a lullaby her own mother had taught her before her mother passed away. It felt like centuries since she last heard the lullaby. As she lovingly cradled and rocked her child back and forth, she hummed the melody as she tried patting her baby's back to calm them down.
Tears streamed down her pale cheeks and crystalized as they fell from her face. Her baby settled back down into its slumber as she held back quiet sobs. Placing her child in one arm, she searched for a crevice in the wall. Finding a crevice that would fit herself if she were crouching, she reached inside to find any lurching dangers that hid in its depths. Groping around, she noticed that the crevice wasn't too far into the wall. Her palm laid flat against the back of the crevice wall and found only bits of sand and dried grass at the relatively level floor of the crevice. From what she could tell, the crevice was high enough from the ground for her baby to be safe from predators that lurked and crept along the cave floor. She spread her senses to the ceiling of the crevice for any nasty surprises and found nothing out of the ordinary.
When her arm came back to rest beside her baby's blankets, she knew that this would be the last time she would ever get to hold her child in her arms. Her heart felt like it was being ripped apart as she knew that her baby's best chance of survival would not be with her. Tears streamed down her face as she kept her sobs from escaping. Bitterness and sorrow ate at her heart. Her child had just been born and she wouldn't get a chance to witness their growth from a child into an adult, wouldn't be able to watch them start a life of their own or get to experience their life path with them. Softly and quietly hugging her child for the last time, she took her cloak off and wrapped it around the baby for additional warmth. Placing her child into the crevice, she wiped away the hot tears that streamed down her face. The time for tears is over. There are still many things to get done.
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Short Stories with No Where to Go
Short StoryJust random stories mashed together. No actual connections or anything. Just random story scenes and whatnot.