My Name Is Adela Kirigan (A Shadow and Bone Season 1 Fanfiction)

Chapter 2: Alina Starkov

When I was young, I was afraid of the dark. 

When I got older, I learned that darkness is a place - and it's full of monsters.

I live in East Ravka, but I've never been welcome here because I look like my mother, and she looked like the enemy. 

Third Person POV 

Alina Starkov, a young dark-skinned girl of 17, sat in the bumpy cart full of Ravkan cartographers, headed to a training camp seated on the fringe of the Shadow Fold that currently split the nation of Ravka in half, where a small pocket of the First Army was located. She was drawing a map of the Shadow Fold on a piece of parchment when one of the soldiers leaned over, shivering from the cold, and asked her, 

'Alina, how can you do that in here?' 

'Bumps help with texture,' she replied, not looking up from her drawing. 

'The Fold looks different on mine,' one of the cartographers said. She met his eyes. 'I need to get a better view from your country,' he said in a cruel tone. The young man that was speaking to her earlier shoved him. 

'She grew up here. Come on!' 

'The Shu Han didn't want her either,' he retorted, but the comment, which the young Starkov must have heard a thousand times ever since she was a child, was utterly lost on her as an older woman opened the raggedy curtain and looked into the back full of young cartographers on their way to what might seem like certain death. 

'Cartographers, listen up. We're almost there. Pack up and be ready to leave. And if you lose anything, you will not be getting a replacement.' She turned, dropping the raggedy curtain as the young cartographers packed up their things. But they aren't the monsters; they're just boys, Alina thought as she packed her meagre possessions together frantically in anticipation for their arrival. They heard a loud growling, raspy and evil-sounding, making them look up as dust blew in their faces and throughout the cramped, tight carriage space. A horse whinnied. 

I learned about my true enemy when I was a child. 

Several years ago. Keramzin, Ravka. Unknown orphanage. 

'Is it real?' a younger Alina asked. 

'Of course it's real,' the matronly woman snapped from her chair in the corner as she did her needlework. 'The Fold ate your parents. It's the reason for many of the orphans here. People trying to cross. Taunting the Saints.' 

'Then why cross it?' Alina asked curiously. 'Why not go around?' 

'Read the map,' the older woman snapped again, as if that was the obvious answer. 'The north want our Grisha dead, the south guards its mountains. We have no where else to go. Now work on your shading, girl.' She stared at the shadowy blight on the map, not moving. 'Keep a pencil in your hand. Or else someone will put a rifle in it instead.' 

I spent years thinking I'd find a way out. Around the Fold, to go somewhere no one cares where I'm from.

Present. Near the Shadow Fold. 

Thunder rumbled as Alina exited the carriage, the careless strands of hair left over from her tight bun blowing around her face in the wind.