SEVEN DEVILS, fili durin

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Not even close."

She was in a dream, a wonderful awful dream, she knew that much, could feel that strange and almost blurry fuzz that drifted in the corners of her mind, always shifting and changing before things could even start to make sense. But this one? This one Nymeria knew like the back of her hand as the dark visions plagued her with memories that would never be forgotten, watching as from above her own body, a far younger version of herself that still had the blessing of innocence in her golden eyes found a creature that looked like herself, only shorter, bruised and bloodied and broken.

How could she of been so stupid? How could she of been so naive? How could she not of felt his disgusting and vile intentions and know just what he was when she gave into cursed curiously and wasted her breath on healing him, her magic flowing through her veins and into his to make him whole, nursing him back to health with ever gentle fingertips, succumbing to his every need just so she could hear stories fall from his lips about the world outside of the Moor, about creatures so different than she, so different than the inhabitants of the forest she knew as envy pooled in her gut ever so tightly.

Perhaps at the start of their tentative friendship, he'd been sincere, perhaps Bróinn had looked upon her ethereal features bathed in gold and seen something holy, seen something worthy and good...but the temptation of greed grew too much and he succumbed to it by taking the one thing that made her her...and Nymeria didn't know which was the worst one, the fact that he had always meant to harm her the moment their eyes met, or the fact that the more time he spent with her, the less he seen her as something to be awed at but instead, something easy to ruin...and ruin her he did.

But before she could delve deeper into the dream, before she could watch the aftermath of blood spilled on what was once a night filled with love and trust, when healing had turned to chaos and gold had turned to red...she was suddenly ripped from her unconscious by landing on something soft with a loud grunt and a rough curse from whatever was beneath her, tasting some stringy and silky in her mouth that made her gag in disgust as she pulled it out with trembling fingers only to find the same weird substance staining them...and she realized that it looked like a spiders web...except much, much thicker.

And when her gaze slowly drifted up, it was to find thick cocoons of white silk, strung up over the looming trees of the decaying forest with what she was assuming was the rather large corpses of the other victims who hadn't somehow managed to escape their webbed prison before what she was assuming was going to be one very large spider would drain them of their morality to sate its hunger.

"Lass! Ge'off-"

The familar voice grunted at her, a strained sounding thing that was almost breathless and choked like the life was being drained out of him, and when she looked down to where she was sure it was coming from, it was to see Dwalin's grumpy eyes glaring back at her as he struggled beneath her, and she would of liked to say that she leapt up immediately with apologies on her tongue because she was sure she'd almost crushed the poor dwarf, however, she'd be lying, because it took her at least a few minutes to grab her bearings and swallow her fear of the apparently huge spiders that thought of her and the company as prey.

However when realisation did finally dawn upon her, she was swift to pull herself off of him with a pained grunt that she couldn't stop from slipping past her bloodstained lips, whole body aching and still covered in the silver webbing that was sticky and disgusting as she muttering about how sorry she was under her breath as she tried, and failed, to stand on her own two legs once more because it seemed that her steep with unconscious had just made everything so much worse because she couldn't catch a bastard break apparently.