[Fantasy novel, completed ✓]
In a world filled with magic, dragons, witches, demons, deadly creatures and other magical beings, the life of the king's daughter Victorine changes with a single blow when her kingdom is attacked.
She loses not only he...
what is stronger than the human heart which shatters over and over and still lives - rupi kaur
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- Victorine -
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It took an awfully long time for the last person to fall. It was true that they had wanted to kill me. And yet they had been unarmed. Unable to defend themselves.
It had been an unfair fight. The most horrible one I had ever fought.
"Look at it this way," the strained old witch groaned. "You may have killed them, but you also put them out of her misery."
I couldn't look at it that way, though. At least, not looking at the body parts that lay all over the floor, barely leaving a free spot to stand.
"Can we go back now?" was all I wanted to know.
"We can," she confirmed.
So I closed my eyes and waited. This time I didn't feel any shaking ground. At some point I just opened my eyelids and stood in the room of the wooden hut, where I sank to the floor, exhausted.
The witch had also dropped onto a chair. Although she was wounded, she did nothing for her healing, but regarded me thoughtfully.
"I like you, Victorine," she finally revealed to me out of nowhere. "That's why I'm almost regretting not having left this task to the king."
"It's all right," I groaned. I knew she couldn't have trusted Nicolas. And down there, you needed someone you could trust.
Hekate rose from the chair and dragged herself to the hatch, again revealing the hole full of darkness in the floor.
"Wait," I demanded. "I have so many more questions."
"I know," she nodded, "but I need to take a break from magic for my healing. So I need to send you through the portal quickly so I can rest afterwards."
Regretfully, I glanced back and forth between her blood-red mark on her hip and the portal.
Unexpectedly, the witch reached for my hand. "I sense that you have experienced much suffering at the hands of humans. And yet you refuse to give up hope in them. You are an amazing woman, Victorine. And I hope to see you again someday, so I can answer all your questions."
Me too. Hoped that we would both survive until that time. And yet, the doubt gnawed at me that there would ever be an opportunity to answer my questions. That it was likely they could all go unanswered.
But I had no choice. I had to go now. Groaning, I raised my tired body into the air and took my helmet again.
Hekate muttered some words I did not understand. Then the image of the wooden floor in the hole of the portal, which I already knew, appeared.
