WHISPER- shadow and bone

Chapter 1

Do you fear the silence? Or do you fear the whispers that can be heard in the darkness, when you are alone? Are you afraid of hearing nothing or of hearing something when there should be nothing?

Adeline Starkov was a girl who caused blood and then mended it. She had a heart that shone with innocence which grew slowly stained each day. She wasn't fearful of the unknown, of the future. No, she feared the present and the past for what they did to her, she feared the monsters that walked on two feet around her, not the creatures from her nightmares. Ada feared rejection, loss, heartbreak, failure, all stemming from her experiences each day and yet the thing she feared most of all was him not liking her.

Whilst Alina preferred spending her time with a certain tracker by the name of Mal Oretsev, Ada preferred to be in the company of her friend Ezra Fahey. She had always felt a little something that she hoped was more than friendship, but she believed Ezra would never agree. The Zemeni boy had run away to Ravka to join the First Army from his fathers farm, forging documents and swaggering his way through the country, a thing that Ada could never seem to understand. He had left the rotting core of Novyi Zem trying to forget all his memories, a clean slate as they say, but the reminiscence of his brother sometimes gave the boy sleepless nights.

The boy was Grisha, a secret one of course just like Ada. A Healer and a Durast were not welcome in an army that looked down on their kind. Ada didn't understand when she was younger, why should people be afraid of magic and people who could control incredible things? As she grew older she realised people were not afraid of magic, but what it could do them. They were afraid of the unknown, of change.

Ezra worked as a tracker alongside Mal and as Ada didn't share her sisters passion for cartography, she took up the job of a medik. She often wondered how the Generals didn't wonder just how odd it was that her patients seemed to be healed so quickly. But Ada was smart and swift, a partial heal here and a partial heal there, no one had to know any divine intervention had taken place.

Ada and Alina had learned about their true enemy when they were just children

"Is it real?", questioned Alina.

"Of course it's real", came the reply.

"The Fold ate your parents".

"It can't be that terrifying?", Ada asked wide eyed.

"It's more than terrifying".

Years and years of questioning passed, thinking there was a way out. Why don't we go around it? The girls asked the same questions but were always met by the same response. There are too many enemies out there. The North and the South held hidden horrors that the sisters couldn't even dream of.

As time passed by they realised that the only way to pass through the Fold was entering its murky depths. You could not escape a creation like that.

The abomination was here to stay.

"A saint who can summon the sun will destroy it!"

Ada didn't believe in Saints. If they truly existed then why did the people who walked the ground live in such poverty. Why did children walk bare footed and bleeding on the streets of the city isolated and in pain? Why did people starve each day, wishing that Deaths gentle hand would whisk them away? Why did she get cursed with a gift that people would kill her for? No, there was no believing in Saints until miracles proved her wrong.

Bravery was an asset Ada found hard to find sometimes. She had learned to fake it just as easily as her abilities for if she were to go into battle then she would convince the enemy of her confidence to knock their own. She'd always been a scared person, terror was an old friend to her, even from the start.