Denial of the Whisper

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Eight.

Brayhd shouldn't have told me. If he had not wanted me to flee, he shouldn't have told me at all.

But at first, I waited.

I ate something from the food tray that still stood on my table from earlier, and I packed some stuff in my woollen, old bag, which looked like as if someone had indeed tried to wash it. The fact that no one had seen it as garbage and had thrown it away, made me actually stop for a moment. That was actually... kindness. Whomever had decided to leave me the last bit of what felt like home... had shown kindness.

Home.

The small hut in the forest.

I missed it. Not the cold, the loneliness, the judging, nasty looks from the villagers... but the nature, my vegetable field, even the raccoon in the garden... The big oak tree with mothers' grave underneath it. I wished, I would have asked Caaln to give me more time to say goodbye to her. A silent tear escaped my firm hold.

I would try. I would need to try.

They had sent in a healer just after Brayhd had left, and apart from my mother, I've never been treated by a healer before. When her ancient magic had done its work, I was reminded of my mother, how she had taken care of bleeding knees and not just once of also a bleeding nose, after I had gotten into another fight with some of the village kids.

But thanks to the healer, my ribs were now almost healed, as moving got at least easier with every passing hour.

I was weary, days of travelling and also this whole past day... with so much and at the same time so little information, seemed to have drained even the rest of my power.

But I wouldn't – I couldn't sleep.

Impatiently, I waited till way after midnight. The hours ticked by, and it was in the middle of the night, when I decided to make my move.

Frankly said, I had no plan. Not a real one.

But my desperation drove me. I knew leaving my room through the door was no option, as they surely had taken precautions as to not let me escape. The windows were manipulated, so that I wasn't able to open them properly. So, I had to break them. And I tried to, for what seemed like hours, to open them completely. But I couldn't. The mechanism was nothing I had ever seen before, and I had no tools. And even if I had something like a sharper knife, at least sharper than the one I had taken from the food tray, I wouldn't know what to do with it.

The realisation of my own uselessness, only made me more desperate and drove me harder.

In the end, I grabbed some blankets, lay them under the window, opened it up as far as I could and used a stony figure, which I had found in the shelf, to break the glass.

At least, the blankets that I had laid on the floor cancelled most of the noise, apart from the sound of the breaking glass itself. But at least, it didn't fall three floors down into the alley, as that would surely have woken the whole house instantly.

But nevertheless, the moment the glass broke, I felt as if my heart had stopped to work.

I didn't know, where the next bedroom was, or if the Fleyr had superior hearing.

All I knew, was that I had to hurry. I grabbed my woollen back, tightened my vest around myself and climbed out of the window, grabbed the makeshift rope of clothes and blankets that I had made and slowly climbed downwards. Step by step I descended, my tired hands gripping tightly onto my makeshift rope, knuckles already turning white.