The Golden Chalice

✰✦✰ Chapter 8 ✰✦✰

✰✦✰ Chapter 8 ✰✦✰
" My Kidnapper & Me "

SLEEP WAS HARD to come by the night before our mission was set out to begin.

   The big hand on the clock waved at me as it landed at three o'clock in the morning and my eyes hadn't rested one blink. They were glued to the full moon cast above in the night sky, sprinkled with shooting stars.

   An hour passed. The clock ticked. The full moon hung gloriously. Whispers of streams outside our home and forest animals chirping quietly. I still couldn't sleep. The reminder that we only had five people to join us for this challenge made it impossible for me to do so. Maybe each of us were going to be tested individually. Maybe there was some sort of magic involved that assessed our strong suits and weaknesses. And what if we couldn't be tested because we were missing a person? Would everything then have been for nothing? Or would the outcome be even worse and end with us all as corpses?

   To be honest, it all just felt unfairly surreal, as if someone had put me in a coma and now this was my neverending dream, or even nightmare, I hadn't decided yet. Either way, there were two possible endings in this dangerous game: us all dead, or I resulted in taking back a throne I'd told everyone I'd ever met that I didn't want.

   Dread sunk its teeth into my skin and I sighed, shoving off my floral duvet and slipping my feet into my shoes. I grabbed my jacket from the front door and decided to take a stroll. Maybe that would tire me and then, when I returned, I'd finally sleep.

   As soon as I opened our front door, the cool breeze hit me. Sylva Isle was never entirely freezing. Yes, we had Winter and Autumn and they definitely made their presence known, but I was never beyond cold here.

   I walked around the firefly-lit forest and jumped over the narrow streams I came across. The tiniest of pixies—creatures so rare they only resided here—were dotted across the tall trees, whizzing back into their small homes the moment they saw me coming. I loved this place beyond words. Even if the fjarlas scared the sanity out of me. They were long, eel-like creatures that were faster than the speed of sound. They hid in the water, mostly in wide streams, but I'd come across them twice in my life. Luckily I hadn't been bit, otherwise I would've died instantly, yet it still left me eerily traumatised.

   "They're not evil!" Clara protested as she reached for a fjarla in the pond.

   Mia and I shouted, "NO!" just as she halted, her big grey eyes skidding over to us innocently, as if she hadn't just almost killed herself.

   She plopped her tiny bum onto the green grass and grunted. "You two are mean. People are just scared because they're wimps."

   Mia giggled. "Where did you learn that word?"

   A Guard shouted in the far distance, clearly on the lookout for us. Father would be throwing a fit if he knew I was hiding in the woods with my sisters again to avoid a conference. But I didn't even understand them. I never knew what the big, bald men went on about.

   "You should be nice to everything," Clara said with a stubborn fold of her arms. "And everyone. All people deserve it. Mummy says so."

   I shook off the memory.

   The Qualidas.

   The saintly, small, sweet Qualidas made up for it. They were little creatures that were even rarer to come by than the fjarlas or pixies, sort of resembling deer, too, now that I thought about it. Then again, this isle was practically the only one with this much forest outside of a small city. Or maybe I was wrong, I had no idea. I hadn't travelled in years. Hadn't gone anywhere but the city centre in years.