One Shot

Chapter 5

There's something important you'll understand in the authors note at the end. Please read it!
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Digging into my back, the sharp pain of the unyielding branch below me travels in stings impossible to describe. It's menacing movements drape like syrup around my spine and drips into the joints between my bones. Lacing around my nerves, discomfort crawls around my body and nestles deep into my blood.
Just after they prop me up, my elbows weaken and my shoulder blades charge into the sharp-edged bark once again, leaving my face contorted in a crumple of agony.
Ignoring it, I remember.
[At least I'm capable enough to steal the innocent lives of the animals that traipse aimlessly into my bow-and-arrow-trap.]
Dancing down my legs, my fingers travel down to brush along the smooth metal of my bow lingering along my back, placed in its sling. I soon find my arrow, placed inside it as if ready to sprint into the air and hide among the skin of my next meal.
Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I swing my legs tentatively over the branch, and drop. Strands of hair tumbling out of the already loose plait by Dem fly up and blow around above my head before my feet crash into the floor hard, and a spike of pain shoots up my back. I ignore it.
I have more important things to focus on.
Like finding food, water, a place to live.
My fingers ever so slightly brush the cracked texture that supports everything. Serenity laces every object in an attempt to trick me into the evil games it plays. But I know it's fake.
I stand up and survey my surroundings.
Crowded in a quiet circle, stones hug each other's sides in a ring, guarding many chunks of burnt wood and sticks together in a mountain of a campfire. Strewn across the floor, a backpack lies, isolated, with a black strap coursing over abandoned bark.
I blink - freeze.
Someone else lives here.
[Watch out for those who inhabit the forests. They wait for people like you, to start something only God knows will happen. They want people like you to join them.]
Suddenly I know.
It's a "waiter."
Quick breaths escape my mouth as I lunge for the bag, turning around only to see a girl with hip-length auburn hair surrounding her like a fallen halo, and piercing blue eyes. From taking one look at her, I can tell.
She's a survivor.
She's like me.
I sprint in the other direction, dodging trees and branches that are flung in my face. My legs burn, but I feel like I'm on fire, not laying on the floor in crisps of demolished hope.
Blazing, not burnt.
My plait pounds against my back, willing to be unraveled, until finally the impact of the hit entices the vine from its tangled state.
My race is like a marathon, never-ending, forever pounding my feet against the leaves that crumple unwillingly below them. They crisp beneath the souls of my midnight, ink-black raven bots like fingers slowly being crushed under the heavy weight of desire and longing.
Like hearts under the weight of being broken. Like breath under the weight of my being.
My life is like a jigsaw, separated into untranslatable parts, slowly collaging to string sentences together that describe a single scene. Sentences forming together to create a paragraph. Paragraphs forming together to make a story.
The whole picture.
Yet even when you have the whole picture laying before your eyes, never do you forget the tiny details that will always be the single words. Never do you forget the minuscule clues you had to develop that was the spark of creativity that began this painting.
This is just another word, perhaps a sentence, a clue that will lead to what happens in my future.
That decides if I have a future. The thing is, I'll never know, that's until I venture out and begin to create my future, begin to paint, begin to write.
and that starts now.
[I want to survive this. I need to survive this.]
So I push. I push further than I new was possible.
I push as if I'm running towards life, being chased by death.
which is true. I am.
Then the unthinkable happens.
Her sharp-toed boot catches the back of mine, and I sprawl across the floor. She's over me, a knife raised in the air.
"Nice try," she hisses, "but you're coming with me."
"Really?" I taunt, preparing myself, "I don't think so." Then my fist connects with her jaw, hard, and I kick her off of me, my feet launching her under her stomach. She flails, then crashes into the floor, eyes suddenly leaking panic.
"I'm sorry," I say while loading my bow and lifting it up, my fingers tuck the bow into their grasp, "I never even got your name." Then, I let go.

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Sorry for not updating in ages! I've had a piano test, quick gym show, trampolining competition and school production to worry about 😂
It's a shorter chapter today, only 814 words 😕
Anyway please Vote, Comment And Follow!
Thanks! xx
The important thing is wattpad won't let me do italics? I know how to but when I press the button it doesn't work. I tried it loads... But anyway the sentences with [-] around them are meant to be in italics.
Thanks for reading!