The Seven Keys of Areid **COMPLETE**

Chapter X: Long Live The Witch

(So. This is how it ends, Part One. It's been fun. But I'll save my shpeal for a separate author's note)

~O~

Adalira opened her eyes blearily, for what felt like the hundredth time. Putting a hand to her pounding head, she found herself totally lucid as to where she was: stuck in a cave system, probably doomed to death via starvation or angry Guardian wrath. As her eyes took in the almost familiar looking obsidian walls, she tried to sit up, stand up, regain her bearings. This, however, quickly became clear as not an option when motion was found obstructed painfully by very short, innocently twinkling silver-white chains, binding the young woman to the ground by her feet not dissimilar to a bird with pinned wings. Adalira did not strain too hard at trying to escape the imprisoning instruments, but simply observed her surroundings, analyzing as much as she could.

Clearly this was not the lair of another Guardian. The room was not artificially adapted like the past caverns she had visited in the past few days. It was very small, the size of a generic bedchamber. The shape of the room was no perfect circle or oval, as the other, now evidentially altered caverns of the Guardians. It was a simple, basic room, circular but with edges and featuring a stunningly natural infection of glimmering veins of precious ores in the walls. Adalira might have found this pleasing enough, in its own regard. But her attention was diverted to something else.

Her eyes were drawn like a moth to flame to the roof of the cavern. For the most part, it was low, dully shining obsidian. But far away from her, directly above what seemed to be a slate table carved out of the floor, shone pure, unrivaled moonlight. True, what could have been an escape was barred by what appeared to be a very thick, inticately woven grate that seemed impossible to break. But the moonlight, filtering down in the form of miniscule little streaks illuminating the dusty, stagnant air, made Adalira so...unrivaledly...content. She sighed, ultimately comforted by the simple sight of possible, if distant, freedom.

"Like it?"

Adalira wouldn't have jumped. She would not have been startled, scared, or unnerved by anything. So when the phrase ran through the room and made Adalira practically fall over in shock, she belatedly wondered why this scared her so. Then she turned.

Sitting directly beside her, crouched on her knees as if they were close friends enjoying an artist's work, was a girl. She looked young, maybe fifteen at the most. Her hair was unkempt and as blonde as the starlight, shining diamond white in the night-tinted moonlight that was the only source of light. This hair seemed unbelidevably long, tumbling down in knotted curls to the skinny, bare ankles of the girl. The girl's skin was stark white, like chalk or ghosts, and her eyes were hidden from Adalira, who was stuck to the wall and could only see the girl's profile. The child seemed to be dressed in a too small prisoner's dress; the dress bunching too tightly at her mid thighs. The girl was much too close for anyone, even anyone who had endured what the elf woman had endured, to not jump.

As if sensing the analyzing thoughts running through Adalira's swirling, whirling mind, the girl turned to face her, revealing much too big eyes, glittering a sharp icy grey in her pale, smirking face.

"I thought you might appreciate it," she said, her voice revealing to be pretty, but with a rasp that added a mysterious (and frankly, a little disconcerting) tilt to her voice, ruining what could have been a melodious song of a voice. Standing up and proving herself abnormally skinny and rather tall, the girl walked with an aimless step across the room, surveying it with her cold eyes not as if it were her sanctuary, like the other Guardians had surveyed their chambers, but looking at it as if it were something less appealing.

"You would think that I, too, would appreciate such naturally formed beauty," she drawled, pacing about the room in front of Adalira and dramatically throwing herself down on the table-structure. "But alas," she said, lifting a hand to her forehead as if swooning, "I have stared at these walls for over a hundred years. I find them so..." She searched for a word. "Repetitive."