Fear

Initial Fear

The war had raged for your entire life. That was some time, when you thought about it, which only made the whole thing even more horrible.

The leader of your small village had made a horrible mistake-he insulted the king of the land, Odin, and his wife Frigga. The consequences were pretty obvious; the leader of your village fled the land and Odin sent his soldiers onto you and your neighbors.

You were the result of the first hit. An unknown soldier had violently taken your mother, who was younger than you are now, and left her to die in the mess his friends had made. Nine months later you were born.

The fact that you were pretty happy didn't help either. Your mother and stepfather loved you, they had given you a little sister and a good life. Your stepfather had educated you well, and you were more intelligent than any other girl in the village.

The only problem was that you didn't want to get married. You didn't want to love somebody and have children and then lose it all because of the war. The soldiers kept showing up every now and then to bring more death and evil to the village, and they would keep coming until the leader gave himself up to Odin and had his punishment, which would take a while since he was the coward of cowards.

You had a friend, Jele, who was a prisoner of war. He'd been taken as a slave in one of the many wars the army had fought, but he escaped and came to your village where he'd been made one of you. The only bad thing about Jele was that both his and your family expected you to get married.

One day you and Jele were having a good time in the outskirts of the village. You had borrowed a horse from Jele's father and ridden out to a big field where you had run around and had fun. Now you were just sitting in the long grass, enjoying the sun and the warm winds blowing over the field, talking about every possible thing.

You had closed your eyes and leaned back against a big rock when Jele gasped.

"Look", he said.

"What's that?"

A lone horse was running over the fields far away. You watched it in confusion until you saw another one and recognized the way it ran. It was an old horse from a farm that lay a bit away from the village.

"Have they escaped, or are they just..."

Jele didn't have time to end his sentence before you stood up and pulled Jele in behind the huge rock you were sitting in front of. As he looked at you, his eyes flashed with fear, and you knew he'd understood. You'd seen them, the soldiers, an army of well-trained fighters once again set upon your village. They had already been at the farm, now they were on their way to the village, and you and Jele were trapped.

"What do we do? Run?" asked Jele, fear now showing in his entire body. As you crouched behind the rock, that was as tall as two of you and as broad as three, your mind raced around thousands of eventual plans, every new idea worse than the other. You slowly started to realize that there was no escaping, if you ran towards the village the soldiers would see you. You had to stay exactly where you were and hope that the soldiers were too concentrated on the village to turn their heads when they rode past the rock.

"Maybe if we hide in the long grass", you mumbled to yourself.

Jele looked at you and you started a whispering discussion on whether you should lay down in the grass or crouch against the rock. The latter won and you hugged each other tightly in desperate tries to be smaller. The sounds of the army growing closer reached your ears. The muffled sound of hundreds of hooves on the soft earth, the excited yells from soldiers expecting to have a great time killing and the sound of swords being pulled out of their scabbards made your heart race. The army drew closer and closer, and you pressed your body to the cold stone that was your only protection from the army. Jele had started to feverishly tug grass from the ground in front of you and tried to hide you with it. You helped him with the speed of light but soon realized it didn't matter. The sound of the army was now deafening. You closed your eyes and bade a quiet prayer that your family was able to get out of there alive, and then the army ran right past you.