Devour | on hold

Chapter 20 (Shadow-haunted)

- Chapter Twenty -

**LENNO'S POV**

Shadow-haunted 

I wake up the next day when a cold bucket of water is poured on me. I gasp and spit water on the floor; it’s dirty, and it tastes like rot. I cough a couple of times then breathe heavily. Then I remember how I even went unconscious yesterday.

Today, after my beating session, they undo the ropes, and shove me hard on the floor. I keep digging holes with my fingers in the dirt beneath me killing time until I fall asleep. I’m too exhausted to think of something to get me out of here.

I hear a sudden sound of something rushing outside the hut, and I can almost catch a glimpse of a shadow in the dim light of the fire they light outside at night. I painfully and slowly lift my head to get a better look, but find nothing. It disappeared. I let my head fall again on the ground, and gather all my strength to get up and stand on my four limbs. Curiosity is getting the best of me, I crawl to where I saw the shadow moving.

I ignore the throbbing pain in every part of my body and stay in the same position, watching the lights outside the straws of the wall–desperate for the shadow to move again. There are not many guards roaming outside tonight, maybe Quidel is gathering them or something. That shadow is strange, not a guard’s one. They don’t move that quickly, or secretly. And that’s what caught my eyes and set my curiosity on fire.

On the other side of the hut, I hear a scratching noise. It’s the shadow again. I get up on my pain-screaming feet and walk there, I slide down until I think I’m in the same level with the shadow.

“Who’s there?” I ask quietly. No reply. “Who are you?” I repeat my question. It’s not an animal. I keep telling myself. I knock on the wall desperate to catch it. “Answer me!” I say.

“Shhh,” is all the shadow says. And honestly, it scares me.

A guard coughs a few meters away from the hut, and the shadow hurries and I lose him in the darkness outside the walls. It must have hidden. He doesn’t come back for a long while. I lean back on the floor and keep forcing myself to stay awake hoping that it comes back.

For some reason, when you’re alone somewhere you don’t know, surrounded by people who are so frank in wanting you dead and hurt, anyone you don’t know will put your hopes up that maybe they don’t want to hurt you. If they want to, they would’ve done it. Maybe this is someone I’m in need of. Maybe this is different. I’m not able to imagine any worse, so I’m hoping this creeping shadow is something better.

I keep wondering if I’ll ever get back to our land, see mother, Lenmana, Nuka and Aylen again. I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance of fighting the whole tribe to marry Lenmana, the Leader’s daughter. A girl who’s not from my family. Before we have to fight our tribe in order to get married, we have to fight our enemies in order to live. Live to fight. That’s what my coming life seems to be. That’s how fate spreads the days I am to live–if I’m going to live–in front of me to watch.

My life of easiness ended the day I shouted at them to stop. The day I risked my life was the day I tried to save Lenmana for the first time.

***

That day of the Internal War, in the morning, I was home, having breakfast with mother and my siblings. The smell of hot corn and fresh vegetables welcomed me as I woke up. I leaned to kiss mother’s forehead and took a seat between her and Aylen on the floor. I watched her as she cut a cucumber into half and gave one to each child. Nuka complained that Aylen took the bigger half, and I told him she was the smaller one and she had to eat more to grow up, and they laughed.