The curse and the dwarf

The beginning

     Eion closed her journal and held it to the light. Her Father has just given it to her for her day of expulsion. The cover was mahogany red leather, the same color as her eyes, and the pages were a dark brown. She had also received a small vial of green ink and a brown and tan-flecked quill, plucked straight from an eagle.

      She smiled and tucked them all away under her cot, and ran outside to find her father. Her plum hair glittered as a beautiful dark wave behind her. She giggled as she passed the other children, waving to the older workers. She ran off, trying to find her father. She hadn't seen him all day and she was getting bored.
Eventually she found him, tinkering away at yet another one of his projects.

"Pa!" He turned to her just as she launched into his arms. "Nearly midday,you not seen me! Would you leave daughter die of boredom?" He chuckled and placed her on the ground. He collapsed in a nearby chair.
"You study?" He took his working glasses off and held them in his hand.
Eion flushed and ducked her head. She scuffed the ground.
"Study boring! When needed?" She pouted and stomped her foot.

He scratched his grey beard and ran a hand through his short silver hair. He was a tired tinker. He could not play with his child like the others in this clan. He had mated to late.

He opened his mouth and heard a bell ringing in the distance.

"Home,Eion. Danger. Wait." He rushed outside and on the way snatched up the cylinder he had been working on. Eion rushed out the opposite way and headed to her home. At least, that's what her father thought.

She ducked around the corner and peeled her head around a few planks of wood resting on the side of the building. As soon as her father disappeared she ran after him, trying desperately not to slip in the mud. She stopped at the next building and waited for her father to turn the corner, and repeated her previous action. This sequence of events happened on repeat multiple times and as she ran, Eion saw that as they became closer to the middle of town, people were not filling the streets like normal. It actually seemed like they were trying to avoid the center at all costs. Her father stopped walking and stood to the left of a divet in the ground, and sat upon his knees. His hands trembled as he placed the cylinder standing in front of him. Eion's eyes widened.
What was he doing? He could be killed out in the open like that. The creature might get him! She trembled in fear for her father as his arms moved around the cylinder. Metal gears clicked and the noise echoed through the streets and only served to make the small child even more terrified.
Finally, she could stand it no longer. She dashed to her father, calling his name, and hoping she got to him before something bad happened.
A sound, very faint, called into her ears. Like a whistle, soft as someone breathing. It started to grow, and became red and fire-y as she ran to the center. Her father turned and wept her name, unbelieving if what he saw. She didn't understand.

What was happening?

The red turned hot and started to burn her ears, and moved through her. Her vision was clouded by a black mass that writhed and squirmed and pulled her towards itself.

The creature. It was the creature, the one that had terrorized them! It whipped a tendril out and smacked her father into a house. The wall gave under him and splintered away under his weight.

It turned towards Eion, and moved into her, feeding inside through her mouth and her nose and her ears and eyes, causing her to choke and cry and bleed from every orifice. Her cries echoed against the trees.

"N-no! No!" She sobbed and scratched at her skin. Her pleas turned to strangled screams as the ground started to vibrate with an intensity of a thousand trolls stamping their feet. She trembled all over her body, every once of her throbbed and shakes with the ground, and the buildings began to fall and crash to the floor.

Calls. Calls from the distance started to pick up in volume and became a wave of fear and desperation that crashed against her on all sides.

      Her skin burned white hot and she felt her body begin to stretch and change. Her bones creaked and cracked , and her skin stretched more and more. She saw a glimpse of her hair and saw that it had started to fade into a deep dark indigo gray that was long and ran down past the heels of her feet. Her jawbone snapped. She spat out the fluid that had gathered in her mouth and saw that it was blood mixed with small white teeth that glistened.

"P-pa.....pa." Everything around her started to fade into grey and she rubbed her eyes. She yelped as she felt blood run down from the area sound her eyes, as she developed cuts on her face. She wobbled and finally tumbled to the ground, hitting her head against a stone.