Rune Stealer

Prologue

"It's alright Lyela," comforted the midwife with the birthing rune, twinkling on her neck in the candlelight. Lyela let out another agonizing scream and she squeezed her husband, Aum's, hand tighter. "Give me one more push."

With all the strength left in her, Lyela pushed hard and screamed at the top of her lungs. Sweat ran down her forehead and her breaths were quick. Finally, a baby's choking cry sounded. Lyela and Aum both let out a sigh of relief and they both shared ecstatic smiles.

"It's a girl," chimed the midwife, her voice thick with a Hamaian accent. "She's beau-" the midwife suddenly stopped and she and her assistant gasped with alarmed looks on their face.

"What is it?" asked the scared mother of the child, her words slurred due to fatigue.

"She- she has a rune Lyela," stammered the midwife as she and her assistant frantically washed the baby.

"Well that's not surprising," smiled Aum, indicating that both he and Lyela had runes themselves and runes were, for the most part, genetic. Lyela had a singing rune scrawled in black at the base on the right side of her neck. While Aum had a hunting rune in the same place, in the same color as Lyela and every person in Kainor with a rune.

"May I hold my child?" requested Lyela weakly, holding out her shaking arms. Her eyes were so heaving all of a sudden.

"But Lyela," whispered the midwife, swaddling the child, the same alarmed look on her face.

"What is so bad that you will not give me my child?" blurted Lyela, still holding out her arms.

"It's no ordinary rune," admitted the frightened woman. She handed over the small baby girl, wrapped tightly in a blanket, to the mother.

Once Lyela saw her child, she nearly dropped her. She heard Aum gasp. The little baby, no longer crying, looked up at her parents with big green eyes, the same eyes of her mother. And covering the baby's right eye, starting in the corner and going up to the brow and out to the hairline, was a shimmering golden rune; the color of the golden sun.

Lyela and Aum were baffled. Runes weren't supposed to be on a persons' face. A rune was to be at the base of the right side of the neck and scrawled in black.

"What does it mean," whispered Lyela, suddenly weak again. The quietness of the room was eery.

"I haven't the faintest idea," mumbled Aum.