The Cursed Souls of Liriethem - Forgotten Lore of Liriethem Volume 1

An unexpected reunion

Gravity seemed to take its time and Liriam continued to fall without encountering any resistance. When her body finally found the ground, the pain she felt was the greatest she had ever experienced in her life. A freezing wave rose through her body and was blinded by the pain, only seeing a kind of a white fog for a few seconds. She started screaming inconsolably: her leg was broken; she knew it to be so.

In the distance she heard someone screaming. "Where are you? WHERE ARE YOU?" There was no doubt, it was Tim. But the princess couldn't understand how Tim could be so far away, when only a few seconds ago he had knocked her down. She decided to endure the pain and try not to scream anymore, because she did not want to betray her location to her foe. She didn't know where she was, but anywhere was better than where she was before she fell. As Tim's cries faded away, Liriam calmed down a bit.

She realized then, with her eyes full of tears, that her leg was intact, but that her foot had begun to swell. It was a price she was willing to pay to get away from the danger she had been exposed to - the pain was great, but she still could move. She looked about the area where she had fallen and saw something that seemed to be a pile of old clothes: someone's body, long dead. It was the clothes of the corpse, and its remains, that had cushioned her fall. Liriam silently thanked the person that, with its death, saved her life.

She found a wooden rod thrown to the side, probably remains of an ancient coffin, and, helping herself with it, set out to investigate a little. Wherever she looked, Liriam only saw graves. "I must be in some lost area of ​​Liamsa. If it wasn't that I almost died so many times in the last minutes, I would even say that this is interesting."

Without realizing it, Liriam's attitude had changed: until recently, she had wanted to die with her father, leaving everything aside. Now, having listened to those men, not only did she desire to live, a feeling new in her life, but above anything else, she wanted to know the truth.

"The truth is only one!", she told herself. She had a clear objective. "I have to get out of here and go back to Liriethem. I have to know if what those men were saying about my father is true." And a deeper voice in her being said, fiercely: "And get Tim arrested, let the royal guard cut off his head... and why not? Find maybe a couple of soldiers that... ehem, "play" with him." That such a thought arose from herself took her aback for a moment, but then she smiled and kept moving forward.

The place had countless ancient tombs, silent witnesses of the passage of time, never bothered until the visit of Liriam. Looking quickly over the tombstones, the princess only saw names of kings she did not know. None of that was different from the rest of Liamsa, so the princess did not pay much attention to the graves of those great kings of yesteryear. "I wonder what stories these ancient kings could tell me. Maybe they would tell me about a completely different Liriethem from the one I know. Once I get out of here, I must pay a short visit to the historians of the kingdom and discover its secrets. But now I must get out of here, and for that I have to stay alive!"

The princess continued her way, slowly and with difficulty, holding back tears because of the pain in her foot, fearing what she would find in every corner. An inner voice gave her courage: she had lived her life more intensely in these last days than in all her twenty years of age. She had just survived unharmed ("or almost," she thought) the attack of a man who had lost his mind completely, and she had managed to recover from her depression caused by the death of her father.

Walking a few more minutes, she found a door with some strange inscriptions. It had many drawings in the same style as those in her father's grave, Liriethem's style. In the dark, Liriam did not stop to appreciate those details and see what stories they told. Maybe if she had read the warnings, since that was what they were, maybe she would have chosen to take a different path. Or maybe she would have entered it anyway, since it was no longer Liriam who was making decisions, but her blood that guidedher, being called by her ancestors.