Chapter 1

Kellynthra’s feet hammered against the ground, their rhythm had long since been forgotten. Faster and faster she ran, her legs almost a blur. She was only beginning to lose hope. The stone tunnels that she felt too big for now seemed endless, with sparse torches as the only lights. She did not notice the orange becoming duller, with soft touches of blue.

She did not notice a small rock as she turned a sharp corner. She saved her face from being smashed, but could not save her hands and legs from the hard thud of hitting the ground. A fresh wave of hopelessness grabbed hold of Kellynthra’s spirit, squeezing and crushing it. But she could not stop. If they knew that she was now able to escape, they would not risk her living. She would be given the same sentence as her people.

Though her hands were mostly okay, she could feel the hot beads of blood running down her legs. Kellynthra got up and resumed her pace, though slower and without the calculated confidence of her escape.

Her nose knew before her eyes that she was close. She could almost taste the fresh air replacing the humid and musty air of the stone prison. She began to gasp as she breathed it in. It was as if she had spent the last years drowning, not knowing what these carved walls were hiding from her. Or were hiding her from.

She saw the bright white-blue light from the doorway of the seemingly never-ending hall. It became blinding as she got closer. Her eyes had long become accustomed to the gloomy and dull orange of the prison. But just as she had learned to ignore the pain in her body from countless years of torture and beatings, she ignored the fierce pain in her eyes. She closed them, letting her nose and faith continue to lead her to her freedom. She knew she had made it out when she felt the soft swish of grass under her feet; the wind hitting her back and sides and not just her face; the wind completely free of the humidity of a stone prison; and when she opened her eyes.

She had spent so long imagining what it looked like, the memory becoming more and more vague through the years. Eventually, it was like a child’s imagination of something magnificent and false. She wondered if her memory was playing tricks on her, and if her mind had followed her heart and given up. Was it real and had she ever seen it? Did she even come from outside? Was she born inside these walls?

But there it stood, white beams shooting off it. Kellynthra felt like she could almost feel it. Even the glimmering and shining stars could not take away the magnificence of seeing the moon for the first time since she was taken from her village. A billow of clouds had started to marr the image for her, which is when she snapped back to her reality.

They would know she was missing by now. Though she was much faster than them, she also knew that they had the resources to outlast her need to hunt to survive. She had limited time. She looked onwards into the dense forest with only narrow paths carved by humans and animals. If she wanted to survive, she would need to make her own, leaving very minimal traces of her presence behind.