FF: Chapter 1 (english)

Selina Aramar put her hand on her right toe once again. Like the previous five times, she couldn't avoid a grimace of pain when the tips of her fingers brushed her ankle, but this time even a tear escaped from her eye by the corner flowing fast over her cheek and getting lost plunging from her chin. She didn't need more confirmations, since the beginning she was convinced it was broken, but she didn't know what to do. The pain clouded her reason and avoided her from thinking clearly.

– Shit! Fucking crap! – she shouted in the eerily silent darkness. She felt much more helpless and frightened than angry, but she tried to sound rude and violent to boost her bravery. It didn't work. Suddenly, she broke in sobs accompanying the sound of the crickets in a melancholic orchestra. Then she heard it.

Steps. Crack of rotten branches and gashing of gravel. Rustle of leaves and the rhythmic sound, almost musical, of horse's hooves. She stopped whining. She felt the fear paralyzing her as a fist blowing her stomach, and then the adrenaline rush pumping in the bloodstream and returning some of her lost lucidity. For a moment she forgot the pain, but the sudden movement driven by the survival instinct instantly recalled it to her as a electrifying stab of pain spreading along her leg coming up to the thigh. She tried to crawl, at the beginning using her elbows, then leaning on his forearms, and at the ending embedding her fingers in the floor, scratching the wet mix of gravel and mud. She had barely moved two meters and had at least another six to reach the embankment covered by chestnut trees and ferns that she wanted to use as hideout… and the steps sounded too close. She noticed the hollow pattering of the mount at the walk only a few meters in the dark.

– Trackers... those sons of a bitch will stab me like a watermelon and they will decorate the path with my innards. – muttered to herself. She reproached herself not had realized about it before, being always so careful, so alert. – How couldn't I not hear them? They are noisier than a fucking saucepan hawker! Pah, the quagmire muffled the noise from those bastards... the damn rain. – she tried to execuse herself. But she knew that she was just deceiving herself. After all, in Estuvert was always raining. But she was just too proud to admit that she was too scared to pay attention to anything.

Finally, she gave up. She lay down on her back, extended in the middle of the path, resigned. She felt the raindrops on her face and the damp on the track soaking her ripped clothes to the bone. The shadows slowly revealed the blurred form of a man walking along with her beast, holding firmly the reins. Selina felt her lips trembling, doubting the expression to show, and her eyelids barely retaining a sea of tears about to overflow.