1 A restless night
~ Aellin's PoV ~
A bright beam of light hit me, it blinded my eyes and forced me to yet again change my position in this small bed. Usually, the pale light of the moon calmed me down and helped me forget about all of my worries and fears. Today, however, it shone bright and relentless, forcing its way through even the smallest cracks in the wood.
Now, that there were neither trees nor walls hindering its way, the light shone on my bed and made me struggle to escape it again and again. An unbearable heat had conquered the tiny room, making me feel like I was slowly boiling alive.
To me, the stars filling the kindled up sky had always been messengers of the cold, bringing both fresh air and silence, today, however, they did not allow for a single moment of sleep.
I have been rolling on my bed for hours already, while desperately trying to escape both the heat and the light attacking me, but the chaos that had conquered my body had cruelly nullified even these weak efforts of trying to fight it.
Wrapping myself in all the blankets I owned, sometimes the thick and warm one I normally used against the coldness of the winter, sometimes the one I had been using almost every day, then even the one that wasn't even thick enough to give me the feeling of being protected from view.
Growing more restless with each passing moment, I even had loosened the hay my bed was padded with, trying to soften it this way, but this too did not allow me to finally calm down my protesting body. In the end, I even tried it without all of this help, lying on the bare, hard floor or sitting against the wall - it was hopeless.
Several hours of struggling like this had naturally exhausted both my body and my mind, but I was unable to spend more than a few thoughts on that.
All of my attention was forced on my stomach, were a pain I had never felt in the thirteen years of her life both seemingly tore at my flesh and pressed down on me with the weight of a dozen stones.
Half of a night had passed since the menacing tension had settled on my stomach. At first, it still had felt as if I had eaten rotten meat, a spoiled fruit or a poisonous berry, things that already happened to me, but my suffering only seemed to grow in intensity with each breath I took.
It was no longer only pain and pressure attacking me, as now both dizziness and nausea, too, added to my suffering. All of this seemed to point to something worse, but there was no way I could accept this being a possibility.
Nobody in my family had ever caught a disease, not with our mother's magic protecting our every move.
«Is it too weak to help me?»
As if by an invisible signal, my agony multiplied. I was about to flee back into the warm embrace of my blankets as my body suddenly began to cramp up. My lungs screamed for fresh, cold air. It wasn't just an urge or desire, I felt as if I would be doomed to die if I were to stay here.
After freezing up for a moment, I could no longer handle it. I tore all of the blankets off my sweaty body, jumped up and stumbled towards the door, my legs quivering with every step I made.
«I have to get out of here!»
A steadily worsening sense of nausea drove me to take faster steps. I couldn't even think about wasting a single moment on putting on a shirt, a dress or even shoes.
Naked, without the protection of a single garment, I struggled to find my way through the hall and towards the saving embrace of the nightly forest.
I didn't manage to escape unscathed. Again and again, I came across individual tendrils and roots protruding into the narrow corridor, each of them trying to make me trip.
Although years had passed since my mother's magic had forced the plants to hide the small house, which once seemingly had been home to a charcoal burner, behind walls of thorns and green, today it felt like I had never crossed this hall before.
By the time my stumbling legs had finally carried me all the way to the exit, bloody scratches were all over them.
Being completely petrified by the view the nightly forest had held prepared for me, I couldn't even bring myself to pay a breath's worth of attention to those little wounds. It had always been beautiful in my eyes, even or especially in the night, now, however, it was far more breathtaking than anything I had ever seen before.
Vivid lights had outlined each of the trees and brushes. They seemed to be alive, almost as if the forest itself was dancing behind veils of hot air.
Before I realized it, I had already taken a few steps into this new, dreamlike world. It felt as if it called out for me, both wordless and invisible, with each of my movements lifting more of the exhaustion and restlessness that had weighed down on me.
All of this had easily enchanted me, it lured me into roaming deeper and deeper into the underwood.
