A CHASED BEAST

HEART THUNDERING within her chest, Chitara woke from her dream and clasped her free hand to her mouth to silence her quickening breath as she glanced down to check on the young child sleeping carelessly, clutched in the small crevice between body and arm.

She closed her eyes, exhaling a long exhausted breath. The dream. It was longer than usual. It was a moment of unconsciousness she could ill afford in their flight to escape the men wanting her captured and held in custody.

Chitara glanced around, eyes straining between the low-hanging branches to the cloud covered blackness of the night. Her surroundings were quiet—if she listened intently, crickets sang in the shadows, and somewhere nearby, the gurgle of a nearby river echoed through the forest.

Bark biting into her back, she sighed as she relaxed against the trunk of the sheltering tree, the child's exhalations wafted gently against the back of her wrist. Ona slept, oblivious to the dangers that chased them. For a moment, Chitara questioned, did this child—also born human just like her, also behold the vision of death as well? She brushed a stray hair from Ona's sleeping face as she pondered the dream.

Chitara occasionally—feared sleeping. For there were times she'd see in her nightmares a plain engulfed by red flames. The brilliant, sweltering, and violent heat whipped ragingly across the horizon as the person who showed her this terror was the only one standing amidst these flames.

It was always the same.

A man, no, a woman perhaps, reaching to the sky as if begging the heavenly lord. She appeared to be wailing bouts of curses and beckoning for something, but Chitara could never hear her. Then, as if time had skipped, the woman was lifeless and in those seconds in which she gasped her final breath, she eternally heeded the gaiety of an audience glorifying her death.

Only this time, Chitara had dreamed differently.

Might it be an omen? What could it mean? She

recalled the lanky overwhelming silhouette of a man towering over the woman in her dream. If she willed it, Chitara felt like she could feel the tears that plopped against the woman's cheek as if it were her own. The man, whose complexion she could not discern in the darkness that concealed his physique, wept for the woman withering in his arms.

For the first time ever, Chitara felt perplexed. Why now? Why mourn a woman who has died a lonesome death for so long—now?

She shook her head from such feelings. How could she be thinking about something so meager, when the child in her arms depended upon her for protection? The priestess had warned Chitara that she would slaughter her—murder a child thought too threatening to live because she knew of her (Chitara's) enigma. How could an eight year old child threaten the?

She stroked Ona's cheek. The girl's nose wrinkled and she shifted in her sleep. Chitara took a deep breath, an unknown emotion swelled in her throat, involuntarily causing her free hand to clench in a tight nail-biting fist.

It didn't matter why the Priestess wanted Ona dead, and her—Chitara—captured. It didn't matter how far they had to go to outrun the bishops of Verena's command.

In her eyes the Priestess was a hag of a woman that never seemed to age. Her appearance mimicked a young girl in her twenties. However, Chitara's eyes, the confidential secret that incited this situation—saw through everything.

The thin film of mana that enveloped Priestess Verena's body was a layer of magic unseeable to the eye of an ordinary human.

In a monster's gaze, however, the impossible was possible. It seemed improbable but what others could not do, Chitara accomplished easily without understanding precisely why.

'You are a disgusting, bile, and irritable thorn in my side, do you understand, child?' Verena's condescending voice jabbed in the back of her mind.

'You wretched, cursed varmint! Blind in one eye? Preposterous! Ought you utter of this to anyone else heed your neck be slit in half!'

If there was a task to be recognized, Chitara understood well. She learnt from a young age through brutal whippings and starved discipline that she was an aberration humanity feared. Yet, no one knew of her abilities, they simply feared her crimson pupil'd eyes that bore into their souls as if stripping them naked, and her inhuman blood unusual to their familiar crimson.

Her scars ached the more she remembered those nights, locked in the dimly lit dungeon below the sanctuary. The crackle of a leather whip and the splatter of her blood the color of fair gold blotted the grimy walls. Verena's sadist nature would leap from within her hideous body, and she would taste Chitara's blood as if a precious delicacy. She felt nauseous thinking about how the woman's body twisted pleasurably.

Chitara turned her head to the sound of a snapping twig carried by the breeze in the night. The dull crackle of boot footed men and the snuffing snouts of bloodhounds close to the ground reached her ears as well.

She shook the sleeping girl gently, placing her fingers across the child's lips to stifle any possible utterance of alarm. Ona's tired eyes opened, wide and instantly awake, so unlike the normal groggy rouse of a young babe.

"We have to go, Verena's bishop's are coming again." Chitara held up Ona to whisper in her ear, and the girl threw her arms around her neck as if used to it.

She said nothing, nodding her head in understanding as Chitara rose from the pile of leaves she had sat on. For the past few days, Chitara noticed that the child seldom spoke. Was it due to the fact that her life was being chased, that the child did not complain? She dismissed the thought as quick as it came and clutched the girl tightly with one arm as she held in the other the folds of her dress, holding them up to avoid dragging the ground and leaving even more traces for her adversaries to follow.

She turned away from the approaching sounds of the men, and stalked across a path of low hanging branches towards the noise she had been clinging onto throughout the night, a peacekeeper to her sanity, albeit only temporarily.

She followed the sound of flowing water.