{A Wattpad Featured Book}
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Her heart or her people. Only she can decide.
Hated, cursed, outcasted. It was Eleena Asterin's life ever since she was blamed to have betrayed her village. So when she is offered a task to earn back her honour and prid...
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There were nights when dreams came in such vivid detail that when I woke, I was confused, forgetting for a fraction of a second that it was nothing more but a wisp of imagination. But everything was black now—inky blackness that reached for my wrists and ankles like wicked tentacles pulling me deeper and deeper and deeper—
Everything was silky and I was weightless. At first, I relished the feeling—treading my hands in what felt like water, letting it slip between my fingers like grains of sand—it was peaceful. But as quick as this spur of a moment came, invisible hands wrapped around my waist and like a stone sinking in an ocean, I plummeted. The darkness in my vision faded as my eyes were forced open and I choked, a stream of bubbles escaping past my lips. I didn't know what was happening, confusion invading my thoughts like a blur. Some would have said a normal human would die from the high pressure alone but I could only part my lips in a silent scream as water surged into my nostrils and throat, burning, burning, burning—
The light blinded my eyes and I gasped.
However, I was quickly silenced by a giggle. Then another, and another.
The laughter rippled across the hallway I stood in, ethereal and peculiar, rebounding on the walls to create an effect of many voices echoing together. However, I could feel my face remain straight and my feet start to move, walking forwards steadily. Not even my physical body seemed to have reacted and could have perhaps not noticed anything amiss.
Silence blanketed the surroundings and my boots clacked against the floor—every breath I exhaled, all seemed to sound noisier in this silence.
And that child's laughter never once disappeared. It was sometimes distant, as if it came from behind one of the doors that lined the walls; sometimes close, as if it was leaning over the edge of my head—
The hallway morphed and the incessant giggling grew louder and faster. Spinning and spinning and spinning—I clutched my head.
"Little human child..."
High-pitched and youthful, the child giggling had begun singing. At first, I'd thought nothing about it but if one was to listen closely enough, the voice was indeed not playful but hid ancient undertones—cold and malicious as though ice-tipped hands had grappled my mind.
"Little human child..."
But then the world spun and spun and I stood in the middle of it, watching as memories of my times with the faeries flickered by.
"Little human child in a world full of beasts..."
A smile, a ride under the golden crown of the heavens, a dip in a sun-touched lake...memories blitzed by and I observed with unfocused eyes before I looked away. A part of me wondered if I was glancing through someone else's memories and if it were mine, wondered why I had turned my back on it in shame.
