Touching Fire

5. What?

Kit woke up, the blue sky bright above her. She stretched her arms say out and cursed when she scraped her elbows on rough stone. She shot up, looking around.

Where was she? She most certainly wasn't in her nucw warm house where she had fallen asleep on her soft white bed. Wear she lay now was hard and scratchy with a chilling breeze blowing over her, taking her hair out of her bubble braid and raising goosebumps on her arms and legs.

She rose unsteadily, her legs shaky from fear. Had she done it again? Has she unknowingly left her home and awoken in a new nad unfamiliar land where she knew no one and no one knew her and she would have to start over again. Is it really true, the saying that nothing lasts forever? Because it was beginning to feel true. Everytime she finds something, someone, to make her feel at home, it's gone in a blink.

She clears her teary eyes, looking around her surroundings, praying to ViiceRoy that it wasn't true, that she wasn't gone and had just sleepwalked into the forest a ways.

What she found instead shocked her. Everything she was seeing was familiar; the gurgling stream down the hill, the restless ocean to her left, even Vylad's crumbling shack in the field to the south in the distance.

It was all there, everything she feel asleep believing would be there in the morning.

Everything but her house.

It's gone. Everything she had built, through sweat and tears, and even her own blood (the phantoms had been a serious problem), and it's all gone. Is she going crazy? Would she even know? Is she right back where she started all fourteen years ago?

She could have sworn it was here before she went to sleep in her bed under her safe roof, almost finished in all its glory. But now it's gone. Was it ever there? Was it all a dream? Or is this just all a bad dream instead, everything she had experienced since she got here?

She kicks a rock, only to realize it's a boulder and wince from the pain. She's definitely not dreaming. So where is it? Surely it was here, all the pickaxe and shovel markings are proof, along with the torches placed all around to keep the mobs at bay.

She runs back to where Vylad's shack was leaning dangerously to one side to check her chests where she finds thirteen phantom membranes. She had gotten them while fighting off endless numbers of phantoms while working on her house at night.

She paces back and forth, running her hands through her hair which has completely fallen out of its ties. There is no way she imagined building it, but where could it have gone? It was so big and had been buried into the hill, impossible to move. Did somebody really take the time to take it apart piece by piece? Why? Why would they have any reason to do this?

Sure, there were no claims on it, but that's just because it was incomplete. She still had to add decorations and interior, still had to carve in the details to prove her dedication to the trade.

She looks over to the tiny island in the ocean beside her and glimpses something behind it in the distance floating on top of the water, the top of it bobbing up and down behind the island.

When Kit cross the stream that separates the small island from the main body of land she is on and climbs the hill that makes up the island, she sees a huge platform rocking in the oceans increasingly violent waves, anchors keeping it from drifting away.

She squints at it to see better before remembering she has a telescope on her amongst her hoardes of trunkets in her vast pockets. Pulling it out, she zooms in on the materials of the build.

Spruce.

She doesn't want to believe it, but what other choice does she have? It makes the most sense. Her house made of spruce was now gone, and here was a whole build in the middle of the ocean right next to her land made of spruce.

What the honk.

I'm gonna start stabbing shit.

Where did she put her boat? Screw it, I'm swimming, she decides. This honker stole my house, I'm sure of it. She gets there, and there are spruce signs everywhere. Most of them say "Please don't destroy".

She reaches to pull her axe out of her holster, but stops herself. No, she think, I am better than this. Instead, she grabs an unused sign lying in a pile and some paint beside it and writes "Are you the one that stole my house?" before walking away.

I am mature.

As she walks away she kicks a sign into the ocean that says "kitchen". When she gets back to the plot of land her house had been stolen from, she leaves another sign that says "to the poopyface that stole my house: you are stupid."

She looks back to the ocean and sees the sun is setting. A shiver runs down her spine as she realizes the phantoms will be here soon.

She gathers up her armor and tools and quickly walks towards her chests, grabbing some iron and wood, then walks even quicker towards her mine. Looks like I need more stone, she sighs. It's going to be a long week. She hears the hissing of a phantom above her and starts sprinting, seeking shelter. She gets inside the mine just as it dives, and she turns to slice at its head. She misses, only managing tk scrape a sliver of skin from its face. It returns to dance in the night sky, preparing for another dive, and

Kit hurries deeper into the cave where rhe beasts can no longer reach her. She places scaffolding, planning on hollowing out the chunk, then climbs down to where she keeps her pickaxe.

She swings it at the stone, humming an old miner's tune accompanied by the sound of iron on stone as it echoes through the cave as she begins her excavation.

A/N: I had no clue the monologue was originally 600 hundred words until I posted it in here and the word count went up to 900 so that's pog. Anyway, I'm going to be posting the original monologue that started this all so if you wanna check that out be my guest :D