Lament of the Traitor King (Complete)

Chapter 42 - Nightmare's End

Netta blinked her eyes opened and watched as the first soft fingers of sunlight peered through the shadows of the forest.  Somehow, unbelievably, after a long, cold night, the day was starting. She had somehow fallen asleep atop the stone slab.

Grunting, Netta sat up, stretching. It was when she happened to move her hurt ankle that she realized that the pain that had been there, before, was gone. Had disappeared.

Startled, Netta grasping along the length of her ankle. She was astonished at the lack of pain, swelling, or discoloration.   Anything that could have shown that there had ever been an injury there to begin with.

Turning slowly, Netta found that the Witches on the ground were asleep. Sometime in the night it seemed that they had forgotten that they were supposed to have been sleeping in shifts.

Netta had been a little worried about what was going to happen to her, if and when Ash showed back up. Just one thought that had crossed her mind was if Ash would even remember her.  Would harm her or, much worse, the Witches who had accompanied her here.

She certainly could not recall much - if anything - about him.

Netta was broken from her reverie when she heard a great, sudden crashing - through what sounded like the underbrush.

Startled, Netta turned and tried, desperately, to peer into the darkness. When she couldn't see anything, a wave of anxiety started, low in her stomach, then swept through her, a terrible fear of the unknown.

She turned to her right, for a moment glancing down again at the two Witches on the temple's floor. Netta examined their exposed faces, saw that their expressions were slack with sleep, their eyes gently shut.   A feeling of protectiveness overcame her and she felt the muscles and bones in her fingers tighten as she clenched onto the edges of the stone surface.

Netta hesitated, afraid of what could be waiting for her as she stared into the uncomforting darkness of the woods.  Even with how skeletal the limbs of the many trees were in the winter, the ancient growth of them that had likely never been touched created a thick, heavy darkness that the beginning of morning could not hope to erase.

It was the weight, the momentary burst of heat that pulsed from the chain that hung from her neck, that jarred Netta's attention.

As she lifted her gaze back up, she thought that she could see eyes that glowed, red, in the gloom.

There was a scrap of something in the withered vestiges of memory that she felt in her mind, like a phantom pain calling out.

Netta leaped from the slab, swinging her legs around so that she was standing, then running from the raised platform of the temple.

She ran into the snow, without giving a thought to the fact that one of her feet had no covering for it. It was when she reached the edge of the clearing that the temple stood in the center of that Netta realized that she felt no pain from the cold of the snow on her naked foot.

She struggled through the underbrush, kicking and shoving branches out of her way as it felt that they were trying to grab her or eviscerate her.   Netta was lost, thinking that there was no way that she could find where those familiar eyes had gone.

She had lost him.

And then, as she stopped her running to lay against a tree, defeat wrapping around Netta like crushing vines, she smelled it.  Like the aftermath of a forest fire, in the middle of a frozen, still forest.

Slowly only at first, Netta followed the scent on the wind until she was running in the shadowed, rich darkness.   She hardly noticed that the tree limbs hardly seemed to strike her any longer, the brush rarely seemed any longer to be a hindrance.  In Netta's mind, where almost nothing else remained, she recalled that smell with a hitch her her chest.