Ashfall: City of Shade (UNDER EDITING)

Chapter 20 | The Sanctuary

CEPHINE

While my dear begins looking over his map, I pick up a spare tunic from the ground and find a set of glowing silver eyes staring back at me -- underneath our bed.

"A-Adler!" I cry out, pointing at the hiding whore, "She's under there."

With a bright smile he strides by me and kneels down. The woman begins shouting as he drags her out. Dried blood coats her disgusting, puffed up, knee.

"Dear Ashta," my husband gasps while eyeing her leg. He picks her up, carrying her limp body and setting her on the bed in panic. "My little pearl! I'm sorry," he whispers fiercely like a little boy as he takes her tiny hand in his.

Dark black circles rest under her heavy eyelids. She looks like a corpse. Albeit, a moving one.

Her hand moves out of his, trembling, she reaches for his chin and tries to push his face away from her own.

"She stabbed you!" I remind him. The little woman's eyes turn to slits on me. "Adler, she has committed treason."

Ignoring reason, he rips up the sleeve of his expensive tunic and begins wrapping it around her baby-sized leg.

"I'm sorry," he repeats after kissing her neck. My blood boils seeing her child-like chubby face light up from the attention. "Do you forgive me?"

She remains silent. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to process the fact that she was hiding all this time.

I cover my ears when he picks her up. She begins crying very much like a newborn.

"You're hurting her leg," I point out while watching some of his guards leave.

They return with Brommy.

He pushes a babalop decorated with crystals and old hardened weaved seaweed. Greta looks terrified as Brommy sets her upright inside it.

She grows quieter seeing my husband's spyrt light up. He clasps the shell strap over her lap to keep her from falling out.

"I'm taking her out," Adler tells me over his shoulder.

"Where?"

"Away from here."

***

GRETA

"You will love it here," Adler tells me.

Reluctantly, I step out of the strange seat he pushed me in all the way here.

Two days it took for us trek to this strange inlet of jagged rock. He never stopped to sleep.

A long path guided us here from the dockyard. It branched off in many areas, I wouldn't be able to follow it back.

No one told me my sisters were made to come live all the way out here.

My mouth hangs open seeing so many great, lush trees just on the shoreline, surrounding their forms as they emerge from the foliage. The tree limbs hang over us, reaching down and tickling my face as I limp over to eldest sister.

Some of my other sisters are filling basins of food Adler and his guards brought with us. More of my sisters wait in a covered marble gazebo by the water's edge. The sea is very still here. I do not understand how it exists when we crossed only land to access this...far off nook.

That is what Adler called it.

Anxiously, I follow him back behind the wall of lush trees. Above this area of the cavern, high up on the cave's ceiling, there are a few gaps letting in light from the sun above.