DOFAB last opened 8-24-23. A YEAR from my last MB post. I tried then but wasn't ready. I told myself I couldn't return until I had something to share but the darkness just kept getting darker until it became me and I was lost, very very lost.
I wanted to share something, even if it wasn't much as so many of you have kept the hope and kindness and cheering from.
CH33 KINLEY
The egg-shaped organ Queen Rakasha was dining on rolls to a stop beside me. Splinters of wood, shattered crystal, and array of jellies and jams become a pentagram of carnage that surrounds me. It isn’t the infant heart I can only hope belonged to a stillborn animal that causes the screaming terror of my bones to reach a pitch that can’t be heard. It’s the vacant ebony eyes staring back at me. Rudy red the same shade as the strawberries in my bowl gushes out from beneath a twisted and broken neck, Thron’s lower mandible missing. This second son of Tristan’s has disarmed and maimed the strongest vampire of the Darkos bloodline in a single fluid movement. No hesitation. Exact execution wielded by a pillar of destruction forged from death’s favorite hand.
“Run, Kinley,” Tristan orders. “Go. Now.” Tristan squares himself with one of Thrage’s four brothers. A frozen beast that has been awakened by the same female vampire who sent me out into those training fields to meet my end.
If a vampire tells you to run, you shouldn’t.
If the Overlord of the Underworld tell you to, you listen.
Crawling out from underneath the broken table that nearly crushed me, shards of glass embed in my forearms, my shoes slipping against the slick-coated floors. I catch the corner of the door’s threshold in my scramble, barely escaping before that same door goes flying beside me, crashing into the stone wall of the hallway. One misstep and I’ll end up as Thron, face-first into an early grave because eevie don’t regenerate. My neck won’t magically heal itself. It will be flames out.
