He came with the sunrise. A burning wind followed by an army of nightmares. The unholy mass broke through our village like a raging flood. Homes and stables splintered and burned, horses neighed, children screamed, men and women cried in horror. In the market my brother cowered at the feet of a hulking figure, then he was gone. My mother and father were devoured by a beast so foul my worst dreams were but children's stories. I ran. I fled through the streets, but everywhere I turned carnage and chaos blocked my path. I rounded a corner and was lain on my back by a forceful blow to the head. My vision blurred as a gnarled figure stood over me. Then darkness…
I awoke in chains. The midday sun was hidden behind clouds. The stench of burning flesh and the sobs of defeated men surrounded me. A searing pain pierced my skull as an otherworldly voice in a strange tongue began speaking from all directions. The cacophony of the surrounding anguish grew distant; all I could hear was the voice… a man's voice. Then it faded away, and the present horrors came rushing back to my senses.
I slowly raised my head; I was the only girl left. The remaining men stood awash in grief and desperation. Clothing was dirty, bloody and torn ragged. Large, brutish, armoured, non-humans dragged the dead along the ground. They flung the bodies atop burning pyres at the outskirts of the village where we were gathered. The largest of the brutes circled the survivors with the air of a commander. Behind him stood a creature on all fours-a familiar beast of horns and teeth and as massive as ten oxen-the creature that ended my family. The commander wielded a jagged and well-used axe and bellowed at the prisoners in his strange tongue. One man broke and collapsed, crying at the fiend's feet. He begged for mercy. The commander knelt down to the man, looked at him pitifully, and unlocked the man's bindings. He picked him up by the arm. The man wept and thanked his captor profusely. Then the commander lifted him off the ground and pitched him to the four-legged beast. The man had time enough to wail in horror before being silenced by the animal's teeth. We were corralled into a broken line, chained, and forced to march eastward toward a great fortress which seemed to have appeared from nowhere on the distant horizon.
The somber whisper of the arid breeze. The shuffling of a hundred feet. The slow tempo of clinking chain. The silent parade of the doomed and the beaten marched into the shadow of the fortress wall. A gate of piked iron held open by oversized chains looked ready to clamp shut like the voracious jaws of a terrific beast. I was pulled closer to the gaping mouth of metal and stone. I heard the soft whimpering of a man praying to the gods for mercy. Somewhere behind me a terrified scream was cut short by the crunching of bones and flesh.
I thought of my father, when he took me hunting. It was only three summers ago, yet it felt a world away-a distant memory. I thought of my mother's warm smile, and her comforting touch when the fever struck. I would never see them again. The sorrow had been welling up inside me. Then something happened... it began turning into anger. The emptiness, desolation, and despair had hollowed a pit in my stomach, and I began to fill it with rage and resolve. My tears ceased as I looked up at the gate that now loomed above me. I would go no farther. The human linkage tugged at me, but my feet inexplicably held fast to the ground against the pull of a hundred men. I felt warm.
"Why have they stopped?"
That voice again. The voice from that morning, but I could understand it. It was no longer foreign to me.
"That one!" The commander barked, pointing at me with the point of his axe..
A sudden hush fell over his troops; their shallow stares upon me.
"She has ignited!" the voice roared, "Kill her! Kill her!"
The commander's armour clanked in rhythm with his bulky gait as he rushed me. In an instant I was within his reach. Lips curled, teeth laid bare, he raised his axe for the killing blow. I gently closed my eyes.
My father's voice…
My mother's smile…
A blinding light…
Silence...
.