(It's been a year since I've started playing Summoners War, and for all the relative difficulties and burn-outs I've had from it, the game has managed to keep me captivated for so long. Of course, having so many cute monsters to add to the collection never hurt.
These same monsters have inspired me. It's made me want to give them personalities and roles the game simply doesn't let them have. So I guess, in a way, this story will be a love letter to those monsters. But not the game. Nuh uh.
While I will be explaining the world in which this story is taking place as I go along, I'd like to state right now that while the game has been used as a background for it, I've tried to make it and some of the lore from scratch.
Also, I consider myself a decent writer, but I haven't written anything creative in about...3 years or so? So I may be a little rusty, but hopefully I'll get back into the flow of things. Case in point, this first chapter is kind of messy, but I can't figure out how to improve on it. Any help in the form of advice or feedback is appreciated!
Anyway, enough of an introduction, let's give this first chapter a shot. Hope you enjoy!)
Chapter 1: A Rude Introduction
"You're not the one."
The words, seared into her consciousness, echoed inside of her head.
"You're useless."
She could feel the sting of the words as if they were being said aloud. She didn't want to be useless. She had tried her hardest to succeed, to prove she was worthy. Yet, the voices of contempt persisted, intensifying as others around her had flourished and were heaped with praise.
"Be gone, worthless unit."
She could feel the ground fall away beneath her, swallowed by her own anguish, falling into the dark, empty void beneath, unable to make a sound as she kept falling...and falling...and falling. The voices began to fade, replaced with silence, as if the darkness was drowning out sound along with site. She could only close her eyes, perhaps forever. Who would miss her anyway?
To her surprise, she awoke, eyes slowly opening, greeted by the sight of a stunning blue sky, the clouds growing smaller and smaller in front of her.
She gasped, barely audible against the increasing noise of the wind in her ears, and she realized she was still falling. But instead of falling into a black void like she was drowning in water, it was a rapid descent, slowed only by numerous collisions with the branches and foliage of trees that battered and scraped her while she fell, before finally hitting the less-than-lenient ground with a force that knocked the breath out of her.
Still conscious, she laid still on the ground, fighting through the pain wracking her body to try and process what had just happened. She had obviously fallen, but she couldn't have fallen that far, seeing as she was still in one piece, and she could still feel her limbs and the rest of her body, however much they hurt. But where she had fallen from, she had no clue, nor did she understand any of the context behind her vision of falling into a void of pitch-black, or even recall how she had ended up falling in the first place.
"Think." She groaned to herself, trying to muster the effort to at least sit up. Her body protested furiously, but obeyed her as she rose, her sight still shaky and her senses dulled from the fall, too busy fighting the pain in her body and mind to focus. But as they began to fade, she started to remember, bit by bit.
"I am Vanessa." She breathed, visually checking her body as her sight cleared, relieved to find no external wounds on her bare thighs, one of the few areas of her body that was not covered in dulled metal armor that once shone red and gold.
The relief turned to concern however, as her memory betrayed her beyond recalling her own name. Who had she been before? Why had she been deemed worthless by the voices in her vision, or was said vision nothing more than a bad dream?
The answers were not forthcoming, and her heart sank, realizing they simply weren't there. Whether her memory had been lost or locked away in the recesses of her mind, they weren't going to be found just by sitting around, she knew that much.
Reluctantly, she rose to her feet, her body still aching in numerous locations, having to fight to stay balanced on her feet. The dry, grassy earth crunched faintly beneath her sabatons, having been kept dry by the dense cover of trees above and all around. Scanning the area, Vanessa could see the rows of trees -hardwood variants, she guessed- go on for seemingly forever, providing no hint of where she should head to escape the forest she had crash-landed into, or any sign of life inhabiting it. She sighed, her choices limited to proceeding into the unknowing, or waiting in futility, and the immediately dismissed the latter as an option. So she set off on her way, a lone, lost female seeking answers, and guidance.
It didn't take long for Vanessa to find the first sign of life, the problem was that it was not friendly in the slightest.
Just as the forest began to thin ever so slightly, she heard something rustle nearby, and tensed instinctively.
"Hello?" She called cautiously, not knowing what was making the noise. Only silence greeted her, so she tried again.
"Is someone there?" She asked. "I need some help. You see, I don't know where I am, or how I got here. Is there a town or anyone else nearby?"
Her question got another rustle in response, having gotten the attention of someone, or something. But nothing was said it return.
"Please...?" She continued, a hint of desperation creeping into her tone.
Then it was all silent again, like the air was holding its breath. Vanessa crept towards the sound of the rustling, right behind the wide trunk of a tree. The rustling intensified, accompanied by heavy, laborious breathing, in a tone that sounded somehow less than human.
Letting blind hope dictate her moves, she took another step forward, eyes trained on the one tree, not watching where she was placing her feet.
Her first mistake.
With her focus on the tree in front of her, she didn't realize she was about to step on an old, thin branch that had been partially hidden in the grass. The decayed wood gave way beneath her feet, crunching loudly, and the breathing grew louder, turning into a snarl.
Vanessa realized that what she had crept up to was not human, and only had time to turn around before a primal roar rose from behind the tree, so loud and angry that the air seemed to tremble around it.
Her blood turning cold, she started to run, immediately followed by a violent crack behind her, the tree crashing down to the ground. Vanessa couldn't help but turn around. What could have caused a tree, one as wide and firmly rooted as that, to be cleaved in half in one swipe?
That was her second mistake. Behind the fallen tree, and the jagged stump where it once stood on, stood a beast of massive proportions. Its coat of blue and black fur was mottled and did nothing to hide the hatred in its piercing red eyes, set into the head of a lion, but that itself was rested on the body of a massive man-beast, with each of its arms easily the size of Vanessa's entire body, completed by enormous wings jutting out of its back, and wicked claws that matched its teeth perfectly, along with twisted horns atop its head that looked ready to skewer anything.
"A chimera?!" Vanessa yelled in horror, breaking out into a run as the beast snorted and stomped after her, shaking the ground beneath it. She cursed in a language she did not even realized she remembered, or knew the name to. The first being she encountered in this forsaken forest happened to be a brutal and powerful chimera? Where was the fairness in that? And why did it have to be the color it was?
Fortunately for her, the pursuer was not particularly quick, lumbering after her and falling further behind with every stride. But Vanessa kept running. Now that the beast had spotted her, identified her scent and registered her as a source of food, it would not lose track of her. It would hunt her down relentlessly, and if or when she would give out from exhaustion, it would be there.
Vanessa pushed the thoughts of what it would do to her when it caught up, and sprinted as far from the beast as she could. Despite the fall she had taken upon entering the forest, her body had somewhat recovered, the aching either diminished or being overpowered by the adrenaline in her body. Being lost in the woods and chased by a deadly abomination, she did not need the handicap of having to nurse an injury.
The forest around her began to blend together, even more so at the speed she was running. The green leaves and brown trunks blurred together, not helped by the sweat that had begun to form and run down her face, threatening to trickle into her eyes and blind her. But the threat of the chimera, still stomping in pursuit behind her, kept her running. Unwilling to repeat her earlier, naive mistakes, Vanessa kept her eyes and senses alert, trying to see any signs of escape through her blurry vision. She couldn't make any more mistakes, not with her life at stake.
Eventually, Vanessa slowed, unable to keep up her pace forever, and took pause for a breath, calming down her pounding heart while her chest heaved. For the immediate moment, there was no sign of the chimera, but Vanessa was well aware of having to keep moving. If she couldn't run, she would just walk at a quick clip.
As she moved, the forest began to thin just a little more, and the first sign of any other activity in the seemingly endless crowd of trees began to reveal themselves, in the shape of a set of hunting traps, made of rope and cleverly concealed in the grassy ground and assumedly pressure-sensitive, ready to trap any unsuspecting animal by the foot and leave them suspended helplessly in the air. Careful to not trigger the traps herself, Vanessa tiptoed her way around them, giving a generous berth to the ropes, trying to get any hints onto who may have set them. Surely, whoever set them would not have come from very far off.
Her hunch was right. Still trying to run, even though her energy reserves were running out, she finally saw an opening in the forest, like a light at the end of a long and dark tunnel. With new-found energy, she sprinted for it, and burst out into and open field, briefly blinded by the unobstructed light of the sun. Exhausted, she fell forward, collapsing onto the tall grass below, knees first before the rest of her body came down. Running from the chimera had tired her out more than she had realized, and if anyone else was around, she would have been embarrassed by her lack of stamina. Even in her fatigued state and lack of memory, she felt her stamina should have held out for longer.
Not that it mattered. She was finally free of the forest, but had no strength to continue across the unexplored land. The feeling in her legs were gone, and so was her hope. If the chimera came out of the forest now, she would be nothing more than easy fodder for it.
'This is it?' She thought to herself. 'No clue of my past, and no future to find out?'
She couldn't muster any strength to answer her own question, and her eyes closed again. Had she been able to hold out for only a little longer, she would have heard two pairs of light footsteps heading towards her, not expecting to find a collapsed female bearing a very familiar crest upon her incomplete, winged helmet.
