"Kelly, run, get out of here!" Mother screamed at me as the raid continued on.
"Mother, I can help you! I can help every injured person here!" I shouted back over the commotion of the fighting.
My mother whipped towards me with a death glare before yelling at me to run one more time before returning back to the fight she was fighting. Any protest I had died on my tongue at what happened next. My mother, the strongest person I have known, getting run through by one of the many bandits. The evil chuckle that came out of that vile man caused every hair on my body to stand on end.
"Now, now, we can't have all the people go running off, can we?" He stated with another evil chuckle. My eyes widened at him and every bandit around our small village. I turned to run only to find Sophie running towards me crying.
Her once platinum blond hair was now streaked with blood and mud. Her once happy-go-lucky attitude was replaced with nothing but terror and sadness. Her twelve year old frame shook like a leaf from fear. The words that tumbled out of her mouth broke my heart. "They killed my mommy and sissy," she kept saying over and over like a prayer.
I grabbed her hand in mine and ran into the woods that most people feared and many didn't return from. We ran 'till nightfall and decided to stop and make camp up in the trees, away from the monsters and the bandits on the ground. We had nothing but the clothes on our back so it was going to be a long cold night. I looked at Sophie to see her staring at the full moon through a break in the canopy she just stared with a blank face. The horrors of the day had changed the once carefree bubbly girl into someone that I could barely know. She never spoke a word after that day and never showed emotion.
Ever noise in the woods caused us to wake up that night and many more nights to come worrying if the bandits we were running from had finally caught up to us. For the next two months we wondered the woods alone. We finally came across another settlement that I believed was a day away from ours.
We asked around if any survivors came here but every person we asked answered the question the similar way... "No there hasn't been any travelers here for more than four months and they had not heard of any attacks on any villages around them either". Sophie gave me a look that gave me the feeling that she was saying we had to go back to that place. What we found would haunt my dreams for years to come.
the battle that we had survived that awful day would never had prepared us for what we found. Neither side had won the battle the day we ran from that place. Both sides lost to an unknown force that one day I would be fighting. Both sides were killed with an over amount of arrows and others frozen in to ice sculptures. Their faces showed nothing but agony and surprise. The grounds was stained red with blood that the rain could not erase. The unknown force let the bodies of the fallen were they laid as if they were just garbage with no meaning.
For the next month Sophie and I worked to bury every body in the ruins of our village. Every building was destroyed and was nothing but rumble. When we finished we left the village for the forest to reclaim.
For the next year and nine months we traveled all over Hellswamp finding nothing on the attack or hearing of another. For once in two years since that attack I was alone because Sophie disappeared from watch that very night. I never heard from her again or seen her for years to come.