Kind of trying to sound out if there's any interest in this. I have a few later chapters of this half-written already, but it'd be good to know if there's any interest in reading it before I start working on it more. Hope this taster is as mysterious as I was going for! Enjoy
Larten awoke with a jolt. With no idea where he was or how he'd gotten there, his first reaction was to scramble to his feet to defend himself against any danger. His eyes took a second to adjust and in that time, he registered a feeling like an oncoming storm in his temples. Reaching a hand to the side of his head, he took half a second to study the curious patches of red on the snowy ground, and then, as he concluded that at least some of the blood was from an injury somewhere inside his hair that had dyed most of his white shirt red, he remembered something.
Where were Arra and Gavner?
The three of them had been forced due to recent weather conditions to take a lesser-known path down from the Mountain. He could remember Gavner grumbling about the cold and the impossible climb and Arra threatening to kill the younger man if he didn't pull himself together. Larten could remember absolutely nothing about arriving here exactly, and similarly he had no recollection of becoming separated from his friend or his mate.
He had no idea how he'd ended up injured, either. He could already see purple corpses scattered around him, against trees and face down in the snow, so he gathered it must have been a battle.
Had Arra and Gavner left him for dead in the ice? It seemed unlikely.
Though his head was pounding with every step, Larten forced himself to study the bodies, in case one or two of them turned out to be vampire. In his confused haze, perhaps induced by blood loss, the gravity of the situation hadn't struck him, and he turned over the corpses without any hesitation. None of them turned out to be those of his comrades – there were five or six in the area, all huge Vampaneze who had clearly not been travelling here by accident. They all had several weapons with them, swords still lying in their limp hands. They had been travelling as a pack, and they had been looking for a fight.
"Crepsley?" a voice said suddenly from behind him, though it echoed in Larten's head three or four times before he registered that it wasn't his imagination. Trying to be swift despite his injury, he spun around to face the threat and reached for a knife that was no longer in its sheath, stumbling and nearly falling in the process.
Before he could gather himself again, someone's hand was on his shoulder. Larten managed to blink his eyes clear and locate Arrow's face in front of him.
Larten got a sense that there were others with him, but he couldn't focus long enough to find out who they were. Just as he started to worry that he might have been more seriously injured than he'd initially thought, and before Arrow could support him, his vision swam and he collapsed.