Whew, sorry it's been a while. The story was not taking a nice turn and I found myself deciding to leave this thing to die. However, instead of moving on, I thought it would be better to abandon the previous Chapter 4 and make a new one on the spot today. It worked out rather well. Before, I was pounding Isude with way too much information, and I didn't like how I was building up his development or the story here.
The story will be taking a much faster pace from here on if I get my way. Look out for my Metal Gear Solid 3 novelization soon after this is done! I just don't want to leave this unfinished, I'll leave plenty of things undone, but I'm trying to make my writing not one of them.
Thanks for the reviews! Hope you enjoy!
Chapter 4: Mystery
She was in a moment of deep distress. Not the kind of thing that you would understand if you were a damsel snatched by some evil knight, but rather, the distress of one who realizes all that there's a threat against everything you've ever cared about of held dear to your heart. As such, she reacted accordingly, or she would have, if the werewolves had not been long gone by the time she got there.
"Casualties?" She asked a guard who seemed to be one of the few who kept had kept his composure.
"N-none…ma'm." She turned her head away from the crestfallen villagers who walked as one did in the first stages of confusion and disarray and looked the guard straight in his eyes, although she had to sigh and raise his chin up with her hand before she could do so.
"None?"
"None…it was like nothing I've seen b-before. They were so quick and powerful, none of us could touch them…they were…they were playing with us." She looked at the snow, listened to the soft breeze and thought and calculated the odds of the fear that was beginning to dig into her heart.
She began trudging away from the scene of the villagers. She walked past the guards who sat proceeding to deal with the usual necessities of the times after a battle. Bandaging wounds, healing the unlucky of the dreaded curse, and some were trying to keep up high spirits with songs and stories of past grandeur, but Arwell could tell that even those voices had an inherent shakiness to them. She quickened her pace until she began to run to her destination. When she arrived at the small house covered with snow, surrounded by tall trees at the outskirts of town, she promptly kicked the door open and unsheathed her sword.
The only thing that seemed out of place was the door that rested with a slam on the floor. A fire was crackling in front of her. The one room shack had a table, cabinets, a single bed in the corner and two chairs.
"You bastard!" She screamed, "Come out!"
When she turned around and saw the stain on the floor, she didn't take much notice to it and quickly ran out. The stain, under further inspection, was the faint trace of blood. It had seeped into the wood, and remained the only sign that a man had once lived there, a man who now lay deep in the snow, far from Arwll's sight. This man had been a well-liked guard, at least if you could get past the fact that he enjoyed his solitude a bit too much.
This man had been the one who had told Arwell of the attack, and he also held all of her suspicions. There were plenty of soldiers at the village, enough to defend it for some time. Surprise had seized her heart, and she didn't think of that, or of the coincidence that it would happen just as soon as he had brought the Isude to her cabin those days before the attack. Whatever motivation he had for his vile deeds, she no longer cared. All she wanted was his head. This my friends, was her motivation.
She knew where he would be, and ran to her own cabin, when she arrived, she was already short of breath. So when she saw her crushed home, her knees fell despite any complaints and protests she might have used against the act. She didn't protest it at all however, and soon her hands were digging into the snow, balling into fists, and her sword also lay on the ground, as it had fallen from her hand.
"What's going on? Tell me…what is happening?" She whispered to herself. Her desperation was so deep, and her confusion so piercing to her mind and heart, that she did not hear the beast trudging behind her, she could do nothing as it's furry hand went over her mouth and dragged her into the forest.
This is where she also meet her our hero, and once again hear the story through his eyes once more.
