Chapter 4

Bella's POV

Bella     

Chapter 4

 

            At the first sign of daylight Bella awoke. She searched the cave for the man that had brought her here, but once again, there was no trace of him. She groaned in pain as she stood, and wobbled as quickly as she could the exit she wished never to see again. She felt a sudden tight grip on her arm. Bella whipped around and collided her fist as hard as she could into the face of the man holding her. He jumped back, and held his hand to his eye, cowering from her. She turned to the exit again, but he pulled her back. She pushed and shoved at his arms weakly, she screamed and kicked him as hard as she could, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally she loosened every muscle in her body and made herself as heavy as possible, and he slowly let her drop to the floor. Bella put her hand to her head, she had given herself a horrible migraine during her struggle. She scraped her feet quickly across the dirt floor away from him until she felt the stony wall hit her back. The man tried to approach her, but stopped when she hissed angrily at him and spat at his feet,

            “Why…” she growled, squinting her eyes against the pulsing pain in her head, “why have you condemned me to this horrible fate, this long, degrading life of the living?”

            “Condemned you? I only wanted to help you Miss…”

            “No one asked you to!” She yelled, cutting him off. “Don’t you see? I came here to die! It is my fate! Even the wisest do not play with one’s fate, for the consequences are brutal to the victim, and they will be unstable, prone to weakness.” She remembered the quote from somewhere in the back of her mind, one of the only things from her endless studies as a warrior that made sense to her, and stuck with her. She sighed, “So now look, you had to play God for whatever sick and perverse reasons you have, and I am no trapped in this soulless body. This once strong figure that is now a skeleton outline of what was and will forever be scarred and broken. And I will spend the eternal years of my life in this ghost body, and walk in the shadows of this cruel, dying world.” The man crouched down next to her, he looked to be scarcely older than she. He looked down solemnly, and Bella hoped that he was so very ashamed for what he had done.

            “I see it a little differently than that…” he began, “You see Miss, this world is very large, and at this point it is quite empty. Your ship could have landed anywhere at any point on this planet, and the odds were likely that you would land in an ocean somewhere, where you would drown slowly and complete the mission you set out to finish, but that was not your true fate. Instead you went a different path, and landed not so very far from me, one of the only Sapiens for a thousand miles at least.” He stood and backed away from her, “From what I see fate set you before me because I was the one whose duty was to protect you from the fate you had chosen for yourself, and therefore I cannot let you leave and carry this out. I know that what I am telling you is not what you want to hear Miss, but it is what you need to hear. I plead that you do not take my words lightly, and let me show you the beauties of this world, and that you may reconsider.” He held a hand out for her to help her to her feet. She ignored it, and stood on her own, staring at him with malicious eyes, hoping he did not sense the tears of helplessness and anxiety growing behind them. She turned swiftly to the corner she had been laying in since she arrived, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her back towards him. She turned furiously, the tears now flowing freely down her face,

            “Let me go!” She shouted, “Please, I swear I will stay here with you, just let me rest for now… I need rest…”

            “Not until you tell me your name,” he demanded. It seemed a simple request, but to Bella to give her identity was to give up herself, it was everything she had always known. But she was not known here. She fought with herself for a  moment, and then spat angrily,

            “It’s Bella.”

            “Shadow,” he replied, releasing her. She ran to the far corner to the bed of leaves and curled up, shutting out the growing light of the sun, and commanded herself to silence. She would not let him hear her sniffle, or her breath catch. The only thing she could not stop were the tears, and she fell asleep to the sound of them falling from her face quietly to the leaves below her.

           

Author's Note

Yet again, the font fluctuates now and then :P