This is a continuation of the short story Abandon but from the perspective of the girl. It's a little bit darker than anything else I've ever written or posted so hopefully it's not too much. I don't feel this is one of my stronger writings so any constructive criticism, general thoughts, or opinions would be very welcome!
She screamed for the boy until her voice was no more than a whisper, crawled until her legs and hands were scraped and bleeding. Exhaustion finally brought her to a shuddering stop. She lay on the cold ground, heedless of the passing time, her body shaking as she sobbed brokenly. She drew her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them tightly, struggling to hold herself together. Sleep eventually took her, drawing her into its calming embrace, releasing her, at least temporarily, from the living nightmare she found herself trapped in.
She awoke in complete darkness several hours later, disoriented and terribly cold, but calmer and vividly aware of the deadly situation she had gotten herself into. Panic threatened to overwhelm her again, but she pushed it down and forced herself to think, something she found to be much harder than it should have been. Despite several hours of sleep, she still felt tired and weak. As she slowly pushed herself up into a sitting position, a wave of dizziness washed over her, nearly sending her tumbling back to the ground. Breathing hard, she closed her eyes and fought to remain conscious.
Once the world had stopped spinning, she leaned back tentatively, letting out a sigh of relief when her back encountered the roughness of the cave wall. As she shifted carefully to a more comfortable position, wary of causing any more dizziness, she felt a flash of pain and rush of warmth on her right side. She let out a short gasp, but the pain was gone almost as quickly as it had come. With concern replacing panic, she began probing gently, feeling along her side. Her fingers encountered a warm wetness just above her hip, the same place where a soldier of the Serpent King had plunged his knife into her less than two weeks earlier. The wound had been deep, but not life-threatening provided that she took the time to let it heal. A village healer had been able to close and bandage the wound as well as the deep knife slices on her legs, several of which the healer feared had separated muscle. The cuts she had sustained on her face and arms while fighting the knights, while not pretty, were mostly superficial and would heal in time. With the Serpent King's men hunting for her, she'd had no choice but to leave the village as soon as the healer had finished his work. She had quickly found that the wound to her side did not bother her too much provided she was careful of her movements, but the wounds her legs had sustained made it painful and almost impossible for her to move much faster than a slow run and then only for a short time.
Now though, trapped in the caves, her primary concern was the injury to her side and how bad it was. She winced as she tried to lift her shirt and found that the drying blood had made the fabric stick to her skin. Working slowly and carefully, the girl set to work freeing it. It was tedious and painful work, but she found that keeping herself busy helped keep the panic she felt at bay. Once she'd freed her shirt, she took a deep breath before examining the wound, already fearing the worst.
Her breath caught in her throat as her fingers encountered the rough edges of the stiff thread the healer had used to close the wound. More than just loosening the stitches in her desperation to catch the boy, she had succeeded in tearing them out, leaving the wound open and bleeding with every move she made. Now she understood what had caused the dizziness, the reason she felt so tired and weak. How much blood had she lost? More than she could afford to lose, that much was certain. And now her position was not just dangerous, it was fatal. Of course, she had known when the boy left her that he was essentially handing her a death sentence, though he was kind enough to give her what supplies he could. Where those supplies were now, she knew not. She had abandoned them in her desperate attempt to catch the boy and any chance she might have had for survival was gone. The Hunters would find her body and -
The girl froze as she thought of the Hunters. As though her senses had finally come back to life, she suddenly realized how quiet it was. The only sounds breaking the heavy silence were her short breaths and a faint dripping from somewhere deeper in the caves. The Hunters' howling had stopped. She whimpered as she remember what the silence meant. Too many people before her had thought the Hunters' silence meant they had lost the trail. What those people had discovered a short time before their deaths was just how wrong they were. Once they were certain that their prey had no chance of eluding them, the Hunters fell silent, leaving the hunted to either breathe a sigh of relief that they had escaped or panic as they waited for what they felt was certain death to find them. And it always found them; both of them.
It wouldn't be much longer now. Soon she would have no more worries, no more pain, soon she would see her family again. A feeling of peace enveloped her as she thought about her family. She missed them terribly, more than she could bear. It had seemed so unfair that she had lived and they had died. She had known the Serpent King would never stop hunting her and it seemed inevitable that he would one day find her and have her executed. She had been determined to fight him to her dying breath. But now she was tired, so tired, and without her family, she seemed to have lost her purpose. She no longer wanted to fight, to struggle. No, it was far better to die this way, so that the Serpent King would continue to hunt for her, never knowing his search was in vain. The last remnants of the fear that had previously consumed her vanished as she sat in the dark waiting for death to find her.
Some time later a faint growl pulled her from the stupor she had fallen into as she sat staring into the darkness. Though she could see nothing, she sensed several large creatures slowly stalking closer and closer. The end had come, but she still felt no fear. As she heard the creatures stop not six feet from where she sat, her mind turned back to her family: her mother laughing as she cooked, her father coming through the door after a long day working in the fields, her younger brothers wrestling on the floor, her twin sister quietly reading a book. The thought of seeing them again brought tears to her eyes. They would be together again soon. A breath of warm air washed over her legs. A low snarl sounded in her ear. Soon.
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