Waking up in a Cult without the Hot Guy
You
No way are you drinking that! It’s probably poison.
After all, you’ve just been kidnapped and kept hostage in a windowless van for who-knows-how-long.
No matter how enticing it smells or how weak you are, you won’t give in!
At the last second, you turn your head, and the contents of the vial spill over the cracking seat cushions instead of into your mouth.
Beside you, the elderly woman swears.
She has quite the foul mouth for someone who sounds inches from death. Or maybe that’swhyshe has such a foul mouth.
“Damn it all,” she mutters after she finishes her more colorful string of expletives. “That was the last of it, and there’sno way to make more. Not in my condition. But look at her! Those fools. What did they do to her?”
“Think she’s gonna die?” the boy asks over top of you, and it’s rather frustrating the way they’re talking around you as if you can’t hear them.
You open your mouth to remind them that you’re still here—
Or, you intend to.
But, to your horror, you can’t even summon the strength to speak.
You used the last of your energy just avoiding drinking that vial.
“Listen, Chosen One,” the old woman says as she shuts her door, and the boy must be driving, because the engine revs to life and the truck peels out in a spray of crunching gravel. “I don’t know what those fools did to you, but that vial could have saved your life. Now it’s wasted, so you’ll just have to hang in there a while longer and hope for the best. For your sake—andours.”
It was going to save your life?
You’re still not sure you can trust her, but you’re starting to regret not drinking the vial. At least a little.
Would it have given you your energy back?
You can’t see.
Everything’s gone dark, and not just because it’s night.
Even breathing takes so much effort, it’s hard to keep going.
If you could only speak, you might be able to tell your new captors what the problem is. That they could save you if they would just turn around and drive back toward Ziros.
That you’re tethered by magic to a hot dude who is now way too far away.
But you can’t speak.
So all you can do is sleep, giving into the deep, heavy darkness as it pulls you under.
And you just hope that against the odds, you’ll still wake up in the morning.
Ziros
The first rays of dawn are already cracking over the horizon when I wake up, nothing but dry, golden grass and rolling hills as far as the eye can see.
I don’t know where the hell I am, but at least I’m alive.
And I’m feeling a whole damn lot better.
