Chapter Two

When the sun settled, Zylenskia double-checked the door’s lock and strapped it with a wooden pole. Working in the dark may as well be surrendering to the guardian of death. She laid moodily down on her hay bed, ignoring the dinner she had prepared for herself. Another pointless day had passed, and all she did was fight for survival alone.

    As the 14-year-old girl watched the air vapor from her slow breaths, she instinctively touched her thigh to make sure her dagger was still there. The rustles of the bared-leaf branches could be prominently heard, and the whistles of the wind were as loud as shrills, loud enough to keep a person awake with alert. The coldness in the air made Zylenskia shiver until her exhausted body gave away.

Light came seeping into every crack of the hut. Instead of the night’s ice breeze, she faced the day’s humid air. The humid air brought bugs—so many insects, especially since she had left fresh food out in the open. Zylenskia combed through her hair and tied it into a bun with dried tree lark that had been stretched.

    When she went to dump the fly-infested bowl of canine meat, there was another note. The note she had previously left was still there, beside the new one that read the exact same thing. Zylenskia shook away the creep that was flooding her veins and told herself that this was yet another note from the past. This time, however, she ripped the 2 small slips of paper into rice-sized bits. Then, she blew them into the air before taking the bowl still filled with crawling insects and then dumping it a few meters away from her hut. It was a dumb thing to do, leaving food out in the middle of a hungry forest, but then who cares? She was never going to eat it anyway; it was too rotten. Grunting, she picked up her hunting ax, rechecked her dagger, and headed out.

    The sun had already shone into the hut, but it was even more blinding outside. Sweat instantly trickled down Zylenskia’s forehead. Her left hand’s grip on the ax slipped slightly due to her palm watering. Biting her lip, she gripped the ax harder until her knuckles were white and set off into deeper parts of the forest.

    Deeper parts of the forest—from her memory, the villagers had nicknamed it Death’s Home—shielded hunters and all living creatures from the relentless sun, but because of that reason, there were huge gatherings of animals. Snakes, tylephants, and all living land animals resided there, along with a deep pond that homed water moccasins, electric eels, and more venomous creatures; thus, the nickname. She had lethal weapons and skills, but Zylenskia had no lethal body. Against nature and all its followers, she was vulnerable—very vulnerable.