A scream woke me up that morning. I tried to open my eyes to see where it came from, but all I saw was darkness. The next sound to plague my ears was the sound of metal clashing together—swords. It went on for a while, people were fighting passionately.
Another scream once the clashing stopped and I flinched. A scream that I instantly recognized the voice of.
I willed my arms and legs to move, but to no avail. They were stuck in place; paralyzed. I started panicking, trying to kick my legs and flail my arms. My throat felt sore from trying to scream.
I needed to do something.
"Silva," I called, although my voice didn't pick up.
Silva.
Was she okay? Did she get hurt while I was sleeping? Did training go wrong somehow?
I opened my eyes and this time, I actually saw the makeshift children's bedroom I had been staying in for the past who-knows-how-long. I rushed out of it, down the stairs, and out the front door to see Silva sparing with Menas.
"W-what?"
"Are you okay?" Silva asked.
I huffed in response, slumping down against the grass. I was relieved to see that Silva was okay, but I was beyond sure that vision meant she was injured during training. What else could it mean?
"Are you okay?" I echoed.
"...Yes? Amicia, is everything alright?"
Rather than explaining to her what I had saw, I nodded, "Bad dream, I think."
It wasn't a dream, I just knew it wasn't. It was far too realistic to be a dream, and I never had vivid dreams anyway. Maybe it was a good thing I stopped their sparing, it could have been a forewarning that she was going to get hurt.
But somehow, I felt that wasn't the case.
I didn't want to worry her, though. So I stayed silent. Silva and Menas looked at me funny for a few minutes, and Silva even left to fetch me a glass of water, telling me I looked too pale. I'm not sure how she caught that, considering my skin was almost paper white, but I let it slide and took the water when she delivered it.
When I went back inside, I sighed. This was the first vision I've had in so long and it was troubling not being able to decipher it. Although they usually were cryptic and unexplainable, this was different. If it was about my the well-being of my friend, I couldn't brush it off so easily. That would just be one more thing I'd have pestering the back of my mind for a while.
♕♕♕
My friends and I were sitting around a table in the community center along with my family (minus my two younger sisters), the blacksmith and his family, and a few representatives from the Elven communities who agreed to take part in our fight.
"Taelman knows of our location and plans, supposedly," Blasius summarized, "so we need to discuss and vote. We either back down or followthrough despite the consequences."
"I worry about our safety," my father said. "Surely the King has better armour, weapons, and more in-depth training than we do. We could be setting ourselves up for failure."
"I don't want to put my daughter's life at risk," my mother added.
"It's for our people," the one Elven leader argued.
"I think we should go. Look how hard we've already worked. Sure, they may be better, but we have numbers and it's worth a shot," the blacksmith added.
"'It's worth a shot' is minimizing the situation just a little bit. Our lives are on the line here," Silva counters. "But I agree. This is too important to back out of now."
"It could be a good thing for us—if we go now, despite lack of training, if we catch them a little bit by surprise by going then they have less time to prepare themselves," I told them.
"As I see it, if we don't go, we're better off turning ourselves in and going back to the dungeon to face the same fate as everyone we left back there. If we don't do anything, we'll be back there anyway," Blasius grumbled, clearly not encouraged by the small lack of support. "I don't want to die a coward, I want to give my parents justice."
The air was silent when he finished speaking. Although most of us agreed, it was slightly unnerving to see him so irate, when he was usually calm and levelheaded. It was clearly something he was very passionate about and I admired his need to get back at the King for what he did to Blasius' parents. It made me want to followthrough with our plans even more. How could we back out after all the King had done to everyone? Both Silva and Blasius have had their families taken away from them because of the King's actions, and currently there were people being sterilized and left to die in the dungeon. Children, even.
My days locked in the dungeon were far behind—it had been months now, but I still remembered the fear when I first arrived, how I had tried to escape and they drugged me, being locked in the isolated cell starving to death. What kind of people were we to even think about leaving other people in that situation?
I could tell by looking around the table that everyone was moved by his blazing words, and rightfully so.
"I'm as scared as anyone for this to go wrong, to mess up, but at this point, we have nothing to lose." This time Blasius's voice was softer. I reached over and took his hand, squeezing it lightly as encouragement under the table. He looked over and smiled, although I could tell there was a hint of something underneath that smile—sadness, fear, something else?
"Blaze is right. We'll die either way. If we have to die, why don't we use our lives doing the right thing?" The words came out before I even realized they were, but my words seemed to elicit some kind of emotion in everyone. Courage, perhaps.
"Then, we shall vote?" The Elven woman spoke.
"Yes from my family," the blacksmith answered.
"Yes from me and my wife, too," my father replied.
Four more yeses came along from me and my friends and then the Elven leaders stood up.
"Then it's unanimous. We fight."
The three of them left, and everyone else gathered themselves up from the table. And so it was decided. We fight.