Resurrection - An excerpt from Shackles of the Storm

 

Hey there, traveler! Dar here a bit late for this week's Behind the Scalpel, with another excerpt from our WIP desert fantasy, introducing another character - the imprisoned djinn of wind, Zaira. Like for the last excerpt, feedback is very welcome, we'll working hard to smooth things to perfection so every tip is appreciated. This is the self-edited version which we will send to our editor when I've finished editing the whole WIP, so keep that in mind. Other than that, enjoy!

~:O:~  
 Resurrection

At first, only darkness and silence surrounded me. I felt locked in a tiny, narrow place, which rhythmically grew and shrunk, accompanied by an unknown, yet strangely natural drumming. Dub-dub. Dub-dub. It came from somewhere in the middle, from a cage that rose and sank, letting the air flow in at a specific point. It brought with it a musty scent, the characteristic aroma of a cave, although I could not smell the fungi and seaweed, nor the mist of the underground stream.

As much as I tried to keep my cool, the sense of anger, despair, and fear overwhelmed me. I didn’t understand where I was, what I had become or what I should do. 

The drumming hastened with my panic, like a tiny, trapped bird. I screamed, but then fell silent.  My voice was odd and familiar at the same time, and even that felt less strange than the hands I raised to my face. They were graceful hands, exactly two, with five fingers on each one.  

I put them back next to me and tried to calm myself. After a while, I learned to control the flow of air, even stop it for a while, but it turned unpleasant, so I gave up trying and just let this weird prison do what it would on its own.

I closed my eyes for the first time, but it felt natural. I hated how well it worked, how perfectly it suited me, even when it was just a sluggish mound of muscles and bones.

You’ll remain there, locked in a prison of flesh for eternity. That’s your due to what you’ve done.

Maybe I’d have been better off if they’d just destroyed me. They had the power to do it, but they hadn’t. I wasn’t sure which judgment was worse.

Eventually, I stopped counting the heartbeats. My voice was gone, my mouth felt dry and the tongue inside it stuck to my palate. My stomach rumbled at first, then ached with a dull sensation, but eventually even that faded.

The pain... It differed greatly from what I was used to, but it was just as unbearable.

After who knows how many days, I got bored. They gave me no instructions; I didn’t know if I was sentenced into this cave forever or if I could leave. I thought someone would come to tell me, but they didn’t. It was just me and my increasingly unpleasant existence.

Eternity was a long time. Even longer lying still underground. 

Finally, I stood up, bearing the waves of stabbing pain in my limbs with my teeth clenched. Touching the cold earth was a novelty, as was the ground-bound position, but this body knew exactly how it worked and didn’t fall. I put one leg in front of the other, walking step by step in the only possible direction. The air became warmer; twilight replaced the darkness, and as I emerged, the sun blinded me for a moment.

I was standing in a hole carved into a rock wall, with a staircase leading down. It wasn’t the only such crevice, but one of the largest. Beyond that, only sand and stone surrounded me. The wind blew through my hair—another oddity—and through the black fabric that covered most of my body.

I walked down the stairs and into the desert. The heated stones burned my feet, but I kept walking forward until fatigue overcame me. The strange weakness in my limbs spread across my body, causing me to stumble and collapse onto the sand without the strength to get up. A rock bruised my knee, revealing a leaking, red fluid – blood. I never had blood before.

The sun set over the horizon, then rose again many times. I was still lying there motionless, because I couldn’t even crawl anymore. But I was still alive.

Finally, I realized that moving this heavy, delicate mess required only my sheer will. The worse it got, the more will it needed, but it didn’t need any other ingredients. I stood up again and continued my journey forward, not knowing where I was headed.

Strong hands grabbed my burnt skin and lifted me from the sand after my umpteenth collapse. Someone held a canteen to my mouth, and I drank, for the first time in my life, gulping the lukewarm water.

“Enough, careful with that,” a firm voice said. “How on earth did you get here?”

Those were my first days as a human. That’s how I walked out from Zaira’s crypt.