Still no beta-reader nor language skills.
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She made faster progress than back then in the desert.
Keeping close to the water she only deviated from her way when she saw a couple of crocodiles sunning themselves at the shore.
Luckily, she had seen them early enough and had wisely decided to avoid them.
Besides of this small detour her little trip had been a peaceful one.
Avoiding the crocodiles even allowed her to find two other caterpillars, so it even allowed her to get lunch! She had already worried that she wouldn't find anything to eat today.
Sure, the insects didn't taste that good, but it felt good to be able to get her own food. Uncle Vernon had always told her that without her mercy she would starve to death.
Now she was proving him wrong.
With enthusiasm she bit into a larva and swallowed the raw meat.
Hmm? Somehow it tasted better than yesterday? May just be her imagination.
She was going to take another bite as she was walking around a particularly high part of the rock formation that reached so deep into the oases that it almost broke the shoreline.
The sight revealing itself to her on the other side stopped her straight in her tracks. The half-eaten caterpillar fall forgotten down to the ground.
In the distance two enormous statues loomed against the sky.
They were easily as high as the small, steep mountains surrounding the oasis, standing across each other like two sentinels, both on one side of the water.
They hold long stony spears and elongated heads with skull like faces.
They were the first signs of civilisation she had seen since the ruins in the desert.
Yet she couldn't help but to feel a strange form of dread rising in her at the view.
Something was frightening familiar about the long heads of the statues and their faces.
She should have been happy that these two statues were there.
So why was a part of her screaming to run back where she came from?
With hesitation she made a step forward, then another and soon started to fall back into her walking tempo.
Soon she was again concentrating on the path ahead of her. Why was she hesitating again?
They were just ugly statues!
For a while Rose continued her path on the shore.
At one point she saw a crocodile lying on the sand before her. This was no problem, that had happened before and she had been simply been able to go around those by leaving the shore for a little.
As such she climbed up the shoreline and continued her path through the more vegetated part of the area.
At first her eyes were merely dancing between the ground before and the palms around her. Perhaps she could find another big caterpillar?
She stopped in her tracks.
Something smelled funny. For a second Rose was reminded of uncle Vernon making a fire in the chimney or Dudley blowing out his birthday cake candles.
Smoke! And that meant…
Immediately she turned around trying to figure out where the smell had come from.
Leaving her planed route, she run through the bushes and over small hills.
There!
Somewhere between teen to twenties meters away from her a group of five people had built a large campfire and where roasting something upon sticks on it.
Humans! Finally!
"Hello? I need help!"
Happily, she stormed down the hill, waving with her arms wildly in the air.
She had found other people! Now everything would become fine!
The three men and two women turned their heads in her direction. Now that Rose was closer to them, she could see them clearer.
They were of a darker complexion than she had seen before. Their clothes were strange, a mixture of leather and rows of teeth on leather cords.
Then she saw it.
She saw what was roasting on the fire.
It was a human body.
She froze still in her movements.
Cut up and spread out on multiple skewers upon the fire place, yet without a doubt- a human body.
Her eyes wandered back to the men and women around the fire. They had stood up when they had heard her coming, and now she saw that their hands grabbing for crude weapons out of sharpened stone or bone.
Rose felt like she was moving through quicksand, as if the time slowed down when she tried to turn around and run away.
Screams in a language she couldn't understand rang out behind her.
Suddenly pain, more pain than she had ever felt before, radiated from her left leg
The next second she was ripped from her feet, landing face down on the sandy ground.
With a loudly beating heart she looked behind her shoulders, seeing one of the men raising a club made from stone and wood above his head.
Her reaction was fuelled by fear and almost completely without control.
Years later she would still be confused that she managed to do it in the first place, since she normally needed to concentrate, she shouldn't have been able to cast her one spell. Indeed, she wasn't even sure that she had went through the necessary steps of casting it.
Yet in that moment, fear guided her magic instead of will.
A loud explosion echoed through the clearing and a green light flashed through it.
Both Rose and the spare clad man with the club were thrown back by it, yet while Rose was merely thrown back a few feet, the other got to feel the almost full power of the explosion.
Like a doll thrown by an angry child he flew through the air, before landing with a sickening crunch several meters away from her.
For a second both Rose and the cannibals l stared at his motionless body.
His body was twisted in an unnatural way.
One of the women was the first to regain her barring. With angry scream she throws herself with a cleaver made of a long-sharpened bone on the girl.
Desperate Rose tried to get away, ignoring her hurting legs she tried to stand up, failing to do so to at least crawl a few steps away.
All to no avail.
A strong hand grabbed her at the back and throw her on the back.
Rose tried to call upon her magic, failing that she blindly struck with her arms.
The woman slapped her arms to the side, fixed the young girl under her with one hand and packed with the other her bone cleaver firmly.
With an angry snarl she raised the wicked looking bone knife and-
A silent gasp escaped her as she let the bone tool fall to the side and blindly grabbed for her throat.
Something looking like a small pointy triangle had drilled itself out of her throat, causing blood to gush out of the wound, dropping on Rose face and painting her white-blond hair red.
The blood stole her vision for a second but even then, she heard the treacherous siring of something moving fast through the air.
The woman broke down upon her, the shaft of two arrows sticking out of her back.
For a few seconds Rose laid there, gasping for air.
That, that had almost been it, didn't it?
She had almost died! Not barely escaped a deathly situation like with the whatever beheaded the wizard or that bat-monster.
She hadn't been able to hide away or been lucky to be left alone by the beast, they had actively tried to kill her.
Tears started to stream down her face.
God, they had tried to kill her! Humans had tried to kill her!
And she was hurt! Her leg hurt so much!
Why was she alone here in the desert? What had she done to these people that they attacked her? Why was everyone and everything so cruel?
At this point she was sobbing.
She wanted home. She wanted to be safe, being hold and being told that everything would be right.
A memory flashed before her eyes. From the last and only time someone had hugged her. And latter when she feared that it all had been a dream, when the Dursleys sat around the kitchen table and uncle Vernon had smiled in that uncaring way.
"Ah, that's right. I am all alone."
An icy cold spread through her.
Not a physical one, but a form of emotional numbness that had been with her until her until Cirilla had entered her life.
With some difficulty she pulled herself free from the dead woman.
Almost mechanical and ignoring the pain she limped to her fallen backpack. She hadn't even realized that she had lost it.
With some difficulty she pulled it back on her back.
Only then did her gaze wandered back to where the other cannibals had been.
They were all dead.
One had an arrow sticking out of his eye, two in their backs.
For a second, she searched for the third until she saw a broken and bleeding body a few steps away from them. A man in a rough tunic was kneeling near the corpse.
She couldn't see what he was doing but he had a bow strung above his back.
Stepping nearer she saw him searching through the pouch the dead man had strung around his hip.
Hearing her stepping closer, he turned around.
"Anhaan vekhat jin azantys? Vezof, anhaan vekhat jin kash!"
He spoke a different language like the people that had attacked her. Well, at least he wasn't attacking her. In fact, he had saved her.
"Anhaan vekhat jin azantys? Vezof!" His voice became increasingly impatient.
"Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying." The man sighted, then he pointed at an elaborate armband on his left arm.
"Anho? Kash kashari vekhat jin azantys?"
She continued to look at him confused. What was what he wanted?
"Sorry, I still don't understand what you are saying."
At this point he seemed to stop caring. He raised the club he had carried with him and started to gesticulate like trying to shoo her away.
"Anhaan vekhat jin azantys vekhat vekhat vekhat. Vezof."
It was only then that Rose looked more closely to the armband he was wearing.
She recognized the snake-like pattern and the green stone in the middle almost immediately.
"Wait I have one too!" Setting down the backpack she pulled out the green jewel with bronze snakes.
"For the last time witch, sod- what the hell!?" The man let his arm sunk down and stared in disbelief at the green stone in her hand.
Rose was just as well stunned, though out of different reasons.
Had the man just spoken English?
Yet before she could ask anything else the man had packed her at the collar of her shirt.
"How did you free yourself from that chackle?!" He demanded, his voice making it clear that refusal was not an option.
"Answer witch!"
"I found it like that!" she managed to voice under some difficulty. "I didn't do anything, please. Its owner was already dead!"
With a disappointed grunt the man let her go, causing her to fall on her injured leg and wince in pain.
"If you are lying to me witch…" He threatened her, but Rose just stretched her hand with the jewel out.
"Please, you can have it, just help me please!" This man had saved her and spoke English, she couldn't lose the first somewhat friendly face she had seen in two days!
"Why should I want another chackle? I want to know how to break my own one." Pointing at his intact armband.
"Chackle?"
But the man had already turned to the next corpse and started to search through their pouch too.
Questions burned on Roses tongue, yet years with the Dursleys had thought her to keep her mouth shut around people.
More important than answering her questions was to show herself useful to the person that spoke her language and could keep her safe.
Pocketing the jewel, she limped to another body.
For a second, she hesitated to do as much as touching the dead body.
Slowly she stretched her hand for the pouch of the dead woman before her.
"Vezof jin azantys vekhatjin!" The angry voice of the man caused her to pull her hand back.
"Sorry I don't understand any languages besides English. I just wanted to help"
Didn't he wanted her to help? Perhaps he thought she wanted to take the stuff from the corpses for herself?
Exasperated he signed her to take out the jewel again.
"Touch my stuff again and you end up like the dafaari, witch. Just piss off already!"
The aggressiveness of the man caused Rose to let the stone fall. For a second, she feared that he would attack her like the cannibals had before.
"But you saved me." She mumbled. "And you can have the green stone if you want."
She knew she needed help, especially after all of this.
"For the tenth time I don't need another chackle that binds me to this damned place! Be happy that yours is broken and you can leave this god forsaken place without getting killed by that Set be damned chackle."
He stood up came over and ripped the pouch of the corpse she had stood near to.
"And I didn't save you. You were just lucky that I had been waiting for an opportunity to catch those damn cannibals of guard. You were merely the distraction I needed to pull their attention."
He emphasised his words with his club.
"And even if I did, this is the penalty colony under the control of the sorcerer Thot-Amon, do you really think that anyone would help another witch? Or risk their life for a brat?"
Rose looked down on her feet's. Every word that man said stung her with its indifference to her and his aggressiveness.
For a second, she wanted to promise that she could be useful, yet… she simply wasn't brave enough to say anything.
After a while in which the man continued to ignore her while searching through the stuff of the cannibals, she turned around and limbed out of the clearing.
She didn't know in what she was searching for anymore.
Frankly Rose didn't care anymore, she just wanted to get away from here.
Away from the cannibals, away from the man, just away from everything.
Yet she hadn't walked away from the whole thing unscared.
The pain in her leg became more and more unbearable, the further she walked.
In the end she let herself fall down to the ground at a palm tree.
God, she hoped her leg wasn't broken. It was clear to her now that she shouldn't expect any help from anyone.
A penalty colony the man had called it? That meant everyone she would meet here was a criminal of some sort, didn't it?
She carefully began to inspect her injured leg.
Wincing for pain she tried to fell for the bone.
It felt, okay? She wasn't really certain, but it wasn't like she felt her leg could move in any weird ways?
Dudley had once broken his leg on a playground and he had her later listen to how it had been in such a weird angle. She didn't know if he had told the truth or just tried to annoy her, but at least it wasn't that bad with her leg?
Her gaze wandered to the green jewel that she still carried in her hand.
The man had told her that it was part of a chackle some sorcerer had created? So, there were other mages here? Perhaps they would be more friendly to her?
Shortly she remembered the wizards that had attacked her and her mother.
Yeah, better not risking it.
But that jewel… the man had said that it kept him from leaving. So, did this mean that it was magical?
Some kind of magical chain to keep others here?
Hers was apparently broken; well, she only had the green jewel not the actual armband, yet it might still have some magic. The fact that she had only understood the man's words when she had hold it hadn't been lost to her.
Her thoughts circlet again and again around the events of the day. At some point she had crawled into the shadow of a bush, hoping that it would hide her well enough.
She didn't know when but soon afterwards her eyes must have closed and she slipped away into a restless sleep.
At first nightmares of people hunting her with stony knives and spears as she run for her life plagued her sleep. Yet after a while these visions grew more and more fantastic, barely resembling the events that had happened.
Soon she saw dreamed as how these people didn't just hunt her like game, but caught her. Silently she screamed when they cut her down into chunks of meat, yet even then she didn't wake up.
With terror she saw her own body cut to pieces and thrown into a burning pit, songs and prayers reaching her through the flickering flames, burning her somehow still living remnants.
But no amount of gruesome horror could have prepared her for what happened next.
Because something answered the cannibal's prayer!
Out of the burning pit something started to rise, its long twisting arms coiling around her broken, burning body, pulling her deeper into the ground of ash and broken bones.
And then just for a second, she saw it.
A thing beyond flesh, blood or such inconvenient things like euclasion geometry.
"God" was the only word she could think of to describe that thing.
The only word that seemed fitting to describe its vastness.
And it filled her with terror.