Excerpt: The Forgotten Heroine

As we walked I heard the sharp snap of a twig and whirled around on my heel quickly. I could not see anything but it did not mean someone wasn’t there. It would be just my luck to miss something and get put in a bad situation. Just as I turned back around I almost knocked into my lover because he was standing still and listening. I listened as well and was shocked by what I heard. I could hear crying echoing through the trees. It touched my heart and I started walking toward it. Then my feet carried me into a dead run. I had this strong urge to find the creature that was making that mournful noise and it was almost driving me crazy. Something was very wrong and all my senses screamed it into my brain but I didn’t care. My eyes took in everything as my legs pumped strongly onward. I could hear Verndure yelling after me to stop and my lovers footfalls close behind mine. I was not going to stop until I reached the wailing creature. The crying was sounding stronger as I went and my desire to find it was fierce. I could not say no to the desire even if I had wanted to. Something was terribly wrong.
Every nerve in my body told me to stop as I came to the edge of a clearing and this time I obeyed it cautiously. I saw a young girl standing in the large clearing facing the opposite direction as me and her shoulders shook with obvious sobs. She stood in front of something but I could not tell what it was. At first I was completely calm but then she turned toward me. As she turned her body I filled with horror, blood dripped from her face and stained her clothes. One of her innocent eyes had been gouged out and one of her cheeks was slit open. She was missing some fingers and the blood kept flowing. She took an uncertain step in my direction and then rolled her one blue eye back in her head and collapsed to the ground. Her body shook in convulsions. When she fell I could see what she had been blocking before. I took a step back in disbelief as my eyes took in what I wished they would not. The image was being stained into my mind as the little girls’ blood was staining the soft ground. My head reeled on me and I almost fell to the ground as vomit omitted from my mouth.