A woman runs about the room, pounding on the walls, the floor, hoping to spring some sort of trapdoor, and come across some secret entrance. “Help me!” Her loud screams can be heard in the empty room. A room with no doors. No window. A single bed, and during the night, that man appears. “Help me! Please… spare my life!” And as she begs for mercy, the laughter in her ears is getting louder, unbearable. “Help me! Please! Help, I can’t take it anymore!” Her calls were unanswered and she screams in frustration to the bare walls. She lost her sense of time. How many days had passed since she had been trapped? Used. Abused. Being touched. Nonconsensual. The terrifying face of the man. Everything. She was afraid of his entire being. “Tch. How noisy.” Cynthia froze at the sound of his voice. It’s him again. A man. Cynthia whirls around. “When…” Her lips trembled as she whispered. “...when will you let me go?” A wicked man chuckled, seemed untouched and unfazed by the dank and dust of

So it was a dreary day, choked with mist that the Queen discovered that she was getting too old to live much longer, and the thought terrified her to her old bones. She wished to live in luxury forever, but she saw that it was impossible. Then she remembered the handsome man on the pond, and how his magic had made this all come to be.‘If he could do all this for me…’ the old Queen thought, ‘then why not make me live forever? That would make all my worries disappear, won’t it?’ So the old Queen left her castle for the first time in many years and set out alone to the forest with the pond. She had to stop many times, for she was very old and weary. Yet finally, she made it to the clearing. She did not see the handsome man, but she did see that the low fog was thick and cold. It swarmed around his ankles, sucking the warmth from her body. The old Queen ignored this and walked to the edge of the pond. She called out for the handsome man to appear at the top of her trembling old voice un

The expression ‘waking up on the wrong side of the bed’ had never been more apt for Fraco than it had the next morning. He tossed and turned on his bed throughout the night until finally falling into exhausted slumber in the early hours of the morning.They’re about to leave. Yet, he was having a hard time going through his morning routine.When his eyes had cracked open under the insistent pressure of sunlight streaming into his room, feeling like shit was pretty much an understatement. He had staggered to the shower and after stripping off his clothes, he had stood under the full blast of water, trying to force himself into some semblance of consciousness.It took him the better part of half an hour before he began to feel even remotely human, or at least, human enough to stagger out of the shower, dry off and dress. Even so, he felt that bone-deep exhaustion in his limbs and his eyes felt sore, tired and slightly painful.Maybe it’s because of the nightmares.“Enough, Fraco,” he to

If he had been forced to choose a sound to describe what happened next, the closest would have been a swoosh, perhaps; and as that sound began, that globe of fire suddenly exploded into a large ball of fire that enveloped those creatures, throwing out waves of blistering heat even from this distance, and then, they began screaming as the fire consumed them. He concentrated again and a whirling globe of fire surrounded them, containing the flames, trapping their writhing forms within as they thrashed and burned within that blast of flame.When their cries faded away, when the fires had burned out, leaving piles of ashes in their place, only then did he release the barrier of air that had sealed them away.“Impressive though perhaps a little inefficient,” A cool, calm voice noted.A man appeared from the mouth of the passage, dressed in white tunic. The fabric reached down to the ground, and a dark and grim expression loomed on his face. Fraco, Kane and the others could only see a shad

It feels as if everything is a dream. The war. The blood. The creatures of the dark and now…‘Half breed!’“Elvin boy, wake up!”‘Huh?’A voice, a loud irritating voice. “Open your eyes and wake up!”‘Fraco?’“That’s it, open your eyes and look at me. Breathe — breathe!”He opened his eyes slowly. The picture — the world where his nightmare begins and ends but then begins again in a loop. A world of torture. A world where he sees his mother getting killed over and over again. The world was slowly coming back, stitching back together.“Fraco?” Lerroy croaked.His throat was completely bruised, damaged in places where The Dark Druid had squeezed so tightly. Fraco had to repair that damage, easing the swelling, reducing the bruising. The young man followed the voice’s instructions.And it was the first time he used the Breath of Life. Fraco looked down on him with such a big smile on his face. “Hey there… Welcome back to the land of the living.”“Hi.” He croaked out."How are you feelin