Pain

“I am the one asking the questions here,” Callista snapped. “Who are you?”

“Ava Weiss.”

“She is foreign,” the woman said, then uttered a string of curses.

“Where am I?”

“City of Blackmore,” the man said. “And your arrival appears to have destroyed half of it.”

“Wake up!” the female warrior screamed at me.

“Callista,” a male voice said.

Rational, if not soothing.

I cracked my eyes. He was also dressed in real armor. Heavy. And scratched in places. If they were cosplaying, it was the best costumes I had ever seen.

Way better than my Zelda one.

“Where am I?” I whispered, as much to myself as to them.

When I could next hear anything, they were words in a language I shouldn’t understand but did.

And they were angry.

I pushed myself to sitting and was confronted by a woman with short black hair. She looked like a furious cosplayer, except she was wearing real armor. Steal, maybe, but heavy. Functional. And it had the look of something well-used.

“You! You did this.”

I closed my eyes and lay back down.

The moment I touched it, I felt as if I had grabbed a handful of wasps and they had all stung me at once.

My vision blurred as pain ripped through, starting at my hand and searing my body.

I felt as if I was being torn in two.

Twisted. Ripped.

And then there was nothing.

I swallowed as I stared at it.

The footsteps drew closer, then paused.

The door to my bedroom opened.

Stifling the scream rising in my throat, I reached for the orb.

The footsteps seemed more terrifying. I pushed out of bed and crept back to the closet.

The box was still in the stone hole where I had left it, the boards still pushed aside.

I pulled the box out and lifted the lid.

The glowing ball stared back me.