Warmth was the first thing I registered.
It was definitely not the cold stone floor of the dungeon. Or the damp and the dark smell of old metal that had seeped into my skin in that cell. Warmth. And something soft beneath me.
I couldn't help but wished I was back on my bed. Maybe everything that happened was a dream and when I open my eyes, I'd be back in my bedroom with my three friends trying to stupidly wake me up by banging on my door.
I inhaled, enjoying the smell of cedar wood that infilterated through my senses. It was a reminder and assurance that I wasn't in that cell no more, and I wasn't running in the forest….running in the forest….cederwood?
My eyes peeled opened painfully slow and I scanned my environment . The room was dark but not completely. A fire burned somewhere to my left, throwing amber light across the stone walls and a high ceiling and furniture I had never seen before. Heavy brown curtains covered the window so completely I couldn't tell if it was day or night outside.
I sat up slowly and looked around.
I clutched to my chest when I realised my ceremony gown was not on me and it was replaced with a white, light nightwear that I know i did not own and definitely did not change into myself. My feet's, that were littered with cuts and small streaks of blood yesterday were cleaned and some even plastered . I stared at it for a moment. Someone had done that while I was unconscious…
I swung my legs off the bed and stood upright, staring at the door that was across the room. Someone had definitely taken me from where I collapsed yesterday but who could it be?
I wasn't going to wait to find out though. I still need to get away from this region entirely and cross to the next one. My plan is to be far from Silvermoon as possible as I can… and the only way I can to that is to crossover to the human world.
My hand latched on the door but before I could press into it, a deep voice talked from behind me, startling the shit out of me.
" It's locked".
I spun around immediately, facing the dark side of the room that tge light didn't illuminate. I don't know how I missed it or maybe because it seemed empty.
But it wasn't empty.
There was a figure sitting in a chair there. I knew it was a man from how huge he seemed and the depth of his voice.
I couldn't see him clearly though. But I knew he was watching me.
"Who are you? And where am I?".
He didn't answer at first. There was a relatively calm atmosphere in the room and I used that opportunity to make out his figure and estimate how quickly I could take him down.
" You're not in the position to ask questions". His voice reached out to me, curling on my skin and sending what I could only describe as electric waves through my body " I should be the one asking what you were doing near my territory. Give me reasons why I should kill you for trespassing".
"Near your territory". My eyebrow scrunched up. I had been so careful yesterday and tried to remain on the no man's land I wasn't inside any pack boundary. I was on neutral ground."
"Neutral ground ends at the second river crossing." His voice came again from that dark corner, unhurried, like a man who had no particular reason to rush anything. "You were past it."
I opened my mouth and then closed it again because I genuinely didn't know if that was true. I had been running blind in the dark through a forest I had never been in before. I hadn't exactly been stopping to check boundary markers.
"I didn't know," I said.
"That changes nothing."
I swallowed. "So what happens now. Will I….." I swallowed "Die?"
Silence.
The fire crackled behind me and threw shifting amber light across the room and the corner where he sat remained stubbornly dark, just the outline of him, just the suggestion of how large he was and how completely still he was capable of being. It was unsettling in a way I couldn't quite pin down. Most people shifted when they sat. Adjusted. Made the small unconscious movements that bodies make when they aren't thinking about it.
He didn't.
"Come here," he said.
"Absolutely not." I pressed my back to the door. Did I just fall in the hands of a weirdo?
A pause. "I want to see your face."
"You can see it from there."
"No," he said simply. "I can't."
I stayed exactly where I was with my back against the locked door and my heart doing something uneven and complicated in my chest. The pull was still there, the one that had woken up when his scent had reached me properly, and being in the same room as him was not making it easier to pretend it wasn't happening. It was like standing near a fire and trying to convince yourself you couldn't feel the heat.
"I am not coming closer," I insisted
He stood up.
That was worse. Maybe…I should have really gone
Standing, he was — I had estimated his size from the chair and I had underestimated it, which I hadn't thought was possible. He moved toward me slowly, not rushing, not threatening in any obvious way, just crossing the room with the particular ease of someone who had never once in their life needed to prove that the space they were moving through belonged to them.
The firelight reached him.
And I — I forgot, for approximately three seconds, that I was supposed to be thinking about the door and the locked handle and the fact that I was barefoot in a strange room in an unknown pack territory with nowhere to go.
He was — the word that came to my mind was unfair, honestly. Because it would have been considerably more convenient if he wasn't. Dark hair, dark eyes with that gold ring around them that the firelight reflecting in it made impossible to look away from, a face that was strikingly perfect.
I pressed more into the door. Ok this was it. I was definitely no match for him and it'll be extremely easy for him to kill me.
He stopped a few steps away from me.
Close enough that the firelight caught fully on his face now. Close enough that I could see the sharp lines of it, the stillness in his expression, the way his eyes—those dark eyes ringed with gold—were fixed entirely on me.
My fingers tightened around the handle behind me.
"Don't," I said, though my voice came out quieter than I intended.
He didn't listen.
Of course he wouldn't.
He closed the distance between us in two more steps, slow and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and I had nowhere else to be.
I felt it before he even touched me.
The pull.
It was strong and overwhelming . Like something had reached inside me and tightened, drawing me toward him in a way that made no sense, that shouldn't….
His hand lifted.
For a second, I thought he was going to grab my neck.
But instead, his fingers hovered just beneath my chin.
Then he tilted my face up.
My breath hitched and my head dazed at the shocking amount of waves that touch sent through my entire body.
His gaze moved over my features slowly, like he was confirming something he already suspected, like he had been looking for something and had finally found it.
"Impossible," he said, almost under his breath.