1k follower celebration + deaths hand chapter 1SO! a while ago somehow i managed to reach 1k followe

1k follower celebration + deaths hand chapter 1SO! a while ago somehow i managed to reach 1k followers which is insane that there are enough of you out there that like what i do thank you so much as i said earlier, i don’t have the energy or time at the moment to invest in a graphic giveaway like i did for 500 followers, but instead please have the current first chapter of Deaths Hand - please bare in mind it’s completely in it’s first draft, it is completely unedited, and only about 90% finished, but i think it gives you a good idea of the setup of the booki hope you enjoy :DThe corpse was a peaceful thing.The winter had come early - the terrible cold had frozen her body so perfectly that if you didn’t know better, you would assume that she was simply resting.But Valeska Jelínková did know better. She knew that stillness was a sign of death. Even the restful living made an impression on the world - a chest rising and falling with breath, a shuffle to a more comfortable position. The dead could only be impacted upon. “How’s Anya doing today?” Ezven asked as he walked through the stone archway that led to the preparation room. The cold was affecting him badly. Despite the blankets that he was keeping wrapped tightly around his frame, he shook like a sack of bones. Which really, was all he was. He’d lost too much weight the past year; everyone had, with half the villages crops going to the war effort, but it always affected the elderly the worst.It wouldn’t be long now before it was his body lying on her table, waiting to be sent to the catacombs. A grim thought, but a reality of life. It didn’t do anyone any good for her to shy away from it.“I left the fire burning to thaw her out some, I think she’s ready to be drained.”Ezven frowned. “Have you been here all night?”“No.”“I hate the fact that you can make eye contact when you lie,” he sighed. Valeska shrugged as she stood up, freeing the seat by the fire for Ezven. “I didn’t want her to be alone.”“We should buy a bed for you, at least that way you won’t damage your back sleeping in these godsforsaken chairs, but then I think I’d have your mother on my doorstep asking why you haven’t been home in three days.”She smiled, leave it to Ezven to somehow be considerate and grumpy in the same sentence.The ground shook as Valeska perched herself on the table next to Anya and dust fell from the ceiling. Neither one of them commented on it, if they acknowledged every explosion that happened near Zadov they’d spend their lives doing nothing else.“I take it her family didn’t visit?”The anger that made its home in Valeska found its way to the surface and turned her blood colder than any winter could. “No.” They hadn’t wanted to look at her; when Valeska had gone to collect the body they’d gone so far as to throw a sheet over her, hiding her from their view. The fact sat badly with her, it had taken all her will to stop her from shouting at them, asking them how dare they. On a basic level, she could understand their motives. To them, Anya’s body was a painful reminder that they would not be seeing their mother, their grandmother, for quite some time, and as such she was a painful reminder of their own mortality. I am gone from this world, the corpse said to them, and soon you will be too.There was no thought given to what Anya needed.Ezven’s face gave away none of the emotion that Valeska knew her own did. He’d been doing this much longer than she had and had mastered the art of comforting the deceased’s loved ones. As far as she was concerned, they weren’t the ones that needed comforting. They weren’t the ones who had died. Out of the whole world, it seemed, only the votranishka’s cared for the dead. Only they stood by their sides and marked their bones, releasing the soul to find the afterlife. Valeska had spent the better part of the night designing Anya’s death marks: a series of hard lines and squares that would mark her as a stable woman, strong and dependable, when she met the gods. The ground shook again and from the corner of her eye Valeska could see that Ezven shook with it. “You should stop coming down here, you’re getting too old.”“You never were one to mince your words were you dear, not even to spare the feelings of an old priest.”“The explosions are getting more frequent, one day you’re going to fall over and break something.”“You know, it’s nice when you–” the rest of his sentence was drowned out by the sound of gunfire. There was a horrifying moment, a hollow second that seemed to extend into eternity, where Valeska didn’t know where the sounds came from. Phantom pain filled her chest, her back, her shoulders, and she pressed her hands above her heart, above the imagined bullet wounds. She expected her hands to become slick with blood, but instead she was greeted by the rhythmic pounding of her heart; too quick to count each beat. She inhaled. Exhaled. Then inhaled again as she willed herself to calm. She could still hear the sounds of gunfire echo off the tunnel walls. “Valeska,” Ezven said, his voice hushed as she saw him discard his blanket and move towards her, slow in his old age. “Valeska you’re okay, you’re okay.” He kept repeating those words as he gripped her shoulders, tethering her to reality, bringing her back from the precipice of panic. How long they stayed like that, waiting for her heart to fall back into its natural rhythm, Valeska couldn’t say. Her mind, cold and logical, told her that it was only a matter of seconds. But her heart, soft and oh-so frightened, led her to believe it was an eternity. However long it was, however long they spent huddled together against the sounds of war, Valeska managed to remember what it was like to breathe. “What’s going on?” she whispered, leaning forward to see if she could reach for the old mans blanket.“Gunfire.”She gritted her teeth as she pulled the fleece around his shoulders. She’d never quite been able to tell whether he was genuinely dense or if he just enjoyed riling her up. “They’ve never come in the catacombs before.”Soldiers in the catacombs. The very thought of it made her blood turn to ice with rage. The catacombs were a place of death, true, but they were sacred, peaceful. A place for the departed to rest, to move on and those who roamed the halls did so not to create death, but to care for those who had already met her. Soldiers bringing their violence and machines of destruction was nothing short of sacrilege. “They lead all the way to Zolenia, perhaps–” Ezven didn’t finish, didn’t have to. The implications of what he meant hung heavy in the air. Perhaps the Zolenian’s had decided to ignore the sanctity of the catacombs. Perhaps they were launching a full scale invasion. Perhaps when they exited the tunnels they would find their small village turned to ash. Her heart still pounding in time with the gunfire, Valeska pried Ezven’s fingers off her shoulders and stood up and, ignoring the look of horror on the priests face, moved to the archway. “Valeska get back here,” he hissed, extending a bony hand towards her. She ignored his plea and pressed her back against the stone wall, the cold of it piercing through the wool of her jacket and it was all she could do to fight back against a shiver. As she turned her head she could see the hallway; the long corridor of stone and bone that twisted for miles under the continents surface, that had been home to their dead for a millenia. She turned to Ezven. His face was pale with fright and the sight of his trembling body made her stomach clench. It was painful seeing him this way, but she forced her features into one of calm, so at odds with the jittery creature that now lived just under her skin. “I’m going to be back,” she said. A placation. A promise. She could see the desperate plea in his hazel eyes, but he did not dishonour her by begging her to stay. She was Valeska Jelínková, votranishka, servant of Kowla Zovdi, the catacombs were her domain and she would not be afraid of them.                                                         ****Once she found herself in the halls, Valeska realised that she didn’t know what she’d planned on doing, just that she had to do something. She hadn’t risked bringing a torch with her for fear of being spotted, but in the unending darkness her eyes had been forced to adjust. The walls and bones were all covered in a fine layer of frost and she could see the reaper moths flitting from body to body, fulfilling their eternal duty to keep them clean, to keep them company. Every time she walked through the hallowed halls she was reminded of why they had become the subject of myth. Of stories of ghosts and ghouls and passages that led to the furthest ice. Legends that spoke of corridors changing position, doorways that would open and close at will hoping to trap unwitting travellers. Though she’d made a second home of them, her heart always raced as she travelled through them. In the darkness existed a world where things such as logic and reason ceased to exist. A world populated by demons and ghosts and creatures that lived in the fabric of a fairy tale; the darkness had a way of blurring the lines of the world to create something more interesting. She put her hand to the wall and traced the familiar cracks with her fingers. What had she hoped to achieve by coming out here? By exiting the safety of the preparation room and leaving Ezven alone? Gunfire still echoed throughout the corridors and it worried Valeska how quickly it had become little more than background noise. Out here, alone in the dark with only the dead for company, she felt her heartbeat slow, her head clear. The preparation room hadn’t been safe, not really. And she hadn’t left Ezven, not truly. She’d just needed time. Time to think, time to shake the fog from her mind, time to breathe. It had been so difficult to breathe in that room, but now she could think she could make a plan. There were a thousand and one places in the catacombs they could hide, hide and never be found. Lost rooms that only she knew of, hidden holes in the walls left over from centuries ago when followers of Zovdi had been hunted down like rats. She would go back, she would get Ezven – carry him if need be – and bring him to one of those safe spaces and they would wait. In silence they would wait until the gunfire stopped and then they would wait some more, just to make sure that they wouldn’t run into any soldiers on their way to the surface. She was about to turn back when she heard it. The uneven thuds of footsteps. The sound of them froze Valeska to the very core and had her eyes darting around the narrow hall, searching for anywhere to run anywhere to hide. But aside from the crevices where the departed rested there was nowhere for her to go. So she froze and sent a silent prayer to Kowla Zovdi to watch over her, to protect her, and to plead that if she was to die to make it quick and painless. The temperature dropped. Frost hung in the air, settling on her exposed skin. She sensed more than saw the man round the corner. Sensed the shift in the air, could barely make out his looming form against the darkness. He was slow, limping with one hand pressed against the wall. Mirroring her own posture. If he saw her, standing there like a frightened deer, it didn’t show. Forward he came. Forward he limped. She took a step back, and then another, and then another. Silently, she became his mirror. As he progressed she moved backwards and she let herself dare to hope that Zovdi had heard her prayers. That was when she made the mistake. She exhaled. A heavy breath that ragged against her throat. A stupid, reckless, arrogant, loud breath. The mans head lifted and he stopped. Valeska snapped her hands up, both of them clasped against her traitorous mouth and, despite the burning in her lungs, refused to breathe. “Dvolzni?” the man called out, his voice barely more than a whisper against the darkness. Dvolzni. The Yechovkan greeting. It could be a trick. A clever trap designed by a clever Zolenian to draw out stupid Yechovkan’s. But, the accent made Valeska inclined to be stupid. The way he barely pronounced the v, the emphasis on the i. The accent was familiar. It was hers. Perhaps, more refined. More tidy around the edges. But there was no denying the accent belonged to the Western Province. Either this man – this intruder of holy spaces – was Yechovkan, or he was an excellent impersonator. Valeska peeled her hands away from her face, her fingers trembling all the while and she told herself it was because of the cold, because she’d left her gloves in the preparation room with Ezven and Anya. She gave herself five seconds – five seconds to ground herself, to ensure that she would not waver, would not scream – and replied, “Dvolzna.”Seconds passed with no reply and Valeska strained to see any change in the mans posture. She didn’t trust herself to move or to speak, so she waited. He took a step forward, and she could see him take his steadying hand from the wall and reach towards her. “Kowla?” his voice cracked, and she was struck by how young he sounded, how frightened. Her stomach clenched as he took another step forward. Kowla. Their people’s word for the divine, reserved for queens amongst queens. The poor soul thought he was dead, or close enough to it to be seeing the gods. She didn’t give herself time to think before she acted. She crossed the distance between them and took his hand in hers and said, “No, just me I’m afraid.” She tried to put laughter in her voice as she spoke, hoping to tether him to this world, but she feared she fell flat. Her talents had never lied in putting others at ease.The man stumbled into her and she very nearly let him fall. With his weight pressing against her she could tell now that he was much larger than her, the hard body against hers indicated a life of training. A soldiers life.  If the situation had been different, if there had been even a fraction of a chance she wasn’t putting her life in danger just by being near him, she would have allowed herself a moment of appreciation. Instead she slipped her arm round his waist and pulled his arm round her shoulders, shifting his weight in a way that made it easier for her to bare it. It had been years since she’d had to carry bales of hay across the fields, but in that moment she was glad for her farmers upbringing and the strength it had given her. “What’s your name?”The mans head shifted so that his nose scraped against the exposed flesh of her neck. “Jakub.”Valeska nodded. A good Yechovkan name. Jakub said nothing as they stood their, just waited as the gears of Valeska’s brain whirred. It would be easy, so easy to just leave him here. The man was a dead weight, and if she was correct in thinking that he was the reason for the gunshots then the smart thing to do would be to let him drop to the floor and run back to Ezven to tell him of her original plan. But this was a sacred place.The rage that had turned her blood to ice earlier returned. What would it do to the catacombs if she allowed such a gruesome death to happen within its walls? Would she ever be able to walk down the corridors again without remembering this mans blood on her hands? Jakub’s breath was cold on her skin. It was a shallow breath, but a breath all the same, and that simple affirmation of life was all Valeska needed to spur her into a decision. As Vasleska hauled Jakub through the darkness she knew only one thing with any certainty: Ezven was going to kill her. taglist (ask to be added/removed):@ivonoris @shewolves @jess—writes @omgbrekkerkaz @the-ichor-of-ruination@novelistcore @lefttowritee @vellichorwrites @velvet-moss @goddeloos @hollenzwei@nepeinthe @nerocael @maxseidel @wolvesofarcadia @leofailsatwriting @authordai @thesunhasinsomnia @writingwips @writingtothestars @twocrownsoneshittywriter -- source link

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