9Chapter Two: First Fight
As the wall rose between Ciarra and her opponent, the terror that she had tried to hold back broke through her defenses and overwhelmed her, and like a light switch her sight faltered and Ciarra was plunged into inky blackness.
'No,' she thought desperately, 'no, no, no, no, NO! I don't want to die; I don't want to die; I don't want to die…' like a mantra, Ciarra's panic-stricken mind repeated this over and over as she stumbled to the side, arms outstretched, blindly searching for a wall and too scared to feel mortified at the cruel laughter her actions evoked from the audience.
Just as Ciarra touched a wall of the arena with slight relief, she only had the small vibration of the ground under her feet as warning before her opponent landed their first blow. Pain lanced through her side and she felt herself fly through the air before connecting brutally to the metal floor and skidding until she crashed into the wall, headfirst with a sickening crack. Ciarra let out a pain-filled groan as she attempted to pick herself up, only to have her arms crumple beneath her. She groaned again, this time in despair. Her arms were broken. She was going to die.
Die, the thought pushed forth the rage that had been suppressed by fear and her surroundings suddenly snapped into focus along with the seven-foot giant, mid-air and about to crush Ciarra under his feet.
Time slowed, and with a clarity she hadn't felt in a long time, Ciarra let her instincts take over. Desperation overriding any pain she might have felt, Ciarra rolled out of the way of the massive form, and almost as if in a trance, focused her light into her hands and slammed her fists into the exposed back of her opponent. Silence resounded in the arena, except for Ciarra's heaving breathes as she Looked at her felled opponent. She waited several beats of the heart pounding in her throat, and when he continued to not move, the relief brought on a wave of pain that knocked her to her knees. Ciarra thought she heard angry voices arguing before she gladly gave into the soothing darkness encroaching on the edges of her vision.
. . .
Pain launched Ciarra out of the comforting folds of oblivion as she felt two people roughly jerking her two broken arms into shackles above her head. She was vaguely confused a she heard the two elves' footsteps receding.
Where was she?
This concept, Ciarra attempted to grasp and ponder, but was unable to hold onto a coherent thought long enough to examine it. Eventually her fuzzy mind concluded that she had never, in fact, been in this place before, but somehow it wasn't the unfamiliarity of her surrounding that was bothering her, not the stabbing pain from the broken arms keeping her weary body standing. No, it was something different, and yet the same, or was it the same and yet different? Slowly, but surely, her sluggish mind sloshed through the quagmire her thoughts had become and eventually came up with a muddy realization. She couldn't see, but no, she hadn't seen anything in a long time hadn't she? But, that wasn't right, she couldn't see, but she had been able to See, in a sense. Now though, Ciarra could not See at all. Yes! That was it!
Feeling proud of herself for her mental achievement, rather than terrified of the relevance of what she had just deduced, Ciarra gave up fighting the murkiness of her thoughts, and instead let her mind drift where it would. Some time later, it could have been a moment or hours, she did not know, the sound of metal clanging against metal and squeaky hinges interrupted the unusual silence pervading the area around her. Footsteps came forward and stopped directly in front of Ciarra and a familiar voice whispered malevolently in her ear.
"You surprised me, my little freak, and I HATE surprises. I knew I'd get to play with you, but I didn't know I'd get two toys instead of one. Now, since neither of you died in the arena like you were supposed to, you will both suffer until one of you dies. I lost my whole week's pay betting against you. You'll pay for making a fool of me!"
Two pairs of hands suddenly re-shackled Ciarra with her cheek pressed into the grimy wall. The first stroke of the whip came as a surprise, Ciarra's muddled mind didn't seem capable of keeping up with these new developments as they occurred, but she felt the pain, white-hot across her back, then the second and the third. They never blended together, each slash cut into her flesh more painful than the last and she was somehow incapable of retreating into herself to escape the whip's cruel bite. Somewhere between the twenty-eighth and the thirtieth strike, Ciarra had a moment of clarity and realized why her thoughts were so incoherent. They wanted her to suffer through this, and with that realization burning in her heart, she screamed.
Sorry for the short chapter, the next one will be longer. I promise!