Haunted By Death

Andrea meanwhile was running through a rough hewn passage filled with nothing but stygian darkness. Her heart was caught in her throat and her body was grimed in sweat and dirt. She feared that there was no escape from this madness she had found herself in. But she prayed that it was all just an evil dream. Either way, all she could do was keep on running. Behind her, she knew all too well, was a creature that was the very embodiment of death. Ahead of her, well who knew what she would find?

She cursed her stupid and arrogant willfulness, her childish need to escape the confines of her father's Keep and to roam the world like an adventurer. She was a nobleman's daughter, not a trained warrior. Oh how foolish she had been!

At first it had been fun and exciting, but of course the lands of the Great Kingdom were at peace and well governed by its masters. So then she struck out to the east where lay the independent duchies and principalities and the shore of the mighty ocean. The peoples there seemed strange and exotic to her. But many were not friendly toward the Great Kingdom or those that called it their home. She tasted her first real adventures among the hills and villages along that rocky coast. From there she turned south and returned to the domain of the Kingdom. She visited the Duchy of Collins and saw the great shipworks there. But the Duke Barnabas was on the look-out for Lord Croix's errant daughter and so she left with haste and followed the line of the sea until she struck the foothills of the Shreken Mountains.

Everyone in the Great Kingdom knew of the Shreken Mountains and what waited somewhere in its hidden fastnesses: the Southern Caves wherein the mighty dragon dwelt. She thought it would be a lark, a summer's idyll if she discovered those menacing caverns. Oh what stories she would be able to tell! And so she and her handmaiden, a girl no older than she, went up into the mountains and by some evil stroke of luck actually found what they were looking for.

And now she was on the run from a monster that drank blood and Tamery, her handmaiden, was lost as well somewhere within the maze of passages and caves that sat in the belly of these dark and loathsome mountains. They had been separated soon after entering the caves, when the vampire first attacked, but the creature had not found her servant out and had returned to its lair with only Andrea. Where was Tamery now? Andrea wondered. Dead, the answer echoed within her mind. As dead as you shall soon be.

1. Andrea trips and rolls down a long embankment

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