Stories from Eave: Rin's Tale

This is a series of short stories all based on my Eave world.  Mind you I am far from a professional but I try none the less.

Fire was everywhere as people screamed in pain.  The airship crashed in a woody thicket of the great forest that was still made up of the great trees.  Rin stumbled, bleeding from a cut on her forehead.  She would have cried but her mother told her to keep quiet.  “There are dangerous things in the forest,” she had told the four year old girl. 

Her mother had just finished strapping Rin into the crash seat of the cabin that they were in and had got up to run across the room that they were in when everything went a dark purple.  She saw a beam of violet energy slice up through the floor and catch her mother.  She didn’t even cry out as Rin looked on with horror and shock as her mother was there and then she wasn’t.  She would have cried out, but her mother told her to be quiet.

She has lost her left shoe in the wreckage as she climbed out, alone and afraid.   As she picked along her the trial of burning and charred debris, the weirdly colored fire casting deep purple shadows, giving the remains and otherworldly glow.  She could hear the screams turn to silence and she was afraid.  She could see a figure in the distance, standing before a purple flame.  “Mother?” she wordlessly said as it looked like her mother bathed in the purple light.  Rin tried not to cough as a breeze blew smoke in her direction.  When the smoke cleared she was surprised to see it.  A large goblin wearing a cap of blood red.  She did not cry out as it raised a bloody, jagged blade.  Rin fell back, stifling a small cry from escaping her lips as it brought down the blade where it severed her left hand and much of her forearm.

Rin awoke with a start, her hands flying up to guard her face.  She sat up in the bunk she was in and breathed hard.  She slowly brought up her left hand and closed her fist.  It was a magical prosthesis made up of a silver and copper cage closed up around a hand, made of darkwood.  It was beautiful as it seamlessly melded with her flesh.  The fist unclenched and she rest it in her lap and sighed.  She got up from her bunk and went to a small window on the opposite wall.  She opened the curtain and could see the sun rising against the horizon made up of a great forest, the ring around Eave slowly fading in the glowing light of the sun.

The intercom rang and Rin went to answer it.  “This is the call you wanted to wake you m’lady.  We are an hour from Maarke,” the captain of the airship told her.  She thanked the captain and returned to the window, the view slowly changing.  She sighed.  It was the same dream every time she flew…