The Fire Child's Gem (Chapter 3) It's back! Maybe... Please read!!

by Zoe in a land of daydreams (which my teachers say I visit too often)

Okay, I am continuing this, or maybe. Depends if people comment or not. So, yeah... Here it is!

Azara was drawn from her hazy state of rage. She jolted her head up, and Jim fell limply to the ground. Her head swirled around. City guards. Coming for her with spears held tightly in their white palms. They had seen it. Seen her kill the one source of information she needed. The one thing that could help her was gone. Not just a thing, either. A person. Whom she had met, had heard about.

Something astounding was occuring within Azara. For the first time, she was sickened with her rage. It had always helped her, always. It had aided her in tough times, and helped her forget everything she could forget. It had controlled her body, that hard rage and determination. And that had always been good, always helped her reach her goal. Until today. Today, she had diminished all chances she had of reaching her goal and finding the gem. She had not only diminished chances, but diminished a life. Usually she killed without giving it a thought. Not today. Today it made her body queasy, even more so when she saw all of the blood she had caused.

Azara leapt to her feet. What was she doing? What was she thinking? Why was she thinking? Why wasn't she running from the guards? That last one she could fix easily. She knew that, even in her odd frenzied state. She pushed her legs foward and ran towards the street, almost as fast as she could. Almost. Why she was not pushing herself she did not know. But Azara looked behind her. Not to see if the guards were chasing her, but to see what they were doing. They were not chasing her. They were kneeling beside Jim, checking the pulse Azara knew he did not have. And while that should have made her heart leap, for it meant they were not following her, it made her heart sink.

Some instinct she had even in this odd and confused state of mind caused her head to spin fowards. At just the right time. She stopped abruptly. If she had not, she would have been run over by a huge horse drawn wagon in the street she had reached. She took a deep breath and leapt fowards, unaware why she was doing this. At least her crazy instincts like this still head strong. For some reason every now and then her body would do some crazy thing, usually when she was in danger. Things like jumping onto a moving carrige. And for some reason, those crazy and unplanned things proved to be the exact things she needed to do when she thought about them a minute later, when she was safe and there was no going back.

The wooden floor of the carrige thudded against Azara's body as she landed on it. When she regained her breath she realized the wagon was not topped with a sheet like it usually was. It is just wooden floor, with crates covering many parts of it. The white sheet that usually would cover it was folded in a corner neatly. She could see the front of the wagon. A woman and a man sat next to each other, the man with the reins. She realized they were looking at each other, and the woman was looking back. They hadn't seen her jump on, but they had felt some commotion. Azara ducked beetween to crates and held her breath. She was very quiet, and dispite the rolling of the wagon wheels, Azara could hear the man and woman talking.

"Do you see anything, Delia?"

"No, Jariad, but really. I heard something on the wagon. Didn't you?"

Azara took a breath slowly, softly. She noticed that the woman, Delia, had a sweet voice, slightly low for a woman but soothing. It reminded her of her mother's...

No. She couldn't think about her mother. Or her father. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet...

"Don't worry yourself, Delia. I'm sure it was just a crate falling over. They aren't in very tight..."

They kept talking, and Azara kept thinking the voice was so much like her mother's. It wasn't usually this way, she could usually block those thoughts out without trying. Today, however, the harder she tried not to think of her parents, the more she thought of them. She could clearly picture her father's red shirt he wore every Saturday, when he and Azara's mother would go out to dance. There would be other couples, but in that barn surrounded by hay and weeds, her parents always seemed more dignified than anyone, so sweet as they swayed softly together, in love with one another like they always had been. As a child Azara would sit with her arms folded against her legs as she sat in a corner, watching her parents laugh and dance. She usually had fallen asleep that way, as it had been late. Nothing had gone wrong at those dances. Nothing. Until that last dance... When he had come. That man who Azara had promised herself to track down.

Azara was crying. She hated it. But there was nothing she could do. It was only about two tears, but they felt alien on her worn face. She had not cried since that night, not a single tear.

She hated it. Two tears that she resented, though, stayed on her face and she did not wipe them off, just let her body sway along with the horse drawn wagon as she waited. She didn't know where she was going, or where she wanted to go, but she would find that out later. Now she would let herself sleep, no matter how dangerous that might be. For night was breaking, it's black spreading like ink across the sky. So mysterious.

Looking at that sky and thinking how amazing it looked, Azara fell asleep, eyes still open when her brain shut into it's state of dreaming.