No 1. LET’S HANG OUT SOMETIME Waking Up Restrained | Shackled | Hanging
There was something in the air, cloying and thick. It stole the breath from his lungs and clouded his vision. Was it smoke?
He needed to keep running, he had to run. If he didn’t—if he didn’t. Someone was crying and he wanted to go to them, but he couldn’t see where they were for all of the fog. Was it fog?
It felt like his head was floating away from his body. The crying had stopped, and he needed to do something, he needed to—to run. But his feet were made of lead and the air was thick and painful and he couldn’t fight the poison. Was it poison? Was he supposed to be moving?
The ground was hard and cool against his aching skull. His heartbeat pounded in his temples in time to the sound of chanting. It was loud, louder than the endless white cotton that pressed into his ears and his mouth and blinded him with its prickly aching touch. He needed to be doing something he—someone was shouting, and they were crying, and the chanting was so loud.
He needed to run, he couldn’t, he could barely even breathe. He’d tried, he’d tried when she’d left them alone. They all had, they’d tried to run, they’d tried, and they’d failed, and now the air was cloying and thick and he was drowning in it.
There was white in his lungs, in his eyes, a melody of dread aching in his ears to the beat of his slowing heart. Even when his eyes slid shut all he saw was milky white.
Waking was a violent thing.
The sounds of blood curdling screaming piercing the fog in his ears. He coughed the fog from his lungs and gasped in air that tasted of smoke and blood. Terror replaced the blank suffocating nothing that had crushed him into unconsciousness. His eyes snapped open and instead of white-nothing he saw the stars above him clouded by a thick black smoke. He tried to sit up, but something cut into his wrists, jerking him back down onto the cold stone slab. Looking down at the chains wrapped tightly around his wrists and ankles, he struggled and shouted in a panic for someone to help, help me pleaseI A frenetic buzzing of terror raced through his veins, as he whipped his head around desperately looking for Kellan, for Leia for someone. What he saw instead was his whole class surrounding him, all chained down to stone slabs just the same as him. they were all arranged in a circle around a massive bonfire where professor Hawthorne stood chanting in a voice that sounded less human the longer, she spoke.
His head was pounding from whatever he’d been drugged with and he couldn’t seem to catch a full breath for the panic pressing down on him. He struggled fruitlessly against the biting chains holding him down. The bonfire was growing hotter and he felt the heat stinging against his face as the flames shot higher and higher into the sky, spitting sparks of bright unnatural hues. Professor Hawthorne’s chant was getting louder and louder as she shouted it to heavens with a manic kind of intensity.
More of his classmates were waking up and crying out. They hadn’t yet realized there was no one to help them. That they were bound and alone with the monster that had taken them here. The shouts died in Alex’s throat as he realized they wouldn’t survive this. He saw Hawthorne staring into the heart of the fire like there was nothing in the world but the heat of the flame and the nonsensical words she was chanting, and he knew that his life, that all of their lives, meant less to her than the wood feeding the flames.
He was frozen in abject terror as he watched her kneel down and grab something from the base of the bonfire. When he saw what it was, he redoubled his fruitless efforts to break free from the chains, pulling and kicking at his bindings despite the way the chains dug into his flesh bruising and tearing at his wrists and ankles. He barely noticed the added pain for the fresh wave of terror that overcame him.
Hawthorne held the dagger she had pulled from the flames up to the sky. The blade glowing red from its time in the fire. She seemed to see the students then, as she approached them with the burning blade in hand and her chant having reached its crescendo.