She had been waiting for four hundred years. For four hundred years she had been staring through a transparent mass of solidified rock. It had trapped her body, her mind and her being for four long centuries. Her enemies considered this to be her grave, but she was still alive. Even down here there was life to be had – from time to time living creatures would scurry by, and she would snatch and devour them without mercy; mercy and compassion were qualities she had left behind long ago. Her anger had kept her alive.
Because she could feel it. She could tell what was happening outside, her wildsense screamed and writhed with the pain it caused her.
How dare they – these greedy little people with their roads, their houses, their… now what did they call them? Wires. Cables. Sewers. Bridges. Motorways.
Railway lines. They carved deep, bleeding wounds through the wildworld; they ripped apart the delicate web of the wildways; they destroyed and they killed. Their roads, smeared with the entrails of dead and flattened animals, reeked of death. Forests and wetlands disappeared. Places where the wildforce had lived, breathed and reigned supreme for thousands of years turned barren and silent; all you could hear now was the banging and clanging of their unholy machines. Iron. Iron everywhere. Soon it would all be over – soon not even the strongest wildwitch would be able to mend the severed bonds.
But now… now it might still be done, if only she could escape.
Her anger wasn’t the only thing burning inside her. She could feel… no, impatience was too feeble a word. It couldn’t begin to describe the fire that ravaged and scorched her core with every wasted second, every hour that passed without her getting closer to her goal. The time was now. Not a day should be wasted. No more dithering, no more misplaced pity, no more caring about anyone or anything other than her one vital purpose: to break the hold of the stupid and the greedy, smash their web of death and free the wildworld.
It would take everything. Everything she had, every last vestige of power that she might coax, threaten, harass or bargain for. Desperately, she took stock of her strengths and despaired at her weaknesses. The weight of rock, the slow green power of plants, the mildness of the air, the soft energy of water, the warmth and deep life force of the Earth… even combined and united, they were not enough. She needed blood. Nothing else could win this battle that was already almost lost. Nothing else mattered – least of all… and her anger flared up more violently inside her when she thought about it… least of all the aimless life of a silly thirteen-year-old girl.
Blood would open her prison. Blood would ensure her victory.
And then it happened. One drop fell. And then another. And then a third and a fourth.
More, she screamed silently. Give me one more drop!
It was as if she could see it quiver as it lingered in the air. As if it were fighting gravity, refusing to fall. But it did fall. And it kept on falling. And it landed.
YEEEeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssss.........
She cried out in mute triumph. Her lips remained frozen; she was still trapped like an insect caught in a drop of resin a thousand years ago and now imprisoned in amber. But not for very much longer. She harnessed all her strength; she summoned all the wildness she possessed. Now. Now. Now!
The congealed mass of rock around her split. Cracks appeared and spread across its surface. In a roar of wildpower she straightened her body, hunched and bowed for four hundred years, and shattered her prison into smithereens. Solid rock boiled and turned molten once more; it burst and exploded; red-hot drops of melted glass sprayed the walls of the cave in hissing cascades.
Those greedy little people had no idea of what was coming. They had probably never even heard of Bravita Bloodling. But they were about to…
I sat up so quickly that I bashed my head on the bedside lamp. My heart was pounding and racing like a hurdler lagging behind the field, bang-bang-JUMP, bang-bang-JUMP; I looked around wildly as if Bravita Bloodling might be bent over my bed with outstretched claws and bloodlust in her burning eyes. She wasn’t. The room was quiet and dark, except for a beam of moonlight that fell through the small, round window. On a mattress on the floor next to my bed my best friend Oscar was sleeping so soundly I could almost see a cartoon “ZZZZZ” above his head. No nightmares for him, that was for sure.
Easy now, I told my galloping heart, everything’s fine…
And yet it took a long time before I was able to stop panting, and even longer before I could shrug off the feeling that my heart was trying to jump out of my body. Some of my previous dreams had already had too much in common with reality, and just because there was no four-hundred-year-old wildwitch lying in wait behind the battered bird books and old nesting boxes in need of repair, it didn’t mean – at least my heart didn’t think so – that I was out of danger.
But even if my dream had some reality in it – and that was a very big if, as most of my dreams were the usual mix of unreal and absurd, luckily – then Bravita wasn’t trying to take my life, I reminded myself. She was after some poor thirteen-year-old girl and I was only…
My thoughts screeched to a halt. I looked at the old-fashioned, tick-tock alarm clock on my bedside table.
The luminous green hands both pointed almost straight up. The time was five minutes past midnight, and it was the last day of March.
Today, I would be thirteen.