Nora's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Nora had spent her whole life wanting out, and now she was chained inside a cage. She was a faerie with monarch wings, a princess of the feywild who hated the crown. She had run from silk sheets and bowing servants toward something real. Faerie traffickers had answered that wish. They dragged her out of the feywild and locked her in a wagon cage, and adventure now smelled like rotting straw and iron. Her wings were pinned. A rope wound tight across the base of both, so she could not lift them, could not cut a single strand. Two traffickers dozed by a low fire. Their wagon sat under a huge dark tree, its heavy trunk swallowing the firelight, its shadowed branches hanging like a lid over the whole camp. Nora tested the rope again. It held. She stopped fighting the knot and studied it instead. One loop crossed over the cage bar, not her body. If she could saw that loop against the bar's rough edge, the whole rope would loosen. She pressed the rope to the metal and pulled. Slow. Quiet. A trafficker stirred. She froze, heart slamming, until he settled. Then she pulled again. The rope frayed. Fiber by fiber, it thinned. The loop snapped. Her wings sprang free and knocked the cage door. The sound cracked through the camp. Both traffickers jolted awake and lunged for her. Nora did not wait. Her wing swept down on the closest man, hard as a blade, and threw him into the fire pit. He screamed and rolled. The second grabbed the cage bars and shoved his hand inside. She snapped the door open into his face. He stumbled back, clutching his nose. She burst out and shot upward. Her wings caught air for the first time in days. She climbed toward the dark tree, aiming for the gaps in its twisted branches. A net whistled past her leg. She dodged, banked hard around the ancient trunk, and broke above the canopy. Below, the traffickers shouted and pointed. One raised a crossbow. A bolt tore through her left wing. Pain flared white. She spun, dropped, then forced the torn wing to beat. It worked, barely. She flew on, ragged and lopsided, over the treetops and into the open sky. When the camp vanished behind her, she landed in a second grove and pressed her back to a thick, twisting trunk. Her wing bled. Her hands shook. But no one had caught her. Nora looked at the dark forest stretching in every direction. She had no map, no coin, no idea which way led anywhere safe. She was free, hurt, and completely alone in a world she had begged to enter. She wiped her eyes and stood. This was the adventure she wanted. Now she had to survive it.