Keara's Mystic Throne

I felt the warm breath of a beast on my neck. I felt its hot and stinky breath roll down my back. I shivered, my body trembling as I tried to keep from screaming. The hissing sound it made was like a den of snakes all hissing at once. It was terrifying, but the sound had no effect on me.

No, the sound did not affect me; the smell did. It was so potent that it overpowered the burning in my lungs from lack of air. My eyes watered from the stench, causing them to water freely, running down my cheeks in rivulets that mixed with the dirt and tears already there. This only made it even harder to see where I was going.

In front of me, the man holding my leash moved quickly. He appeared to be keeping up a brisk pace without ever getting winded, while I couldn't even think about how tired my legs were. It wasn't just physical fatigue either; it seemed like every step forward was more difficult than the last one. Every time we took another step, I found myself looking behind me more often than ahead of me.

I could hear the scraping sound of something heavy being dragged along behind us. As we went further into the forest and away from any other living thing, I began to develop a sense that something else was there with us in the woods. At first, I thought it must be some kind of animal following us, but then I noticed that whatever it was kept its distance from us and didn't seem to make any noise besides our own footsteps and breathing.

We trekked through what felt like miles of forest before we came upon a clearing in which stood an old house that seemed to have grown out of the trees around it rather than having been built by humans for their use. It wasn't anything fancy by human standards, but in this place where everything looked so alien and nothing made any sense at all to me anymore, this house was an island of sanity within a sea of madness and confusion.

The man stopped abruptly when we entered the clearing and dropped his end of my leash to reach down into his pack on his back for something that resembled a book with pages too thin to be paper and held together with what looked like leather strings instead of staples or metal rings. He flipped several pages until he found what he wanted, then nodded once before closing the book and putting it back into his pack with practiced ease. He reached out toward me with both hands while uttering words in a language that shouldn't have existed on Earth itself much less anywhere near here but sounded strangely familiar in spite of this fact.

Before I could understand what he'd said or react to his actions, he pulled me close to him before suddenly disappearing from where we stood with a loud *swoosh!* A moment later, he reappeared again with another *swoosh!*, this time standing outside a round building much larger than our current location but something similar enough that now that we were here I could almost place where we were in relation to everything else around us.