Captured By The Starbornthe Mythbloods Series – Sam Drury

But I don’t move. I just look at her. Really look. And in her eyes I see the truth: she knows. She’s always known. I make myself breathe. “Saaren,” I say. It comes out low, rough. The old word for heartmate, for the one who is your end and your beginning and everything in between. She blinks.

Her lips part, and for a second I think she’ll laugh, or cry, or maybe both. Instead, she smiles. Not much. But enough. The world shifts. The auroras above us tangle, gold bleeding into green, then blue. The flowers at our feet pulse in perfect rhythm. The stone beneath my palm vibrates, alive with the memory of a million lost names.

I don’t touch her. I don’t need to. The bond is awake. It’s all the touch we’ll ever need. The rest will come later. For now, we just stand, locked together by the word and the light and the impossible, unbreakable truth of what we are. Khari. Saaren. 1kitap1.com/en Eira The first time I see the runes, I think they’re just more of Torvin’s art —same gouged-out strokes, same sense of purpose, same oversized ego in every single line.

But these aren’t his. These aren’t anyone’s. They’re older than the cave itself. Older than the idiot-giant who claims to be my soulmate. Older than any story left in my half-burnt DNA. I find them by accident, stumbling around the back corridors of the sleeping den, hunting for a private place to think. Or maybe to cry.

I’m not picky. They’re at the farthest end, where the wall curves in on itself and the air goes damp, a little sour. The light here sucks—half the glowmoss is dead, and the blue that’s left is so faint it makes everything look like a negative of itself. I almost miss the symbols entirely. But the pattern is too strong to ignore. Too insistent. Three lines. Three glyphs. Each cut deep, with a hand that didn’t mind bleeding for the work.

I step closer, tracing my thumb over the ridges. They’re packed with old moss, tough as felt and shot through with tiny silvery filaments that might be fungus or might be something less cute. I scrape away a clump. The dust that comes off smells like bone. Maybe it is bone. The first glyph is sharp, almost angry.

A double slash through a triangle with a bar crossing at the base. Proto-Norse, if you believe my undergrad advisor, but worse—warped, mirrored, like the writer was already going blind and wanted to make it as hard as possible for the next poor bastard.

I wake up face-first on something hard, cold, and wet. That’s clue one that this isn’t the same Tuesday I left behind. Clue two is the taste in my mouth: like someone dared me to lick a corroded battery and I couldn’t back out because my best friend was watching. Oh—and I can’t feel my fingers. At all. Panic should be next on the agenda. Instead, I try to breathe, choke on my own spit, and almost suffocate.

Humiliating, sure, but effective. It gets my eyes open. Which is when clue number three smacks me: I’m not in my apartment. Not in the grad lab. Not anywhere that makes sense. I’m in a cage. Not the kind with lions, but a grid of bars pressed into my cheek deep enough to leave waffle marks. The ceiling looms barely a couple of feet away.

Maybe three. My ruler-brain is fried. It’s a sheet of corroded paneling attempting to look like aluminum—cheap industrial cosplay. Across it runs a glowing strip, soft blue, like an aquarium light. Except the “fish” swimming there aren’t fish. They’re symbols. Not letters. Not words. More like runes, or the fever scribbles of a math teacher gone feral. They pulse in time—three slow, one fast.

Morse code for the deranged. I try to move and instantly regret every decision that brought me here. Pain lights up in different dialects: spine in Gothic, neck in Old English, right thigh in screaming black hole. My teeth chatter even though I’m face-down and numb. My bloodstream has been swapped for a Slurpee. Then: a whump behind me. My heart spikes. I’m about to be sucked into space. For a heartbeat, I’m back in middle school during that tornado drill that turned out not to be a drill at all.

Everyone frozen under the bleachers, waiting to see if the roof would peel off. But this time, instead of vacuum and debris, I hear a grunt. Then another. Then a low, helpless moan. Not me. Someone else. I twist my neck, agony flaring hot. Eventually, the corridor comes into focus. Bodies line the opposite grate. Face-down. Curled. Still. One girl shivers so hard the floor rattles under her.

All women. All pale. Most share the same genetic paint-job as me—redheads, strawberry blonds, skin that looks like it belongs on a vampire’s appetizer plate. I count nine before the angle cuts off my view. That’s when my brain pipes up, smug as ever: Abduction. This is an abduction. I argue back. Experiment? Fallout shelter? Radiation poisoning club? But no. Even half-frozen, I know the truth.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 342ce4d4f0489416
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,514,385 bytes (1.444 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 215
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 390.44 minutes
• Total Words: 78,088
• Total Characters: 410,656
• Average Words per Page: 363.2
• Average Characters per Page: 1910.03

Most Frequent Words

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