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So here’s a scene further into my WIP.

Book title: Excavatia: From Dust Arise [Book 1]
Moniker: @obrian-of-the-surface-world

Audio Link: Chapter 005 – The  Incident Behind The Inn_(Scene 10)

Text: (1658 Words) [13 minutes 50 seconds audio]

Begglar’s wife, Nell came down from the upstairs and helped us all get a late meal, get situated in the rooms upstairs, and stow our belongings. I saw no sign of Begglar the rest of the evening, so I assumed he had gone off to drink privately or had gone on to bed.
There was some trouble getting Miray settled down with one of the other girls, but Nell and one of the women eventually worked out an arrangement.
I opted to sleep in the hayloft, as Begglar had suggested, and to keep the first watch of the night. Nell stoked the fire in the fireplace and recommended that I get warmed up before going out into the wet and damp, foggy night, so I sat at one of the long tables and drank some of the warm black tea she had brewed for me.
When she and her maidservant retired for the night and most of the others had settled into the guestrooms, the girl, whom the Troll threatened, came quietly down from the upstairs to the table where I was sitting.
Her head was down, and she could not seem to look at me for more than a brief glance. It is clear she wants to say something but can’t seem to find the proper words to do it. She paces a moment and then finally, she sat down across from me and put her hands on the table, one palm over the other. I looked up at her and smiled gently, “It’s okay if you want to leave. I do understand and I won’t hold it against you.”
With tears brimming in her eyes, she faltered and then swallowed and began, “It’s just that it wasn’t like what I expected it to be. There is something more here that I did not bargain for. That thing out there…” She broke off, gathering her courage, but never truly find it.
“I’m sorry,” she said again, “I’m not ready to take on this quest. I can’t face another situation like that. I’m not strong enough yet. It hurts too much…”
She broke down and wept. Long, deep, waves of pain and memory washing over her. Her head down and her hair covering her face as the dam of long-held emotion broke and the hurt washed out in pressure waves built up over far too long a time.
I put my hand over her hand and just let her cry. Tears are healing. We need them for release. She had carried these burdens and wounds far too long by herself. No words came to mind that could help her. She just needed someone to be there while she cried. Someone who didn’t judge her for it. Someone who would just listen.
After some time, she lifted her tear-stained eyes, her cheeks brighten in the firelight from the hearth.
“I’m so sorry,” she said once more, and the silent tears continued to rain as she struggled to catch her breath and composure. She half laughed and almost broke again when she said, “Back there with the Troll, memories I had pressed down and never dealt with suddenly came back to me. And I couldn’t…”
Her hand went to her mouth, covering her trembling lips, again try to hold back the sobs.
“I haven’t dealt with it. I wouldn’t…deal with it. But now I’ll have to. Won’t I?” again with a defensive laugh.
“Only I can’t do it here. I can’t do it now.” She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“I understand,” I assured her again, “No one here judges or condemns you if you don’t continue. There will be another time for you. If not here, somewhere where you can feel safe.”
She laughed at me, with a nervous and cynical sound full of doubt, yet wanting to believe it.
“There is no place safe enough for that,” she wiped her mouth and looked away into the firelight, taking in a few shuddering breaths.
“That thing out there. What is it exactly? How can it do what it does?”
I sighed and slightly shook my head.
“No one truly know the how about things that happen here. We say we do, but in some way, we are deceiving ourselves into some semblance of security. Are we safe? I don’t know that we are either here or back in our lives in the Surface World. What I do know is that, wherever we might be, we are loved, and wanted and uniquely special to a perfect Father.”
“Father!” she fidgeted with her fingers. Her eyes growing distant and narrowing, as she seemed to be transported back into a memory she looked at with a certain defensive disconnectedness.
She dug at her fingernails abstractly, narrowing her eyes.
“That is what the Troll zeroed in on. My relationship with my father. I want to believe what you say about this all loving and all caring Father, but I can’t. I can’t get past the prosaic reality and image of my own father.”
She was silent a moment. Continuing to dig at her nails and brushed a wing of her hair out of her face where it hung against her cheek.
Finally she said, “Daddy said I’d never amount to much. Said I’d probably be pregnant by sixteen and living on the street. Never hold a decent job and be passed around from man to man. That was his assessment of me at the age of seven years old. That my life would be just some dirty joke told in a smoky pool hall. That my phone number would be written somewhere on a bathroom wall for pervert to call me and ask me for a date. That was what he told me before he left us for some floozy in Florida.”
She swallowed back her tears, shivered a bit, and seemed to find a certain calm. Her eyes grew distant again as her sight probed and sifted through piles of buried memory. She wiped her eyes as she raised her head again.
“It was raining the night he left us,” she said quietly.
“You know that verse that says, the rain falls on the just and the unjust?”
I cleared my throat and nodded.
“Well, it was sure falling that night. Coming down in sheets.”
She sniffed.
“Mom, acted like she never saw it coming. Her entire world came crashing down on her, when he told her. She begged him to stay. Said he could keep his new girlfriend, if only he wouldn’t abandon us. That was to moment I lost all respect for my mom. Crying and watching them fight through the window on the front lawn as he packed up our only vehicle. I saw mom grab his arm as he dragged her through the dirt. I saw when he cuffed her in the side of the head, and punched her in the stomach. Later, my mom would tell me that it was my fault that he left.”
She said all these things in a detached calm that was eerie to listen to and gut wrenching to hear it so quietly told as if none of it mattered.
“My last image of my father was him driving away in our only car, my mother doubled over in pain on the front lawn for all of the neighbors to see and do nothing. And all of this, while the rain continued to pour down.”
She was silent again, her eyes unfocused and now unreadable. She stared vacantly at her hands on the table before us. My comforting hand still over hers. She took in a long breath, and at last, her eyes raised to mine.
“So.”
“So?” I asked.
“So, I need to leave here. Back to the real world, where there are no such things as Trolls that make you divulge your deepest, darkest secrets to strangers who can do nothing for you. My problems are my problems. Yours are yours. Back to the ‘Big Girl’ world. Back to another day of proving my “father” wrong.”
It hurts so much to see the shroud of toughness and bravery be pulled back over her wounds like a winter sweater. I don’t know exactly what to say to her. I have had no context for such pain and any words I could muster would seem so empty now that she has put the tough-girl exterior back on.
Quietly I ask her, “Do you mind if I ask you your name?”
She stares at me for a hard moment and pulls her hands away, wrapping herself in them as if feeling a sudden chill in the air.
“Why?” she asks, with challenging eyes.
I flatten my hands on the table as if smoothing out an imaginary tablecloth, feeling the wood grain beneath. I almost say something, then hesitate and check myself.
“Alright. No need for names. I just want you to know and remember, as you return to the Surface World tomorrow that there are people here that imperfect as they may be, do want to have you as a friend and could care about you, if you ever gave us a chance. Fair enough?”
Her arms were still folded as she slowly stood up and watched me for a moment, measuring my words.
“You are welcome to come back anytime. I’ll have one of the others provide an escort back in the morning. Be sure and keep your torch. It is yours to light at any time, should you wish to return. No one will judge you for leaving. And if you one day come back here, your arrival will be celebrated by all.”
Quietly she turned to go up the stairs to one of the upper rooms she would share with one of the girls.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turned once again, and whispered, “I’m sorry.” And then quickly and quietly ascended the stairs.