I sat there for a moment longer, trembling but resolute, as the adrenaline coursing through me began to ebb. My mind was a battlefield of fear and determination. If they thought I was going to quietly accept this fate, they were wrong.
I was human, fragile, breakable, painfully mortal trapped in a den of creatures who fed on screams and bled shadows. My every heartbeat must’ve sounded like thunder to them, a pulsing reminder of how different I was, how out of place I truly was here.
I stood and surveyed the room again, searching for anything I might have missed earlier. The dresser had yielded the knife, but it didn’t hold much else a few scraps of fabric and some tarnished trinkets that wouldn’t help me. My eyes darted toward the vent near the ceiling.
It was small, too small for me to
