Belili’s eyes flew open, staring into the darkness. Where am I? Her whole body was tense, and her heartbeat drummed vigorously in her ears. 
Almost frantic, her hand searched for the protective amulet she wore around her neck. Feeling the carved symbols on the simple stone, she slowly calmed down. 
As her eyes adjusted to the lack of sunlight, she recognized a familiar straw ceiling. She was lying in her usual corner in the servant quarters. All around her, the snoring of the other slaves filled the room. Saras recently complained a lot about it, but Belili had never minded it. After their long days of labor, it was easy enough to fall asleep. 
But what had woken her? Her heartbeat slowly calming down, she tried to listen for suspicious noises. There is nothing, she thought. It was just a dream. Again. 
Recently, she had had a lot of weird dreams, the details of most of which she couldn’t remember the next morning. And yet, after such nights, a feeling of uneasiness often followed her for hours. Once, she had asked old Ninkar about it, but the cook had just scolded her and given her more work. 
No sense in losing sleep pondering, Belili thought. She rolled herself to the side and pulled the thin linen blanket over her shoulder. 
Next to her lay Saras, sprawled out as always. Her brother was peacefully asleep, no doubt dreaming of a glorious future as a warrior, performing great deeds like the legendary heroes whose tales he so loved to listen to over the fire. 
Belili had to smile. Sometimes she envied Saras his imagination. For herself, she couldn’t see a future beyond her existence as a slave of Zabu’s household. 
Pulling the blanket tighter around her, she closed her eyes, ready to drift off for another couple of hours of sleep. With a flash, it came all back to her. What she had seen right before she had woken up, played in her mind like memories of something that had happened only moments ago. Of course, she thought. I was fighting for my life.
In her memory, she was cornered by three men. They wore long traveler’s cloaks and their faces were covered to protect against the desert sand.
One of them tried to stab her with a spear, but she didn’t allow it, making the bronze tip piercing one of his comrades instead. 
The third man stood back, holding up a torch. She clicked her tongue and the flame became alive. In the blink of an eye, it ran down the torch and bit into the bearer’s sleeve. From there it spread consuming fabric and flesh. The poor man screamed. Dropping the torch and falling to the ground, he tried to extinguish the flames in the dirt but it was too late. The moment he opened his mouth the predatory fire jumped down his throat. She made it so.
Belili turned away to finish the spearman who was still staring in shock into his dying comrade’s eyes. The latter had dropped to his knees, but as if afraid to do more damage the spearman hesitated to retract his weapon. 
She touched the hand holding on to the spear shaft. 
The man looked up to her blinking as if woken from a state of shock. A heartbeat later his eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell to the site, foam coming from his mouth. 
Exhaustion overcame Belili. How long had she been awake? I can’t rest here, she thought. The rest of them can only be hours behind. 
A shadow moved in the corner of her eyes. She spun around, bringing up her staff but this time she wasn’t fast enough, fatigue having slowed her reflexes. 
The shadow easily dropped below her wide swing, closing the distance in an instant. 
Pain bit into her leg. 
With a gasp, Belili opened her eyes. The exhaustion and pain immediately fell away, only leaving a fading memory behind. She reached for her tight, still feeling a tingle where the blade had cut her. There was nothing. Despite the vivid memories in her head, her skin was as smooth and unblemished as it had always been. 
What is this? What is happening to me? 
She was still here, lying between her fellow slaves, waiting for the sun to come up and another day of labor to begin. But somehow Belili knew, she had only to close her eyes and she could will herself back to where she had been killed.
No, she thought. Not killed. She couldn’t have said how she knew, but she did. 
Without clearly understanding why, Belili rose to her feet, careful not to wake Saras. She picked up her sandals and made for the door of the single-room house. It wasn’t easy. The slaves, both men and women, lay everywhere, but she had lived in this room for most of her life and knew every square foot like the back of her hand. 
Reaching the door without waking anybody, she carefully pushed the rag that served as a curtain aside.
“Where’re you going?” a sleepy voice mumbled next to her.
“Just stepping out, Ninkar,” Belili said in a low voice. “Go back to sleep.” 
“Do not get pregnant.” The old cook turned around without ever opening her eyes.
Belili waited for another couple of heartbeats, but Ninkar fell back into an even snore. Satisfied, she slipped through the door, leaving the warmth of the sleeping group of bodies behind. 
Outside it was still dark and only clad in her simple sleeveless tunic the chill of the night made her regret not bringing her blanket. But there was no thought of heading back. 
Quickly slipping the sandals over her feet, she looked around. Dawn still hours away the main house lay dark. So was the little shack, the three guards Zabu had hired slept in. At least one of the men was supposed to stand guard all night, but there hadn’t been any news of bandit raids close by in months. And since Zabu was a man who seldom beat his slaves, there wasn’t much chance that anybody would use the guards’ laziness to run away. Where would we run to anyway? Belili thought, following one of the paths leading away from the estate. 

Around her Zabu’s fields stretched out in all directions. They were large enough to feed their household of about twenty people and even generated some surplus to be sold in the market of Urk. Those who occasionally accompanied Zabu had told her there were much larger farms closer to town, but she had never been allowed to go herself.
Belili hurried through the night. That way, she thought, looking towards the eastern hills. She couldn’t have said how she knew where she had to go. It felt like she was drawn to something ahead. 
Passing through the field, she took care not to step into one of the many irrigation ditches used to keep the precious plants alive. Digging and maintaining the network of tiny channels connecting the fields to the spring in the hills, the only water source in miles, was a backbreaking labor that never ended and occupied many of Belili’s days. 
Reaching the end of the fields at the foot of the hills, a wide pond stretched out before her. It was nursed by the spring under the hills and protected by the shadow of a high rock on its southern end. Never running dry, not even during midsummer, it was the lifeblood of the estate.
Urk be praised for the water, Belili thought, subconsciously touching her amulet before lifting up her tunic and wading through the calf-high wet. On the other side, she had to scale the hill’s rocky slope. In the dark, it was dangerous ground, but something pushed her to hurry. 
At thirteen years of age, Belili was strong and healthy. Used to hard work from dawn to dusk for as long as she could remember, she managed the strenuous pace easily enough. Reaching the top of the hill, she began her descent on the other side without delay. 
Only after traversing two more hills, she finally came to a halt. Below her lay a small valley. A natural trail went through it ending about a mile to the north-east of Zabu’s estate. 
What made Belili hesitate after hurrying here without pause were the silhouettes of bodies spread around along the trail. With only the light of the moon above, she might have mistaken them for something else but she had been here before. She remembered this scene from her dream. 
I should get away from here, she thought. If there were bandits or nomad raiders in the vicinity, she had to warn the estate as quickly as possible. Their small community didn’t have enough people to defend itself against an attacker that could create such carnage. Their best chance would be to pack anything valuable and flee behind Urk’s mud brig walls. 
While her mind followed such rational thoughts, she suddenly realized that her body had already started moving. Whatever had drawn her here was down there, and so she carefully descended into the valley.
When she reached the bottom, she hid behind one of the larger boulders sprinkling the ground. The valley seemed as dead as the motionless bodies ahead, but she couldn’t be sure. The closer she came to the scene of her dream, the more nervous she became.
What had started as a feeling – an unrelenting need to come here – was weakening the closer she snuck to the center of the valley. As it relented its hold on her it made room for fear. 
Standing in the shadow of a particularly high boulder, Belili realized she was completely alone and should something happen to her out here, nobody from the estate was likely to find her before scavengers had eaten her body. Still, she didn’t stop.
Staying low, she crept forward, moving from cover to cover. Near the trail, a sudden stench assaulted her. Holding her nose, she kept an eye out for the source.
“It shall smell even worse once the sun rises to its highest,” a deep voice beside Belili said, making her jump. 
She whirled around, her arms raised
There is nobody there! 
Panic flared, screaming at her to run. 
“Do you have water to share with me by any chance, child?” The question was followed by a light cough. 
The origin of the voice was right in front of Belili. Following an intuition, she took a careful step to the side. There on the ground, the back leaning against the stone sat a shadowy figure. Had she circled the last boulder the other way around, she would have stumbled over him.
“Do you not understand me, child?” the man asked. Belili couldn’t see his face, but his accent marked him as a stranger to this region. 
“I understand,” she said. 
It followed a moment of silence with either of them probably waiting for the other to say something.
“Water?”
“Oh,” Belili said, embarrassed. “I am sorry.”
The stranger nodded. “It is fine.” Putting one hand on the ground, he adjusted his position against the boulder so he was facing her. The movement seemed to bring him some discomfort and Belili could hear him suppress a groan. 
Unsure about the situation, she took a careful step back. 
With a sigh, the stranger fell back against his stony backrest. “May I ask what brings a young girl to this place in the middle of the night?”
“I…ahm…I could not sleep,” Belili said nervously. She wanted to kick herself immediately for the stupid answer. But what was she supposed to say? Lowering her eyes in embarrassment, she looked right at the stranger’s hands. Through shifting his seat, his lower half was now illuminated by the moonlight. 
I know these hands, she thought. I remember looking down at them. 
“I am Belili,” she said, straightening. “I came here to find you.”
The man tilted his shadowy head. “To find me, you say?”
Belili nodded, feeling a sudden confidence rising in her. “Yes, I dreamed of you fighting. I saw you kill three men. But there was a fourth that got me… you.”
“Who got who is still to be seen when the dawn comes,” the stranger said slowly. “I am Master Jas’ar. Are you a seer, Belili? Or apprentice to a magus?”
Belili frowned. “No, I’m a slave.”

Book 1 of The Reluctant Magus series now on Amazon.