1 The Power of Ten – The Missing Tens – Sama Rantha (1/2)

The Power of Ten – The Missing Tens – Sama Rantha, Vol I – Hagborn

Chapter One – Rebirth and Death

Where am I?

I looked around dazedly, trying to get my foggy thoughts together. It was hard to think.

I thought… I thought I had been reborn. I thought I was a baby again, and then, and then –

I jolted at the remembered images. No. No, I hadn't just thought that. Those balefire eyes, gleaming with evil. The bruised, blue-back skin, the warts and extended nose, the teeth like jagged nails, and that voice…

No, it wasn't a thought. And then that… thing. Like a baby made out of ooze. Crawling toward me, opening its maw into darkness, coming down on me, covering me, coming INTO me…

Devouring me…

I looked down at my hands.

They were translucent, see through, as if I wasn't really here. And small, too…

I was small. I looked around, and everything looked so misty, and so big…

Not really a baby, not really anything, but… a dream.

I twitched again, and memories fired back up coldly in my head.

How I had died… was that a building exploding, coming down on me? It was hard to tell. The world had gone to Hell, I was fighting… undead, zombies, yes… death…

It had been a game, it had become reality. I had been…

Sama Rantha.

My head snapped up and around as something seemed to whisper, inside, outside, I couldn't tell. I didn't know how real my body was, but my senses seemed to work the right way.

I was a Hagchild in the game. And now…

Naturally, being a Hagchild meant I had to learn just what being the daughter of a Hag meant. Basic information was that you were a would-be Hag who had undergone the Ritual of the Silver Queen, had the Hag's Curse and the magic that came with it ripped away, ending up a Forsaken Human who could never wield magic.