(1) Moonlit Flight

I was running, faster than I've ever run before. My heart was racing and I thought the blood pumping through my temples was going to split the thin veneer of skin separating it from the air whipping past my sweat-soaked face. I was being chased. I could not stop. One misstep equaled death. Trees were snatching at my arms and brambles were tearing deep gashes in my legs but I could not stop. The gasps escaping my lips were not those of pain, I was beyond that, they were the only means air could find its way into my desperate lungs. My chest was heaving and my sides aching, but I could not stop. They were coming for me.
How had they found me? What could I have done to give myself away? What would happen if they caught up to me? My mind was rolling these thoughts in a tumbling cyclic vortex when I rounded that corner. My body was falling, but only for a moment. I slammed into the ground and thought "This is it, I'm dead." I was lying there in the mud and my own blood when the footfalls behind me were suddenly above me. A strong, rough hand reached down and dragged me up by my tangled locks. It held me, suspended a foot above the ground so that my face was level with the beast's own. In the moonlight it started into my eyes with it's coal black ones. They flickered when they recognized me as the beast's prey. My hair was pulling on my scalp as it held the entire weight of my body. Tears slid silently down my face and mingled with the sweat dripping down my cheeks and sliding down my neck. The creature turned to it's companion and nodded before I felt my body fall again to the ground. My eyes caught the raised hand of the creature before it fell upon me and I dropped into the spiraling darkness.
The swirling blackness was all I knew. Sensations came, but they were disjointed at best. Cold, smooth stone; drip, drip, drip...water dripping on....something; a terrible pain in my head. This sensation took over from all the others. As the pain grew, it was all I could think of. It was all I knew. Slowly the reality of the pain brought me back to consciousness. When I was finally fully conscious, I kept my eyes closed. I didn't want to face whatever waited my sight. I don't know how long I laid there, just waiting. Waiting for a reason to open my eyes, to see the horror that surely awaited me.
Eventually, I don't know how long it was, human instincts took over and my body demanded food and water. Before I had been hunted down I had gone several hours without food. The energy expended in my flight had used up all my energy stores and I had no idea how long I had been under the tide of consciousness. I held my eyes closed for one more moment, one shining moment, while I assessed my body and its condition. I had not moved a centimeter since I had woken, but I seemed to be in one piece, lying on my side, my legs curled and my arms bent so that my hands were toward my face. My hair tickled at my face and down my back and kept my right cheek off the cold stone that the rest of my body felt beneath it.  I inhaled the damp air through my nose as I prepared to part my eyelashes. As I exhaled I slid my eyes open...