Where monsters roam

My first thought when I walked into our house was that Kari’s face looked a lot like my Dad’s that one time I had come home late. His eyes were wide, his movements jerky, and his mouth tapered into a thin line. The biggest difference I noted was that Kari’s blue eyes wandered aimlessly whereas my Dad’s had locked onto me straight away. But she knew I was there.
“Fulgora, where have you been?” she gasped at me.
Well, I knew I couldn’t lie to her.

That was the strange thing about Kari. She always knew you were lying. She couldn’t see my face, so it didn’t matter how guilty I looked when I spoke, but somehow she could tell. Maybe my voice warbled or she heard me fidgeting, I don’t know. But she knew. So I decided to tell her the truth.
“Well... I snuck through Death Trap till I reached the edge. I got over a fence and waited a while before I came back.” There was no point babbling to her about how excited I had been to have stood on Elemental ground. She wouldn’t take a bar of it.
“You made it through Death Trap?”
Okay, I should explain. Altreas is a massive continent split into six sections. Five of these sections take up the outlands, and the centre, which conveniently is shaped like a circle, is where we live. Those of us who are probably referred to as commoners. Our village is branched out over the left side of the circle, and the other half, over a large stone wall, has been nicknamed the Death Trap. The name is self-explanatory. Out there, monsters are roaming, and it’s unlikely anyone who goes out there will come back. So why did I go? Well, I’ll tell you that later. First, Kari’s reaction.

“Don’t you dare go feeling like you’ve accomplished something. You could have been killed!”
And then, as though she were adding things up... “Wait, why were you waiting a while?”
There really was no hiding things from her.

I shouldn’t have gone there in the first place, but if you want to understand why, you need to know more about my life, and that starts with my eyes. Unlike everyone else in my village in the centre of Altreas, I have glowing yellow eyes. No-one has heard of anyone with glowing yellow eyes except Kari, and she doesn’t tell me much about it, except that I’m different. Well, I learnt that pretty quick. You see, I’m the only person I know that exists in this world who can conduct current. Like, electricity.

There are five different Elementals who stalk the land. Water, Air, Fire, Cosmic and Nature. Well, that’s what everyone tells me. All my life I’ve had a desperate urge to get past Death Trap and stand on Elemental ground, to find someone and ask them about the Elementals and see if I could find anyone else out there like me. Maybe find my own tribe of Current Elementals.

“Fulgora! You didn’t fight one of them, did you?”
I’d forgotten Kari was lecturing me again.

BOOM!

Kari’s head whipped around, and now I was definitely out of my reverie.
“What was that? Fulgora, can you check?”
I ran outside, looking out into my village of wooden houses and crude mud huts. A few people saw me and leapt back in alarm, as they always did. But what really had everyone’s attention was the shadow monster tearing down our only protection- the brick wall keeping the monsters out.