ELIF
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Elif´s hands clutched her knees with a shaky ferocity that she had never experienced before, greedily taking in as much air as she possibly could. Having to stop dead in her tracks to avoid obstacles had made sprinting a much more laborious task than she thought it would be. She was aware that standing still was one of the worst possible decisions one could make in a situation like this, but she still stopped for air regardless. Her throat burned and her feet felt as if they had been flattened along with her surroundings. Elif´s brain desperately put the next steps of her plan together. She´d have to perform a mad dash across the fields and only then would her father´s tents be visible.
A panicked villager was a hair away from knocking her over, prompting Elif to spring back into action and resume her escape. Her small moment of weakness had only lasted a few seconds at most, yet she already felt regret at letting that time slip past her. Elif took off into a more labored sprint than before with no solid route. Every hard step resounded on the ground and sent shockwaves of force from her feet to her knees, increasingly hurting her body.
It had felt like another eternity had passed before Elif was anywhere near her father´s whereabouts. The various scattered tents that had once been a lifelong source of boredom were now a beacon of hope. That was, until she had registered something else. Several chunks of fallen rock all around the area, one of which had completely flattened a tent as if it were made out of playing cards. They were small compared to the monstrous boulders that had rained on the market square, but so were her father´s tents.
Elif bit her tongue until it bled and ran with reckless abandon. She didn´t have the energy to shout anymore, instead letting hot tears quietly spring from her eyes. Whether her father was inside of that tent or not at the time of disaster would determine his fate. Elif´s overbearingly optimistic personality was being put to the test. A one in four chance of arriving to the flattened corpse of her father. A one in four chance of having no family left. She sloppily wiped her eyes with a dirtied sleeve and ran even faster. Her home was still so far away and she felt her legs burn more strongly than ever before.