Chapter One

Caroline had never known anything but this life. Her mother taught her at home. Since her father had passed away, Elizabeth Forbes needed a helping hand on the farm to keep their life afloat. Aside from leaving her friends, Bonnie and Elena, in the small city, the blonde didn't mind it at all. She loved to learn, and it didn't make much difference to her whether she learned from her mother, or a 'traditional' teacher. A few months before her father's death, she and her mother had begun to grow rather close. His death only strengthened their bond.

Caroline walked with a skip in her stride. She had awoken to the perfect sunrise that morning. The birds were singing their lovely choruses, crickets ceased their chimes, and even the frogs could be heard far down at the pond. It was the start of autumn and Caroline felt happy to be alive, along with the rest of the world.

Her mother had asked her to fetch some water from the well outside, and being that she had woken in such high spirits, she cordially obliged. The water source was but a few meters from her home, surrounded by the beginnings of the autumn season. Leaves were beginning to fall from their lofty branches, sprinkling the browning grass blades with their newly adopted shades. Caroline loved the smell of the autumn months. The pumpkins, the spices, and even the rare treat of a caramel apple were among her favorite delights.

She reached the well in a relatively quick fashion. The went about the usual routine leaning over the lip of the circular wall surrounding the water hole to retrieve the wooden bucket hanging slightly from the rope, wrapped around an iron pole which rotated when a handle connected to it was spun, moving the bucket down to get the water, and ascending once it was acquired As she began to do this, her blue eyes gazed down into the abyss of the well. It was then that she saw something that had never been there before.

What is that? Is that a-

Yes, in fact it was. Caroline had spotted a largely over sized top hat, floating in the deep, watery shadows. Caroline's eyes narrowed at the sight. She lived with her mother in relative seclusion They were a few miles out from any neighbors. Neither Caroline nor her mother owned a single top hat, and the same could be said for everyone else that they knew who lived near them to her knowledge, let alone one that seemed to be a little more than foot in height.

As she examined this, Caroline was, unknowingly leaning over the edge further and further in an unconscious effort to get a better look at the foreign object, and in that was also slowly loosing her footing. And then, in a split second she went from slowly slipping, to falling head first into the well. Her scream bounced off of the stone walls, tears welling in her eyes as she anticipated the morbid, but brief feeling of her skull colliding with the bottom of the well after falling below the surface of the water.

All she could think of were the places she had never been. She wanted to see cities. She wanted to take grand travels, have marvelous adventures. The kind of adventures that people write about in stories one day, and pass on to their children. Death defying tales and heart-warming stories. She wanted to see what adrenaline felt like. What being in love felt like. Caroline had never left her small town and this was, above all, one of her greatest regrets.

Wait- wait just one second. She thought to herself. Shouldn't she have hit the water by now? What was going on? As she was pulled from her thoughts, her heart jumped to her throat, and her stomach dropped a mile. The girl was floating down into the depths of the well! She looked up, desperate for any signs on light, only to see a small blimp of white growing smaller and smaller by the second. In no time at all, it was completely gone. Despite the fact, a strange, blue glow was elicited from the walls that surrounded her. Caroline looked down, and again- as when she had looked towards the surface- darkness. A fear that she had never felt before filled her up until she felt as though she would burst. What if she was stuck here? Doomed to the confines of this magical well for the rest of her life?

As she contemplated this, Caroline noticed that the light was slowly becoming brighter and brighter. She moved her eyes to look below her once more, and saw a small orb of light, and it was growing! She felt as though it were her savior, the light at the end of the tunnel as it were. Her eyes remained fixated on the thing, unable to look away no matter how she wished to break the trance. The light began to agitate her blue hues, but still, she could not look away. For every second she looked into it, every second it began to grow larger, and larger until it completely engulfed her in its celestial brightness.

Caroline screamed.

It was in the midst of her screaming that Caroline covered her head with her hands in an attempt to create a protective shield. As she became comfortable with this position, she came to realize that the ground she was kneeling on was freezing cold.

The ground!

Her heart skipped a beat when the blonde realized that she had finally found solid ground, once again. Quickly, her arms flew from around her and slammed onto the floor. In a fit of happiness, she began to kiss the tile floors and cry. She didn't even take the time to look around the room she had found herself in. She was upon the ground, and it was already much more than she thought she would ever see again. The fact had consumed her mind. She gave no thought to where she was nor how on earth a well had gotten her there.

It reminded her strongly of a time in her early youth when she had been swinging on a swing that her father had fashioned for her. Caroline loved to swing on it more than almost anything. It was made from a beautiful block of wood which he had sanded and glazed to perfection. On the seat of it, in elegant blue paint he had sprawled her name. The rope with which it was tied to the out stretching branch of the willow was decorated with ribbons which mirrored the color of blue in her eyes/.

One day she had been swinging. She went higher and higher until she was so high that she was completely parallel to the ground. Caroline, in shock, let go of the ropes and began to plummet back down to earth. Although she met the grass in mere seconds, it felt to her as though it had been a century. In those moments, her eyes were closed shut and she was almost certain that once she collided with the ground she would die.

This of course was not the case in either instance. Once the feeling of blind happiness was passed, she examined the room.

The floor that she had been kissing with joy was checker tiled with black and white all around the room, which seemed to be a perfect, large, square. Lining the walls side by side were beautifully crafted and extremely spotless mirrors. She spun in a circle, looking into each one and seeing the same thing. She looked to the ceiling and saw that it too was checkered. The room perplexed her, but most of all, it frightened her.

There were no doors, and no windows that she could see.

Desperately, she ran to each mirror, searching for a hidden window or exit. The first few showed nothing of interest. Each was identical, and each showed the same; a frazzled and terrified Caroline Forbes. Her hair was windblown and it made her look a bit insane.

With each mirror she looked into, the more anxious she became. She was going to run out of mirrors sometime, and then there would be no hope to be had. Even now, what hope that seemed to be left was hanging by a thin chord.

Her eyes passed over one of the reflective surfaces quickly, but returned in an instant when something odd caught her attention. She examined her reflection more thoroughly. As she did, Caroline saw what her eyes had noticed. There was a line of blood, dripping from the collar of her dress.

Her beautiful blue dress was being stained! She gasped and inclined her head down looking toward her collar, but saw no such thing. Her eyes darted back to the mirror, and still, the blood was dripping further and further. She took a step forward, and a another, and another. Still, the blood remained. There was no possible way it could be on he mirror, but it still wasn't really on her collar either. Caroline was mere inches from the mirror when she reached her hand out to touch the image of the red liquid. She made to wipe it away, an attempt to rid herself of the disturbing image. As she did so, she gasped in amazement.

Her hand had gone right through the mirror! The glass ripped in return, moving like water. She felt a breeze on the other side of the mirror, moving over her hand merrily. She smiled in spite of herself, for being so clever in assuming there was a secret door. Caroline put the thought of the blood in the back of her mind, forgetting it completely.

With her heart in her throat, Caroline took a deep breath. She knew what she had to do. It didn't matter what was on the other side of the mirror, because to stay in this room meant to die, and maybe even go mad in the slow process of it. Caroline clung tightly to the chance of survival this new development presented. She inhaled once more before taking a step into the unknown. As she finally did so, she felt the warmth of the familiar sun on her skin. She smiled to herself, sure that she was home.

But as she opened her eyes, she found out just how utterly wrong she was.

A/N- I know this was a little short, but I promise that the other chapters will be a bit longer. I hope you enjoyed it! Review, please! They tend to motivate me to update much faster.