There was blood everywhere, splashed on the marble floors and walls. The stench of burned bodies and the smell of iron loomed in the atmosphere.
All the little girl could see was death, there, in front of her laid a burned corpse which had a locket around its blackened neck , the very one her mother always wore around hers.
Her fragile knees shook and buckled underneath her and she landed on the hard floor, the word " Mamil" escaped her tiny, trembling lips. Without looking, she knew that the other two bodies were her father and brother. They were all gone. Tears fell from her eyes to the floor. The world seemed to tilt and give away right from under her.
How did this happen?
And she felt it, the darkness which was lingering in the hall, grew stronger, thicker. It was as though the source of its creation was close by and it was responding to it. It snuffed out the small amount of mana which had sparked in the little girl due to her escalating fear and nausea, leaving her drained and paralyzed.
What stroke her, was that there was a familiar feeling to the darkness, something in its heart was known to her, but how?
She felt a presence behind her, all of her tiny figure was shaking, not because of the sorrow which had crippled her but because of what she was sensing. She could feel, taste the menacing, murderous aura, radiating from the person behind her.
"There you are little Elika." The cold, bitter voice was but a whisper yet as black as death itself.
The little girl turned, her breath coming out as short intakes of air and looked at the figure in darkness, her eyes filled with disbelief and horror as she recognized the personate.
"Why?" She whined, the figure smiled, an unkind one, and said, "Because it was the right thing to do."
He raised his hand and the dark shadows engulfed her, they felt icy cold, penetrating in to her very core, clutching her soul and tearing it from inside her. She gasped and tried to scream, tried to move, to fight back but she couldn't. Her very essence was being ripped off from her, she was dying….
A loud, powerful voice boomed in her ear, "WAKE UP, ELIKA!"
Elika woke up with a loud gasp popping out of her tightened throat, and sat bolted upright in her bed. Her eyes scanned the room to make sure that she was in the girls' dorm of the school of magi and not the hellish nightmare she had just woken up from.
She tried hard to calm her frantic breathing and her thudding heart which was shaking her slim stature. Her whole body was covered with a shin of cold sweat, sticking her night shirt to her skin. Her hands were still clawing at the sheets. The memory of the dead bodies and the blood_ covered room flashed through her mind and her stomach lurched painfully. She stumbled out of her bed and tramped towards the bathroom, barely making it without tripping over her own feet and making rockets, causing other to wake up.
She fumbled with the nob, opened it and rushed in, bent over the nearest basin and vomited violently. Even though there was nothing in her stomach, the nausea didn't stop right there. The vomiting reflex forced her to double over the basin three times, until her body and mind calmed down.
Elika inhaled deeply while turning the water facet on with shaking hands and splashed cold water on to her face and neck. The feeling of cold water was a refreshing sense. She drank several gulps of water before straightening up and looking at herself in the mirror, which hung from the wall.
Her reflection was startling; a pair of sky blue eyes, stared gloomily back at her. They were set in a delicately built skull with pools of dark bangs underneath them; the dark shadows under her eyes seemed even darker due to her pale skin which was beaded by water drops at that moment.
Thick locks of snowy white hair framed her face and sprawled down her back to her waist. Her hair was sticking to her forehead and cheeks so she rinsed her hand and brushed her fingers through her hair, tugging it behind pointy edged ears.
She let out a quiet sigh and looked at herself one more time in the mirror; she was Elika Surena , the elven student of the circle of magi school, with a horrifying past which hunted her to this very moment. And she knew that her past won't be the only thing hunting her in the near future.