IMPORTANT NOTE: UPDATEEEEEDDDDDDD! (again, i know, i'm sorry, i just have so many things i like adding in LMAO. SO yes. This is now a prologue as per the suggestions of my amazing reviewers! what used to be chapter 1 can now be found at the beginning of chapter 2 ;) )

Blanket disclaimer: I do not own anything except my OCs, the countries, places, and plots that I've created on my own out of my lil ol' brain :)

To my little sister and our grandfather.

EXTRAORDINARY

Prologue

Prologue

Zahra

Several years later... (major updated)

And then Zahra finally opened her eyes. They stung, she noticed, and her hands immediately went to them to wipe out whatever made them burn. But to her surprise, she felt her hands spread something cool and wet across her skin instead. With tremulous breaths, she looked down at her quivering hands, and suddenly remembered her first night in the jungle. She remembered being just shy of eight years old. She remembered being so stunned with fear that her entire body refused to move.

Zahra craned her aching neck to scan her surroundings. She felt her hair, returning to their blackness, tumble across the bridge of her nose, down her cheeks, and over her shoulders. Ash hung from the strands, decaying and gray, some still burning orange along the edges. The crackles of scraps of fire, mere memories, began to ring with an agonizing sharpness in her ears. Fires were everywhere, she noticed. Flames danced on fallen palm trees, their trunks crisped and flaking before scattering into the dust-filled breeze like the seeds of dead dandelions. There was nothing left. No homes, no huts, no signs of civilization except for the bodies. Sparks flew from them—elders, adults, and children alike—strewn across the ground, severely burnt to the point of anonymity; they were unrecognizable. Zahra felt bile shudder in her stomach, the stench of death making her light-headed, queasy with repulsion.

The familiar sway of her robes returned to her jelly legs. She collapsed, suddenly, her knees smashing hard into the ashen ground, but she didn't care. Burns on her arms sent waves upon waves of shrieking pain across her skin, but she didn't care. Here senses were numbing. All she could see was him.

He was staring right back at her. His clothes were a mess. So not like him, she thought. Once beautiful white and violet robes were singed and discolored to grays and browns, reduced to rags. Tanned skin smothered in blood and scrapes and bruises, hair matted with so much soot that not even a speck of royal purple was to be seen. But what horrified her the most was his eyes. Gold, true gold, gleaming with a different sense of awe. They didn't look at her the way they used to. Solomon, she missed the way he used to look at her, with fascination, curiosity, filled with the passion of adolescence. Now, those eyes were dripping with hurt. She could almost see memories galloping through them, piercing into his heart for the first time in so, so long. She could see the horror scribbled over his features, probably with disgust and loathing rather than pity and worry. It was unbearable. She wanted to go to him. She wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to say an infinite amount of things—things she should've said, things she shouldn't have said—but she couldn't: she was paralyzed with fear. But she knew the source of her fear was different this time.

This time, she was afraid of herself.

She let herself go too far.

She let her fires run rampant.

Nobody was able to stop her this time.

Not even him.

"W-Where's the v-village?" Zahra managed to croak out, her voice raspy with dirt and the gasps of unbridled terror. "Where… where is i-it?" she asked again, knowing the true answer but earnestly, desperately praying for a lie.

"It's gone, Z," a familiar voice spoke sorrowfully. "It's all gone."

No. No, no, no. That can't be. There's no way. I couldn't have—I'm not capable of—I wouldn't…

I would never…

would I?

… Did I…?

Zahra's head fell, her gaze downturned to her bloodied hands once again.

What… what have I done?

! PLEASE READ:

I want to make a note about something important that I want to incorporate into my story. ART! I'm really into art and honestly I'm a pretty visual person, which is why I like to incorporate imagery into my art, and why I'm going to be drawing 'visual aids' to this story for you guys to see! It could be like a mini manga strip, or a scene from a chapter, or just OC sketches, you know?

So my first drawing is my cover - that's my OC, Zahra. Please don't steal because I worked hard to draw it so thanks for not stealing :)

deviantart(.com)/ada-01

^remove the brackets lol sry fanfiction is being weird so i had to put them in.

If you don't know WHEN I'm going to post a new art piece(s), I will announce it in an actual story update (in other words, my story updates and art updates happen at the same time, and if you follow this story, you'll know both.)

Also I know that my first two chapters are pretty short right now, but that's because I organized them funky and weird (it's hard to explain), so my third chapters and onwards are much longer. SO yeah, if it looks like my chapters r gonna look like this, TRUST they won't (ref chapter 3).

OH and this is during AoS manga - you'll see what I mean soon. I'm trying. Bear with me here. Thanks loves.

~ AVA