The sun was slightly warming my skin on my walk home from Camelot. The wind would blow every few minutes to ensure I didn't overheat, which made the weather quite pleasant. The path was lined with bright green grass and purple flowers beautifully contrasting the green. The path never failed to be lovely during the spring and the walk that my mother had forced me take was a little less miserable because of it. I had gone to Camelot because my brother had a fever, and I was finally old enough to run errands from our little village about two miles from the city. So that meant I went out of the village whenever my mother required it. While in Camelot, I was to acquire medicines from an apothecary she knew inside the walled city. He was a kind, old man. His home was drowning in herbs and flasks containing more medicines than even imaginable. I didn't even know what half of them were for. He insisted I take his medicine for free, which shocked me, but he said he had known my mother long ago so I accepted them. It wasn't a miserable time, and the entire time I was in the city I had a strange feeling of belonging. However, I constantly felt as if someone was watching me.
About a mile out from my village, the light began to fade from the sky, leaving a swirling array of colors as it left. Then the stars appeared in the darkness with the moon by their side, helping me finish my last stretch home, about half a mile.
When I finally did arrive home, everything was three times too bright for night. My village was consumed in shades of orange and yellow. It was burning. The smell of burning wood and grass and… another sick, unfamiliar smell poisoned the air and made it hard to breathe. Women and children ran from the fires while the men battled both the fires and the other men on horses. They appeared to be bandits. I was safe in the cover of the trees, but I needed to help them in some way. No one had spotted me yet, so I pulled out my dagger. The dagger my father gave me for protection that perfectly fit in my palm no matter how I held it. Its handle was a dark brown leather and blade had a swirled engraving in it that I had never been able to translate. He never told me what it meant before he died.
Focus.
I looked straight at a man who was keeping watch in the trees. He wasn't the only one there. There were several men in the trees surrounding the clearing the village was in. They seemed to be prepared to slaughter anyone who tried to escape. The bushes would cover me so that I could get right behind him and attack him. I slowly crept until I was close enough to smell a slight odor emanating from the shaggy man ready to kill innocent people. Ready to kill my people. I constantly reminded myself that the man was evil and what he was doing was wrong. I flipped the dagger in my hand so that the blade was facing up; it would make slicing his throat easier and he wouldn't call out to the others to alert them of my presence.
I lunged at him and slid my knife across his jugular in a fluid motion, according to my plan. No one noticed as he fell to the ground choking on his own blood, gasping for life. A metallic smell filled my lungs and redness covered my hands. I had killed a man. Blood pumped in my ears and my head felt cold. As I saw the people dead in the road and those running from men with swords only one thought filled my mind: where is my family?
Something came over me and I jumped out from my cover of the bushes and ran towards the homes on fire and the screaming people. Men shouted at me and to each other, but what they said didn't matter. I had forgotten my family and they could be dead. The road was difficult to follow, but I found my way to my house at the other side of the village. It was completely burned to the ground. I stepped through the rubble, the rest of the commotion a blur and completely silent. In the rubble it felt like I saw-
A man's cough brought my eyes away from the home I had grown up in, the house I spent my entire life in. "Hello, love." His smile was disgusting, looking at it sent a shiver down my spine. I looked away and then matched his perverse look with a dark glare. I sent him all of my rage and pain. Men circled around me until I was completely surrounded. But for some reason, I wasn't afraid. The coldness in my head grew worse and my blood pumped to where the screams were nonexistent. Men shouted at me, but I only saw their lips move. Spots clouded vision. Then everything went black.