Chapter One:
I t all began that fateful day... the day Alfred Jones fell from the sky. The queen was already on the edge. The whole kingdom knew it… they knew it was only a matter of time until she lost if for good… it just took a little trigger. Just the slightest trigger and she would go completely and utterly insane. The entire kingdom waited in terrified silence, hoping that whatever than trigger was would never come… but alas, it did, as everyone knew it would. It was barely past noon and the rain was pouring down hard as it always did in spring, trees casting their light shadows across the palace walls, giving in an even gloomier, eerie look that it already had. The birds were singing their hopeful tune, and the ring of a large ax being sharpened echoed throughout the castle ground, as if somehow knowing the endless amounts of blood soon to be shed.
Arthur Kirkland was little more than just another royal servant. Nobody special really, but he tended to parts of the garden, and fed the palace cats and overall didn't complain much. He had food everyday and by watching the rest of the kingdom slowly turn to skin and bones, he knew that was more than enough. However, these logical thoughts didn't stop him from dreaming. Dreaming of a world in which everyone has food, a world in which the magical creatures surrounding the forests of the city were not feared, but loved, and most importantly… a world in which people were free. Arthur refused to spend such times on these dreams though, for he knew better than to ever actually have hope of such a thing coming to be, and he knew that dreaming only made reality harder and, with each day Arthur began to dream less and less.
Then it happened… the man fell from the sky. Arthur couldn't believe his eyes. He felt as though such a circumstance must be an illusion, or a daydream, or anything other than what he was seeing at the moment. There was a man, not possibly a day older than himself, lying at his feet. He was clad in nothing but a small white toga, not unlike the cherubs in the garden, and had hair that seemed to be made of gold. Most fascinating however… was that, protruding from his back, he had a large pair of magnificent feathered wings that would have been pure white if it wasn't for the fact that they seemed to have gotten badly burned, feathers falling from them in a blackened mess. Arthur knelt down beside him and gentle touched his hair, somehow entranced with the man, and then before he knew it there was shouting, and orders given and he was thrown away from the man, who was quickly whisked off to the castle before he even had the chance to grasp what was happening.
Whatever was about to happen, wasn't going to be good. Not for Arthur, not for the winged man, not for the kingdom, possibly not for the world.