Chapter 1
Listen
I only remember pieces of what happened. Pieces that couldn't fit together right. I can't make sense of it, not because it muddles everything I believed to be true, but because it completely terrifies me.
Above me deep green flashes of light silently sliver through the air. Lightning thrashes its way through the sky and what looks like it makes noise is silent, dead. All I can hear is the ringing that seems to move beyond my ears and pierce my head through my temples. What happened to me? I remember running, a scream? And then light. Not the light one would picture when ascending to heaven but a light filled with a burning hatred. One that feeds on the living, that seeks power, destruction.
I can not breathe, the air clouds my lungs and feels like poison with every breathe. Am I dying? The pain in my lungs however are nothing compared to the seeping agony in my hand. It feels like a sparkling white hot knife found its way into my skin and it churning slowly from side to side. This pain is uncomfortably familiar. I had felt it before. An agony that trickles through every vain, every vessel in your body. The kind that tears you up from the inside.
It takes me back home. A princess in a castle made of stone. It could have been a beautiful life. Walls to protect me. Kitchens to feed me. A warm feather bed to hold me.
But they kept leaving. And their leave became my wait. Waiting turned to watching and watching grew. It turned from minutes to hours to days. My home was once a sanctuary, a shelter from the dangers of our world. The castle walls stood tall above the weeping trees below and in my waiting they called. Day after day my mind would wander through the trees of the forest in hopes to catch up with the carriages that left far too often. To run into my mother and father's arms and yell "take me with you!" And maybe just this one time they would listen. This was just a dream, and the more time went by, the more this home felt like a dungeon, keeping me from whatever adventure lay beyond the horizon.
Sitting by the windowsill became a normal pastime. My mind would wander into places it had always dreamt of going. In these places there lie hope. Hope that one day we would be reunited and they would never leave again. This hope was so comforting, until I grew old enough to realize I would be waiting for the rest of my life to see it realized.. The palace walls once graced in soft ivory vines now felt like black cages crumbling in on me. The playful willows fell quiet. The sunlight felt cold. They were never coming home.
And now I am finally free finally out, finally… I can't hear. The ringing is dying down but I still can't hear! The green fades and I find the strength to wipe the tears from my eyes and I see it. More accurately, the lack of it. The conclave, once beautifully embellished in gold and silver that reminded me so much of home, torn to shreds. The walls stripped of all color now heaped in piles of ashes and stone. The ground covered in black soot and smoldering blood. It looks like another world, one far away from anything I have ever seen before. I feel sick to my stomach. The air smells of fire and death. The world around looks bludgeoned, beaten, torn apart.
The sky roars above me and shakes the ground beneath my trembling legs. I turn around and behind me hundreds of glittering green eyes appeared from the mist. Spiders, hundreds of spiders racing towards me! Their legs singed, their eyes glazed over. I can see the venom dripping from their mouths. I freeze for a moment there. I can't do it! I should be dead, look around! Everything is tattered and baked in black and I am here untouched! I must be dead!
And then it takes over. I don't know what it is, maybe a will to live, maybe the drive in my heart to face my parents killers, maybe my need for something more than the life I have been living. But I run. With every ounce of strength left in me after my world destroyed before my eyes I feel myself running. Running turns to sprinting and sprinting turns to climbing. I find myself climbing now to the top of the hill where the heart of the conclave once stood beautiful and tall. And the I see her.
A woman bathed in gleaming light flowing through the mist around her. She sparkles with golden crystals and rainbow flakes brighter than the sun itself. She looks like heaven itself and maybe she is. I run to her. To my mother, to my father, waiting for me in paradise just out of my reach. To the forest beneath our castle where my mind would so often play. Into my parents arms. Where no one can hurt us. Where no one can take them from me. Where no one can keep me locked away. To freedom. To my mothers red hair swaying in the summer breeze. Her freckles gleaming in the sun. And my father grabbing me in his arms his scruffy beard piercing my skin. The smell of white roses in her hair, and musty cigars on his breathe. Home. I'm coming home.