Okay, the story gets better soon! These first two chapters are like the background information, and they're still important, even if it's slow moving. Remember: I wrote this when I was younger. Please review and give me suggestions on how to make this story better!
My name was Elisa (but in the other world it was and is my middle name). I had an older brother named Lou (who, when I was born, was 7) and an identical twin sister. Her name was Emma.
Emma and I loved to switch and pretend to be one another and confuse everyone… we had the same, long brown hair and slim, wiry figure. We were both the same height, too (about 5ft 5in). Mother and Father were no fun, thought. We could never confuse them. They could tell us apart by our eyes. Mother told us, "Emma, your eyes are a bright, sharp hazel with slightly more green in them than Elisa's eyes, while Elisa's eyes are a dark, rich hazel. That is how we tell you apart."
We would have been a regular family except for one detail: The curse of obedience. When Emma and I were born, as Mother told us when we were five, a shimmering light came in our room and said, "I give the gift of obedience" and was gone. Mother didn't think that it was Lucinda the fairy, for she had changed since Queen Ella married King Charmount, who lived in Frell.
How we wished we were like the Queen Ella! From the torture of the curse to breaking the curse and marrying a prince, and then becoming a queen! Although Queen Ella had at first refused to go with the title "Queen," many people continued to call her "Queen Ella," so she gave it up and accepted her the title of "Queen."
The curse was that if someone ordered us to do something, we had to do it, or we were in a lot of pain. But, if someone said, "I wish you would fetch me some flour" or "Please run to town for some bread", we didn't have to do it. But if it were "Fetch me some flour" or "Run to town for some bread", or even "Kill yourself", we would have to do it! That's why Mother ordered us never to tell anyone about the curse. Of course, why would we want to tell anyone anyway? We hated being bossed around.
We lived in the outskirts of Kent, a town about 35 miles away from Frell. Kent was not much of a town; it was just a bunch of farms grouped together and someone decided to add a marketplace for farmers and merchants to sell their goods, and Kent was born. After a few years the marketplace grew slightly, and even a zoo was added by the time we were twelve! Mother said she'd seen the castle at Frell since she made dresses for weddings and balls all around Kyrria. She had made Queen Ella's wedding gown.
Mother knew many languages since she traveled. Mother was one of the first women to own a business and travel around like a man. She was strong, brave, and very adventurous. I always wanted to be just like her. When she was home she would teach Emma and I bits and pieces of Elfian, Orgese, Athoryian, Gnomic and more. We were really good at Elfian above all else, and we learned to speak it fluently.
But it wasn't like Father stayed home. He was the best cook in all of Kent (and the tallest cook, too! He was 6ft 4in, according to the calculations of our world), and also traveled everywhere to cook. He was never home, at least, not all the time.
Then there was Lou. When he turned ten, when I was three, he began to spend much of his time with the centaurs, and became the "caretaker" of them. Tall and quiet, he was very reclusive, so we didn't see much of him, either.
While Mother and Father were away, and while Lou was with the centaurs, they left us in the care of Flora, our cook/maid who's fifteen years older than us. She taught us how to sew and how to carve, and Emma and I were fast learners, especially with carving, for some reason. Flora was my best friend, besides Emma, of course.
We weren't very rich, though. Mother did not get enough pay for her work (being a woman) and Father somehow only made enough money to keep everything going (probably since he was "descended from a peasant family line," therefore making the food taste bad or some stupid reason like that.) Also, all of our excess money was spent on caring for the horses and centaurs and the rest of our farm. We had nothing more than we needed, which was fine with me. The only expense we had -- and that we could afford --that made us different from the "poor peasants" of Kent was the fact that we had a cook/maid. With Mother and Father gone most of the time, we needed the extra help. However, we never really considered her to be our servant. She was simply "hired help", I suppose.
Our family owned a farm, and we raised horses and centaurs. But we also had some chickens and cows, though very few. We also had an herb garden, although the herbs were only for Father's odd seasonings that he invented. Sometimes Father would sell centaurs to people, but not all the time. He would also sell the horses.
This was the world that I grew up in.