Every family has its stories – the stories of love and lust, passion and betrayal, bastard children and baroness. Of murder.
Every family history has a murder in it – most of the time, these murders are plotted by power-hungry siblings, angry parents or bitter children.
It's usually the heir that gets it. If it's not the heir, it's the guardian or the favourite – the competition.
Every pure-blood or aristocratic house has an heirs room. In some cases, two people have inhabited it in one generation, because of a murder. In rarer cases, three people.
In my generation, it's seven. Seven people passed through the old oak doors across from me. Seven heirs sat on this bed, this iron frame. Stepped on this floor, unpacked into that wardrobe.
Five of those lives were taken in this room. Another in the room in the tower, up the old spiral staircase, and another on the roof. Or rather, somewhere between the roof and the ground.
Another dies in the bedroom on the first floor, small and comforting with feminine decorations and little girls' toys.
Two were taken in the nursery, with its sunshine yellow walls and cute baby's cradles.
But five were here, in this room. By this four-poster with dark green drapes and black throw. On this carpet, soft and green like grass, looking out into the world beyond through this very window.
All but the nursery girls stood in my way to becoming heir. Was it me who killed them? No, no. I wouldn't have even known how. I couldn't pull a trigger or wield a knife. I hadn't the strength to push someone from the roof or string them from the rafters. And what knowledge of poisons did I have? At six years old? None.
Boys that never grew into men, girls into women.
Ten people who could have changed lives, but never had the chance. Ten good, strong people to uphold the family name.
Why am I the only one left? Why is it that I survived to sleep in the heir's room when they did not?
Why is it that I'm still here? I don't know. But I feel that perhaps it won't be like this for very much longer. I can only wonder if this is a good or bad thing.
Every family has their stories; every heir has a tale to tell.
You could say that my tale is the worst. But my story is not yet complete, and I very much doubt it has a happy ending. My tale is long and fearful. But I will tell it.
You may not believe my words, but you must heed them. For this story is not just mine – it is also the story of nine before me, and to even comprehend the danger I am in, you must listen to their stories before mine.
Besides my memories, I have only one thing to recount the dark tale – a diary.
This diary holds words from the hands of my siblings – in almost all examples, their last.
These people were real. They are not my own invention; they were real people, flesh and blood, just like the rest of us.
Please, gods, whatever you do, do not cross the monsters of my past. No matter how hard you try, they will win. They always do.
And these monsters, these crazed beings who took away the lives of so many, are the hardest kind to fight. Because they're all to human.