(A/N) Hi guys! Here's the first chapter for the new story. It was so hard to write because 1) I kept changing the title, 2) School sucks, and 3) I hate my first draft thingies. I mean, I don't really make first drafts, I kinda just write and the edit, but you get the point. Gosh, even the author's note is hard to write! And I don't have a Review Response because I'm posting this like ten minutes after I posted the prologue. So I guess I'll stop bickering and let you read!
Chapter 1: Flashbacks
SOPHIE GROGGILY ROLLED OUT OF BED as streams of the morning sunlight peered through the one window of her small room. Waking up was... different. She missed her old bed at Havenfield, she missed her friends, she missed Grady and Edaline, she missed everything. Now everything's not the same.
She trudged across the room to grab a simple grey tunic and a black cloak to put on. There was a long day ahead of her.
Sophie swung open the wooden door of her sad little room. She marched out, ready to face the day ahead.
Walking down a narrow hallway, she recounted the horrors she had experienced in the past couple weeks. Deaths. So. Many. Deaths. She hated to admit to herself that some of them were because of her.
Sophie turned to the left and walked through another wooden door. She found herself in a spacious room with lots of fluffy couches. Many elves were sitting and socializing with each other. There was easily a few hundred elves. But those are all the known survivors of the war. Survivors. That's all they were now?
Many people greeted Sophie as she walked to the room's exit: a crystal archway. She waved to the people who stopped their conversations to look at her, but quickly hurried out of the building, not wanting to be the center of attention.
When she was outside, she tripped on a tiny pebble, no bigger that her thumb tip. With no one to catch her, she fell and scraped her knee. She winced at the painful reminder of what was before, and what was the after.
Her friends.
Her family.
Everything was fine. It was great. Perfect. And then one day tore it all apart.
And here was the after: the ruins of what was once there before.
Is that what the after always has to be like?
The remains of before?
Then the flashbacks took over.
Lady Gisela gave Keefe, Fitz, and Sophie identical leaping crystals. She explained that they would take them to an always-changing safe place.
Although the friends were still suspicious, they took the crystals to satisfy Gisela. They asked her how they could trust her, and she showed he Vengeance cloak.
Then everything went wrong. From thin air, figures wearing cloaks bearing the Neverseen eye grabbed everyonr but Gisela.
"Stop!" Sophie yelled. She fought the Neverseen person to raise her hands and prepared to inflict on everyone. Everyone. She didn't care that she would hurt her friends.
"And you'll do what?" A painfully familiar voice said. Sophie felt that she should know who it was, but she didn't. The more she racked her brain the farther the answer seemed, so she gave up.
Sophie wanted to say, "Kill all of you!" At the black-robed fools, but she knew she couldn't make good on the threat. So she looked at Keefe.
"We'll... use it." Keefe said. What is "it?" Thought Sophie. Before she could recall any memories of Keefe finding something, a deep, thunderous laugh echoed through the corridor.
"You have no idea what you'll get yourself into." Said the figure. That one seemed to be the leader, so if they can take him down and then...
"And I know what you're doing." He said, pointing to Sophie with a black gloved hand. "You're trying to figure out how to save everyone in the room and take us alive as prisoners, then be the hero who saved everyone and couldn't bear to let someone die. But in the end, you'll soon realize that you can't."
"Wrong." Sophie said with a mischievous look on her face. "I'm thinking of ways to kill you without hurting anyone else."
"You can't. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Not when we have this." They said, pulling a stained purple disk out of his cloak. "All we have to do is press this button and you'll all be knocked out cold on the floor, maybe even dead. So you have a choice: come with us, or die."
The Neverseen let go of the friends and backed away. The group exchanged looks, each knowing what decision was right. "We'll stay." They said in unity, bracing for the sedative.
The figures pressed the button. Almost instantly, the world began to black out. The last thing Sophie remembered was glaring at a smiling Lady Gisela and vowing to never let her escape again.
Everything came back into focus. She realized that she had a job to do. So she trudged on through the vast, rocky plains, hoping to find something, someone, or anything that survived.
That was when she spotted a dark green tent sitting under a boulder with light flickering inside of it. Sophie rushed towards it, only to be sucked into the darkness again.
(A/N) Well, I guess that was decent. I think I'm gonna make Tam and Linh more important characters. I don't know. Now I'm off to starting another chapter on my other story. And I'm still deciding between Tophie and Sophitz/SoKeefe. I feel like Tophie is under appreciated, but there's still lots of those stories out there, but at the same time, there's so much Sophitz and SoKeefe. So which one?