• I never thought I would see something as crazy as this.
    The sky was swelling. It was going to explode.
    I knew this in a fraction of a second, in every particle of my body, and I yearned to prevent this abomination of nature from happening. My mother and father, chatting placidly on the front doorstep, could not see it. But the splinters of chillingly deadly bloody light, fingers of death and woe, slipping from the cracks already spiderwebbing through the clouds, flashed in their peripheral vision, and they turned to look, at the exact second that I screamed, "MOM, DAD - QUICK - YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE!" and, knowing that there was no escape for myself, threw myself behind a the brick-patterned garden wall.
    They stared at me, undaunted by my warning. My father glowered and said curtly, "Enough of this playacting tomfoolery, Lakumi." At the same heartstopping moment, my mother looked upwards at the sky - swollen in all of its wrath, a mystifying raging scarlet and nightmare-black. And then she screamed.
    It was only a heartbeat later that the force of the explosion shoved me into the earth - my limp, eight-year-old body pressed in the cool green grass, still wet with dew. My parents screams echoed in my ears.
    Spirals of shattering light swirled insanely before my eyes, my consciousness slipping and my eyelids locked together as my entwined eyelashes were tied together and weighed down with heavy lead. Agony ripped through my body, searing through my fragile blood and forcing my heart to hammer in my chest.
    The screams were abruptly cut off.
    And the pressure lifted.
    I cautiously rose from the ground, shuddering, not knowing if the liquid that clung to my cheeks were tears or the dewdrops from the grass. The sky, ragged and shattered and a dull, deathly gray-white, rumbled loudly. It began to rain. I trudged somberly through it, shaking wildly with the terror that still gripped my heart with icy fingers. My parents lay on the ground, dead. Their bodies were woven together. It had been their last human instincts to cling to one another, protecting, even when it had proved worthless to the merciless sky-fire. I looked down at their mangled remains and cried, producing more water than the rain could boast of.
    I was alone in the world now. This was the darkest magick yet - the kind that tore at you from the inside, the kind that there was no cure to. Poison with no antidote. Gashes without bandages. Time would pass. I would never forget.
    The rain ceased, and the snow-white sun shone bleakly through the clouds.