• Chapter 2
    ~*~*~*~*~
    Two Years Later…


    The warm morning besets the room. The sun shines happily onto my pale face, slowly waking me up. I am woken by my brother’s cheerful voice singing Goodnight Elizabeth outside my door (though he oh so cleverly changes the words to ‘Good morning Elizabeth’… how clever).
    I sit up in bed and call to him.
    “Good morning to you too,” I say. “I couldn’t expect a more fitting wake-up call for today.” I stand and put my robe on over my matching night gown, walking over to my open window and moving the curtains to let the beautiful sunlight in. As I do this, he peeks through the door behind me.
    “Happy to help, M’lady,” He teases with a cheerful smile. I cannot help but to smile back. I tell him I’ll be down stairs as soon as I get dressed, and, with a yawn, close the door as he leaves.

    I walk down the stairs in my white sundress and hat, both with the satin ribbons my mother gave me for my most recent birthday, the hat blocking the sun from my eyes and exposed shoulders. I walk out onto the balcony and look up at the clear blue sky, letting the sun warm my face for a moment and sit at the small table that is set for breakfast. The wind blows briskly into the house, allowing the scent of the newly-bloomed lilacs to fill the room with a quite peaceful scent… As I inhale briefly to smell them, a single lilac floats onto the balcony and lands on the empty plate in front of me… Every detail of this morning is absolutely breath-taking…

    My brother walks out onto the balcony and sets a tray of tea in the middle of the table before sitting with me… we are home alone, which completely fills my heart with unimaginable joy. Spending time with him is all I want.
    “I’m so glad I got the chance to spend some time with you, Liz,” he says, practically reading my mind.
    I nod and take a sip of tea in response. “As am I.” I am finding it quite difficult to maintain my manners and posture.
    He frowns at me and sighs. “You know you don’t have to be so formal with me,” he says, his cheerful smile returning at once. I shake my head and look at him scornfully.
    “If I have to speak formally to my own mother, you are no exception,” I say almost venomously. “If I am not formal with you, I might slip up with mother, father or even Melody… She‘s such a taddle-tale…”
    He blinks and rolls his eyes, attempting to make fun so the conversation doesn’t ruin the morning. “Well it isn’t like Melody has much control over you, my dear,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
    “And mother and father?” I ask in response.
    “They’re easy to win over.”
    “Since when?!” My voice slips and I cover my mouth in embarrassment. He bursts out laughing the moment I do so. I blush slightly and glare at him. “What exactly is so funny, Edward?” The fact that I called him by his full first name, a mockery of father for the most part, makes him laugh even more. I pout and take another drink of my tea, blushing even more.
    Our morning went on cheerfully like this, my mind racing through the beauty as I have described to you, until father pulled me aside for my studies. We went over the basics; mathematics, science of all kinds, history, economy, government, art, music, home economics and combat training (including the form of combat used by my family… I suppose you could call it a form of magic). It was all a great bore, though I didn’t dare tell my father that. My brother had finished his studies and graduated. I had a different tutor for every subject… I couldn’t stand most of then and because of that fact I often didn’t do my homework… but homework wasn’t a huge grade issue and I never missed test questions. I got fine grades. My life seemed somewhat perfect. I had no idea how trapped I was. They never let me leave the house, but I was told that the outside world was a place to be feared. A place consisting only of rape, pillage and plunder (though that’s what most of it was because there was a large pirating issue in our area). I wasn’t aware of what wonders lived in the outside world… I was about to find out though…
    At exactly 6:00 PM that night… the end of the day which had started to beautifully would end in horrific flames… A loud crash had come from the front door… I was playing Canon in d… My favorite song of all… I had just begin measure 57 when the crash came. It took three crashes and he entered the room… followed by a huge crowd of demons of all sorts. Any animal you could name was there… There burning my house to the ground.
    My sister Melody let out a scream to wake the nation… It didn’t slow her down at all though. She began making hand gestures and chanting under her breath… Her necklace lit up a bright red and small sections of demons began to whither away into nothing. I reach for the dagger in the sheath around my thigh under my skirt (well hidden of course) and threw it against the wall. I immediately deteriorated and appeared again in mid-air next to the dagger. I was so graceful… My dress flowing in perfect sync with my movements made my unbecoming posture for a lady make me seem even more attractive… My long brown hair blew in front of my face and fell when I landed. I removed the dagger and threw it into a crowd of enemies where it stuck into the back of on. I disappeared once again. I appear, unseen by the enemy in the body of the demon with the knife in its back. I grip the handle of my blade and run it through his abdomen, slicing quickly through his flesh, the blood runing straight past my eyes as he is cut in half. The other demons see me, my body covered in blood. I lift my blood-soaked dagger in front of my face and charge the crowd. With magnificent movement, I slice every one of them to pieces in a matter of seconds. It seems longer to me… but it’d taken a total of 30 seconds to kill 90 enemies. That was most of them… But I heard crackling. I looked up and saw my ceiling soaking in black… then orange. I ducked underneath the piano as the other patches of black and orange met each other and collapsed on top of me. My piano burst into flames with my scorches ceiling on top of it… The terribly heavy piano on top of me. I couldn’t breathe… and I couldn’t see Melody. I looked at the bodies of what were the remaining demons and then say my brother among them… his body limp and pale… he lay dead… the brother I had had so much fun with that morning lay dead on the floor.
    A scream escaped my lips and I painfully stabbed my dagger into the floor. I appear on the floor below me. This floor was obviously a storage shed… almost every member of my family lay here… drenched in each others’ blood… I gag and fall to the floor, the blood sending my senses into a tizzy. Suddenly all I feel in my head is pain… and down to the floor I go. Next thing I know, it’s an hour later… I wake up with a massive head ache and I was watching my home and family burn to the ground with my sister… I’m so devastated that I am unable to cry… Unable to speak… unable to move… simply unable to function. And all this was cause by a man named Reilly.......