My friend told me I should just write even if it sucks, so this is the start of a story for him.
It happened many years ago, during the first outbreaks of the 4 kingdoms civil war; a little girl was walking the woods when her village was destroyed . It all befell on a cold winter’s day, the coldest, driest winter in over 60 years. The elders of the village knew that sort of winter meant a bad omen for them, long ago they had heard the stories about the icy wind flying across the lands with the promise of misfortune, but despite feeling the urge to forewarn their folk, their mouths had long been numbed from the amenity of a kingdom at peace.
That early morning, before the sun set up above the gray winter sky, the good people of Obduro raged upon the sleeping town with tridents and torches in their hands and a mad thirst for the blood of innocent men. The scorching fire became their war roar, warning the defenseless villagers of the danger stepping on their land´s edge, about to feed on their once peaceful life.
Unable to fight back, the people from the village tried to escape to the mountains to gain some higher ground, however the attack was no barbaric intent, it had been planned for days. It only took seven days for the man of Obduro to prowl the lands, calculate the time and finally elaborate an attack plan stable enough to make a first move. For seven days the men had waited and observed their pray, confident that victory was at hand, which meant no man, woman or child would be left alive.
That morning, the men of the village tried to run, but they were pierced through their hearts with spears and arrows. During the commotion, the children ran and hid in the pumpkin fields, clenching their mouths to make sure their chuckling yaws wouldn’t make a sound, but soon the men from Obduro were searching after them like wolves hunting for rabbits. The ones they found were killed at sight, the rest still hiding did not ran under such luck; too impatient to look for every single one of them, the people from Obduro burned every field around them and waited, sniffing the air like animals they felt glad when they began to notice the smell of burned flesh in the air.
In a desperate attempt to save their own lives, the women of the village grabbed their crying babies and begged for mercy, holding them high up to their attacker´s faces. Gently, the men took the babies from their mother´s hands and said ¨We´re taking your child to be trained as a soldier or escort for our men¨ delivering the now childless mothers to the same fate as every other man in the town.
Lastly the elders, feeling remorseful for failing to warn their people they were unable to gain enough strength to get up and fly, so they remained there, guilt struck, laying on their beds, hands intertwined as their houses burned down to the ground around them, listening in fright to the screams and yowls of their people being torn to pieces.
Out stood the little girl all by herself, her face tainted black from the ashes of her house. Her feet covered in cuts and scrapes, leaving little footprints of blood on her way. She had managed to escape the attack just a few hours before it happened. Her mother had woken her up in the middle of the night and ordered her to take a dive in the forest pond, for she was filthy from playing in the fields all day and they wouldn´t have time to clean themselves in the morning before it was time to harvest the corn fields.
The young girl obeyed her mother as she always did, she stood up half asleep, grabbed clean clothes and a piece of cloth to dry herself, kissed her mother goodbye on her cheek and walked out of the house and into the forest, not knowing that would be the last time she would ever feel her mother´s warm skin against hers again.
Whilst walking through the woods, the little girl heard the cracking and creaking of the trees getting louder and longer as she made her way forward, making it seem like the trees were livelier than they looked. The little girl however, never stopped walking, instead she slowed her pace down and listened, she listened carefully to the trees, almost convinced they were trying to send a message to her, one of the most urgent of sorts. She kept walking and she kept listening, and for the entire time she kept wondering ¨Why would my mother sent me out to the pond during winter?¨.
By the time the trees were silent again, the girl had reached her destination. She realized at that moment she had been paying too much attention to the trees and not enough to the road, for when she realized she had reached the forest pond, she was already standing on its edge.
The girl looked down at her feet and saw her own reflection looking back at her from the crystallized mirror that was the water. Her body stiffened from the realization that her mother had sent her away for some entirely different reason. Worried out of her skin, the little girl dropped her carryings and began running back to her home, where her mother and father were waiting for her. She ran so fast her shoes flew off of her feet, but she did not care for one minute, she kept running and running, never minding the ground cutting her skin as she went along.
As she got nearer to her village, the smell of smoke got stronger by the second. It stung her eyes and made her heart shrink. She could think of nothing else but seeing her mother and father safe and sound, harvesting the corn fields as they always did at that time of the day, smiling at her while her mother tucked her honey brown hair behind her ears. Maybe the smoke meant something else; maybe someone´s oven had been left unattended to;maybe the old men had done a poor job at putting off last night´s bonfire;maybe some impish kids had started a fire just to irritate the foreman again;Maybe nothing´s wrong;maybe everything is alright and this is just a silly little feeling of a silly little girl.
The possibility of ¨Maybe¨ always carries all the hopes of our hearts, but never the facts we really need, and that the girl knew well, so when she finally got to her beloved village and saw wreckage and death holding tight to the ground burnt black from war fire, she began to repeat in her mind “if maybe I had remembered the pond was frozen when my mother woke me, maybe I wouldn´t be standing alone right now”.
That day the girl lost everything. She had been made a victim of a war her county had not part in, but she did not know that yet. The orphan child walked through the village unwillingly, moved by some primitive force deep in her brain that told her to look for something, anything she could hold on to and keep as a token of past times. She walked slowly, so she could observe her surroundings with objective vision and accept it as her new reality. The houses were unrecognizable, for they did not stand where they used to before, they had been swept away by the wind from one place to another turned into nothing but dust. The fields bared no produce, nor would they be able to ever again. The wells were dry in water but fresh with the stains of splattered blood. The air smelled odd and the wind blew in a direction it had never blown before. Everything was different, and so was the little girl.
To any passing stranger, the town was the picture of violent desolation. Its crime was not being powerful or rich enough to be kept alive as resources to the men of Obduro, instead it was seen as a strategic obstacle between them and the kingdom of Abbatia where king Aufero lived lavishly with his adolescent queen Avaritia, splurging away the realm´s capital.
All of this information wouldn´t be known to the little girl until many years had passed, when she became an important counselor to many kings and emperors from all over the 4 kingdoms. But before her name could be heard across every border, she had a destroyed little village at her young feet; the stories of a town wiped clean, no one left to tell them but her.
Strangely enough, the girl felt a sudden sense of empowerment from this tragedy; she had found a new purpose to her life. She decided she would be the carrier of all of her people’s stories, old and new she would bring them along in every step she took, pushing her forward against the strong winds of uncertainty.
With newly found resolution, the girl intended to head on to the open road, hopeful that the town next to hers wouldn´t have had the same fate. Quickly she washed her swollen feet with water she found in a bucket near the pumpkin fields and tore a bit of her nightdress to use as bandages. She stood up, testing if the bandages soothe the pain enough for her to walk, and gave one last look at her lost home, knowing she could never come back.
The tears began to swell up in her eyes and an urgent need to disgorge followed, but she held it all in forcibly, taking a deep breath she turned back while wiping her eyes. Suddenly, peeping at the distance she got a glimpse of what seemed to be some white fabric waving in the thick air. It´s pureness stood out brightly among the ashes and blood. At first she thought nothing of it, just a forgotten flag for all she cared, but soon enough she felt curious, she asked herself “ is it standing by itself or is someone holding it?”.
The girl felt uneasy, she knew it could belong to the enemy, but it could also be one of her people asking for help, whichever it was she had to know. The child advanced with precaution, constantly looking down at her feet to avoid stepping on stones or branches. She moved in a zig zag formation, hiding behind anything she could find in the way until she got close enough to see that the banner was standing on its own, supported by a steady staff buried deep in the soil. She felt both relieved and disappointed; but still she had little to wish for any way. The little girl stared at the banner intensely, aware that it was the enemy´s marking on her childhood home she still wanted to see it, she wanted to see the stamp of the people who had killed off her family and everyone else she had ever known, she decided that would be her token of better, happier times.
The girl went around facing the front of the banner, as if it were the face of the enemy itself. Her hands clenched into fits, her heart beating out of her chest, she was ready to tear it to pieces right there in that instant, but she stopped herself from destroying the killer flag, or more precisely, the words written on it triggered something within her that relaxed her muscles and left her openmouthed. There, written in a deep blood color against the pure whiteness of the fabric were the words that would be imprinted in her heart forever, though the letters were fresh and dripping, she could still read:
¨When the walls of men crumble, and the earth is burnt down with the flame of wretchedness, look for the Phoenix that rises from the ashes, its flight will mark the beginning of the one true king¨
romaincrisis
amandla
gamechangershow
izzy806
gracieabrams